….MSNBC, for this winner today:

“Is Nature Out of Control?”

(ANSWER: why yes, MSNBC, yes she is…)

I was sad to read tonight that Jody Powell died of a heart attack. And I was surprised to learn that Mr. Powell, the White House Press Secretary under President Jimmy Carter who went on to become one of the partners in powerhouse Beltway PR firm Powell and Tate ( the “Tate” is Sheila Tate, Nancy Reagan’s former press secretary) was only 65 years old when he passed away today. That means he was only in his mid 30s when he came to DC from Georgia and braved, then won over the aggressive White House Press Corps of that era.

By all public accounts, Mr. Powell was a truly nice man, and I believe it, because he was awfully nice to me.

In 1978, I was a budding news and political junkie living in Bell Buckle, TN. While other little girls in my elementary school class were playing with Barbie Dream House, or experimenting with their mother’s set of Clairol hot rollers, I was more likely to be sitting in a tree in the backyard re-reading about the exploits of Woodward and Bernstein, or maybe flipping through the pages of “The Boys on the Bus.”

During that particular stretch of my childhood, we were allowed to watch some TV (for long periods here and there, when my parents would decide my little brother and sister and I weren’t reading or playing outside enough, we had a TV-free house). I particularly loved the smart, literate Saturday morning news pieces for kids that CBS ran between cartoons, reported by Christopher Glenn.

In these Saturday morning pieces, and on the evening network news, I loved seeing Jody Powell do his job, explaining President Carter’s policies. In our household full of Democrats, with two parents who were journalists, Mr. Powell’s job looked just ideal to me. I didn’t know whether there had ever been a girl White House press secretary (there had not, and would not be for another 14 years, when Dee Dee Myers finally broke that barrier), but I figured I’d aim to be the first.

So I wrote Mr. Powell a rather lengthy letter on the special, new stationery I had gotten for Christmas, the flowery blue paper with my name and address printed at the top. In the letter, I explained to him how I thought that being White House Press Secretary looked far more interesting than being President, and I explained how I intended to be the first girl to land the job. I also asked him whether Amy Carter – who, like me, appeared to be a bookish 10 year old girl with really bad glasses – liked living in the White House.

My parents gently cautioned me that the very busy Mr. Powell might not have time to respond to my earnest letter, but he did, telling me that he appreciated my letter, and that he hoped I would aim even higher than being White House press secretary. And included with his response was an autographed, 8 by 10 photo of Amy Carter, playing with her cat.

I cannot tell you how excited I was to receive this letter. And the photo of Amy and her cat hung on my bedroom wall until it was finally replaced with a poster of Duran Duran.

I think the letter and photo may still be tucked away in a drawer at my parents’ house, along with some other treasured autographs I collected as a child, including Miss Lillian, The Fonz, and both Ponch and John from CHIPs.

Godspeed, Mr. Powell. And condolences to the Powell family on their loss.

My new blog post at Babble is about why parents who did not allow their kids to see the President’s speech at school today should think very, very carefully about the anti-American message their decision is sending their children. Go read it, and let me know your thoughts.

In the past two or three days, folks around Knoxville have been rather horrified to see a large banner with a graphic photo of an aborted fetus being flown overhead, pulled by a plane. In the case of my sister, the plane flew over her 7 year old and 10 year old outside their school, leaving the children upset and frightened.

What I don’t get is how anyone thinks that this kind of tactic actually does what they claim they are trying to do, which is reduce the number of abortions in this country. I suspect that they are actually just attention hounds, like the PETA people, who care more about creating spectacle than they do about creating real change on this issue they claim to be so passionate about. And I have heard several of my staunchly pro-life friends say that they are equally annoyed by how extreme and pointless grandstanding like this gives people the wrong impression of their cause and the people who support it.

My sister took the time to track down the contact info for the organization behind this week’s city-wide campaign of visual harassment, and here it is for those of you fellow locals who also want to contact these people and tell them to knock it off:

Fletcher Armstrong, PhD CBR Southeast Region Director
P.O. Box 20115, Knoxville, TN 37940
phone: 865-776-3261
e-mail:Fletcher@CBRinfo.org
For more information on CBR-Southeast: www.ProLifeOnCampus.com

This is the email my sister sent them:

Mr. Armstrong,

How Ted Kennedy and Palin are the same: Kennedy was the original partisan litmus test of the modern political era; no one was neutral or indifferent about him. People either idolized him, or hated him with foamy-mouthed rage. Sarah Palin is the current, iconic partisan litmus test, inspiring the same extreme reactions in one direction or the other.

The comparison I am making is strictly about the extreme, emotional partisan responses each of these people has the ability to inspire in Americans. Lots of politicians are liked or disliked by “the other side,” but very few become iconic representations of partisan anger and passion like Kennedy and Palin are. Very, very few. Both Kennedy and Palin transcend who they actually are, what they’ve actually done or what their views actually are in the way that people feel about them.

However, when it comes to the two individuals themselves, and their own partisanship, there is a big difference. Ted Kennedy – love him or hate him – is recognized across both aisles as a guy who knew how to work effectively with those in Congress who totally disagreed with him in order to get things done. His views were partisan, but his collegial relationships and on-the-job working style were not. He belonged to an old-school style of partisan politics that allowed titans of both parties to bash heads on the Senate floor all day, and then go out for beers together after work. And that’s why I suspect that Teddy Kennedy, Tip O’Neill and Ronnie Reagan are at this very moment, sitting around a table together at the celestial pub, tossing back and few, and regaling other patrons with hilarious Irish talltales.

If you live in Knoxville, Tennessee, as I do, you have been unable to get away from a terrible double murder that took place in January, 2007. The details of the case are almost beyond comprehension; two happy, healthy college-age students out on a date together are carjacked by several career thugs. Over the next 24 hours, the young people, Chris Newsom and Channon Christian are held captive, blindfolded, tied up, sexually and physically tortured. They are both eventually murdered – separately – and the specific details of how each finally met their death after what they had already endured are the stuff of our deepest, darkest, most nightmarish fears.

At the time of the crime, I was working as the online producer at WBIR, in the newsroom. I took many of the first calls that came into the newsroom as the case unfolded. Within only 8-10 hours of the couple going missing, their parents and close friends had organized their own search parties, and were literally combing the areas that certain clues (cell phone signals, etc) told them their kids might have ended up. This was at a point where police were mostly uninvolved; the families reported that Chris and Channon had never come home that night, but there was no evidence yet of any crime, and let’s face it, even the most conscientious 20 year olds sometimes fail to come home at night. The police can’t and don’t begin treating every call they get from a worried parent as a possible crime until there is some further evidence of some kind that it is a crime.

We got a lot of calls like that in the newsroom each week, too – parents begging for some publicity for a teenage or young adult child whom they considered “missing,” but the authorities did not. Each time I took one of those calls, I imagined how I would feel if my own adolescent child had suddenly gone missing, but I couldn’t get anyone to help me try to find him. I always tried to be compassionate and gentle. I encouraged the parent on the line with me to continue communicating her worries to the police. I always felt really sad and kind of helpless after we would hang up.

And then, after Chris and Channon’s bodies were discovered, and as arrests were made, I spent the next year, before I changed jobs, writing numerous stories about the case. Because I had to repeatedly, over time write out the terrible words that described what was done to these two people, I found myself emotionally and mentally detaching from the reality of it. I just couldn’t “go there.” If I let myself really think deeply in an emotional way about the crimes, I knew I’d be unable to do my job.

But perhaps the biggest part of my emotionally dissociative state regarding writing about this case in the year after it happened stemmed from WHERE it happened. The small house where Channon Christian was held captive, raped, tortured and brutally murdered is very, very close to my own. In fact, I could walk there in probably 10 minutes. The railroad tracks where Chris Newsom’s burned, mutilated body was found by a railroad engineer on that cold January morning is almost as close. But that little corner of my part of town – even though it’s geographically close, is not one where I ever go. I don’t ever need to drive through it, and it’s not a place anyone would seek out as part of their daily constitutional. So even though I wrote on a regular basis about the address where the murders happened, I was somehow able to ignore the fact that this happened where it did, and basically pretend it wasn’t where it was.

But since leaving my newsroom job in August of 2008 – meaning that I no longer have to cover or write about the case – I have been increasingly unable to push away the realities of the whole thing. Over time, as the criminal prosecution of the accused has become the next phase in the story, and press coverage has continued at a very intense level, I’ve found myself “going there” emotionally, and it’s been hard.

One day found myself – almost without volition – driving by the small rental house (since torn down by the owners as a sign of compassion and respect for the Christian and Newsom families’ suffering) to see with my own eyes what I’d seen in photos so many times. I stopped a few houses away, unable to bring myself to get any closer to something that seemed so tangibly evil.

And that’s when it hit me; the thing I’d been unable or unwilling to think about previously was the fact that in those 24 hours in January of 2007, someone’s beloved children were being tortured and murdered in unspeakable ways while I happily went about my life in my own house only a few blocks away. I know it’s irrational, but I found myself feeling as if I should have known, or sensed somehow that someone was being hurt so terribly over a prolonged period of time so very close to the place I consider the warmest and safest in the world – my own home. That sense that I was oblivious to that level of suffering and cruelty over those many hours taking place so close to me has given me more than a few nightmares in the past year – generally the same nightmare. In my dream, I hear someone’s daughter screaming for help, begging for help, and I am frantically running up and down streets in our part of town, knocking on doors and trying to find her before it’s too late, but I always fail, and I wake up feeling sick and sad.

The other thing that I finally allowed myself to think about after my visit to the scene of the horror was the fact that the terrible, sick, predatory individuals who did it almost certainly DID drive by my house, likely on multiple occasions, as that’s the route they would have taken from their rental house to a major thoroughfare, and the interstate. Were my children playing in our front yard,? Did they consider hurting one of them, just because they were an easy target, like Chris and Channon? Did they ever see me standing outside my car on our city street, perhaps fumbling with my keys, and consider carjacking me? Did we pass one another in the aisles of our shared neighborhood grocery store? Did they case our street to consider possible home invasion targets? These are the thoughts that now come to me, now that I understand in a meaningful way the very real geographic connection between my home and that house.

As the details of the case have become even clearer with the police investigation and judicial proceedings, I am, of course, horrified by the brutality of the men who did these things. You hear about sexual sadists – and that’s surely what these guys are – on TV and in true crime books, and you pray that you don’t have one of this relatively rare but incredibly dangerous kinds of predators living in your own neighborhood. But what are the odds that we apparently had three or four men who all knew one another capable of this level of depravity living basically up the street? Three or four men capable of something that went far, far beyond the “ordinary” criminal behavior of robbing, killing or even of raping a woman in an opportunistic way. And not only were there three or four of them who were capable of doing something savage like, they were capable of doing it over and over and over for at least 24 hours, hurting Channon Christian, leaving the house for groceries or to visit friends, and then coming back to hurt her in new and unbelievably horrific ways. This brutality wasn’t carried out in a brief time frame – in a sexual or murderous rage or frenzy, or while under the influence, or during a psychotic episode – this was a conscious, willful brutality over a prolonged period of time. The fact that that many people with that level of evil perversion and willingness to cause pain to another human being over that period of time were here, right here all the time, chills me in a way I can’t quite express.

The last thing that I really struggle with is the issue of the women, at least one (she admits it) and probably others, who knew that there was another young woman, just about their age, hogtied, blindfolded and bleeding in the bedroom at their boyfriends’ rental house, and yet they went about their lives inside and outside the house during the day or more that Channon was being held captive. They did things like prepare sandwiches for the men between their individual forays in and out of the bedroom to rape that other young woman. At least one of the women has children of her own, just like Channon’s mother. At least one of them knew that Channon’s mouth was washed out with household cleaning chemicals in a bizarre and horrible attempt to erase evidence of rape. But these women, who could have ended Channon’s suffering and saved her life DID NOTHING. And there is absolutely ZERO evidence that this was a case where the women in question were “brainwashed” or had any sort of battered women’s syndrome or that they even felt actively threatened by the men during that period of time. They weren’t strung out on drugs and incapable of thinking clearly. No, they were just without consciences, and part of a trashy, thuggy subculture that’s both incredibly sexist – everything caters to the men, and to getting and keeping these worthless men who father their children – as well as very self-absorbed. But as a woman and as a mother, I just find it incomprehensible that other women, another mother, could stand by and let this happen without making any attempt whatsoever to make it stop.

I am sure that there are many thousands of other people all over my adopted hometown who are also haunted by this case, and who have nightmares about it, like I do. Sadly, however, I suspect that the people who committed the crimes – or who stood by watching others do it – sleep just fine at night. And that’s terrifying to me.

ADDENDUM: Attention kneejerk racists who have just started posting comments on this: this is MY blog. Thus, I decide what content appears here, including comments.

Katie

This is really fascinating. The NYT Freakonomics bloggers argue that early weaning from the breast is significantly impacting the declining number of females among India’s overall population:

Stanford’s Seema Jayachandran and Princeton’s Ilyana Kuziemko argue that a preference for boys tempts mothers to wean daughters significantly sooner than their sons.

The earlier they wean, the earlier they can again conceive and roll the dice that this time it’ll be a boy.

Meanwhile, the weaned daughters have been deprived of the health benefits breast-milk and nursing may provide and are more vulnerable to illness and death, particularly in the developing world where the study is focused.

The authors conclude that the “breastfeeding factor” accounts for 14 percent of India’s “missing girls.” More boys survive infancy than girls.

Big props to Knox County Commissioner (and my neighbor) Amy Broyles for introducing a resolution that supports the modest and reasonable accommodations that our county employees who also happen to be nursing mothers need on the job.

Better support for working, nursing moms means more Knox County babies will be breastfed, and breastfed longer, meaning a healthier community for all of us. It also makes Knox County more competitive in attracting and retaining top-notch female employees. It’s win-win for Knox County employees, and for us as taxpayers.

Go Amy!

If you are a Knox Countian, be sure to let your own county commissioner know that you support Amy’s fiscally wise and health-promoting resolution.

Did you first hear today’s big news on Facebook? Twitter? TV? Radio? An email alert? On a blog? From a coworker yelling down the hall?

DISCUSS.

It’s deja vu all over again. Obama’s health care reform plan is in trouble for many of the same reasons Clinton’s went down in flames back in the day.

The president’s plan is far too messy-yet-watered-down for the significant minority of Americans who want some form of universal health care, a la Canada, France, England, etc. So none of those folks or their advocacy organizations are out there working with any real passion or energy to support the plan. That means the loudest voices on the issue are the ones from the smaller minority of Americans who oppose pretty much any government involvement in healthcare, and their highly partisan voices are being greatly amplified by the advertising and lobbying dollars of powerful special interest groups who want to maintain the lucrative healthcare marketplace in which they currently operate.

And then there is the biggest group of Americans by far, the ones in the middle. This group is comprised of the vast majority of peoplewho DO, in general, want better access to more affordable care, but who don’t have the foggiest clue what it is Obama is currently proposing. Because they don’t understand Obama’s plan even a little bit, these folks are either completely apathetic about the whole thing or they have decided to err on the side of caution and oppose the plan. Either way, Obama loses.

Obama has done a very poor job communicating his vision for what he, as president, would like America’s health care system to look like. And he seems very personally detached from the plan to which he’s attached his name. His support seems lukewarm, half-hearted. He should have kicked off this whole health care reform campaign with a Great Big Speech that truly inspired Americans to look past our differences and envision a sort of shining health care city on the hill. He should have laid out this inspiring vision of what could be before turning the debate over to special interests, extreme partisans and policy wonks, who have now taken it so far into the weeds that no one can really figure out what’s even being proposed, or what it would actually mean for their own families. He should have shown some real leadership on this, but he didn’t.

But I think it’s too late now. Nothing substantive is going to come out of the current debate. We are going to end up with a great big nothing of a plan that pleases no one. It will be comprised of 60 gazillion pages of new regulations that will only serve to irritate doctors and hospitals because this “reform” will simply mean lots more red tape and paperwork for them, without any truly meaningful changes that will have any significant impact on how most Americans access or afford health care.