HOT : More on Elimination Communication: Infant Potty Training

Elimination Communication allows your child to be diaper free

Elimination Communication is the early infant potty training method that allows babies to go diaper-free.  Working moms, which most single moms are, may have trouble going completely diaper-free as they aren't home with the baby all the time. 

Part-time Diaper Free allows you to do elimination communication, while using diapers as a back-up.  "You will gradually use less diapers - in a natural transition from full-time diapers to .. no more diapers when they become inconvenient. (Yes, that happen!)"

The site encourages you to just start by using one less diaper a day.  They also encourage the use ofsign language to help your infant communicate with you.  Sing language is an incredible way to communicate with your infant for everything, not just for potty training. 

source : http://www.examiner.com/x-17789-Salt-Lake-City-Single-Moms-Examiner~y2009m8d28-More-on-Elimination-Communication-Infant-Potty-Training

HOT : Jaguars vs. Eagles "Eye Test"

While the scoreboard tonight is irrelevant, I will be paying attention to the game like other Jaguars fans and followers. 

I say followers because of the fact that only about 40k people have season tickets.  THOSE people are the fans.  People that cancelled their lawn service, lowered their cell phone minutes, and reduced their channels on their Comcast subscription so that they can attend the games in person and enjoy the NFL gameday experience.

So tonight, we all will see the 'game', or scrimmage, together.  What are you looking for tonight?  Post 1 or 2 things you're looking for.  And please, leave the silliness out.  I don't want any "I want us to play bad because I want us to draft Tebow".  The Jaguars can make the playoffs and still get Tebow. 

He'll be available at pick 24.  Tight Ends rarely go higher than that.

So here's what I'm looking for tonight:

1) Eugene Monroe: page 1 of 'the book' on Monroe for opponents to use might have been written last week.  He was bull rushed and dominated, and possibly exposed.  He has great hands if you try to rush around him...but Tampa DE's rushed right over and on top of him.  Let's hope this is an anomoly. 

2)  Brian Williams: Unless Williams is trying to market himself more by putting his name out in the public, I'm getting tired of seeing the back of his jersey.  'B-dub' is getting 'B-urnt' too much.  Del Rio's biggest mistake might become the fact that even after the bad year Williams had last year, to stick with him. 

3) PUNTER: Like Williams, I hope the Jaguars don't try to stick with Podlesh just because he has had a decent camp.  An entire body of work in real games is a better barometer of ability than performances during camp.  Podlesh had MAJOR problems last season, keeping the Jaguars from sucessfully 'flipping' the field numerous times.  This defense can't afford to give teams good field position.  It will be up to our punter, hopefully Weatherford, to do this.  If you're looking for a hint on who's leading the competition, look for who is holding for Scobee on field goal tries. 

What are you looking for tonight?

source : http://www.jacksonville.com/interact/blog/markspencergolf/2009-08-27/jaguars_vs_eagles_eye_test

NEW : Judge approves Vick’s bankruptcy plan

After multiple attempts, a judge has finally approved Michael Vick’s plan to get out of $20 million of debt.

From ESPN.com:

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Frank Santoro said while Vick is “at the pinnacle of his profession,” he has proven unable to manage his finances in the past and ordered him to retain a financial planner as a condition of the plan. The plan was overwhelmingly approved in a ballot of creditors.

Vick, 29, hustled away from the courthouse with his fiancee, Kijafa Frink, to catch a flight back to Philadelphia and make his debut with the Eagles in a preseason game.
“I’m happy it’s over. I can move on with my life,” Vick said.

“I’m excited about the game,” he said. Asked if he was nervous, he said, “Not at all.”

The plan approved by Santoro was supported by all creditors or representatives in court, save for one creditor owed $13,000. It hinges on Vick liquidating an estimated $9 million in assets, including houses, boats and high-end sport utility vehicles. He would not have to pay creditors during the first year with the Eagles.

Vick is “at the pinnacle of his profession?” Uh, okay.

The only reason this deal was approved was because Vick signed a two-year (the second year is a team option) contract with the Eagles. Had he not been signed, I don’t know how Vick would have been approved since he was denied multiple times before today.

From a football standpoint, it’ll be interesting to see how Vick fairs tonight. Even though Andy Reid says that Vick has looked good in practice, he’s been out of the league for two years so it stands to reason that the game will look fast to him tonight. Can he still get out of the pocket? Does he still have the zip on his passes? Can he absorb a hit?

Stay tuned.

source : http://www.scoresreport.com/2009/08/27/judge-approves-vick’s-bankruptcy-plan/

NEW : Kennedy motorcade arrives at JFK Library

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's body is carried into the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, Thursday afternoon. The Providence Journal / Glenn Osmundson

By Cynthia Needham
Journal Staff Writer

BOSTON -- The hearse eased up to the JFK Library under a blazing late afternoon sun.

It was just before 5 o'clock.

Throngs of people waiting in line craned their necks to see.

The crowd fell silent but for the sounds of camera shutters capturing the moment and news helicopters hovering overhead.

Members of the Kennedy family watch as the casket is taken out of the hearse. Providence Journal photo / Glenn Osmundson

Moments later, the Kennedy family began pouring out of a fleet of black town cars. Victoria Reggie Kennedy in pearls, Maria Shriver grasping at her children's shoulders. Behind them, Patrick Kennedy emerged in a sport coat, his shoulders slumped. A family so used to mourning in public seemed unfazed by the hordes of television cameras that followed their every move.

A military honor guard stepped up to meet the flag-draped casket, sliding it out of the hearse. And then, in synchronized steps, the men, representing all branches of the military, whisked the coffin inside the library. The family followed steps behind. It was over in less than 5 minutes.

While awaiting the motorcade's arrival, visitors wound their way through the exhibits, paying special attention to those featuring the youngest Kennedy brother.

Tourists in flip-flops and professionals on lunch breaks said they came to revisit decades of Camelot memories.

Buried deep in the line that inched through the parking lot toward the library were former Rhode Island union leader Dennis Grilli and his wife, Carol.

Dennis, left, and Carol Grilli, center, of Smithfield, wait in line to pay their respects to Senator Ted Kennedy this afternoon at the JFK Library in Boston. Providence Journal photo / Glenn Osmundson

"For all he's done for American working families, a short drive to Boston is nothing," said Grilli,
former Council 94 executive director, who hails from Smithfield.

"To call him a lion is appropriate because he was a fighter," Grilli said. "He was the heart and soul of the Democratic Party."

The Grillis met Ted Kennedy several times through Kennedy's son, Rhode Island Congressman Patrick Kennedy.

The senator's body will lie in repose this evening from 6 to 11, and again Friday from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Your turn: If you or a family member are in Boston today to remember Senator Kennedy, we want to hear from you. E-mail us or call (401) 277.8100.

Visitors leave remarks and sign a condolences book at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. AP photo / Charles Krupa

Waiting for the motorcade, a crowd formed early, some resting in lawn chairs others with picnic lunches, taking pictures with the likes of Katie Couric, under a cloudless sky.

"He's a political icon. We're not going to see someone like him again. He fought hard for the people of Massachusetts," said Irene Fortin, 54, Quincy, who is fourth in line to view the senator in repose.

Hours before the motorcade was scheduled to arrive, the grounds of the Kennedy Library were filled with national media and visitors who wanted to pay their respects.

People brought flowers, American flags and their favorite memories -- moments that spanned the decades of the senator's lengthy political career. On a day like today, they said, they couldn't stay away.

Among them was Yvonne Eider, who had been a secretary for North Dakota Sen. Quentin N. Burdick during the 1970s. She said she still remembered Kennedy's kindness, especially the day that a group of disabled students from North Dakota arrived in Washington, D.C.

The children's one wish was to meet Senator Kennedy, Eider said. She assumed he would be too busy, but she called his office anyway. Not only did Kennedy agree, she said, he sat with the students for nearly an hour, answering all of their questions.

"He was an amazing man. There wasn't any one of those children who could have done anything for him, but he stayed and stayed," Eider said.

Susan Jackson and her husband, Patrick, took the day off from work and drove from their home in Millbury, Mass. Jackson said her late father would have wanted it that way.

Her father was a bricklayer and a stalwart fan of Kennedy, through good times and bad, she said. As a little girl, Jackson, now 44, heard her father's oft-repeated phrase, "With Teddy, you'll always be safe."

Acey Neel said she walks to the Kennedy Library every afternoon with her infant daughter, Maggie, but today's walk took on a new significance. "I felt compelled to come, because as a gay woman raising a child, I feel so appreciative of Kennedy's push for gay rights years before it was popular to do so," Neel said.

Inside the museum, beside a family portrait, a father explained the Kennedy legacy to his son, who knew more about President Barack Obama than the famous family from Massachusetts.

A middle-aged woman stood before the footage of John F. Kennedy's assassination with tears in her eyes.

At the final exhibit, where a silver-haired Teddy Kennedy read in his trademark booming voice from his brother's book, slain President John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage, a group of visits from Tallahassee, Fla., stood riveted.

In a glass atrium overlooking Boston Harbor, a long line snaked across the bright space, well-wishers queued to sign a memorial book and to offer their condolences.

"Ciao Ted!" they wrote.

"Thank you Teddy."

And this entry, from Christine Lamb of northern Virginia, "To the Kennedy family, America has lost a brother, and one of the greatest senators of modern times."

The route chosen for the motorcade passed places in Boston that are meaningful to the senator and his family.

The motorcade was to travel down Hanover Street into the North End and past St. Stephen's Church, where his mother, Rose, was baptized and her funeral Mass celebrated. It was to cross over the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway, land that the senator's mother had enjoyed as a child and which is now a park that the senator and community leaders created to give families green space in the heart of the city.

The motorcade was to pass Faneuil Hall, where Boston Mayor Menino was to ring the bell 47 times, and onto Bowdoin Street, past 122 Bowdoin, where the senator opened his first office as an assistant district attorney and where President Kennedy lived while running for Congress in 1946.

The motorcade was to continue by the JFK Federal Building, where Kennedy's office has been for decades, and then travel onto Dorchester Street into South Boston.

source : http://newsblog.projo.com/2009/08/visitors-flock.html

NEW : Benjamin Friedman on overmighty finance

Harvard economist Benjamin Friedman asks a few questions in Thursday'sFinancial Times that are amazingly basic and unsettlingly unanswerable. And inadvertently (or perhaps not), Friedman, one of the eminences of American economics, reveals the limitations of the discipline as it's currently practiced.
In this case, Friedman isn't trying to forecast anything -- accurate prediction being the most obvious failure of economics in the current crisis. Rather he asks a seemingly simple question that is remarkable for not being asked before this. Why do we have such a large finance industry relative to earlier periods? Do all these bright Ivy types flocking to finance produce an aggregate benefit? Is a massive finance sector an efficient use of resources and does the costs that it accrues outstrip its gains? Sounds pretty
straightforward. In fact, we have no idea, which Friedman readily admits. Despite a headline on the column that suggests certainty (he undoubtedly didn't write it) -- "Overmighty finance levies a tithe on growth" -- Friedman himself lays out the situation and throws up his hands. "Does the increased efficiency our investment allocation system delivers meet that hurdle [of a net economic benefit]? We simply do not know."
Give him credit for honesty. If we don't know that, than we really don't have a clue about what to do with the financial system, either through the bailout or into the regulatory reform phase. We are, in the most basic way, as blind as Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson in the frantic days around the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. Not that this simple-sounding question doesn't cover some difficult underlying issues, none of which have answers either. We are left to speculate. Could it be that a massive finance sector is necessary to squeeze out every ounce of growth from a large, complex and relatively mature economy, like a big turbocharger strapped to an old Cadillac? After all, what would occur if we permanently unbolted the mechanism of liquidity generation and financial innovation and tossed it away? (We tried it for a few months and almost expired.) This is analogous to Paul Krugman's suggestion earlier in the year that we simply roll back financial innovation to, say, the early '80s: What would happen to employment, corporate profits or growth? Clearly, the Obama administration was not prepared to take that leap into utter darkness and possible political destruction.
Could it be that such a large engine of liquidity is the price we pay for social and political "choices" -- actually, less political choices and more like tendencies -- that we've drifted toward over the past few decades, such as a massive, dysfunctional, private-public healthcare system or the increasing exposure of all Americans to market risk? Could it be that our propensity for bubbles is the result as much of political as financial choices? Does the economic system require greater jolts of adrenaline (that turbocharger again, to mix metaphors) to keep it growing at a rate that papers over underlying social and political problems we have no will to tackle? Are all bubbles equally bad?
These are questions not opinions. If Friedman doesn't know, then I haven't a clue. What these questions point out, however, is something that's been obvious since the economic punditry (and the faux-economists in their train) rose to full cry with the coming of the crisis: That this crisis is as much about politics, about the distribution of power and rewards, as it is about technical economics, like whether the stimulus will work or whether we're heading for a V, W or U recovery (the once-popular L seems to have been forgotten). And, again inadvertently, it points out where so much of the commentary has seemed half-baked. Economists like Krugman may write continually about politics, but the underlying discipline that provides credibility does not have a clue when it comes to what was still called in the days of John Stuart Mill "political economy." (Not that some haven't tried: Simon Johnson offered up his theory of a financial oligarchy, but that operated more at the level of provocative metaphor in the service of a set of specific policy prescriptions than as a complex view of the relation between finance and the real economy. At the end of the day, taking Johnson's oligarchy theory seriously only leads back to Friedman's question: Is such a large financial sector beneficial or necessary?) The question of the role of finance in our political economy is a matter of daunting technical complexities, but more damning, it involves soft and nonquantitative matters that simply don't fit the self-image of economics as a predictive science.
Friedman, in fact, may be a mild exception that proves the rule: His last book "The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth," explores the marshy territory that abuts quantitative economics. Still, since even Friedman, who at least has students to shape and colleagues to influence, is just asking the question now, it may be many years -- if ever -- before the dismal "science," which really does dominate policy and policymaking in the U.S., grapples with a meaningful answer. - Robert Teitelman

source : http://www.thedeal.com/dealscape/2009/08/benjamin_friedman_on_overmight.php

HOT : John Mayer's mug shot revealed; singer faces consequence after challenging TMZ's Harvey Levin

John Mayer was arrested on May 26, 2001 for driving with a suspended license in Atlanta.

LA County Sheriff's Dept.

Patrick Stump was arrested Tuesday on a two-year-old warrant for driving without a valid license.

• 
  

When will John Mayer learn?

If you challenge TMZ's Harvey Levin, you'll get burned.

Either in a moment of stupidity or a need for publicity, Mayer took to Twitter early this morning to reveal his criminal past.

"I was arrested for the same offense as Patrick Stump," Mayer tweeted about the Fall Out Boy singer who was arrested Tuesday on a two-year-old warrant for driving without a valid license. "It's the lamest answer to the question "why you in here?"

Mayer, 31, went as far as to challenge the TMZ honcho, who has become notorious for finding undiscovered celebrity mug shots, to find his old photo.

"If Harvey Levin at TMZ can produce my mugshot, I will donate 25k to the charity of his choice," he tweeted. "Who else is in? Harvey is Freedom of Information Act King."

Indeed he is.

Within 14 hours, Levin produced the unseen photo showing a fresh-faced Mayer after his arrest on May 26, 2001 for driving with a suspended license in Atlanta.

Time to pay up, John.

source : http://www.nydailynews.com/gossip/2009/08/27/2009-08-27_john_mayers_mug_shot_revealed_singer_faces_consequence_after_challenging_tmzs_ha.html

NEW : Wal-Mart submits smaller proposal for Ventura Kmart site

While Wal-Mart has submitted new plans to renovate and move into a shuttered Kmart in Ventura, opponents have vowed to intensify promotion of a November ballot measure to block the proposal.

This is the third time Wal-Mart has submitted conceptual drawings to replace the former Kmart on Victoria Avenue, and each proposal has progressively gotten smaller. The latest plan shows a 98,000-square-foot store with food sales, which would comply with new city rules that restrict stores along the busy Victoria corridor to no more than 100,000 square feet.

The proposal, however, would exceed size limits under Measure C, which goes to Ventura voters Nov. 3. If approved, the measure would prohibit any new store selling groceries that is larger than 90,000 square feet.

The measure never mentions Wal-Mart by name, but proponents — including residents and grocery employee unions — began crafting the measure after news surfaced that Wal-Mart wanted to replace the Kmart with a 150,000-square-foot store. Revised plans submitted in February reduced the store to 130,000 square feet.

The latest proposal calls for using the existing building but adding facade improvements, a new entrance, a loading dock and a garden center, according to drawings submitted to the city last week. City approval could come as quickly as a few months if the proposal fully complies with revised development rules adopted in April, city planning officials said. That analysis hasn’t yet started.

Critics allege Wal-Mart has grander desires. Plans show an additional loading dock would be constructed behind an adjacent vacant commercial building that is not part of the proposed retail store.

“They are clearly paving the way for an expansion at that location,” said Ventura resident Nan Waltman of Livable Ventura, a citizens group that is part of the Stop Wal-Mart Ventura Coalition. “Why in the world would they be putting a loading dock behind a store that isn’t theirs?”

Waltman said Measure C forbids “piece-mealing” — moving into an existing store and then expanding. Critics worry a Walmart store would hurt local businesses, add low-wage jobs in a community without affordable housing and worsen traffic.

“We’re going to close a library and open a Walmart. What does that say about our fair city?” said Livable Ventura’s Carol Lindberg, referring to the H.P. Wright Library on Day Road, which could close because of funding cuts.

Wal-Mart spokesman Aaron Rios could not be reached for comment on the latest proposal. But in earlier remarks, Rios said the retailer would not actively oppose the ballot measure.

The Bentonville, Ark.-based company in general opposes limitations on retail development by government. “Consumers should be the ones to decide where they shop,” he said.

The ballot measure would not ban a large electronics store like Fry’s or Best Buy, or a department store. It also exempts “wholesale club” stores that require memberships, like Costco or Wal-Mart-owned Sam’s Club.

Some City Council members oppose the ballot measure, saying it could thwart businesses the community wants, such as a third Target on the city’s east end, and the tax revenue such stores generate. The feared ill effects from a Walmart — low-paying jobs, competition against locally owned stores — could occur anyway if a new Walmart store opened in Oxnard, some say.

Council members agreed in April to allow existing stores along the busy Victoria corridor to be “modernized,” including the addition of loading docks, new entrances and environment-friendly improvements.

source : http://www.venturacountystar.com/news/2009/aug/20/wal-mart-submits-smaller-proposal-for-ventura/