Posts Tagged ‘U.S. Govt $$ hard @ work..’

Got “Profound and long-term civic despair?” Check out JusticeWomen.org

In interest of getting out a FAST (and largely spell-checked) post today, here is an OLD two pages from JUSTICEWOMEN.org.

Feel free to photocopy and distribute this information as long as you keep the credit and text intact.
Copyright © Marie De Santis,
Women’s Justice Center,
www.justicewomen.com
rdjustice@monitor.net

(My commentary in italics)

Please analyze. In fact if I have a single piece of advice (today), it’s to take time and read the ENTIRE website here. No, not all cases are recent, but I assure you, little has changed in the interim. Truth is truth, denial is denial, and attempts to make women reporting assaults on their persons, or their children, be minimized, ignored, discredited, and in short shunted off to never-never land, have not changed. What has changed is who is running the show.

This is a page copied entirely from one of the best sites I found for women attempting to leave domestic violence. Funny, none of the agencies I was sent to told me half this much information, specifically the differences between civil & criminal systems.

I can say with authority, from this vantage point (2009), and that’s from a good deal of research, phone calls, collaboration with actual mothers who lost custody of their children, or retained it, but are trying to share it with an uncooperative (and nonchild support paying) ex, and/or others who are already homeless from the “custody switch & bait” activity (currently, I know two) and yet more who are simply impoverished, and trying to be activist, supportive, still eat.

As we are approaching, for some, “Domestic Violence Awareness Month” my fellow-bloggers are wondering how make the public aware of how little the “professionals” seem to be “aware” of what’s going on in the trenches. The credibility gap is getting wider and wider as the slick logos and posh conferences — that we are not asked to, can’t afford to attend, and at which our input is not really welcome.

Have you ever wondered how it is that all the funds devoted to Ending Violence Against Women (or, more typically these days, “Family” violence) and hotshot resolutions just don’t seem to change the headlines? It doesn’t even change the rate of femicide.

Last night, sleepless, I woke up to a County Cable TV promotional, only to see another slick self-congratulation collaboration with:

Child Support Head Honcho (for the county)
Domestic Violence speaker
Child Psychiatrist speaker
Fatherhood/Domestic violence advocate.

What a nice conference. As I attempted today to call the Food Stamps place and tell them my need ain’t the FOOD, it’s the phone & bus so I can get a job so I can get off the damn system your damn system failures forced me back on (when I’d already gotten myself AND household OFF), I also called one of the (above) entities above and gave them a piece of my mind about the CHUTZPAH of congratulating themselves when women are still being dumped out on the streets and (add graphic verbs . . . . . . ). . . . . As the same old, same old claim that the cause of our woes was “fatherlessness” (add soulful videos of African American young men being taught to change diapers and saying how badly they needed a male role model) was “single motherhood,” I wondered where were the pictures (and voices) of the soulful African American and five other colors of young AND mature women coming out of hospital emergency rooms, and standing in soup kitchen lines, or reasoning with law enforcement that it wasn’t just a “dispute” but a genuine threat. Where were those voices?

How long do we have to sit back and watch this good-ol’ boys (and it practically is becoming that, BOYS’) club act? Should I send in coupons for a yoga or stretching class so they can pat themselves on the back better?

How do I communicate to all the published, conferenced, professionals, who’ve been “in the field” 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, that having written something isn’t the same as having LIVED something. I’m very tempted to go get a Ph.D. so someone will actually take me seriously, although this was certainly otherwise not on the life plan. I could’ve by now, for all the skills it took to deal with the family law system which is critical in minimizing child abuse and woman abuse, stalking, and other criminal behavior. Yes, maybe that’s what I’ll do. 4 years for a J.D., about 3-4? more for a masters & Ph.D., and then I will participate, old and cragged, and tell some of these folks what I think about the expertise. Obama wants mothers to go back to school. I’m a mother. . . . Yes, maybe that will work. If it’s Piled Higher and Deeper, then it MUST be true.

ANYHOW, for today — and to get a jump on this month where Domestic Violence Awareness and Halloween share a double-billing, I would just like to “ADVOCATE” that everyone who is actually concerned (as opposed to, wants to be SEEN as concerned) thoroughly — and I do mean THOROUGHLY — review this very modest site from just North of SF Bay Area, California. There are principles to learn for mothers, advocates, and others.

Just a side-note: In order to keep a fighting, spirited, fiery woman in an abusive situation, it generally requires more than just physical force. Crucial to it is cutting off communication with the outside (meaning, we can’t always count on internet or phone access), and/or punishing for utilizing these. ALSO critical is controlling cash flow / economic abuse. ANY solution which doesn’t address this, or which exhorts women to sell their souls (or fork over their own kids), join programs, proclaim themseslves somehow “less than” because of the violence, or otherwise demean their ability to think, reason, and make informed choices — but does NOT address the role of the child support agency in all this – – – – is going to be fundamentally dishonest. This is the “chink” by which the scales can be balanced to make Dads come out higher than they otherwise would, by proclaiming (ad nauseam) they are under-represented in programs, initiatives, courts, and everywhere else. Sure, dudes. I don’t read, so I’ll buy that line of reasoning. It’s not necessary to consider the facts, it’s more important to balance the scales, adjusting the facts to do so.

ANY solution that doesn’t address economics isn’t legitimate. The things NOT talked about are the MOST important, generally. For example, when I know a speaker has been receiving federal grants, around $500,000 or $1,000,000 per year, repeatedly, for “discretionary” activities, yet I myself couldn’t get pro bono legal help, an advocate to sit in, or a cent of the Victims of Crime funding to replace lost income (and 100% of income was lost by this unreported crime), then I sometimes get a little jaundiced. Plus, I miss my kids.

To simplify, the quotes below are from the site above. I hope this complies with copyright requests from the site.

CONSIDER: (quote):

The dangers of this deterioration in police response are obvious. What is more difficult to convey is the profound and long term civic despair that results in individuals and throughout the community when people’s life’s emergencies are scoffed at by authorities. We need to start now to establish an independent check on police exercise of their authority in Santa Rosa.

ALSO, please consider (same website):

How To Start an Independent Advocacy Center to End Violence Against Women, …and Why

Part 1 ~ Why it’s so urgent to reinvent independent advocacy and activism to end violence against women:

1. Because there is a need to break out of the restrictive funding that has frozen the violence against women movement in place.

Over the last 15 years, the U.S. violence against women movement has become increasingly embedded in the very institutions we most need to change. The feminist rape and domestic violence centers of yesterday have become morphed into the quasi governmental service agencies of today. The influx of federal funding with its many strings attached, combined with big budget hungry programs, are trends that are crippling our capacity to advocate effectively for victims’ rights and to get at the root causes of the violence. There’s no question that the current system of rape and domestic violence centers is accomplishing a huge task of providing some much needed services to literally millions of women. But the often restrictive requirements of big funders, especially government funders, combined with the compromising liaisons many centers have entered into with powerful patriarchal systems, in particular the justice system, have frozen the movement in place, institutionalized it, and stripped it from its roots in a feminist movement for social change.

When advocates and the agencies they work for are contractually bound to these government systems, as most are today, it becomes nearly impossible to apply the pressures needed to make those systems change. Sometimes abruptly and sometimes imperceptibly over time, advocates and programs that aggressively fight for women’s rights have been weeded out, defunded, terminated, retaliated against, disciplined, or are no longer brought on board in the first place. Not the least of the consequences is that victims of violence against women turn to these centers believing they will have an advocate who is fully free to fight for her rights, completely unaware they are relying on someone whose paycheck is tied to the system’s approval and control, someone likely to be fearful of stepping on toes.

The social cost of being stuck in the cycle of domestic violence is felt in a widening ripple — sideways, through employers, associates, relatives, bystanders, social services systems (i.e. welfare), and repeat trips to government-funded courts, mediators, guardians ad litem, etc. Did I mention police, crime-scene clean-up (don’t think that’s NOT a factor), hospitals, and on and on. . . It is ALSO felt vertically as the next generation of abused/abusees has to deal with the trauma. Some will overcome, and some will dull it with drugs and other forms of abuse, not always evident to others (eating disorders comes to mind. See acestudy.org). I was initially elated to be OUT of the violent household (actually, my husband was evicted through the civil process with kickout) and rebuilding/repairing, but still those children were seeing their Daddy. Things were BETTER. For the first time in my married life, I was able to actually really determine how to spend the money I earned, which jobs to work (or not) and could come and go, for the most part, without finding the furniture totally rearranged when I came back, or similar effects. At least inside.

Then that restraining order expired, too soon, and since then the trend has been downwards, as the tempers go upwards, until the “bait and switch” custody switch totally derailing the concept of actually HAVING long-term plans, and a possibility for the next 3 decades (which I hope to survive til). To have one’s kids “deleted” from one’s life on an overnight is unbelievable. I didn’t do that. . . . In retrospect, I regret that I had actually gone to the already “compromised” agencies above — except that there was no other way out, that I could see. STILL, it is better. It IS better than being assaulted in the home in front of children. The begging is there, but I can sleep and wake up when i choose to. I can play music or not, read or not. It is still better. But what about my kids?

BACK TO “JUSTICEWOMEN.ORG” contents:

This took place in SANTA ROSA. First paste is an account of reality vs. police-reported reality. IN light of recent (ANTIOCH) events, I hope readers will consider the quotes vs. the facts, as reported by this nonprofit.

TWO pages follow — one shows the truth (as per this nonprofit, who worked with a woman) versus the police version of it. I have experienced dishonesty on police report — and yes, it DOES gender “profound civic despair” to see this. I am sure there are honest police officers and law enforcement when it comes to domestic violence reporting. One, while we were still in the home, I thought was perhaps an angel, and while my ex argued (for 1/2 hour) in the home with this officer, I was grateful to have one adult male sticking up for me, for once. No charges were pressed at any time. . . . . . . . Then, afterwards, and after restraining order was off, it was a law enforcement “free-for-all.” It was a shock of cold water, as if entering the family law venue wasn’t another one, witnessing the “mediation” process totally upend my household each and every time we went through it. Callous. Unbelievable.

This shows how much work goes into keeping the facts on the record, as opposed to just “going with the flow” of what law enforcement say. It’s not inaccuracy I’m talking about, it’s deliberate twisting, omission, mischaracterization, and an occasional lie. This hurts twice — once, the woman didn’t get the help. Second — the abuser (if it’s the male/female situation) realizes he has a “carte blanche” to do it again, later. And will.

http://justicewomen.org/letter_srpdaccountability.html

1. Letters to Authorities (facts vs. report)

Violence Against Women and Police Accountability at SRPD

Date: January 1, 2,001
To: Santa Rosa Mayor, City Council, and Community
From: Women’s Justice Center

Re: Violence Against Women and Police Accountability
at SRPD

On August 24th, 2,000, we wrote to then Mayor Janet Condron and the Santa Rosa City Council outlining seven victim case complaints against Santa Rosa Police for their mishandling of rape and domestic violence. These case complaints originated between May and August, 2,000. In that letter we provided an array of leads to witnesses and physical evidence supporting those complaints. We also described the police defensiveness and cover-ups we had experienced over the last year and a half as we attempted to bring a steady flow of such victim complaints to the attention of SRPD officials.

Because of our strong dissatisfaction with police response to our previous case complaints, our August 24th letter urgently requested that Santa Rosa City Council provide for independent review of the seven more recent case complaints.

In the four months since our August 24th letter and request for independent review:

Mayor Condron and the Santa Rosa City Council denied our request for independent review of the seven case complaints,
Instead Mayor Condron and the City Council asked the Police Chief to convene a series of meetings with the YWCA, United Against Sexual Assault, Redwood Children’s Center, representatives of Santa Rosa City Council and our organization, Women’s Justice Center,
In the course of those three meetings, Santa Rosa Police presented a written report of their investigations into the seven case complaints. At no point were these SRPD findings questioned or reviewed by the group, nor at any point did any of the participants seek to inspect any of the plentiful evidence leads we provided pertaining to these complaints.
The one substantive outcome of these meetings was a plan for SRPD chief Dunbaugh to convene two working groups; one to focus on language translation, and the other to focus on internal quality control at SRPD. Though this is a beginning, it is grossly insufficient to resolve a problem which calls for much broader and deeper digging. It also doesn’t begin to resolve the monumental problem that if Santa Rosa Police say that the sun rises in the West, then Santa Rosa City Council, without further ado, seems satisfied to set the public’s course based on the fact that the sun rises in the West.
Most troublesome, in the four months since our August 24th letter, we have received eight new complaints from victims of rape and domestic violence regarding SRPD response to the victims’ calls for help.

We strongly believe that the SRPD problems with handling of violence against women as well as the problem of exodus of female officers (10 since July 1996) cannot be resolved until there is willingness to look squarely at the problem. The report presented by police on the case complaints illustrates as well as anything why it is foolhardy for the community to rely on self-investigation by police for any assessment of the problems. And why it is cruel and unjust to shunt victims’ complaints back into the hands of the same police that denied them justice in the first place.

The following is a critique of just one case example from the police report..

{{Let’sGetHonest Commentary: Readers, alert. A comparison of report versus assertions of fact shows several “techniques” of changing the contents to say something quite far from the truth. Public should make note. Hearsay is hearsay. A uniform on a reporter doesn’t make a reportp more or less true, but it’s commonly assumed to. That’s the alert. Know this!}}

We choose the section of their report dealing with case #2 because it is the shortest and can most quickly be responded to in full. But the police biases, cover-up, and deceptions illustrated in this example permeate the police report throughout.

{{I do not live in this area. But the words “bias, cover-up, deception” applied in our case. It is disheartening. One cannot have JUSTICE without a modicum of TRUTH. TRUTH COUNTS! To me, an intentional lie is an intentional aggression — it is a challenge: My reality will supersede yours! It’s a power-play if both know the lie. While we are used to this from the abuseer, it’s not appropriate for those in charge of helping!}}

The SRPD report of their investigation into the detective’s handling of Case #2 reads in its entirety:

“The detective assigned to the case attempted to contact the victim by telephone on the date that it was assigned (one day after the initial report). There was no answer. The detective contacted the victim approximately one week later. At that time, the victim declined to participate in an interview at the Redwood Children’s Center. She did agree to speak with the detective on the telephone and a brief interview took place. The victim told the detective that she was no longer seeing the suspect and that she did not know where the suspect lived. Further investigation ultimately led to the detective identifying the suspect, interviewing him and obtaining an arrest warrant. The suspect was arrested and on September 26, 2,000, plead guilty to several counts of unlawful sexual intercourse.”

Anyone reading this report would be assured that nothing was amiss in the detective’s handling of the case. If anything, the report engenders a certain sympathy for the detective who had to deal with a victim who was apparently less than cooperative and who didn’t know much. Yet the reality is, as you’ll quickly see, that the Santa Rosa Police detective was dumping a serious case of child molestation, a case that had ample, easy to obtain evidence, and a victim who was completely cooperative. And the detective continued dumping the case even after we complained to police superiors and after we had written the August open letter to the City Council.

Look again at this report section by section:

“The detective contacted the victim approximately one week later. At that time, the victim declined to participate in an interview at the Redwood Children’s Center.”

Assuming this statement is true, the report neglects to mention that “the victim” here is a child under 14 years of age and as such, there was no way that “the victim” was capable of evaluating the significance of an interview at the Redwood Children’s Center. And there is no way that a detective serious about doing the case would have left that decision to a child. The fact is that at every point in the process, this girl openly and cooperatively answered questions from all officials. But the statement in the above police report, without mention of the girl’s age, leads the reader to form an opinion of an uncooperative victim of unknown age.
The statement (and the rest of the report) neglects to mention that the detective did not, as should have been done, contact the victim’s mother to set up the interview at Redwood Children’s Center, even though the victim and her mother had the same phone number and the same residence since the initial report, and were available at that same phone number on a daily basis. In fact, the detective never contacted the victim’s mother until more than six weeks after the initial report, and then only after complaints had been made.
Perhaps most significant, police wrote the above statement even though, according to the mother and the victim, neither of them were contacted by the police during the investigation into the detective’s handling of the case. This then is not, as it was put out to be, a report of an investigation, it’s a public relations piece spun from the report of the detective who was supposedly being investigated. No impartial or sincere investigator would have neglected to call the victim and her mother for their version of events.

“The victim told the detective she was no longer seeing the suspect…”

That the victim was no longer seeing the suspect gives the reader the impression that there was no big deal here, no urgency, since the criminal activity had stopped. But the fact that a crime is no longer occurring should, of course, have nothing to do with whether or not the crime is investigated. Would you want multiple felony sex crimes against your child ignored just because the crimes had stopped? This mother certainly didn’t, and she and her whole family suffered immeasurably, as we’ll explain, because the case was being dumped.

The statement also implies that the child was in control of what this man was doing to her.

“…and that she (the victim) did not know where the suspect lived.”

The victim DID know where the suspect lived, she always knew where the suspect lived, and when we were finally able to apply enough pressure to get the case moving (three months after the initial report), the detective immediately knew how to get that information from the girl.

The detective simply got in a car, picked up the girl and her mother at their home, and said to the girl, `show me where the man lives’. It is true that the girl didn’t know the number address and the street name, just like most kids can’t give a number address and street name of even their best friends. But the girl ALWAYS knew where the man lived and the detective could have found out from the girl where the man lived at any time, the same way every detective knows how to get an address from a child when they want it.

The truth is the detective was dumping the case, and the public needs to know that this is what it looks like when detectives dump cases.

{{GOT THAT? “The truth is the detective was dumping the case, and the public needs to know that this is what it looks like when detectives dump cases.” This is why I’m posting this, today}}

The detective buries the case under these little slights of hand. The detective’s supervisor sees that the detective has come up with a `workable defense’ for not moving on the case, and work on the case is stopped.

“Further investigation ultimately led to the detective identifying the suspect, interviewing him and obtaining an arrest warrant. “

What’s left out of this statement is all the pressure that had to be applied from the outside to make each one of these things happen. Also left out is the intolerable time span it took to do them. Even after the detective had gotten the victim to show where the man lived, even after we had complained all the way up the police department ranks, even after we had made a public written complaint to the City Council and the press, the case investigation was again dead in the water.

To get things moving again we had to take the additional step of going to a deputy DA who cares about these cases and ask him to add his weight to the effort.

“The suspect was arrested…”

The suspect was arrested on September 9th. An impartial investigator would never have left out this fact, nor would they have left out that this was a solid five months after the mother, the girl, and their doctor made the initial report to Santa Rosa Police Department in early April, 2,000. The report also neglects to mention that the evidence needed for the case could have been gathered in a matter of days.

“…and on September 26, 2,000, plead guilty to several counts of unlawful sexual intercourse.”

The man was charged with 24 felony counts of child sexual abuse; 12 felony counts of PC 288 (child molestation) and 12 felony counts of 261.5 (unlawful sexual intercourse). The statement also neglects to mention that the man pled to and was convicted of 6 felony counts of 261.5 waiving even his right to a preliminary hearing. An impartial investigator would never have referred to this information as “several counts...”

Most of the facts we’ve presented here can be verified by a check of documents on the public record.

The public needs to know a couple of other things that were left out of the police report. The mother of the girl is a Spanish-speaking single mother of three children who worked two jobs to sustain herself and her children. The detective is Spanish-speaking too. Knowing this, the public can begin to understand that the case wasn’t being dumped because of any technical difficulty with language, though that would be no excuse either. Most likely the case was being dumped, like so many other cases we see, simply because officials figured the victim and her family wouldn’t be able to find any effective way to complain. Once knowing the range of dynamics in an array of these cases being dumped by police, the public can then begin to ask critical questions about what kinds of system controls are necessary to protect all people’s rights to police services. But first we must have honest, independent, and impartial descriptions of the problem.

Probably the most poignant thing left out of the report on this case is the tormenting consequences to the family resulting from police denial of help. In early April, when the mother never received the follow-up phone call from police that was promised by the responding officer, she had no idea where to turn. She went to the school principle for help for her daughter, and found no help there. She then began to call another police jurisdiction. Because the officers who answered the phone at the second jurisdiction didn’t speak Spanish, the mother had to put her 10 year old son on the phone to try to explain the complex problem about the girl to police. The mother made five such calls to Windsor Police. Windsor Police never came to the mother’s residence, nor to her assistance, though it’s difficult to know exactly what information the boy communicated to police. Nonetheless, it wasn’t until over two months after the initial report that the mother found her way to a social worker who then referred the mother to us.

In the meantime, however, the mother’s landlord, who regularly obtained public records of police calls originated from his housing complex, noted the five calls made to police from the mother’s address. Those five calls made by the mother to Windsor Police became the sole basis for the landlord writing a “notice of cause” against the mother, the first step in the eviction process.

This is the kind of snowballing of critical life problems that overtake victims when police deny services. It is something we see on a daily basis, because police denial of protection and justice is so common, especially in the minority communities we serve

The regular denial of protection, combined with police’s incurable cover-ups of complaints is a deadly mix for the women and children of Santa Rosa.

We again urge you to provide an effective mechanism of independent review of police where the people can take their complaints.

Sincerely,

Marie De Santis
Director

Written by Let's Get Honest|She Looks It Up

September 29, 2009 at 8:20 PM

Posted in After She Speaks Up - Reporting Child Sexual Abuse, After She Speaks Up - Reporting Domestic Violence and/or Suicide Threats, Cast, Script, Characters, Scenery, Stage Directions, History of Family Court, My Takes, and Favorite Takes

Tagged with Child Molestation, obfuscation, social commentary, trauma, U.S. Govt $$ hard @ work.., women's rights

Access and Visitation, only $10 mill/year (annually, since 1997).

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Oh No!

I just lost the top half of my last, colorfully-illustrated, and highly annotated, sarcastic scatalogical post, “Thrusting Abstinence Education on the Unwary Public” (as summarized, with links, by Wikipedia, in about 2005). It’s coming. I’ll expose it soon. It exposes the money that traded hands in private before the PR professionals, using their media connections, pushed two policies that are now coursing through the bloodstreams of the 2 largest United States Executive Branch departments and affecting, I say, all of us. These were the Healthy Marriage/Fatherhood/Abstinence Education initiatives (as to HHS) AND . . .. AND . . . .the “No Child Left Behind” policies (as to Educ.)

Regarding that. . . . .

I figured, since the Bush Admin public servants want to Push its way into the public’s thoughts (first) and pants, skirts, or burqas, etc. as to trying to regulate whether (let alone with whom!) we (or our children) do or do not engage in sexual intercourse, whatever they find where they don’t belong is their own problem, and any tone of response communicating “get out!” is appropriate. The moral being, #1, don’t take rides from strangers promising Health, Human Services, or any other ecstatic experiences or transportations, or accept candies from them, either, and #2, more of us need to restructure our lives so as to keep better track of our track of our Congressmen, and whatever % of them are Congresswomen who vote on how to dispense $$ collected from us through taxes. If these are being used Inappropriately (and failing kids K-12, then trying to back track and teach an abstinence Congresspeople themselves do not exhibit, either as to finances or their personal sex lives (not unilaterally for sure is most definitely INappropriate).

Who knows, the candy {whether in form of ideas, or psychotropic, as in Ritalin, etc. through the school systems, etc.) might have drugs. Besides which, anyone calling you, or people in general “Human” probably isn’t. Would such a person call their own offspring, or spouse, a “human”?? Then how come other, more distant people of the same species become suddenly “humans” and need “servicing.”

Marriage affects health, sure, but in definition is a commitment between two individuals who have exchanged vows, generally in front of witnesses in their community, and have also a certain public document. By definition, and usage, it’s private! Where it becomes public is only where an individual in it breaks a law, particularly as to domestic violence and child abuse, but also any others.

Similarly, a nation is not a living, throbbing organism to be run from the top and have its temperature taken by elected officials and parts re-arranged at (its will). We are not bees, we are not ants, we are not to be treated like them either. Our elected and/or appointed officials are not bee-keeprs or ant farmers, even if and (when) they may think they are and such activities have apparently given their otherwise meaningless lives purpose, by labeling others misery or happiness.

In PARTICULAR, we mothers are not to be bred for our children, and then judged as to our health by virtue of whether the “sire” of the kids is in the house or out of the house. And that, friends, is what this nation is currently (at our own expense) in the business of. Studying itself. The top half is studying the bottom half, only it’s not even close to “half.” The bottom half (sic) exists to serve, and pay the top half (sic) to study it.

That’s how I read the situation currently, anyhow. I may be jaundiced by my particular run through the last 20 or so years, but I have networked, read, studied, and collaborated plenty, as well as read what others are networking and collaborating about as well. When it’s one own’s life & kids (as opposed to, say, job) at stake, one tends to study more closely.

Moroever, the columnists promoting this already had their hands in the till by taking money from the public in the form of grants. So the hand was ALREADY in our pockets financially. Moreover, it appears the infamous (to me at least) “No Child Left Behind” (which takes the cake for vague, amorphous rallying cry if I ever heard one. First of all, it’s false — what about private schools? What about where are we going? what about the talented children already being held back in the schools, which is from what I can tell, probably the majority of them. What about keep your hands off my kids too, until you can talk sense? This initiative also started in similar manner — a man was paid to promote it, but failed to mention the pay.)

So, as to Abstinence Education, thus I figure anyone (promiscuous, married and faithful, or married and hot-Mike-Duvall, or abstinent, or celibate, or in fact ANYONE) should be able to give them a hard time about this. Especially because what was NOT exposed was whose $$ (ours — federal grants) was in whose pockets before the inspired (by $$) PR eulogies began. I guess you get the general idea of how I felt about that. The moral there, and with this Access and Visitation grandiose talk is, when someone on the federal dole comes up to you UNSOLICITED especially, saying “you need a ride? You look lost, you need some direction? You look poor! I’ll help you — just sign on the line (and give me your offspring) here. Come, let me give you a (mind/face/family-) lift — then the appropriate response is to ignore the talk and survey the surroundings, particularly for the closest exit. And any other strangers (to you) in the vicinity behaving oddly.

ANYHOW, another post. THIS one, is on a grants system set up back in, I gather 1996:

2 years after National Fatherhood Initiative (1994)
One year after Clinton wrote the (in)famous, “let’s revamp the Exec. Dept. to include more Dads (1995).
3 & 4 years before Congress voted”inexplicably” that the true crisis for the United States was fatherlessness, and they “resolved” (National Fathers Return day being one such resolution) to DO something about it (in both houses: 1998/1999)
only 5 years before the half-bald, mustached, slightly-smiling, white guy to the right (see photo) was “unanimously” appointed Secretary of the HHS (2001-2007), and I gather in 2007, he kinda sorta was encouraged (??) to step down. At least he resigned.
But not before the ball was really rolling on this idea that the REAL problem is Kids Minus Dads.

Since he’s white, middle-aged and half-bald,(and right-wing conservative), (and apparently well-off) why doesn’t he limit his concern to what he actually has lived? But know, he and his NFI prominent thinkers are going for the usual suspects, African American mothers who aren’t married to their children’s fathers. But attacking African American mothers, unmarried, isn’t QUITE PC enough, so the circuitous route is to express for or the kids lack of ROOTS (as defined , to their Dads).

: Psychologist Wade Horn, from NFI to HHS, and out again.).

DO YOU think I’m kidding? I’m not!

JUNE 17,1999, Congressional Chronicle(tm)

Topic: National Fathers Return Day

Mr. LIEBERMAN. (speaking) Mr. President, I want to say just a few words on the jarring statistics from that report and column for my colleagues. Of African American children born in 1996, 70 percent were born to unmarried mothers. At least 80 percent, according to the report, can expect to spend a significant part of their childhood apart from their fathers.

(in some cases, those fathers got shot, in some cases those fathers were not interested in them to start with. In some cases those Dads may have been in a war and gave their lives for the country. In some case those fathers were violent. Perhaps in some cases those fathers may have been sports idols and are on the road. Does THAT put them at risk, per se? In some cases those fathers were womanizers. Should we put the Dads back with their sons and daughters to learn that this really doesn’t matter, when it’s Dad? In some cases, perhaps Mom OR Dad had a religious awakening, mabye like Mr. Horn’s, in which case the uninterested (in that brand of God) spouse may wish to continue (or re-act) by doing drugs or watching pornography, or being promiscuous.

I know one family (not African American) whose Dad decided to come out of the closet, with his new paramour, while his offspring were adolescents. Guess what. Those kids didn’t sleep in his home. Those poor (well, they weren’t poor) kids would have fallen under the Access Visitation grants definition programs. They had a noncustodial parent. If their Dad were nasty, or either parent poor, he could’ve been recruited through the child support program to further harrass her or impoverish the kids. It only takes one bad apple to get the whole family ensnared til kids reach age of majority.

Suppose Mom finds a second, healthy marriage. According to these theories, the kids are still at risk, because it’s not “Dad” in the home.

(LIEBERMAN, to CONGRESS, 1999, con’td.) We can take some comfort and encouragement from the fact that the teen pregnancy rate has dropped in the last few years. But the numbers cited in Mr. Kelly’s column and in the report are nonetheless profoundly unsettling, especially given what we know about the impact of fatherlessness, and indicate we are in the midst of what Kelly aptly terms a “national calamity.” It is a calamity. Of course, it is not limited to the African American community. On any given night, 4 out of 10 children in
this country are sleeping in homes without fathers.

We are NOT amused at what’s actually taking place in government grants la-la-land.

The first attempted post was about a Wikipedia article (about 2005) highlights who was paid what to screw us nationally, and that’s not much of an exaggeration. I’m talking about grants and initiatives that ended up transforming the role of the courts, and there was also a reference to the illicit origins (i.e., a PR person was PAID off from Dept. of Educ. Fund) to start “NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND.” Which, in my state, last I heard, means that approximately 42% of them are up to snuff, and this is considered “good,” however, if a child came up wit 42% on a test, that was considered failing. WHich pretty much describes the difference of standards between “government” behavior and our own. Also, if I only got 42% of my children actually literate after they’d been in my care for a few years (versus K-8, let alone K-12 years), I’d give myself a failing grade too.

Well, since all my technical (wordpress) wits was far below the level of the rhetorical wit, this crudely dropped the readers midstream, with no buildup or momentum, into the usual back-story commentary on the Wikipedia entry on the not-exactly-breaking-news that columnists and PR sorts sometimes do pay attention to what side their bread is buttered on be for buttering up the ideas of the person with the butter.

Ah well. . . . .

So I decided to “punt” and go to this topic: ACCESS & VISITATION GRANTS, where the real “conflict of interest is” in the courts.

Anyone that doesn’t like my profiling Wade Horn according to his race, gender, state of follicle challenge, age, and demeanor can go jump in a lake. I don’t like being profiled according to my gender, or having my household profiled according to how many adult males biologically related to my children in it, rather than to whether or it has a violent, battering, assaulting, property-destroying and chaos-inducing male (biologically or not biologically related to my children) in it. He can’t change his race, I suppose. He could even change his gender, if this were part of his right-wing religious preferences which I bet it ain’t.

I can’t change my DNA, nor can my ex, nor can my kids. But what I CAN change is whether or not I am going to sit around my home being slapped because I’m female in front of children, and mine happened to be female. Then let some (male) _______ (or female) come to me, after having ignored years of that, and then push this dogma that the real problem is, there’s not a “man” in the house.

There WAS a man in the house, and that was solved with a restraining order, temporarily.

I don’t feel like changing my gender either. And it makes equally as much sense (i.e., NONE) for a bunch of men (and some women) to get up there and saying, it’s a GENDER problem, starting with African American children (of either gender) — and they did! See below! — not having their OWN fathers living with them as it does to say it’s a RACE problem. I dare a bunch of Congressmen to get up there and have a national white folk day. And get it nationalized, with a straight face. CALL it that. Push it all over the state, county, and nonprofit institutions just like fatherhood and healthy marriages has been. State that as a lot of black folk are in prison, obviously the problem is their race — not the prisons, not poverty, and not communities, not behavior. And not racism. I am waiting for the day.

With President Obama now, no one would dare (let’s hope!) But one profile we CAN all gang up on is mothers, especially single mothers. Good grief! In another day and time, this would be Jews. In another, Tutsis. In another Hutu. In another Armenians. But the gender for all times to hate (and particularly if it stops hating its own, or protests) is for sure female. They must give up their kids and make sure that they have contact with Dads, even if Dad kills them (and this has happened), kidnaps them (and this has happened) and even if the ongoing conflict with a chaotic or controlling personality introduces years of needless conflict — AND more poverty — into the children’s home. And if Dad can’t restrain himself, or might rape, kidnap, beat, or hurt the kids during a visitation, no matter. There is ANOTHER government-funded and/or free-market-niche to make sure they still have contact: “Supervised Visitation.”

Now that’s not really safe either. No matter. There’s ANOTHER program to train the supervisors. How’re they going?

2008:

“Danger Zones: Battered mothers and their children in Supervised Visitation“

Supervised visitation centers (SVCs) have developed rapidlyacross the United States. Increasingly, courts are restrictingcontact between abusive intimate partners and their childrenby ordering visitation or exchanges to occur at SVCs. This articledescribes some of the key lessons the authors learned over 18months of planning and then another 18 months of implementationat a SVC developed specifically to serve families for whom domesticviolence was their primary reason for referral. The authorshave organized their experiences around five major themes: (a)battered women in supervised visitation, (b) how battering continuesduring supervised visitation, (c) how rules at the SVC evolvedover the first 18 months of implementation, (d) the importanceof well-trained visit monitors, and (e) the need to embed SVCswithin a larger context of coordinated community responses todomestic violence.

Key Words: battered women • batterers • children • supervised visitation centers

This version was published on November 1, 2008

2004:

Six Crucial Issues in Supervised Visitation

There is no way to predict whether a specific batterer is likely to kill his partner. {!!}} Even though data are available about batterers who actually commit such murders, the batterer’s violence behavior alone does not provide enough information about accurate predictions about which batterers will go on to kill the partners. Psychotherapists can use a variety of checklists and other instruments to help determine the level of risk for a lethal incident, but these assessment devices have not been validated by empirical research. ^[16^]

Who conducts risk assessment?

Despite their close ties with domestic violence shelters in their communities, many supervised visitation program staff do not have the level of expertise necessary to conduct formal risk assessments. Therefore, it should be domestic violence professionals who should conduct the assessments, not visitation personnel:

For those who haven’t “got” this yet, the majority of these studies are, (I finally “got” this) not about our safety or our children’s safety, or our children’s best interest, or to prevent family violence. From the front lines, and a front lines person who knows many families going through this AND has attended conferences, and probably reads as much as a lot of the professionals (at least to pass for one in a number of situations; all I lacked was the degree) on this, and has a REAL vested interest — my life, my family’s lives, my livelihoods, the safety and well-being of the communities I was in during all this stuff (before and after separation) and so forth — I pay attention, and try to place accumulated information in a growing database and I refile as necesary when stuff “doesn’t fit.”

It’s not about our lives, it’s about the professions. Here is a statement from a real well-respected site, now 5 years old, saying that the issue is not that we are bringing supervised visitation into the picture at all, but that it’s just that the visitation personnel are not properly trained by professionals, domestic violence professionals.

Here’s a question raised (finally!) by someone addressing a(nother) conference of ALL kinds of professionals associated with this topic about preventing violence, protecting children, and all kinds of REALLY nice healthy topics. I am thinking that PROBABLY the conference (Jackson’s Hole, Wyoming?) might have been an clean safe place. This (male) professional in the field started the first Domestic Violence Unit in Washington, D.C., he says in his opening remarks.

He broaches again the question I’ve twice posted on this site, in articles from 1989 and 1992, as to whether children need relationships with their (abusive) fathers. Let’s see if he qualifies in our eyes as a Professional. But first, the quote.

2009, June 2:

Do children need a relationship with their fathers even when their fathers have been abusive to them and their mothers in the past?

Even the question is a little “framed.” “have been abusive . . . in the past” is not the typical situation of a woman trying to leave abuse with her children. This mindset implies it was “over with” and that while broken bones, teeth, bruises, and blood may indicate “being abusive” (i.e. COMMITTING a pattern of misdemeanor or felony-level domestic violence), stalking, property destruction, intimidation of relatives, or keeping one’s ex in a nonstop pattern of defense against allegations in family court arena do not.

Oh yeah, incidentally this was the U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, and his short speech is on the date link.

It appears to me to be the present policy (I include practice) that mothers moreso than fathers, are considered dispensable to children.

Do children need a relationship with their fathers even when their fathers have been abusive to them and their mothers in the past?

Actually, by the time one sorts through how contradictory one policy is from the otehr, and then read about the conferences where organizations sponsoring BOTH sides of the contradictory policies collaborate together (but the parents involved are not invited, generally, nor their kids) I’d have to say that in the long run, one concludes that when it comes to dispensing TAX DOLLARS (my shorthand for grants, federal, local, state, and private) what’s really dispensable, and is being lost, are:

1. Justice.
2. Children.
(With justice, children will be safe, as long as laws against domestic violence and child abuse remain on the abuse, and SHOULD they ever start being consistently defined, and enforced).
and
3. OPM. Other People’s Money AND OPL. that’s other People’s Lives.

What really seems INdispensable, once underway, appear to be the systems dispensing 1, 2, and 3, above.

I am going to (re-)introduce you this concept “Access and Visitation” and its costs, starting with the HHS own site describing it. If the prose is lame and lacks vigor, just understand that I blew my wad on the first topic, so this is a pale second offering from a drained commentator.

However my commentary cannot possibly be as lame, nonsequitur, and incoherent as the concept of Designer Families at Public Expense, as executed by a centralized opaque bureaucracy in cooperation with private and nonprofit businesses, not to mention religious organizations that haven’t quite yet “got” that hitting women ain’t legal.

This is where “Access Visitation” concepts meets the “Supervised Visitation” concept. One encourages and ALLOWS certain services (this is the HHS source of grants) and the other DISCOURAGES but does not forbid, practically the same types of activity (this is the DOJ/VAWA source of grants, as I recall).

One is the government paying a LOT of government institutions (you have no idea, but I assure you, I do!) to make sure “NONCUSTODIAL PARENTS” have “ACCESS AND VISITATION” to their children, even if it means getting them free legal help while in prison to modify their custody orders, something I don’t recall getting of one second past the time our case hit the family law venue.

The converse of this is, when a parent is really bad and needs to be “spanked” or “supervised” somehow, then there is SUPERVISED VISITATION. I could’ve used solme of this and requested it, in fact, one reason was, I didn’t want the kids kidnapped. i asked for this in 2005 and was told No. Then when my kids were taken on an overnight in 2006, and we show up in court, I asked for it again, and was curtly told, there’s no money (meaning WE didn’t have some to fork over) for this. The result was, visits were so traumatizing I was hard put to get them. There was also no real exterior witness or regulation of the fact that the second this man got our children, theyw ere basically, not going to be seen by me again, even when a court order had stipulated, every othe rweek. So there you have it on SUPERVISED VISITATION.

Sometimes this also is used to punish mothers by forcing them to pay to see their chlidren after they speak up about something (seems like it could be almost anything — child abuse, harm done to the kid by the other parent, or some other violation of existing standards) and are silenced by having their kids switched, SUDDENLY, to the other parent. This has been described elsewhere better than I am summarizing here.

But, til I find the missing witty intro to a version of BUSH-WhACKED around MARRIAGE INITIATIVE type post, I give you:

OCSE Access and Visitation Grants Information

I suggest filing this under Congressional Linguistic Cognitive Dissonance.

Overview

With an annual appropriation of $10 million, 54 States (*including the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, and Virgin Islands) have been able to provide access and visitation services to over a half million non-custodial parents (NCPs) and their families since the program became operational in 1997! In FY 2006, States contracted with over 300 court and/or community- and faith-based, non-profit service providers for the delivery of access and visitation services to NCPs and their families.

NCP is a “NonCustodial Parent.” Primarily, fathers. Note, that the CP (which obviously is another adult) does not even exist as an entity. it’s NCP’s and “Families.”

“STATES CONTRACTED” — Yes, the feds pay the states, and we’re not yet QUITE sure what happens once it hits state level, although some diligent research DOES ascertain that it’s pretty darn hard to track after that.

I. Enabling Legislation

The “Grants to States for Access and Visitation” Program (42 U.S.C. 669b) was authorized by Congress through passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996.

Goal: “..to enable States to establish and administer programs to support and facilitate non-custodial parents’ access to and visitation of their children…”

Cognitive dissonance: “It’s about money. It’s not about money, it’s about the children. It’s about reducing welfare distributions. No, it’s not, it’s about noncustodial parental access. Aw heck, Im not really sure! No it’s NOT a pay-per-hour-per child scenario (i.e., children as property), it’s about families. Well, on the other hand, though we really need to entreat these men to get on the stick and get some work (including after they get out of jail) so we will help them for free, LEGALLY, to get back at those Moms, get more time with their kids, in exchange for which we will then lower child support obligations (but, listen closely, this is NOT, we repeat, NOT a pay per child per hour arrangement) (unless it refers to SUPERVISED visitation) and maybe then, if we treat the disgruntled — or unemployed — or incarcerated — NCPS nice, they will respond in kind, step up to the plate and pay the past due child support.

Alternatively, we can switch custody and put HER in jail if she doesn’t pay, because women don’t need to be BRIBED to support their own children, generally speaking. And, again, we’re not ordering, we’re just “supporting and facililating’ (modification of custody orders). Without telling the custodial parent in advance, of course.

II. Allowable Services

According to the statute, States are permitted to use grant funds to develop programs and provide services such as:

Mediation

Mediation is “premitted” for the States, but “mandatory” for the parents in many states, including mine, and that’s a PROBLEM when violence has been involved, already. Typically by the time the order was obtained (at least I know my case and many others), attempts to “mediate” the concept of not being hit, abused, threatened, etc., have already failed. Hence the protective order to start with. For protection, not negotiation! Well, mediation puts two parents in front of one mediator, which typically (given the little time he/she is going to have) will pick a side and stick to it, throughout the course of the case, which, given these factors, will probably stop when ALL kids hit 18. Or one parent has worn out, given up, or simply gone homeless, meaning, can’t fight back.

Moreover, all the opposing, “NCP” has to do is start a debate on almost any issue between them, and then it goes to mediation. This is simpler than presenting facts and evidence in the courtroom, adhering to all those rules of court, etc. All he/she has to really do is win the favor of the mediator, who then (although this isn’t strictly legal, it’s practice) sways the judge who then upends whatever the last status quo was. Note, abusers are great manipulators, it’s kind of their profession, that two-sided thing, or the abuse couldn’t be kept up for so long.

Development of parenting plans

Education

(And a REAL market niche for the would be parent educators, therapists, and counselors (see next item)

Counseling

Visitation enforcement (including monitored and supervised visitation, and neutral drop-off and pick-up)

Development of guidelines for visitation and alternative custody arrangements.

In other words, as part of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, once we figure out whether money, or the child’s best interests is the issue, we will — again, outside the vision and awareness of the CUSTODIAL parent, bargain with the NON-custodial parents and help them de-stabilize the children’s life, repeatedly, and on a proceess that takes place outside the courtroom.

(Responsibility/Opportunity/Responsibility/Opportunity — which is it?)

III. Annual Funding

$10 million is divided among the States annually based on a funding formula contained in the statute.

Funding Formula (according to statute):”The allotment of a state for a fiscal year is the amount that bears the same ratio to $10,000,000 for grants under this section for the fiscal year as the number of children in the state living with only 1 biological parent bears to the total number of such children in all states.”

Minimum Annual State Allocation $100,000 This statutory provision ensures that states with small populations of single parent households with minor age children are guaranteed a base amount of $100,000. Those states with larger populations are awarded an allotment according to the prescribed funding formula.

Required State Match States are required, by law, to provide a minimum 10% match of the Federal grant amount. This match requirement can be fulfilled via cash or in-kind contributions by the state and/or local grantees.

This isn’t a section I’ve examined too much. I HAVE searched for the funding to states under these grants, and was appropriately shocked at amounts, and who was getting them.

IV. State Administration

Designation of State Agencies Following enactment of the AV Grant Program in 1996, the then-Governors of States were asked to designate a State agency that would be responsible for receiving the grant funds. Roughly half of the State AV Grant Programs are administered by State Offices of the Courts and the other half by State IV-D Agencies.

In California, it’s the California Judicial Council, which is THE policysetting arm of the Judicial branch in the state. Then it goes to the Administrative “office of the Courts,” and so forth. So we have pretty much a socialist type setup here. Read on.

Funding Responsibilities States are required (that’s “REQUIRED“) to ensure that funds expended under the Access and Visitation Grant respond to and support the program goal which is “…to establish programs to support and facilitate noncustodial parents’ access to and visitation of their children…”.

Comment: The thing that facilitated noncustodial parents’ access to their children PRIOR to this was called a court order. It was signed by a judge, stipulated some terms of custody & visitation, and people who interfered with this were (depending on when the law I am thinking of was passed) to comply, or suffer possible contempt of court (order) sanctions, and fork them over to the otherr parent. The thing was done in a process called, formerly, the “LEGAL” process, also casually referred to in some circles still as “DUE process.” It’s what our country is about at its most basic denominator: Constitution, Bill of Rights, and so forth. Remember those? So, these grants and grant programs can’t quite come out and say “ORDER NONCUSTODIAL PARENT ACCESS” because, after all, they come from the U.S. Exec. Dept., which is supposedly separate from the Legislatives, which is supposedly separate from the Judicial.

This was actually intentional, from what I understand of the ffounding fathers. They wanted these strong powers distributed among different players. NOT centralized in one or just a few players, in which case we’d be an oligarchy, not a republic (cf. Pledge of Allegiance, US Citizens, if you forgot what that means). “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. And to the republic for which (this flag) it stands, one nation, under (expletive deleted, according to some sources), indivisible, with Liberty, and Justice, for all.” While we know it doesn’t exist yet, this is the pledge and that is the gol. Notice: “Justice” not “program goals.

JUSTICE is a process. It is a MEANS. “Program Goals” is an end, and apparently the end justifies the means here.

shall administer State programs funded with the grant directly or through grants to or contracts with courts, local public agencies, or nonprofit entities“;

shall not be required to operate such programs on a statewide basis; and

shall monitor, evaluate, and report on such programs

Reporting Requirements The enabling legislation requires states to monitor, evaluate, and report on services funded through the Access and Visitation Grant Program. This statutory requirement is satisfied through the annual completion – by states – of the “State Child Access Program Survey” which includes:

State agency contact information;

Services funded; {{Note: “permitted activities,” above.}}

Provider agency contact information;

Number of parents served; {Define “SERVED!” — forced through the programs??}

Socio-economic and demographic information on families served; and

Outcome data (i.e., number of noncustodial parents whose parenting time with children increased as a result of services).

COMMENT #1. McDonalds “serves.” (1 billion served — did they mean hamburgers, or patrons?) But the fact is, the desired OUTCOME of these grants is to modify custody orders, basically, or make sure unenforced ones then get enforced.

I have looked at one of these reports. It ain’t much.

Here’s a Self-report on this (Margot Bean, from the Child SUpport commissioner. i STILL think it odd that the child support agency should be enforcing a grant whose design is to influence the judicial process. I have experienced this personally, and saw the connection, although in the courts involved, a pretense of separation is maintained. It’s a “DEAR COLLEAGUE” letter. As a litigant, of course, I am not a colleague and went forward like a lamb to the slaughter, not knowing how many millions were going to my state (approximately $10, over the years), to get a “required outcome” to what I myself wished and wanted to be a law-and-evidence-based process. Guess if you ain’t “in the IN crowd,” forget it!

DEAR COLLEAGUE LETTER

DCL-07-15

DATE: May 24, 2007

TO: STATE IV-D DIRECTORS AND STATE ACCESS AND VISITATION PROGRAM COORDINATORS

RE: New publication which assesses selected State Access and Visitation programs client outcomes especially with respect to subsequent payment of child support

Dear Colleague:

I am pleased to provide you with a copy of a new report entitled: “Child Access and Visitation Programs: Participant Outcomes.”

Since 1997, the Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE) has been responsible for administering “Grants to States for Access and Visitation.” To date, OCSE has awarded $100 million dollars to states ($10 million per year) to “…establish and administer programs to support and facilitate noncustodial parents’ access to and visitation of their children,” as mandated by Congress.

I cannot speak loudly enough to express how profound a conflict of interest this remains. Parents are recruited through jails, through child support offices (when in arrears) and sometimes flat-out through courtrooms by flyers, to participate in programs that are intended to sway the legal process, and THROUGh these programs. Many women leaving violence, or protective mothers, protest that the safety of their children should be left in the hands of someone who is having business funneled to them through these courts and through government mandate (and how are we to know whether or not actual money? It has happened, from what I understand) to tip the balance in the courtroom. THIS PROCESS makes a farce of the courtroom process.

In order to achieve this end, States are allowed to fund a range of services including (hint, hint, hint…) : mediation, development of parenting plans, education, counseling, visitation enforcement (including supervised visitation and neutral drop off), and the development of alternative custody and visitation guidelines. Between FFY 1997-2005, over 400,000 parents were recipients of AV services.

I’d estimate then, about 50% of them unwillingly, or unwitting that they have a right to refuse. Moreover (personal experience), quite often the mediator’s report is not even received before the hearing! I have twice out of three times received it IN the courtroom, which is hardly the place and sufficient time to reply and consider its ramifications!

This study assesses participant outcomes resulting from the Access and Visitation Program in 9 states for mediation, parent education and supervised visitation services. Mediation was studied in Missouri, Rhode Island and Utah. Parent education was assessed in Arizona, Colorado and New Jersey. Supervised visitation was looked at in California, Hawaii and Pennsylvania. The primary findings for the 970 cases studied are as follows:

Let’s review this report here. Out of, in their own words “54 States (*including the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, and Virgin Islands)” only 9 (literally, only 1 in 6 states) were studied, and only 970 cases total. That’s approximately how many per state, and now we have math lesson #1 about this department: DEMONSTRATION SAMPLE — hardly any. APPLICATION FROM DEMONSTRATION (or even EVALUATION) SAMPLE — to the rest of the country. This study was in 2007 (10 years after program started).

Child support payments increased from 53 percent to 93 percent by service in the 12 months following service provision. {{DOES THIS INCLUDE THE SUPPORT ORDERS HAVING BEEN MODIFIED DOWNWARDS, WHICH IS ALMOST INVARIABLY THE RESULT OF SUCH PROCESSES, AND THE PURPOSE OF THEM, TOO}}

Child support compliance rose by 20 percent to 79 percent for unwed cases; but did not increase for divorce cases.

(I’M A DIVORCE CASE, AND THE REDUCED CHILD SUPPORT ARREARS WAS BASICALLY TREATED AS A JOKE AFTER THIS PROCESS. IN OTHER WORDS, YOU GIVE A PERSON WHO ISN’T IN COMPLIANCE AN INCH, AND THE DOOR THEN OPENS WIDE TO NO COMPLIANCE. THIS IS WHY THROUGHOUT THE SEPARATION, I WAS TRYING TO STABILIZE ADN INSIST ON COMPLIANCE, AND AT EVERY TURN, I WAS DISCOURAGED FROM THIS, AND EXHORTED TO GIVE. FINALLY, I HAD TO “GIVE” MY CHILDREN. WELL, NOT FINALLY, ALSO A LOT MORE, INCLUDING THE SENSE THAT ANY COURT ORDER HAS ANY VALIDITY OR FORCE. THIS IS THE CONSEQUENCE OF JIMMYING THE COURT PROCESS FOR A DESIRED OUTCOME, I BELIEVE.}}

The level of child contact by the noncustodial parent rose from 32 percent to 45 percent by service in the 12 months after service provision. (HOW ABOUT 13-15 MONTHS?)

The behavior of the youngest child as reported by the custodial parent improved by 26 percent to 41 percent by service in the 12 months after service provision.

WAS THIS ABOUT WORK OPPORTUNITY OR PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY (REFERRING TO ADULTS!), OR ABOUT GRADING CHILDREN’S BEHAVIOR? LET ME RE-READ THE LEGISLATION. ALSO, I KIND OF WONDER ABOUT THE WHOLE CONCEPT OF WHO IS MEASURING KIDS’ BEHAVIORAL PERCENTAGES, AND ACCORDING TO WHAT, AND SUPPOSE THE CUSTODIAL PARENT EXAGGERATED? GOOD GRIEF! “MY KID WAS 10% BETTER, THE OCSE SHOULD KNOW….”

Twenty-five percent of both parents reported an improved relationship in the 12 months after service provision. The rate was the same for all service types.

Another way of stating this is that “75% of parents reported it didn’t make a damn bit of difference as to their relationship, high-conflict, violent, or casually friendly.

Seventy percent of parents who mediated a visitation/custody agreement reached agreement.

If some of these cases were anything like mine, a good deal of threat was involved in the process. For example, when my kids went missing, I wasn’t about to be allowed in front of a judge unless I went through the gatekeeper, the mediator. I requested another one, but no one available for over month. So what would you do? Let the kids stay MIA or try to get it to court? That’s called extortion! it’s not a real choice!

Nearly all of the parents who received parent education were satisfied by the education.

(or so they said, supposedly).

Ninety percent of parents who participated in supervised visitation characterized this service as a safe place to conduct visits.

Applying the findings in this study should help states design, fund and measure better programs. For additional copies of this report, please contact OCSE’s National Reference Center at 202-401-9383 or OCSENationalReferenceCenter@acf.hhs.gov

Sincerely,

Margot Bean
Commissioner
Office of Child Support Enforcement

(whatever. YOu see about the level of reporting).

That’s all I have time for today, but i have been meaning to bring up this topic again. So I just did.

Again, the financial picture is $10million/year to compromise due process in the courts and force the above programs on parents trying to divorce. This is NOT mentioned in the court facilitators offices (at least for Moms, that I knew of). As many times as I was in that child support office, also, not a whiff of it. All I could smell was the dysfunction. I just didn’t know where it was coming from.

2008, summarized, on this site;

Office of Child Support Enforcement
State Access and Visitation Grants – FY 2008
State/Jurisdiction	Federal Allocation	State Match	Total Funding
Alabama	$142,379	$15,819.89	$158,199
Alaska	$100,000	$11,111	$111,111
Arizona	$169,198	$18,799.78	$187,998
Arkansas	$100,000	$11,111	$111,111
California	$957,600	$106,400	$1,064,000
Colorado	$125,800	$13,977.78	$139,778
Connecticut	$100,000	$11,111	$111,111
Delaware	$100,000	$11,111	$111,111
District of Columbia	$100,000	$11,111	$111,111
Florida	$497,059	$55,228.78	$552,288
Georgia	$295,222	$32,802.44	$328,024
Guam	$100,000	$11,111	$111,111
Hawaii	$100,000	$11,111	$111,111
Idaho	$100,000	$11,111	$111,111
Illinois	$344,357	$38,261.89	$382,619
Indiana	$191,496	$21,277.33	$212,773
Iowa	$100,000	$11,111	$111,111
Kansas	$100,000	$11,111	$111,111
Kentucky	$122,440	$13,604.44	$136,044
Louisiana	$139,592	$15,510.22	$155,102
Maine	$100,000	$11,111	$111,111
Maryland	$166,481	$18,497.89	$184,979
Massachusetts	$161,374	$17,930.44	$179,304
Michigan	$292,451	$32,494.56	$324,946
Minnesota	$133,277	$14,808.56	$148,086
Mississippi	$109,483	$12,164.78	$121,648
Missouri	$171,561	$19,062.33	$190,623
Montana	$100,000	$11,111	$111,111
Nebraska	$100,000	$11,111	$111,111
Nevada	$100,000	$11,111	$111,111
New Hampshire	$100,000	$11,111	$111,111
New Jersey	$217,801	$24,200	$242,001
New Mexico	$100,000	$11,111	$111,111
New York	$549,720	$61,080	$610,800
North Carolina	$271,792	$30,199.11	$301,991
North Dakota	$100,000	$11,111	$111,111
Ohio	$349,127	$38,791.89	$387,919
Oklahoma	$108,016	$12,001.78	$120,018
Oregon	$100,213	$11,134.78	$111,348
Pennsylvania	$327,030	$36,336.67	$363,367
Puerto Rico	$100,000	$11,111	$111,111
Rhode Island	$100,000	$11,111	$111,111
South Carolina	$142,115	$15,790.56	$157,906
South Dakota	$100,000	$11,111	$111,111
Tennessee	$188,867	$20,985.22	$209,852
Texas	$687,405	$76,378.33	$763,783
Utah	$100,000	$11,111	$111,111
Vermont	$100,000	$11,111	$111,111
Virgin Islands	$100,000	$11,111	$111,111
Virginia	$207,722	$23,080.22	$230,802
Washington	$175,056	$19,450.67	$194,507
West Virginia	$100,000	$11,111	$111,111
Wisconsin	$155,366	$17,262.89	$172,629
Wyoming	$100,000	$11,111	$111,111
Total	$10,000,000	$1,111,108.34	$11,111,108

How this translates elsewhere, CFDA Code 93597.

TAGGS, interactive search, year 2008 only. First, you can click on the Grant #. This will then show you this year, and a particular designated state agency. Then click on that agency, and see what else it’s doing.

What you will see is centralization, I believe, and a whole panorama of events and activities you were possibly aware of (or, I was just a babe in the woods in this category, DNK):

Number of rows returned: 54
Rows 1 through 54 displayed.
Records Searched: 147753

Award Number	Award Title	OPDIV	Program Office	Sum of Actions
0801GUSAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 100,000
0801VISAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 100,000
0801AKSAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 100,000
0801ALSAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 142,379
0801ARSAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 100,000
0801AZSAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 169,198
0810CASAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 957,600
0801COSAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 125,800
0801CTSAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 100,000
0801DCSAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 100,000
0801DESAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 100,000
0801FLSAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 497,059
0801GASAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 295,222
0801HISAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 100,000
0801IASAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 100,000
0801IDSAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 100,000
0801ILSAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 344,357
0801INSAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 191,496
0801KSSAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 100,000
0801KYSAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 122,440
0801LASAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 139,592
0801MASAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 161,374
0801MDSAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 166,481
0801MESAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 100,000
0801MISAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 292,451
0801MNSAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 133,277
0801MOSAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 171,561
0801MSSAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 109,483
0801MTSAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 100,000
0801NCSAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 271,792
0801NDSAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 100,000
0801NESAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 100,000
0801NHSAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 100,000
0801NJSAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 217,801
0801NMSAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 100,000
0801NVSAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 100,000
0801NYSAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 549,720
0801OHSAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 349,127
0801OKSAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 108,016
0801ORSAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 100,213
0801PASAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 327,030
0801PRSAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 100,000
0801RISAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 100,000
0801SCSAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 142,115
0801SDSAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 100,000
0801TNSAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 188,867
0801TXSAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 687,405
0801UTSAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 100,000
0801VASAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 207,722
0801VTSAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 100,000
0801WASAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 175,056
0801WISAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 155,366
0801WVSAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 100,000
0801WYSAVP	2008 SAVP	ACF	OCSE	$ 100,000

NOW, the THEORY behind “access visitation” includes the concept that doing this will help the deadbeat NCP (Noncustodial parent) to be more warmly inclined, or able, or less discouraged, or have incentive, to pay up. This is why it’s related also to welfare reduction. So, basically, it’s a project about reducing outstanding deficits, and is of course administered by the OCSE. So we should presume that its purpose is somewhat related to the OCSE, which is child support collection.

SO, at $10/million/year for (so far about 12) years, is this enough? NO, there is still more unexplored territory when it comes to Child SUpport Demonstration projects. Even after they reported on a whole 970 cases nationwide in 2007.

I just looked under a different code (see chart) and here are the new explorers:

WELL, the first one below, Center for Policy Research isn’t exactly new, in fact Jessica Pearson is behind a whole lot more in these matters, and in the family law field, than meets the average eye. (See website). She most definitely qualifies as a heavyweight, along with her (and six other’s) “Center for Policy Research” and an apparently? related “Policy-Studies.com which (I have to double-check, but it’s already posted recently) got a whopping $4 million (one year) recently for abstinence education too. Coincidentally, both organizations out of Denver. When you click on the site, it reads (on the URL address frame, at least on my computer): “Health and Human Services Outsourcing and Consulting.”

POINT BEING, if we already have all these other Child Support, Child Welfare, and other special demo projects going on, why all the extra, extra funds for Access Visitation?

About PSI

PSI improves the lives of people every day by helping health and human services

organizations reach out to the people they serve; qualify them for essential services; and

manage caseloads with precision, speed, and superior customer service. With more than

1,400 employees spanning 57 programs in 28 states and the District of Columbia, we help

our clients significantly improve program performance. For more information, please visit

http://www.policy-studies.com.

Policy Studies Inc. (PSI) provides outsourcing, consulting, and information technology services to government clients. PSI also supports private sector health organizations in their efforts to strengthen strategic performance and growth. Headquartered in Denver, Colorado, the company has more than 1,200 employees in over 40 sites nationwide. In 2003, PSI was named the sixth fastest growing private company in Colorado by the Denver Business Journal. For more information about PSI’s products and services please visit
http://www.policy-studies.com.

View Jobs for Policy Studies I

http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Policy-Studies-Inc-Reviews-E22614.htm

(Funny review from two employees:

“Its not just a job, its only a job!”

Pros

A stable paycheck and the coworkers are usually pleasant. A great place for people looking for just a job and who don’t want to work too hard.

Cons

Some of the technical folks seemed hesitant to make changes or use newer technologies. Bureaucracy was rampant and individuals could not make changes or improvements. Communication was completely lacking, and senior management would decide what they though was best rather than listen to the folks who were doing the job.

Advice to Senior Management

Be more open to the experience of the people in the remote offices. Discuss ideas before making broad policy and business practice changes.

“Proceed with caution”

Pros

Work with human services agencies, the people at the project level are usually very talented

Cons

Sr. Management has driven off key staff, few opportunities for advancement, poor communication about important events, high spend on initiatives that are risky

Advice to Senior Management

Get back to the basics of what made PSI successful.

Fiscal Year

OPDIV

Grantee Name

City

State

Award Number

Award Title

CFDA Number

CFDA Program Name

Award Activity Type

Award Action Type

Principal Investigator

Sum of Actions

2008

ACF

CENTER FOR POLICY RESEARCH

DENVER

90FI0085

SPECIAL IMPROVEMENT PROJECT

93601

Child Support Enforcement Demonstrations and Special Projects

DEMONSTRATION

NON-COMPETING CONTINUATION

JESSICA PEARSON

$ 124,829

2008

ACF

CENTER FOR POLICY RESEARCH

DENVER

90FI0098

SPECIAL IMPROVEMENT PROJECT/PRIORITY AREA #3

93601

Child Support Enforcement Demonstrations and Special Projects

DEMONSTRATION

NEW

JESSICA PEARSON

$ 99,908

2008

ACF

CHILD AND FAMILY RESOURCE COUNCIL

GRAND RAPIDS

90FI0087

SPECIAL IMPROVEMENT PROJECT

93601

Child Support Enforcement Demonstrations and Special Projects

DEMONSTRATION

NON-COMPETING CONTINUATION

CANDACE COWLING

$ 124,674

2008

ACF

Cuyahoga County Prosecutor`s Office

CLEVELAND

90FI0093

SPECIAL IMPROVEMENT PROJECT

93601

Child Support Enforcement Demonstrations and Special Projects

DEMONSTRATION

NON-COMPETING CONTINUATION

FRANCINE B GOLDBERG

$ 25,000

2008

ACF

DENVER CTY/CNTY DEPT HUMAN SVCS

DENVER

90FI0094

SPECIAL IMPROVEMENT PROJECT

93601

Child Support Enforcement Demonstrations and Special Projects

DEMONSTRATION

NEW

BEN LEVEK

$ 99,800

2008

ACF

Family Service Association of San Antonio, Inc.

SAN ANTONIO

90FI0086

SPECIAL IMPROVEMENT PROJECT GRANT

93601

Child Support Enforcement Demonstrations and Special Projects

DEMONSTRATION

NON-COMPETING CONTINUATION

RICHARD M DAVIDSON

$ 125,000

2008

ACF

IA ST DEPARTMENT OF HUMAN RESOURCES

DES MOINES

90FI0095

SPECIAL IMPROVEMENT PROJECT

93601

Child Support Enforcement Demonstrations and Special Projects

DEMONSTRATION

NEW

MARIE THEISEN

$ 100,000

2008

ACF

Kern County Department of Child Support Services

BAKERSFIELD

90FI0088

SPECIAL IMPROVEMENT PROJECT

93601

Child Support Enforcement Demonstrations and Special Projects

DEMONSTRATION

NON-COMPETING CONTINUATION

PHYLLIS NANCE

$ 25,000

2008

ACF

Kern County Department of Child Support Services

BAKERSFIELD

90FI0097

SPECIAL IMPROVEMENT PROJECT

93601

Child Support Enforcement Demonstrations and Special Projects

DEMONSTRATION

NEW

PHYLLIS NANCE

$ 100,000

2008

ACF

NC ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICE OF THE COURTS

RALEIGH

90FI0099

SPECIAL IMPROVEMENT PROJECT

93601

Child Support Enforcement Demonstrations and Special Projects

DEMONSTRATION

NEW

KRISTIN RUTH

$ 78,842

2008

ACF

NY STATE UNIFIED COURT SYSTEM

NEW YORK

90FI0092

SPECIAL IMPROVEMENT PROJECTS

93601

Child Support Enforcement Demonstrations and Special Projects

DEMONSTRATION

NON-COMPETING CONTINUATION

MICHAEL MAGNANI

$ 24,325

2008

ACF

OK ST DEPARTMENT OF HUMAN SERVICES

OKLAHOMA CITY

90FI0100

SPECIAL IMPROVEMENT PROJECT (SIP)

93601

Child Support Enforcement Demonstrations and Special Projects

DEMONSTRATION

NEW

KATHERINE MCRAE

$ 100,000

2008

ACF

SANTA CLARA COUNTY HEALTH DEPARTMENT

SAN JOSE

90FI0101

SPECIAL IMPROVEMENT PROJECT (SIP)

93601

Child Support Enforcement Demonstrations and Special Projects

DEMONSTRATION

NEW

RALPH MILLER

$ 100,000

2008

ACF

SHOALWATER BAY INDIAN TRIBE

TOKELAND

90FI0089

SPECIAL IMPROVEMENT PROJECT

93601

Child Support Enforcement Demonstrations and Special Projects

DEMONSTRATION

NON-COMPETING CONTINUATION

DEB DUNITHAN

$ 49,934

2008

ACF

Sagamore Institute, Inc.

INDIANAPOLIS

90FI0090

DEMONSTRATION AND SPECIAL IMPROVEMENT PROJECT

93601

Child Support Enforcement Demonstrations and Special Projects

DEMONSTRATION

NON-COMPETING CONTINUATION

DR DAVID G VANDERSTEL

$ 24,995

2008

ACF

TX ST OFFICE OF THE ATTORNEY GENERAL

AUSTIN

90FI0091

SPECIAL IMPROVEMENT PROJECTS

93601

Child Support Enforcement Demonstrations and Special Projects

DEMONSTRATION

NON-COMPETING CONTINUATION

MICHAEL HAYES

$ 25,000

2008

ACF

URBAN INSTITUTE (THE)

WASHINGTON

90FI0096

SPECIAL IMPROVEMENT PROJECT

93601

Child Support Enforcement Demonstrations and Special Projects

DEMONSTRATION

NEW

RENEE HENDLEY

$ 68,355

Search on “Center Policy Research” (modest results, really).

Fiscal Year	Grantee Name	City	State	Award Title	CFDA Program Name	Award Activity Type	Award Action Type	Principal Investigator	Sum of Actions
2009	CENTER FOR POLICY RESEARCH	DENVER	CO	SPECIAL IMPROVEMENT PROJECT/PRIORITY AREA #3	Child Support Enforcement Demonstrations and Special Projects	DEMONSTRATION	NON-COMPETING CONTINUATION	JESSICA PEARSON	$ 50,000
2008	CENTER FOR POLICY RESEARCH	DENVER	CO	SPECIAL IMPROVEMENT PROJECT	Child Support Enforcement Demonstrations and Special Projects	DEMONSTRATION	NON-COMPETING CONTINUATION	JESSICA PEARSON	$ 124,829
2008	CENTER FOR POLICY RESEARCH	DENVER	CO	SPECIAL IMPROVEMENT PROJECT/PRIORITY AREA #3	Child Support Enforcement Demonstrations and Special Projects	DEMONSTRATION	NEW	JESSICA PEARSON	$ 99,908
2007	CENTER FOR POLICY RESEARCH	DENVER	CO	SPECIAL IMPROVEMENT PROJECT	Child Support Enforcement Demonstrations and Special Projects	DEMONSTRATION	NON-COMPETING CONTINUATION	JESSICA PEARSON	$ 124,820
2006	CENTER FOR POLICY RESEARCH	DENVER	CO	CHILD SUPPORT ENFORCEMENT DEMONSTRATIONS AND SPECIAL PROJECTS	Child Support Enforcement Demonstrations and Special Projects	DEMONSTRATION	NON-COMPETING CONTINUATION	JESSICA PEARSON	$ 24,730
2006	CENTER FOR POLICY RESEARCH	DENVER	CO	SPECIAL IMPROVEMENT PROJECT	Child Support Enforcement Demonstrations and Special Projects	DEMONSTRATION	NEW	JESSICA PEARSON	$ 198,664
2005	CENTER FOR POLICY RESEARCH	DENVER	CO	CHILD SUPPORT ENFORCEMENT DEMONSTRATIONS AND SPECIAL PROJECTS	Child Support Enforcement Demonstrations and Special Projects	DEMONSTRATION	NEW	JESSICA PEARSON	$ 100,000
2004	CENTER FOR POLICY RESEARCH	DENVER	CO	EXPANDING CUSTOMER SERVICES THROUGH AGENCY-INITIATED CONTACT	Child Support Enforcement Demonstrations and Special Projects	DEMONSTRATION	NEW	DR JESSICA PEARSON	$ 99,926
1996	CENTER FOR POLICY RESEARCH	SYRACUSE	NY	HOW POOR HEALTH INFLUENCES WORK AND RETIREMENT	Aging Research	SCIENTIFIC/HEALTH RESEARCH (INCLUDES SURVEYS)	NEW	DWYER, DEBRA S	$ 35,910

And here, FY 2000-2009, is a cute little chart showing the top 10 states for receiving these Access/Visitation grants from USASPENDING.GOV. IN 2002, apparently someone was very enthusiastic or reported differently, whereas in 2006, the data (or its reporting) took a nosedive. However, it’s at least a resource for CFDA 93597, “Grants to States (again, to designated agency in each state, and then distributed locally to get the PROGRAM GOAL OF MORE TIME FOR NONCUSTODIAL PARENTS WITH THEIR KIDS.”

I’ve been noncustodial for some time now, and was in the court many times the first year, none of which visitation was happening as order, which I repeatedly brought up. I didn’t see anyone too concerned about this in the various courts (including custody & child support hearings) I was in, or the mediator’s office (see above, mediation was supposed to help). Hmmm.

WELL, this is enough for one post! And another long one, alas!

Written by Let's Get Honest|She Looks It Up

September 16, 2009 at 5:54 PM

Hot mike exposes how Hot Mike (Duvall) values (his own) family, not to mention women in general…

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Some of my fellow-bloggers know that my favorite part of blogging is picking a title. Finding a sarcastic one is rarely hard, all I do is look at the headlines, then the policies, then the grants, then the headlines, and connect the dots. This is where titles like “certifiably insane” or “restraining order suggestions,” (which they are; they are orders that are in effect “suggestions”) come from. I consider the situation. i consider the relationship between the different elements, and names that describe surface.

No wonder the family law field is where the mental health professionals congregate — it manufactures cognitive dissonance on a daily basis.

What IS it about overweight, Caucasian, white-haired politicians that causes attractive women to demean themselves? I just don’t get it. Yeech! Charisma? Money? Publicity? Come on, ladies! This is NOT a step up in the world!

Are you so desperate for attention, or the thrill of secret affairs, or an “in” with a man that’s “in.” Was this to spice up the life with your legitimate husband? Or was it, that a system that wouldn’t let you walk in the door on your own talent, as a woman, and because of your character and track record (not your cronies), you’ll get “in” (or, apparently, vice versa) in some other “positions.” Was this heading towards a blackmail situation for your company’s causes? What gives?

What are you lobbying for in life? THIS??

But speaking of “can,” after hearing Family dude Michael Duvall’s public blunder (let alone hypocrisy), I was really like a kid in a candy store this morning, choosing between post titles. Where does one begin? Canning it? Keeping it zipped? Hot Mike didn’t know the mike was hot?

These are not really minor matters, they are serious discrepancies between politicians and the rest of us who voted for them.

There must just be too many boring marriages around Congress these days. Maybe we should can the WHOLE deal; Marriage Promotion, Responsible Fatherhood, AND of course Abstinence Education. You can’t practice what you preach, no finances to preach it, then. If you can’t keep your own pants zipped, CongressMEN, and anyone else in government, then let’s zip up those federal grants to preach to the rest of us.

I’d rather SEE a sermon than hear one every day. I put my life on the line to leave domestic violence, and lose my own daughters, in good part to the “designer family” mentality coming down from Washington, D.C. (female-headed households causing the social values erosion across the country? Sure, right . . . . . . )

How’s this for not just one, but (2, count’ em, 2) two UN-Healthy Marriages and one IR-Responsible Father?

One hot (married) woman, one stocky white-haired (married) family guy, and one hot mike:

Michael Duvall is a conservative Republican state representative from Orange County, California. While waiting for the start of a legislative hearing in July, the 54-year-old married father of two and family values champion began describing, for the benefit of a colleague seated next to him, his ongoing affairs with two different women. In very graphic detail.

Male menopause? Or just more misogyny? Bastard!!

For instance:

She wears little eye-patch underwear. So, the other day she came here with her underwear, Thursday. And  so, we had made love Wednesday–a lot! And so she’ll, she’s all, ‘I am going  up and down the stairs, and you’re dripping out of me!’ So messy!

Duvall’s sophomoric braggadocio, of course, was picked up by the microphone in front of him, and wound up on a tape for the legislature’s in-house TV station. From there it was sent to a local news station, KCAL, which ran this full report last night:

{“This Video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by CBS.”}

According to both KCAL and the OC Weekly, an alternative weekly in Orange County, the woman who wears the “eye-patch underwear” is Heidi DeJong Barsuglia, a lobbyist for an energy company, Sempra Energy. Duvall is vice chair of the Committee on Utilities & Commerce.

In the tape, Duvall also says of Barsuglia:

So, I am getting into spanking her. Yeah, I like it. I like spanking her. She goes, ‘I know you like spanking me.’ I said, ‘Yeah! Because you’re such a bad girl!’

The OC Weekly explains that it identified Barsuglia as the woman Duvall was talking about because Duvall also said:

And so her birthday was Monday. I was 54 on June 14, so for a month, she was 19 years younger than  me. I said, ‘Now, you’re getting old. I am going to have to trade you in.’ And she goes, ‘[I’m] 36.’ She is 18 years younger than me. And so I keep  teasing her, and she goes, ‘I know you French men. You divide your age by  two and add seven, and if you’re older than that, you dump us.

The hearing took place on July 8th. OC Weekly looked at voter registration records and confirmed that Barsuglia turned 36 on Monday July 6.

Separately, KCAL named Barsuglia, citing sources.

According to the OC Weekly, Duvall and Barsuglia have been seen “arm-in-arm” at fund-raising events, and even shopping for groceries together near the Capitol.

One Sacramento staffer told the paper:

Their relationship is the worst-kept secret in Sacramento. He’s old and fat. She’s hot, blonde and about 20  years younger. He could have never gotten a woman like that before he got  this job.

She’s a social climber. I wonder what school system or faith system she came out of. This is our culture that devalues women. They just don’t know what to do with us. We’re either hot tarts, or the scapegoat for society’s ills, or need to be beaten into submission in our homes. We don’t have equal legal rights, really, and were last to get the vote. Nevertheless, this is the atmosphere, rest assured, in which the laws of our nation are discussed and passed.

As for the second woman, whose identity remains unconfirmed, Duvall said in the recorded conversation:

Oh, yeah, Sher, Shar, Shar. Oh, she is hot! I talked to her yesterday. She goes, ‘So are we finished?’ I go, ‘No, we’re not finished.’ I go, ‘You know about the other one [Barsuglia], but she doesn’t know about you!’

So, he was cheating on not one woman, but two? One for the money, two for the show, and three to keep them all at bay. This is giving fundamentalist polygamous religions an excuse Good _____ ing grief!

This story, of course, just wouldn’t be the same if Duvall — a former mayor of Yorba Linda and the owner of an insurance company — weren’t known as a strict conservative and a staunch defender of family values. But alas, he is.

YES IT WOULD BE THE SAME. DEVALUING WOMEN MAKES NO SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCE NO MATTER WHO IT’S COMING FROM, AS FAR AS I’M CONCERNED. Including women themselves, who buy into this. IT HURTS ALL OF US. men and women both. SOMEONE WANT TO PROPOSE THE PROGRESSIVES OR LIBERALS ARE HISTORICALLY MORE FAITHFUL TO THEIR WIVES? WHEN IT COMES TO CONGRESSMEN AND POLITICIANS OR PRESIDENTS (I’m thinking any man would be NUTS to not value Michelle Obama, and I’m betting that our current President is a cut above in this category. But he’s NOT when it comes to policies that demean mothers . . . . . )

As the OC Weekly reports,  Duvall has “blasted” efforts to promote gay marriage, and got a 100 percent score from the Capitol Resource Institute, which describes its mission as to “educate, advocate, protect, and defend family-friendly policies in the California state legislature”. In March, a spokeswoman for the group called Duvall “a consistent trooper for the conservative causes,” adding that “for the last two years, he has voted time and time again to protect and preserve family values in California.”

Here’s a glance at “Capitol Resource Institute.” (everything is an institute, a coalition, a council, an initiative around here, when it comes to noble causes) What three great words: Capitol. Resource. Instititute. Maybe calling it something like this will make it happen:

OK, everyone, your marriages should look like this (and make sure you marry, too. And abstain until you do):

White, 40-something, and one cute little blond boy between, everyone happy, strong, strong strong family bonds:

Capitol Resource Institute

CRI’s mission is to educate and strengthen families and we do that by working to influence public policy**. It’s imperative that citizens join with us in staying up to speed on current legislation affecting family values!

As your watchdog for family values here in Sacramento, CRI is committed to keeping you informed about important legislation. So, stay tuned!

**For the uninitiated, this is not a “Christian” value, it is not the job of the government to educate families. It is the individual family’s job.

The “theocracy” was tried and failed in the nation of Israel. They tried judges. Many of the judges were corrupt. They then wanted a king, and got Saul, and it appears to me that our nation [Specifically, the Executive Branch of the Federal Government, not just present administration] still has Saul’s problem, he confused himself with a prophet, offered sacrifices, broke the laws of the kingdom, and he and his son ended up consulting a foreign spirit (in the form of a medium), and died in father/son suicide when a battle was lost. Before this, another notable metaphor in the book was of the “Tower of Babel.” Men tried to reach heaven: one language, one tower, one global seamless enterprise and world government about to happen. The account says, God confused their language and knocked the whole thing down.

We’re trying it again. It makes me sick.

Moreover, it is not “American” to promote the idea that it’s the government’s job to educate families. The “American” idea is embodied in the U.S. Constitution (and Bill of Rights, AND Declaration of Independence). Any President that is sworn in is to uphold this, he takes an oath. Incidentally, the Chief Justice administering this oath to Obama (not Obama, but the Chief Justice), flubbed it, putting president-elect Barack Obama off-guard, but he handled it OK. A clip of this was on the Internet recently; it’s searchable. I’m curious why a Chief Justice couldn’t get the short statement by memory, straight. . . . .

While it’s entertaining and good press to know every detail of our public figures personal sexual lives (well, thank God, not every detail) and adventures, and to throw mud at them when they’re caught with their, er, pants down, it’s BETTER entertainment to see what’s happening with that Constitution, these “Charters of Liberty” and our tax dollars. That’s why in this blog I try to alternate between the “headlines” (illustrating, Houston, we have a problem) and the social policies, and the charts showing the money flowing to promote a particular social policy. One has to look at all three.

A look at our government in practice will show that there’s nothing family about it, it’s as corporate as any business model anywhere. A close look at the leaders in our government will also show that many of them do not have their own families or marriages together.

Policies that are CONSTITUTION-FRIENDLY are “FAMILY-FRIENDLY.” I’ll take them any day over Designer families and you should too. Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and keep your government policies out of my personal pants (or skirts) and Congress (congress is LARGELY male still) start leading with the big head, not the little one between your legs, please, and I’ll bet it IS little, if you need three women to feel masculine and powerful.

Sorry to be crude, but I’m trying to communicate down on, apparently, the language some of you speak. If you ran into enough real women, that can tell an honest man from a cheater, you’d probably turn tail.

The main problem the Libertarians and Conservatives, that say they want to get back to basics in the matters of the Constitution (vs. UN and globalism) is that they continue to think it doesn’t apply to all citizens, specifically, less so to women, and less so to people of color. All animals are theoretically equal, but in these groups’ practice (and promotions) some animals are more equal than others. I’m saying this from the horse’s mouth; I’m female, and when I appealed to both faith institutions and courts of law for due process and enforcement, I found that the bottom line was, I had children and I was female, not male, and this discrepancy applied at every level.

Until we start moving away from an economy that requires a form of slave labor, or close to it, which requires a substrata to get the good things of life, we’re not going to move that close back to the Constitution and Bill of Rights. FYI, the job of the public school system (and our current President’s move, along with the courts, to get those kids away from their Mamas and a “Head Start” in life) is to indoctrinate the masses into not getting to uppity, too literate, or too “onto” what the rest of the leadership is doing in private conferences, and I’m not referring primarily to the sexual escapades of family guys.

(More on that in other posts).

MEANWHILE . . . . on Mr. Duvall

There are still countries that stone INNOCENT young women for being gang-raped. What if it were the other way around, men, would you put a lid on it?

There are two ways to control people: indoctrination (brainwashing) or force, or a combination of both.

I’m thinking we ought to start setting an age limit on who gets to be a Congressperson, and if you’re Caucasian & male, you’re put out to pasture when you hit 45. Or, Affirmative Action Congress. That means half women. In every state. That’d be a new day!

Perhaps then we wouldn’t have so many groupies around Congress distracting legislators from some very real problems that still exist in the world outside Southern California, as well as outside the executive offices and marble stairways that represent what a bunch of colonists pledged their lives for 200+ years ago, and gave them, too.

If you cannot control your sexual urges, and confine them to one woman, the one that you vowed to marry (for those who are married in Congress and are male, obviously) then it’s quite unlikely you can be faithful to any oath you took to uphold the U.S. Constitution or the laws of this state. Let alone show some fiscal restraint.

This was ostensibly the standard in a fledging religion long ago:

“If any be blameless, the husband of one wife, having faithful children not accused of riot or unruly.” Titus 1:6.

Well, I’d guess that’s just a bit “unruly,” eh? On Dad’s part at least. The principle being, start small,

and if you’re competent to handle smaller groups of people — like your family! honestly then you get larger ones….

So, let’s say (this IS familycourtmatters.wordpress.com, right?) Mrs. Duvall decides NOT to “stand by her man” like Ms. Clinton did, and help him through this, and they divorce.

Then they can go through mediation, custody and if there’s a discrepancy, the courts can tell Mrs. Duvall how, they KNOW he’s a womanizer and charmingly unable to handle the marital relationship, he just has a healthy appetite for women, but a boy needs his father (do they have boys), so should see him regularly. After all, there is a crisis in father absence, which is a greater crisis than a crisis in, say, morality or ethics, and boys will be boys, and must learn about how to cheat on their futures wives with impunity from somewhere, that a rich old man can have a woman half his age if he wants one, or two; just as children leaving domestic violence, or abuse by a parent, need to learn that there is a double standard around, one for males and one for females.

Well, at least he resigned.

Written by Let's Get Honest|She Looks It Up

September 10, 2009 at 8:28 PM

Posted in Cast, Script, Characters, Scenery, Stage Directions, Designer Families, My Takes, and Favorite Takes

Tagged with Manhood, Michael Duvall, social commentary, U.S. Govt $$ hard @ work..

Finding a Firm Place to Stand, Prying Loose Violence and Abuse

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Note on display: Twice, I painstakingly went through and re-inserted the paragraph breaks in this post, and saved the revisions. I do not know why they aren’t all displaying anymore, so presume only the most curious readers will wade through the nonparagraphed texts. I did not (waders will find this quickly) correct all typos. I am talking about how to THINK about the issues in family court and deal with them. They become greater, often, than the issues which brought a family there to start with, and generally result in impoverishment of one or more spouses in the process, which then becomes an ongoing issue for the duration of the case.

Although the label on the door speaks ‘reconciliation” “mediation” “family” and “negotiation” “parenting” and all kinds of good fuzzy words, the fact is it is a form of warfare. First, between the parents, and second, upon the parents, and their rights and of course their wealth. I have been in this system many years as have other mothers I know. Stamina is always an issue, and attitude even more so. What I am interested most in, though, is angle of approach and reducing personal frustration by refusing to hold to myths which have proven to be myths, and arguing points that, though they shouldn’t be, are truly “moot.”

I finally got out of my abusive violent marriage, and good thing, when I found a place to stand and vocabulary to describe the situation. Then I had to experientially understand that something else was possible. I had to believe that other ways to exist would open up, even if I didn’t yet know what they were, but the one firm decision was, this was NOT the way I was going to spend XX more time, no matter how murky the exit seemed.

I would like to leave a bridge for others and tell them where the U-turns and dead ends are, like a scout. This would be best done before both my children have “aged out” of the system (one almost has). Part of that process is chosing the right place to stand in looking at it.

ALMOST NONE of the evaluations of the family law system, or recommendations to reform it, deal with the issue of child support, although certainly both mothers (and mothers’ groups) and fathers (and fathers’ groups) complain loudly about unfair support orders, or unpaid ones. That seems foolish to me. While many others talk about the professionals in the courts, and complaints and versions of them, very few talk about the entire SYSTEM of this, or the HISTORY of this. So in order to understand a thing, one must step OUTSIDE and look further, after the “full-immersion” version of what’s in there. I was shocked, and am shocked, to find a trail leading back to places like Washington, D.C., Denver Colorado (in an upcoming post) and places like Minnesota, or Texas, in explaing what the heck is going on in California. Or for that matter, on other continents. Failure to understand this is silly, given globalization and the internet, however typically this is about how it goes on the local level.

When I walked into some domestic violence family law places many years ago to try and get a handle on the violence that was ongoing and becoming more frequent, more frightening, more destructive (to work, relationships, income), and I was concerned also about whether it would turn deadly, the business of the day was bonding with other women, hearing their stories, learning I was NOT alone or without resources to change something, and learning the vocabulary. While this is normal (and part of abuse is generally being talked AT and down TO, not conversed WITH, so this experience was important and validating), what I did not do at that time was question what this center was doing, who was running it, who had conflict of interest with whom, and why we were headed into the family law system when I had felony level domestic violence going on at home? Why weren’t these people showing us how to deal with police?

One time during an incident, they even SENT police (when I called to try to avoid an attack that was building up and couldn’t get out), but why wasn’t the difference between criminal and civil explained, that I recall?

Now these organizations have “morphed” also, which is another topic.

Meanwhile, this post “morphed” into two topics, and then I started reflecting, which makes three:

So please bear with the initial posting, and then in a bit I will cut the pie into appropriate, more digestible pieces.

I used to, more often, wonder about what happened to this statement, in the family law system’s communal “head” and reasoning.

It’s already been voted into law I believe this statement to be true, experientially:

http://www.sddvc.com/pdf/2008finalwithsignatures.pdf
This is out of San Diego: Law Enforcement Protocol:

“The California State Legislature has declared that:

(1) “[S]pousal abusers present a clear and present danger to the mental and
physical well-being of the citizens of the State of California.” (California
Penal Code section 273.8.)

(2) “A substantial body of research demonstrates a strong connection between
Domestic Violence and Child Abuse.” (California Penal Code section
13732(a)).

So the next question is, “What are YOU going to do about it?” (when in court).

Or, “What can I do about it, when this is my family?”

Or, “What can I do about it, when this is my friend, or my community, or . . . . . . “

Or, if one is exceptionally social-minded or moved by this: What can I do about this?” PERIOD.

My approach, until I learned, experientially, the next truth, was this(same document):

“The decision to prosecute a batterer lies within the discretion of the District Attorney
and the City Attorney. Victims do not “press charges”, “drop charges” or
“prosecute” their batterers.

Ay, there’s the rub. So, they go get civil or family court restraining orders, which are less respected. Or, they go to their family, friends, faith institution, etc. Then they find out what their: family, friends, faith institution, etc., are about. And the years go by, the kids grow up. . . . . .

Ay, there’s the rub.** So, they go get civil or family court restraining orders, which are less respected. Or, they go to their family, friends, faith institution, etc. Then they find out what their: family, friends, faith institution, etc., are about. And the years go by, the kids grow up. . . . . .

**”To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub”

Origin From the celebrated ‘to be, or not to be‘ speech in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, 1603:

HAMLET:
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;

When there is a clear and present danger, one (which one? ONE! We. I, you, the mother, the wife, the father, the neighbor, the society, although I’m not into communal society dreaming a single particular dream. . . . . It runs to abuse . . .. . Who interprets the dreams? WHo dreams them, the king? Do we have a king in this country? Ostensibly no, but our behaviors don’t always indicate this belief, no matter who’s currently in office), one cannot afford to dream.

But in “Family court matters” we are told to, as parents, or have our head examined by the local shrink more familiar with the dream.

I’m burnt out on all the propaganda in this field, let alone being preached AT from multiple quarters. The beginning of any school year, which for a former teacher, and former mother with kids in the house, and former musician/performer, is often a tough time emotionally.

So I’d say a WHOLE lot of this system is itself a “moot point” and intentionally so. It’s not what it pretends itself to be, and don’t you tell me this is because judges jsut don’t “understand” the domestics of domestic violence. They understand the power dynamic JUST FINE and are part of it.

Well, THIS post will have to be revamped for sure tomorrow morning! What a day!

1. Moot points and

2. Paradigms as tools to pry loose from a confining world view that leaves one trapped in useless dialogue.

And now here is

3. Reflections, descriptions.

Just to be ornery, let’s do this in reverse order:

3. How it feels (reflect, describe, (OK, complain)):

(I also have spliced in some reflection and reaction (personal). Well, I will sort this thought laundry after it’s been rinsed, spun and dried. The situation arises today because I’m simply tired of a lifestyle of seeking funding, seeking grants, seeking ways to make a dysfunctional system function (it’s not “dysfunctional from certain points of view) and weighing that alternative with the prospects of launching a proper civil suit to demand damages for torts, or access funds due people in my situation, it’s called “victims of crime” funding, but they are working on shuffling this into the domestic violence shelters, supposedly), OR simply getting through another day when life is racing by, with no way to access and have reasonable contact with either daughter? What would I do? Bring one of them along for a grants application, or have them sit by while I fill out legal paperwork against their current caretakers? Not hardly! I no longer associate with the former professionals, or have even funds for a museum trip. Show them how to ask a stranger for bus fare? This gets old after a while, particularly processing so many alternatives. I need to pray).

I have about five decades of life under my belt, and now two-fifths of these dealing with a singular issue — family violence, and leaving it. And approximately four and a half of these inhaling and exhaling music, for which I no longer even have an appetite, which is bothersome if you’ve lived and breathed this mode of living for such along time.

Of the approximately two-fifths of these decades dealing with the family violence issue, up until three years ago, my sole focus, intent, and drive was 3-fold:

1. set boundaries, and defend them so I could adequately

2. Get both daughters a reasonable education without so much stress and melodrama (because the fight was over this, within the family)i.e., get them back into the arts and off to colleges on scholarships. Literally the only way to do this as a single mother and with such limited funds, was homeschooling, which had just been stopped, or an alternate variety of the public school which gave them (and me) time to do the arts through independent study, or collaborative agreements with (by their ages now this was available) a local community college. We got 2 weeks only into this in summer 2006, anda the girls were literally stolen by his father and a girlfriend from my custody on an overnight visitation, sending into chaos 1, 2, and this:

3. Regaining financial self-sufficiency and some decent STABLE relationships (or, barring that, at least income) by engaging in: piano, choir and voice — which was what most of my life had been about, apart from being a mother and leaving abuse.

I believe it’s quite understandable why I don’t feel like taking up with a male for either sex, warmth, shared housing, or simple companionship before feeling literally, safe in my own skin, house, and profession. For one, it’s outside of my personal beliefs to sleep around, and part of this is practical. I do not want to engage in another relationship without the financial capacity to leave should it turn the same direction again. PERIOD. And, I don’t want to engage in a relationship with a needy male who can’t pull his own weight and needs a woman to do so, or to help punish and ex, which is the type of person my ex made a beeline for in his second live-in relationship.

The question, who ARE you continues to come up, when the usual definitions don’t do, and this is an issue women constantly face as they go through life. When the trip through family court adds to the turmoil with stigmatizing labeling, psychologizing and theologizing about who a woman is because she has personal limits on abuse and (________ deleted), it takes strength to redefine where one stands.

Which brings up the issue of, if you’re that strong, what does one “need” a partner for, as most of us do want to be wanted. Sex? Money/ Someone who knows you over time to eat a meal with on a regular basis, and some conversation (I’m strongly tending towards the latter)? Someone to have some fun (and intimacy) with? Yep. So, then which religion do we throw out, eh?

I have always known that I was able to relate solitary (as to the art and work, nature, writing, etc.) BUT also in social groupings and communities was necessary, including individual friendships and relationships. My family was nothing of this to me, they went through the routines, and in fact the only one whose conversations hold much weight with me at this point is actually my father, who has been gone 26 years. At least he had a sense of humor, all I get from the surviving relatives is dogma, and bitterness, now that I surfaced as individual AND mother, and serious about both. Like I said, i was tolerated to the extent I forked over the futures of two children I gave birth to, and the less complaint, the better. That concept was disgusting to start with, and how it happened, worse. How much more important values can a mother transmit to her daughters than that it’s unacceptable for any man to assault a woman, let alone a pregnant one, and that they are NOT commodities, but individuals? That the laws of this land exist to protect them (actually false at this point, they are “moot” in practice) and that RIGHT is in this direction and WRONG is in that direction. That true is true and false is false when it comes to certain facts, and that these matter? That the sky, not the gutter, is the limit for them in all categories of life, and this includes demanding no double standards in work, in marriage, in life, and in schooling. IN communication and anywhere else.

And that it is of CRITICAL importance to call that event what it was, several years ago, and a travesty and misfiring of the justice system, and a coverup of a felony action, covered up because it was committed against a female, not a male. In the long arch of life, these are important.

As is choice of college.

As I’m running out of years, and options (and have run out of funds) and have hammered away at the problem of ethics, illogic, and troubling immorality within, in order: marriage, family, faith institutions, and ever expanding circles, including legal, family court, child support, and finally (how much further up can one go?) the U.S. Federal Government, and how it’s put together, apparently, I struggle between investing in another income initiative (knowing what this brings on from the family) and going for legal enforcement of some right (knowing how corrupt THAT system is) and continually calculating the odds.

Over the years, and as a female, I was naturally taught to seek help, collaborate and cooperate in this matter of throwing out a man that was dangerous, and maintaining a safe, but kindly access to my kids’ father, and yet also asserting –and REbuilding, really — a personal integrity and identity as mother, and professional.

After multiple betrayals, and eventually, watching my non-immoral, non-narcissistic, employed, tax-paying, non-law-rejecting supportive friends and colleagues (many of them also parents) vicariously, through this support, worn out, drained, and finally need to distance themselves to protect their OWN livelihoods and personal time, what remains instead is the toxic relationship with the ex-parent, and a continual need to replenish income and social contacts, however there is little common experience on which to make them.

Meanwhile, whether with children or (criminally, was how this happened) absent children, I was seeking simple law enforcement, asserting a right to reach financial independence in any legal moral way I saw fit, not in the politically correct to relatives and ex manner. I wanted control of my own infrastructure, and I wanted EVERYONE out of my personal turf that had no legal business there and no right to be there. Boy, THAT was a war!

How suspicious this is to our society in general. Can’t a woman get a little peace? My “liberal” relatives had a snit fit over me, without a resident male in the household, even though the resident male was, literally tearing up the place, and at times, portions of my face. In front of our children, too. What’s liberal about THAT?

I have been literally ordered to give my relatives what they wanted, and shut up about it afterwards — make the court orders, ALL of them “moot points,” prostrate myself and fork over all major decisions about life income and their schooling. They wanted MY KIDS, through the father, who at one time tried to offer his custody rights to these people in order to follow through in a prior personal threat to do this, solitary confinement for the sin of standing up!

In that sense, yes, it was “about the kids,” but when it gets to suppressing facts, lying, and breaking laws, it’s not about any children but about ego. How dare these folks use me as a surrogate mother to compensate for a prior elective choice, irreversible past menopause, to not have children? And break laws, intentionally ignore and dismiss domestic violence, and felony child-stealing, all kinds of bribery, manipulation and extortion, and serious character defects in the father (such as failure to support even himself, let sufficient work to also help support them) in order to get their way?

How dare my daughters be used for social, emotional props from a religious group that tolerates wife abuse? But they are. How DARE their distress fund the legal systems in two counties — but it does.

2. Paradigms, Tools to Pry Loose, Places to stand and the Lever of Language

Well, there are a lot of fish in the sea, tne the ones that don’t travel in schools that dart too and fro as athey are told to, and with each changing current, are the somewhat smaller groups of predators with teeth. So, I guess the task at hand is to figure out where the “teeth” are in this life. And where is the MOST relevant truth at any individual point in time. Where is the place to stand to move the system, or at least pull up the heavy stage drapes revealing the scaffolding, the catwalks, the prompters, and the actors without their stage makeup on.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

So, the first rule in depth perception is using both eyes — 2 Points of View.

For someone totally immersed, the first key is another set of experiences, a paradigm or language tools with which to Uproot Abuse and expose its roots. Hint: If one way fails, perhaps you have the wrong tools, and/or are standing in the wrong place.

(Where I’m eventually going with this is the money trail in the courts. . . . .. we won’t get there today….)

The reason I KNOW this is both the man who knocked my teeth loose

(for adjusting the volume on the radio from earsplitting loud, at the wrong time)

AND

my family of origin

AND

it’s obvious by now the family law system (cf. grants to courts for “Access/Visitation” being administered by OCSE,

office of Child Support Enforcement. There’s not even an attempt to conceal this on the websites)

2A. Dude, it’s about the money. That’s the paradigm to understand in understanding the family law system. This means child support and federal grants have to be examined as well, as well as job referrals, and private conflicts of interest among professionals on the same case.

They all know it’s about the money. So why do we all go into court and pretend it’s about the laws, REALLY? It ain’t. What is that, a courtly dance? Pirouettes, music, and all? And to half the people involved, at least, who can REALLY believe any more it’s about the kids – good grief! (see my last post). They themselves are growing up and saying they’re TIRED of being used in this manner. They grow up suffering all kinds of problems later, and then support other underground economies, like DRUGS. Then the fatherhood groups say this is because there’s a lack of father involvement. The fact is, the converse might be true — abusive Dads were KEPT in relationships too long. And while aspects of the system might be responsible for excessive jailing of African-American men, and men more than women, that’s not the woman’s fault when a child is at stake!

You know what some women I’m aware of got jailed for? Primarily, failure to pay child support, and taking their kids to prevent child molestation after it’s already happened. There’s a woman in southern California without contact with her kid. She says she found him pimping himself on the internet and contacted him (with an RO in place) to say STOP DOING THAT! She was threatened with jail for breaking a no contact order. Was anyone else concerned about a young man pimping himself on the internet to get away from an abusive Dad? There are all kinds of horror stories, and they are not just stories, either.

2B. Anything that is obviously, over time, a moot point, then this is not the reigning paradigm, even if you wish it were or thought it should be. Another one is actually primary. is the goal to change the system or win your case

(and which first? Because one timeframe is shorter than the other. This is where many organizations, with a cash flow, employees, business offices, and a little momentum, have a different world view than mothers, who have fast-growing children and fast-changing situations personally.)

MOOT POINTS:

When I was married, pretty much every thing was a “moot point” but what “mood” someone was in. It didn’t take too long to figure this out, but what to do about it was definitely a work in progress, and required my adjusting my concepts of both marriage, self, relationships, and (most importantly) PRIORITIES until I came to the conclusion that OUT was BEST.

I have been questioning recently why I bother to blog. Will it change anything? Does it make someone feel better or give a person hope or more tools to make sense of their situation? Does it help record these “stolen” years? I blog, therefore I am? Is it as much a contribution to society as my former practice, teaching kids, youth, and adults to SING, which I know was empowering and helpful to society. It was another “paradigm” for many of them, to hear what they could do, especially ensemble. And there is some terrifically beautiful and inspiring choral music out there; one can draw from different centuries and DEFINITELy different cultures. ANd build a skill, some discipline, some good times in the process also. What a great profession!

On the other hand, in the years behind me is a trail of court actions pronouncing one thing or another, after which I’ve been dumped by the roadside of life, having fulfilled my civic duty: Surrogate mother (as to our family line) and Family Court Client (as to the last many years). Before then in life, tuition has been paid through two sets of bachelor’s degrees, and our difficult divorce has justified (supposedly) the existence of several court-related and many nonprofit institutions, none of which (from MY standpoint) have fulfilled their assigned purposes, as judged by what the titles proclaim they do. For example, “Child Support Enforcement” “Restraining Order” “Custody Order” and “visitatin/vacation” schedule. All became “moot points” in our case history. So as far as “giving at the office,” I’ve done my part in life.

The collateral of THESE becoming “moot points” is that my work history and efforts have become JUST as “moot.. I would get jobs, only to lose them around the above. And then be targeted for further ridicule from my own family who were both the source of many of the job losses and (my mother) of some of the help to recover from them, since my local government determined not to enforce its own laws when a mother & woman was concerned. Go figure THAT one out.

Now we are to start again, but the situation has not been closed, and moreover, more cooks are involved, within my own family. The second chapter of leaving abuse is leaving the family of origin, or the abuser’s associates’ influence.

So, I have been bounced out of the paradigm of getting and maintaining and income, and investing some planning in doing so, into the paradigm of navigating either the government bureaucracy of welfare, being insulted that the same government drove me and my kids back there, from a different segment, OR (as my ex either does, or simply exists under the radar; which isn’t clear yet) trying to go “off the grid,” OR, getting back into the arena.

What happens with wrong paradigm? You lose! A lot.

Oh, by the way, did I mention that, barring repentance, a new character implant, or true reformation, or actual, actual inner spiritual awakening (not just the kind that gets probation vs incarceration, or that wins the heart of a gullible vulnerable female), “conciliation” isn’t really the reigning paradigm in the family law courts. OSTENSIBLY it is, but in practice and practice shows intent, it ain’t.

While I was operating under the (illusion, I say) paradigm of LAW vs. Enforcement/compliance, etc., and with the vocabulary I learned post-separation to describe this abuse — because without a tool for the mind, the words, one is hard put to dig, pry, or loosen a situation, to objectify it and decide what to do with it, the people on the other side of the court motion, including one unrepentant woman-batterer, were using the pretense of negotiation to enforce ultimatums, point by point, on my life that no court order warranted. And while the courts and police exist to handle this, it was not practically possible once the downward slide got going with some speed. And the first thing that slid away was jobs. and with them relationships and sources of referral for more work (i was self-employed in the profession as many if not most classical/teaching musicians are)

So WORDS ARE CRUCIAL, just as words justified abuse and oppression in marriage — the wider picture was the rapids ahead — family law, instead used the exact opposite paradigm the paradigm of pathologizing conflict and reuniting family. The paradigm of Big Brother (and his other relatives) as “doctor” and anyone that comes through the doors as little children needing coaching for their “squabbles.” It was the paradigm of “Reunification” for the good of society. Only much, much later did I learn of the paradigm of the social crisis of “fatherlessness.”

Words alone are not indicators; when they are only as good as their context and who is speaking. So listening to content only is a literal, Western-minded, linear type of thinking that just don’t work in the jungle. One has to listen differently than one was taught to in school and in other areas where tuning out the static and background noise would actually be functional. Again, abusers and people whose intent is to dominate, not reason together, listen and observe in this manner also. This listening goes on outside the courtroom, and in fact outside the courtroom is often MORE relevant, and INSIDE, while the arena whre a judge signs and order, is a very, very small portion of time in the life of a lawsuit.

WORDS. So, enter “cognitive dissonance” the first time it hits you, and a lot of water (time) under the bridge dealing with it emotionally. THAT is the point of the game . . . . . like a spider injects toxin into its prey, to numb it, or a lion roars, or sometimes headlights can blind a deer. The point is the fascination that freezes the prey. The TALK is the toxin.

So for some years and months, and to different entitites, I kept talking law, rules, safety, and “get real!”, while this system kept talking different words, but they were only smokescreen words. I had already (the year prior) translated the family “talk” sufficiently to act on it. I deciphered that they rejected the analogy of domestic violence (not to mention the restraining order then in place, also) and I acted accordingly, and went about my won business. Problem? Hadn’t fully analyzed the situation yet, how adversarial indeed it was, and what was at stake, namely total control of my daughters.

To take the words coming through the family law system at face value is to deal with the pawns, not the bishops, knights, rooks, or kings and queens in the game, which have different powers, patterns of movement and move (except the king) further and faster, although if you get the ponderous king stuck between a pawn and a knight, it’s still check-mate.

So, there are two paradigms and two languages in effect; one is public (glitter and sham) and the other is private, and that IS the money and professional affiliations involved. That IS the business of the court, literally, and it is interlaced with the business of government, and the total transformation of society into basically, I’d summarize it, basically back to a feudal system. The Court, The Courtiers, the Courtesans (of course) and the subjects. Fealty counts. Betrayal of secrets is punished harshly, as individuals suffer when attempting to individually break a family code that tolerates almost anything WITHIN its ranks, but not disloyalty to “outsiders.” To them, this is “good.” TO those who disapprove of the family cult or clan, it is “bad.” There you have it.

2C. GENGHIS KHAN: Who was he? Who was his army? How did they conquer so much territory?

That’s a lot of territory. Now, it’s less geography, populations. Technology and using language to transform beliefs.

The Devil’s Horsemen:

“The Devil’s Horsemen.”

The conquering Mongols were most feared by their victims as “the devil’s horsemen” who carried everything before them and left nothing behind.” (Genghis Khan & the Mongol Conquests, 1190-1400 [page 8]) The “invincible” Mongolian Army faced little opposition, physical, nor mental, until they began campaigning in areas outside of the steppe regions.

. . .

The first problem that the Mongols and their current leader Genghis Khan overcame, was the complex planning needed in order for them to defeat their more organized, and better equipped foes. “New military technologies therefore had to be learned and relearned

. . .

At Xiangyang in 1272 Khubilai Khan was forced to send to his kinsmen in the west for counterweight trebuchets, the latest thing in siege catapults, to breach its walls.” (Genghis Khan & the Mongol Conquests, 1190-1400 [page 9]) The need for a more strategic way of fighting allowed the Mongols to evolve. Without that evolution, the Mongols would never have been able to stand up to their well-trained, well-organized enemies. This extraordinary skill to adapt, and thus survive, helped the Mongols not only in the physical aspects of warfare, but the psychological. Becoming an enemy that has the ability to adapt and thrive in any situation and on any terrain earned the Mongols the title of “the Devil’s horsemen”.

Application:

When you begin studying grants, particularly as to “Domestic VIolence Coalitions” and “Healthy Marriage Coalitions” as I have, you’ll see the heavy upfront investments in INFORMATION DISSEMINATION and “Technical Support” infrastructures. Money to shelters may be cut back, but not discretionary grants to preventative organizations that confer, publish, conference, and advise — no sirree!

This is the “technology” of our age. Backed up, though is the reputation of terror. This system can literally terrorize, tear up, traumatize, and restructure a family at will. As Ghenghis Khan united warring tribes, after establishing his reputation, I can trace (and others have) how certain organizations (nonprofits / for-profits) have positioned themselves as “experts” in several fields and united, dominated the conversations in these fields for decades. As I like to say, “before you got up for breakfast.”

Whereas formerly these fields supposedly (and probably) were separated: “Father’s Rights’ (i.e., anti-feminist), Violence Against women (i.e., feminist, meaning, we’re human beings with equal rights, not baby-producers or upstart rebels), and Child Protection Services (I can’t say whether these groups ever performed the function, and I haven’t studied them as much) they now pride themselves on collaborating.

The “technology” of our time is the internet and information, but it is indeed backed up by police force to incarcerate — OR, to release from prison some thug that is GOING to kill or terrorize again. Toms River, Minnesota, California, Nevada, you name it, it happens.

Consider a bit of Mongol history:

The Mongols

by antonio2godoy</a>” href=”http://socyberty.com/author/antonio2godoy/” mce_href=”http://socyberty.com/author/antonio2godoy/”>antonio2godoy in History, March 29, 2009

This is an a little description of what the Mongols were like under Genghis Khan’s rule.

(I put it in very fine print, because it’s not central to this post, just related:)

The Mongols were amazing herders and horse back riders. Within time they dominated China and Eastern Europe. Who would have envisioned that these nomads, herders that relied on animal and natural resources for survival, would reign over a great deal of territory belonging to the Chinese and Eastern Europeans?! But with the leadership of Genghis Khan, the Mongols conquered all who opposed them and ruled with an iron fist earning a reputation for extreme cruelty. Then, after a hundred years the Mongol empire disappeared. After reading this you’ll learn how the Mongols put effective leadership first and then effectively manage it with discipline.

. . . Genghis Khan changed his name from Temujin after numerous victories. Temujin was born in 1162 and was part of the Kiyad tribe close to the Burhan Khaldun Mountains. He had three younger brothers and his father, Yesugei, was the tribe leader. Yesugei arranged Khan’s marriage to Borte at a young age. Yesugei was poisoned at a dinner of a neighboring tribe. Although Temujin was next in line, he still had to prove that he was the strongest to before he can lead over the tribe. At the young age of 13 he killed his brother while hunting. Age 17 Temujin married Borte and united two tribes. Borte was then kidnapped by an enemy tribe. Legend says that Timujin sent an army of 40,000 to rescue his wife which may have led him to his destiny. After Temujin conquered and united numerous tribes, as well Mongolia his name was well known throughout the land as Genghis Khan, Ruler of the world.

{{establish dominance. A “name” is very important to leadership}}

Many historians consider Khan ahead of his time because his army was well structured, trained and equipped. He organized his 80,000 soldiers into divisions of 10,000, with 1000 in each regiment, 100 in each company and 10 in a squad. In 1206 all of Mongolia was conquered. {{HE WAS 44 years old}}

Khan made all of his soldiers from different tribes pledge loyalty to him. He won his victories with his skilled horse warriors and archers. He required his soldiers to wear light leather and metal tunics with protective silk undergarments. Khan also made sure his soldiers had enough equipment like 2 bows, a quiver of 60 arrows, scimitar, and attached 5 horses. His soldiers also carried useful tools such as meat pots, needle and thread and objects to sharpen arrows.

Khan controlled his people by a code of law he created called the Yasa. These laws were extremely cruel and harsh. The death penalty was a sentence for many offenses including stealing, cheating on your spouse, {{interesting, eh?}} resigning from combat in the middle of a battle, not paying taxes three times and even peeing in public water routes.

Genghis never taxed the outside land he conquered. He let defeated kingdoms live as they liked, which gave people the choice of religion, and to live with their custom laws and celebrations.

((Therefore not provoking their rebellion.))

Another place to stand to move the world.

When I finally Decided to Leave / Moot Points.

The final decision to get OUT came when I experienced two full weeks (not just one, as I had an earlier time in the marriage) actually free from his abuse and threats, for the most part, and still fully functional in my beloved profession of music. This was WITH little girls (stilll, then) in attendance. I was amazed at the experience of being talked to, working, and interacting with people for several days in a row with no trauma, and no likelihood of imminent trauma, geographically near.

Then I returned, and experienced the response to my having been “allowed” out of this man’s control for the first 2 weeks (that I recall) in almost 10 years. Literally. There were no other such 2 weeks.

To “pay” for this, all my belongings were thrown out of the bedroom I was then living in, and my ex ensconced himself IN, putting locks on the door, and again, I was (since not working) reduced to hoping or asking for a $1.oo or perhaps $2.00 for the day, with small children to care for, and I do not recall if an operational car at this time. Yes, I did, but cars still need gas to go anywhere. I specifically remember shamelessly, if he forgot to close the door all the way, going through his pants pockets for spare change. This is a while back, but as I recall there was no bank account and no income — the last full-time apparently had so threatened the guy that another man was brought into the home to try & persuade me to turn all income over to my husband shut down my bank account. Alternately, I could quit my job.

This was discussed in front of me AND two growing daughters, as if I were not even there. We are talking a woman in her 40s, and in an urban California area.

Because I now had, experientially, not just theoretically (BIG difference!) 2 points of view, back to back, this highlit the situation. The guy was indeed right to be extremely threatened by letting us out from underneath his thumb for a few weeks, because witnessing his retaliation to this, DID indeed tip the scale between fear of action and inaction. I was disgusted enough and wanted the better way of living ENOUGh, to get out.

When others got out:

In another blog here, I mention a woman who was held captive to her father for many years, and had to bear children for him. She was able to report WHEN SHE KNEW HER KIDS WERE SAFE. “Alyssa” a.k.a. Jaycee Dugard, who also fathered two children for HER kidnapper/rapist (though not her own father) was also able to get free finally, when she was in one room, and her captor/father of her daughters (Phillip Garrido) in another room, both with law enforcement there. I don’t know all the details, but I bet that Mr. Phillip was NOT in the room during the conversations with Ms. Alyssa when the truth came out.

Another woman, that Phyllis Chesler connected with the Dugard case, and that I also mentioned on-line, had been kept captive in a BOX 23 hours a day for years, until she was allowed out and graduate to family slave. She’d been told that a group called ‘the Company” would come and cut off her fingers, or do horrible things to her family, if she rebelled or left. (Incidentally, I consider stalking and other threats, along these lines, basically, this is a form of control and intimidation to force compliance).

One day the other woman got tired of the same man’s betrayal and mistreatment, and she told the captive that there was no “Company.” The person then got on a bus and went home. She’d been captive for YEARS.

When an individual parent exhibits this amount of control over contact with the other parent, and child abuse or domestic violence has not been identified as a cause, the court would be RIGHT to switch custody. However, instead they tend to do it in the opposite situation after it HAS been identified, and sometimes even on the record, with evidence, etc..

What is happening in the court system, my friends (and enemies) is that mothers, morally, cannot get out, because their kids are going into unsafe situations. In this scenario, they have a choice of abandoning their own kids under basic threat to hurt them MORE to save themselves, or staying in the fight, and passing off the drama and drain to society.

Therefore, the family law forum, and the systems that resonate to its drumbeat (or vice versa, it’s a synergy!) is practically a foolproof business model. While there is SOME attrition — some people will escalate, and annihilate one or more family member, but even then the survivor and the paternal grandparents or maternal can duke it out around who gets the kids and how. Meanwhile, new kids and new divorces/separations are happening weekly, monthly, year after year.

Other “attrition” could be considered when parents actually do settle out of court and do NOT escalate to high-conflict (a misnomer) and/or violent custody battles. To the parents, this is good. To business, it’s not, really. Hence, putting a child into the hands of the wrong parent guarantees they will come back, and back, and back, until some or both are destitute or dead, or simply cannot handle it any more (my current situation is 2 out of 3, and you can figure out which one I’m not).

In this paradigm, the “business model” paradigm, a kidnapping – – though on the books, a felony — can be even better — someone can, but depending on which parent (male or female) may not get jail time.

DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA how many federal grants and studies are based on captive audiences, literally? Plus the professions staffing the jails, and the skillsets those professionals acquire? For example, the social worker from a corrections center, in Lodi, California — whose wife he imprisoned, starved, and humiliated for 22 months, until finally she called 911, and when the police cars approached, she RAN out and DOVE through an open patrol car window. They apprehended this man it says with $23,000 and NINE (count’em) (9) weapons. Her life musta been hell. The man doing this learned how to control people and play two-faced “let me fix you” (while I use my woman at home, that I imported for the purpose) and apparently how to use a gun also. (search my blog I blogged this article recently).

Generally, though, with a kidnapping, the left-behind traumatized parent is going to go to court again and again to try and get justice, just as the disgruntled ex did when the cause of separation was domestic violence or child abuse. Evaluators mediators and court-appointed attorneys are hopping for business, and I’d imagine have more caseloads than they can personally handle. The profession is certainly booming. Supervised visitation centers and professionals to go with them, and software to support these centers, is also BOOMING. It is a replicatable business model described and sold on the internet — see “The Duluth Model.” See Family Justice Center Alliance, st arted with a million ($1million) grant from Verizon (may blog this).

The presses (on-line and/or print) are churning, and periodicals addressing the problems in the family law venue area going full steam, and to publish in these is a notch in the career belt; to quote them lends a sense of authority, and along with these there are conferences on how to stop violence against women, help fathers become better parents (and gain access to their children) and of course how to stop children from experiencing abuse, trauma, molestation, kidnapping, or anything distressing. That IS, presumably, (??) what family law is all about.

And so, I was thinking about my situation here, where so many avenues already tried, and failed, failed, because the law is a “moot point” unless enforced, and the law enforced is also a moot point if the person held back by it gets pissed off and comes close to express this is in a nonverbal way, either stalking (itself an escalation), or the risk implicit behind the stalking, which I don’t want to name just now. All of the theory is moot point in certain circumstances.

I know that I need to stand a different way and in a different place, probably with a different TOOL, to do THIS:

???

Archimedes:

The engraving is from
Mechanic’s Magazine
(cover of bound Volume II,
Knight & Lacey, London, 1824)

Courtesy of the
Annenberg Rare Book &
Manuscript Library
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, USA

Wall painting in theStanzino delle Matematiche in theGalleria degli Uffizi(Florence, Italy). Painted by Giulio Parigi (1571-1635) in the y

“Give me somewhere to stand and I will move the earth.”

Greek Mathematical Works, by Ivor Thomas, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1941, vol. II, p. 35

First, analyze the situation accurately. Accurately, the chances of a court order being respected in my situation, or someone doing something about this (even if officially asked to in a motion) are nil. Most times, while I went about this, a guerrilla attack (and clearly purposed as such) came from another “gang” member offended by the principle that my motions should disrupt their equilibrium, the equilibrium of the self-anointed, self-evaluated, self-selected, with zero accountability. Point 1. The lever must be long enough and not break under the weight. The longer the lever, the less weight need be applied.

Where to stand? I say, look at the finances. Do not approach a crook and talk about ethics! Do not talk about someone drunk with power and talk about the immorality of using their power! Talk in terms they understand, not your own paradigm! How do you think we got into this place to start with?

WOMEN NEED A PLACE TO STAND IN THIS LIFE. WE NEED TO MAKE AND DEFINE THIS PLACE IN FAIR NEGOTIATION WITH MEN. WHEN CHILDREN ARE INVOLVED, THIS FAIR-NESS IS EVEN MORE CRUCIAL.

YOUNG WOMEN NEED TO BE TOLD SOME HARD TRUTHS — THERE ARE MEN THAT WILL GO FOR YOU TO PRODUCE A BABY (THIS CAN ALSO BE TRUE OF THE YOUNG MEN). PARTICULARLY IF YOU ARE YOUNG AND FERTILE, AND HE’S ON A REBOUND. OR IF YOU ARE OLDER AND AFFLUENT, IN THIS CASE, YOUR HOME IS NEEDED FOR A NEW HOME FOR HIS KIDS FROM THE FIRST WOMAN. OR, ALTERNATELY, YOUR CHILDREN FROM A FORMER MARRIAGE MIGHT DO, TOO.

i feel this is just as applicable to professional women in their late mid to late 30s/early 40s as others. Until our society starts VALUING women as people and as women (including mothers!), the whole climate isn’t healthy enough all round, and people need to know in the river of life where the rapids and sharp rocks lie. This differs by culture and community, and it AIN’T up to Washington D.C. and a bunch of economists and human behavioralists drawing research from shelters, prisons, and head start outfits, to set the standards! (OR, churches, dammit! The average church these days, I’ll speak for Protestant, is basically a cult. In every sense of the word. Marketing spirituality and social connection and good feelings, for a price, allegiance. . . . And money, and services).

So now we get too MOOT POINT. This post is just about a moot point today: I’ll revisit it in a while.

Idiom: Moot Point

If something’s a moot point, there’s some disagreement about it: a debatable point. In the U.S., this expression usually means that there is no point in debating something, because it just doesn’t matter. An example: If you are arguing over whether to go the beach or to the park, but you find out the car won’t start and you can’t go anywhere, then the destination is said to be a moot point.

Category: Law

View examples in Google: Moot point

Wiktionary:

(US) An issue regarded as potentially debatable, but no longer practically applicable. Although the idea may still be worth debating and exploring academically, and such discussion may be useful for addressing similar issues in the future, the idea has been rendered irrelevant for the present issue.

Until we rebuild downtown, whether we build more parking spaces is a moot

Moot point (http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/moot-point.html)

Meaning

An irrelevant argument.

Origin

Some may disagree with the above meaning and argue that it means ‘a point open to debate‘, rather than ‘a point not worth debating‘. That former meaning was certainly the correct one when the term was first coined, but that’s going back a while.

In this post, I refer to the second usage

Laurence Humphrey, the president of Magdalen College, Oxford, wrote Nobles or of Nobilitye, a manual of behaviour for the English nobility, in 1563. In that he wrote:

“That they be not forced to sue the lawe, wrapped with so infinite crickes and moot poyntes.”

In medieval England, moots, or meets, were assemblies or councils where points of government were debated. The country was split into juridicial areas called hundreds and administered via assemblies known as hundredmotes. The form of government has long since vanished but the term hundred is still in use as the name of the procedural device which gives consent to MPs’ resignation. British MPs aren’t allowed to resign and, when members wish to leave Parliament they may do so by applying for the notional position of Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Chiltern Hundreds. In such assemblies points which were put up for discussion were said to be mooted.

The change in meaning has come about following the introduction of ‘moot courts’, which are sessions where law students train for their profession by arguing hypothetical cases, i.e. ‘moot points’. The lack of any substantive outcome from these theoretical cases has led to the ‘unimportant/not worth discussing’ meaning of ‘moot point’, which is what many people accept today.

Here is one WHOPPER of a “moot point.” I used to think that bringing this one up would make a difference. I was so glad to see this written here. But, it’s a moot point — in practice no one actually believes this. If they did, too many programs would have to shut down.

Let’s go over this again:

http://www.sddvc.com/pdf/2008finalwithsignatures.pdf
This is out of San Diego: Law Enforcement Protocol:

“The California State Legislature has declared that:

(1) “[S]pousal abusers present a clear and present danger to the mental and
physical well-being of the citizens of the State of California.” (California
Penal Code section 273.8.)

(2) “A substantial body of research demonstrates a strong connection between
Domestic Violence and Child Abuse.” (California Penal Code section
13732(a)). ”

Now, same document:

So, those offices bear looking at. When they don’t prosecute for any of those (or child-stealing, case in point).

Written by Let's Get Honest|She Looks It Up

September 8, 2009 at 4:07 PM

Posted in Cast, Script, Characters, Scenery, Stage Directions, Domestic Violence vs Family Law, History of Family Court, Vocabulary Lessons

Tagged with Clear and Present Danger, domestic violence, family annihilation, family law, HHS-TAGGS grants database, Intimate partner violence, OCSE (Office of Child Support Enforcement), social commentary, trauma, U.S. Govt $$ hard @ work.., Victims do not prosecute

Today’s post is a new blog page: “Lessons from Antioch” (California)

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The pages are full of the Dugards and the Garridos; people what answers, and collectively, it appears there’s a need to process the trauma, and put names to the “Who, What When, How and Why?” this happened.

Click on this link:

(As these posts get a little more personal, understand it’s not just for the blogger’s sake but for the bloggers’ hope that another perspective on these things might get heard.)

It triggers trauma, or perhaps it’s thoughtfulness, or perhaps it’s a desire to mention what other mothers have gone through that is different, but of some similar qualities: sudden loss of access to and contact with their sons or daughters, and lack of closure, or time to recover or heal from prior abuse(s). One can get so acclimatized to abuse, or to repeated violations of personal integrity, that this sort of “alternate reality” becomes “normal.” What’ I’m concerned about in this matter is future generations, and what “normal” has become for American women, both growing up and grown-up mothers.

My own father (deceased) I deduce was told, like many, to “man up,” shut up and step up to the plate when his (wife-beating) father abandoned the household. Retaliation for even CRYING about the violence, let alone reporting it, was simply part of his youth. After being locked in a closet for crying initially (so the family lore goes) he went on, and worked hard, educated himself hard, provided well, such that his own children (ALL of them) also got college educated. I’d say did all right (that’s one adult child’s perspective only; there ARE others), but as the youngest of these, and alone in the house as his marriage disintegrated, I certainly noticed and questioned that, despite the success, he also drank hard too (bottling something else up?), married several times, and, unfortunately, never discussed or addressed any of his own family shortcomings, nor did any of our own adult family actually handle these well, other than by transmitting what I could call UNhealthy family values: Zero dialogue on THE most important issues of life, a lifelong habit. Scapegoating. Tolerance of domestic violence towards, now, more than one member, and clan-like excommunication for anyone who dares to report any of the worst family secrets (and I shudder to think of the ones that haven’t yet come to surface).

My father died suddenly and under circumstances that were not explained to me. I learned more about him after his death from the Internet than from anyone I was related to. He has been described alternately as a genius, and modest (a side of him we didn’t know!), and creative. His mother was devout, and he rejected the concept and existence of God, another family value I myself later rejected, and paid dearly for over the years. I like to think that, had he realized one of his daughters would go on to marry and be exposed to what his own mother was, I like to think he’d be turning over in his grave, but fact is, I don’t know. I do know there was a certain sexism, not uncommon for the day and time. And I do thank him for not following the utterly insane policy that the HHS is nowadays, deciding and enforcing that children need contact with wife-beating fathers, for the good of, I guess, the country (???) and their little lives.

I consider refusal to address violence endorsing it. They consider it “dwelling on the past,” even when the ostensible past was as recent as last week or last month. They got that one down, and in order that my children should not know the truth about this family, have endorsed further criminal behavior towards them, and me, and this state, again in the name of “Family.”

It appears that the family law venue is also in the business of telling people to shut up about both their own family secrets (retaliation on custodial parents for reporting abuse in the form of switching the kid to the accused parent!) as well as ITS own secrets, which (as family secrets tend to) includes the financial business deal driving the steamship that’s steamrolling over (well, I could go on and on with that analogy, it’s an apt one) – — that’s steamrolling over the years that SOME families might have otherwise had in peace to recover from the initial trauma, and rebuild a few lives. Big Brother had a supposedly Better Idea for the country, you know, and so we are to sacrifice the duration of our children’s — well, til they are legally adults — and stay in the system until all the proper tolls have been paid, and “Therapeutic Jurisprudence” has run its course, replacing the former language of right, wrong, crime & punishment, and deterrents for doing it again.

Which deterrents Phillip Garrido had, but in the words of one of his several kidnapped for the purpose of raping women, (the 1976 woman that got him the 50 year jail sentence, that he served a few years of), it just made him a smarter and wiser criminal.

However it’s not the men’s doing this so much as the institutions they create doing this, which frightens me the most, for at least my own children’s futures. Put against this, is their spirit and, I hope, smarts.

And the VOLUNTARY donation of the national resources and sort of “conscience” to the federal government. Kind of like the cycle of rain, rivers flow to the ocean, evaporation, clouds, rain, etc. The concept is that justice and a better society will somehow rain down on us.

I’m not holding my breath.

However, sometimes this happens when the parents may even know where they are; this happens in the “family court venue.”

Recent articles talk about how the girls are recovering from trauma, and that’s partly where I started in this new page. I note a difference of perspective from the experts quoted and what i know about the trauma thing from experience.

I end up talking about the importance of the declaration of independence, and personal defense of boundaries. And how it MIGHT help if the public were a little less self-delusional, compartmentalized, and dissociative when it comes to US vs THEM and the role of government in kissing all our “ow-ies,” settling our squabbles, raising our young, monitoring our marriages, determining our public visions, and protecting our boundaries.

NO, let’s get back to the foundational principles. And add women and girls in the mix as citizens, not as items to be devoured or dominated.

If overall, we ALL had less tolerance for unreasonable dominance, I think a lot of partnerships and society would be healthier. You can force compliance, but you can’t force love, and when force gets into the family business, then we are REALLY in trouble. And we are.

I don’t think the culprit is god or godlessness. I don’t think the culprit is men OR women. I think the loss is of a sense of selves as individuals (socially) and a loss of language — transformational ideology throughout the internet, and our institutions.

As imperfect, or OK< sexist racist classist (etc.) as those colonists were in the latter 1700s, the three “charters of freedom” still shed light and common sense:

Declaration of Independence
Constitution
Bill of Rights.

If we don’t like the middle one, we should change the oath Presidents take on assuming office. Barring that, we should hold them and every one else in any form of government to the same standard of these 3. “Consent of the governed” still counts.

So I recommend we start thinking in those terms again, starting with putting some of the terms back into our heads and coming out of our mouths. Expect a fight, in that matter, though!

That’s all for now. If you want straighter talk and fewer words, get it from the street:

http://www.thestreetspirit.org/

On God (Dec. 2006)

3. If God is, whence come evil things? If He is not, whence come good?
BOETHIUS (Roman philosopher 480?-524 A.D.) The Consolation of Philosophy, translated by W.V. Cooper, 1981

4. I still believe that standing up for the truth of God is the greatest thing in the world. This is the end of life. The end of life is not to be happy. The end of life is not to achieve pleasure and avoid pain. The end of life is to do the will of God, come what may.
MARTIN LUTHER KING JR., (U.S. clergyman and human rights activist, 1929-1968), “The Most Durable Power,” sermon, Montgomery, Alabama, 6 November 1956

(LIFE LIBERTy and PURSUIT of HAPP(y)NESS, and in that order. Physical, mental, or spiritual Welfare =/= happiness, but the first can sustain life. Moral proclamations by government about how to live, how free to be, and what happiness consists of is not the government’s province, it’s ours).

On poverty, who are you going to believe? A Harvard Ph.D. or a poor person?

Poor Magazine

This stereotype is that poor people can lift themselves out of poverty because, it assumes, they are responsible for their own poverty. Linda Burnham explained in her opening, the myth in America is that “everyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps.” This myth allows the public to discard “a whole layer of society” who can’t pull themselves up.

Linda spoke of the American economy as both an engine of incredible wealth and an engine of poverty. This engine “creates and recreates poverty everyday in the US and all over the world.” During the war, discussions of poverty have been swept off the table. It is important to connect the war against the poor to the war abroad. Burnham mentioned that Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest weapons manufacturer, has just been awarded a contract to run the welfare system in Florida. The company, who makes huge profits off of war, will now be making huge profits off of managing Florida’s poor.** In order for a country to subjugate and dominate another population, it has to first dominate its population at home. All you have to do is look at the streets of your city to see that this is being done on an everyday basis.

**This is why I don’t think much about the conversations on solving domestic violence. IF it were solved, there’d be less cash flow all round, less poverty, and poverty IS an industry!

Or Ask the Beat Within

Violence And Material Madness
by Speedy, posted May 18, 2009I think violence comes from people who has a bad life style. They don’t get the good things in life and so they get angry, so they look to robbing and stealing. That’s what gets them in here. So then, when they get in here, their whole life is starting to mess up. And when that happens, they’re in the system. Then they get even more madder because they’re missing out on a lot, so they get to more stealing.

Some people grow up with anger, and some are taught to be mad and act bad. Like some parents say, when somebody hits you, you supposed to hit them back. But sometimes that’s not the right thing to do, so than they get in trouble for what they parents taught them. But when they get home, he or her mom says, “That a’right.” So than they keep getting’ in trouble.

But some violent stuff mostly come from material madness, so they try to steal and stealing ain’t the right thing. You should just get a job, have some money in yo’ pocket and that’s go be you. And if that material thing is really expensive, so that’s when you save up and get that thing for yourself, so than that’s when you see you don’t have to look to stealing. When you don’t have to steal and you see that you don’t have to do that no more.

OR: (This issue had several letters to President Obama….)

A Letter To The President-
by TAE, posted May 18, 2009Dear Mr. Obama,

I think you should make certain things that keep young black men busy for the weekends, so we could stop killing ourselves. I also think that you should start building new colleges for people who cannot afford that type of money, so they could be something in life to take care of their family, and get the majority of the tax money every year.

I think there should be less education about African-American people and more about other cultures so people wouldn’t have to feel down all the time by hearing the word “Nigger” a lot.

People who’s getting abused in their family should be taken care of in a shelter that provides a little bit of discipline, so they could grow up and succeed in life, and keep innocent people out of the pen.

OR:

Dear President
by Richard, posted May 19, 2009How are you Mr. President? I am writing from Santa Clara juvenile hall. My name is Richard. I am facing a life sentence for kidnapping, attempted murder, carjacking, and 2nd degree robbery. I am 17 years old.

I would like to congratulate you for becoming the 44th President of the United States of America. You inspire me to do many things. It gives me hope to become something I thought I couldn’t be in life no matter what it is. I believe in you, that you are going to make things right in this world. I know when I go to prison I can try my hardest to get my education and other things. I didn’t think I could at first, but with you as President, I have faith.

I know I am in here and might not get out soon, but I know you will be there for those on the outside of these walls. I know you will make a change. I hope the best for you, Mr. President. Thank you for reading this, and I apologize for taking your time.

Our Mission

The Beat Within’s mission is to provide incarcerated youth with consistent opportunity to share their ideas and life experiences in a safe space that encourages literacy, self-expression, some critical thinking skills, and healthy, supportive relationships with adults and their community. Outside of the juvenile justice system, The Beat Within partners with community organizations and individuals to bring resources to youth both inside and outside of detention. We are committed to being an effective bridge between youth who are locked up and the community that aims to support their progress towards a healthy, non-violent, and productive life.

Regarding recovery from violence (WHICH the Antioch/Dugard articles from today dealt with),

from http://www.Lundy Bancroft.com:

Addressing the healing needs of children: There is a wide consensus that children’s recovery from exposure to domestic violence (and from divorce) depends largely on the quality of their relationship with the non-battering parent and with their siblings.20

Of course this statement runs entirely contrary to the bulk of the “fatherhood” premises and the entire family court venue basically doesn’t validate or practice.

Therefore, in addition to safety consideration, court determinations should take into account whether the batterer is likely, based on his past and current behavior, to continue to undermine the mother’s authority, interfere with mother-child relationships, or cause tensions between siblings.

This becomes kind of irrelevant when the court itself does the same things. My experience is that the past was considered to be a totally blank slate, and therefore any fallout was attributed to whoever it “fell” on. Extended family influence (which I tried to bring up, and was significant) was ignored. It was an unbelievably stereotyped reaction. Possibly the reason I’m writing so much is from the impact of the years of being told POST-separation not to talk about this, or any other subsequent criminal behavior(s). Oh well . . .

Because children need a sense of safety in order to heal,21 juvenile and family court decisions may not want to include leaving the children in the unsupervised care of a man whose violent tendencies they have witnessed, even if they feel a strong bond of affection for him.

So when it typically does, often right after the filing of a civil restraining order, or when divorce is started almost immediately after someone files a protective order, resulting in the “joint custody” “Shared parenting” mindset, then we have a serious values conflict, as I did, in the past, now almost ten years. A move was made (locally) to extend the initial restraining order time to 5 years from 3. I know I would’ve made it had this happened. Certain agencies, and entities, made sure this was defeated. Now that I have time (called unemployment!), I did find out who they were in that case.

If you want straight talk on some poverty, justice, and crime policy issues, again, (although I try, there’s the verbiage issue!), try: Street Spirit, Poor Magazine, the Beat Within (although that’s getting slicker and slicker since I first saw it),

Thanks. Happy Labor Day (USA). Unemployment rate _ _ _ _ _???

Labor (or rest) well, we have one more day off in America. I gave up the concept of seeing a daughter at this time in favor of not fighting that fight until I have some income. The lack of closure is a constant source of stress. Closing has to be done right to be safe. Go figure. This is one reason I think if women leaving abuse could get a bit of space and time, they could run some great businesses. It appears that Jaycee/Alyssa both helped her captorS S S S Ss s s s s run a business (not including any horrors she endured IF the brothel rumor was true) and educated her also-imprisoned daughters, the product of her rapes, but nonetheless her DAUGHTERS, the best she could. I wish her well and the family that’s now reunited with her.

Written by Let's Get Honest|She Looks It Up

September 6, 2009 at 5:17 PM

Posted in compulsory schooling, Designer Families, Fatal Assumptions, History of Family Court, public education, Vocabulary Lessons

Tagged with "We had no idea!", 2nd Amendment, family law, parental kidnapping, Self-Defense from DV, social commentary, Social Issues from Religious Viewpoints, Studying Humans, trauma, U.S. Govt $$ hard @ work.., women's rights

“Wife Abuse and Custody and Visitation by the Abuser” –A Man Speaks from the Past (1989).

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This voice from the past (1989 to 2009 = 20 years!) —

is pretty well drowned out by “the Duluth Model,” and the millions of $$ of grants, funds, and now even new professions springing up, all to help avoid what I’d call THIS common sense. I guess I will have to show. This will deal with the issue of Supervised Visitation: The question nowadays is how to make it safe, etc. The question of why ANY visitation with such violence, scarcely gets raised again.

Wife Abuse and Child Custody and Visitation by the Abuser

by Kendall Segel-Evans

originally published:
ENDING MEN’S VIOLENCE NEWSLETTER, Fall, 1989

I recently read the National Organization for Changing Men’s statement on child custody, and the position taken that, in general, sole custody by the previously most involved parent is preferable to joint custody. I would like to elaborate on this position for families where there has been violence between parents (i.e. woman-abuse). The following includes the main points of a deposition I was asked to provide to a lawyer for the mother in a child custody case. I do not believe this is the last or best word on the subject, {{now THAT’s a rare humility in the field!}} but I hope that it will s(t)imulate useful dialogue** about the effects on children of wife-abuse and the treatment of wife-abusers. I also wish to further discussion on the issue of how we are going to truly end men’s violence. *** Clearly, I believe that the treatment of wife-abusers should not only be held accountable to the partner victim/survivors, but also to the children, and to the next generation.

**{{WAS THAT A FREUDIAN SLIP IN THE ORIGINAL?? “simulate” for “stimulate”??}} . . .

***

I’ve noticed that the professionals are more likely to have the “social transformation” goal, while typically women leaving abuse, and specifically MOTHERS leaving abuse, have a more short-term goal, namely LEAVING abuse and providing safety and good things, including good values, safety, education and role models — for their CHILDREN. This is a significant difference, and with different goals come different means to reach that goal. Moreover, as women leaving abuse, we have a ZERO tolerance for situations that might lead to, well, death. Women have been killed around visitation centers, which is a dirty little secret. Another one is that some supervisors are themselves abusive, or “on the take” and so forth. Again, the professionals have spoken to this issue — but not changed it. (For more info see nafcj.net). Are all? No. But why even risk it?

WHY place both children and the nonabusive parent at any sort of risk whatsoever, for any reason? For one, good grief, what about PTSD? A child has witnessed abuse or been abused. Therefore, expose them to the abuser. REGULARLY, and in a performance situation. A mother has been abused or her child. Therefore, force her — and/or her children — to see their father, regularly and in front of others who will “judge.” AND they do (see “Karen Oehme”). The model lacks integrity, to my mind. No matter, it has government backing, and LOTS of it.

SO this post is a “blast from the past.” I’ve read the literature a LOT, I assure you; you don’t hear this person’s name a lot. Too much common sense. And yet he is in the marriage field, and attaches a Bibliography like anyone else:

Kendall Segel-Evans, M.A. Marriage, Family and Child Counselor 4/15/1989

He recommends not taking chances. Such types of recommendations are not the stuff publication, conferences, and promotions are made out of. No new building needs be built for this recommendation. It’s just too dang sensible.

Reminds me of Jack Straton’s similar work, a while back, here below:

1992

What About the Kids? Custody and Visitation Decisions in Families with a History of Violence

National Training Project of the Duluth Domestic Abuse Project – Thursday, October 8, 1992, Duluth, Minnesota

from the Journal of the Task Group on Child Custody Issues*

of the National Organization for Men Against Sexism

Volume 5, Number 1, Spring1993 (Fourth Edition, 2001)

c/o University Studies, Portland State University, Portland, OR, 97207-0751

503-725-5844, 503-725-5977 (FAX) , straton@pdx.edu

What is Fair for Children of Abusive Men?

by Jack C. Straton, Ph.D.

{Let’s GetHonest speaking….}} Reviewing this document years, and years after baptism by a dissolution/custody suit cold-shock immersion in to the language and lore of Family Court, resulting in a return to Food Stamps, but no return of my missing children!, but I HAVE (there’s always a silver lining) perhaps returned closer to placing my hope in things eternal more than things local! (I’m talking Jesus Christ for those who don’t catch the reference), I have a different opinion, not on its CONTENTS but on its CONTEXT, as follows, re::

I want to express my deep gratitude to Ellen Pence, Madeline Dupre, Jim Soderberg and the others from the Duluth Domestic Abuse Intervention Project for giving me this opportunity to speak with you. The State of Minnesota should be proud that, quite literally, the world looks to this program for guidance on understanding and ending domestic violence. I also want to acknowledge how much I continually learn from Barbara Hart, of the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Domestic Violence.

I will first critically examine the criterion at the base of all custody laws today “What is in the best interests of the children?” I will the talk about children’s choice in these matters. Then I will examine the actual effects of wife-battering on children, and develop an alternative paradigm for custody based on those effects. From this I will examine the question, “Is it ever appropriate to ever give a batterer custody of a child?” (emphasis mine…)

{{PLEASE PARDON THIS INTERJECTION! This article indeed does that, and convincingly.

LINK: DAIP Grants rec’d 2000-2009 (scroll down to bar chart)

(hint: over $4.5 million)

LINK: Grants rec’d by DAIp Parent organization, “Minnesota Program Development, Inc.“

(hint: Over $25 million, and NOT including some of its sub-groups, which apparently get their own grants, too).

(the bottom half of logo proclaims” home of the duluth Model, Social Change to End violence Against Women”)

)

Visitation Center

The Duluth Family Visitation Center opened in 1989. Our mission is to provide a safe place where children can build and maintain positive relationships with their parents. The Visitation Center offers support for victims of domestic violence and their children as well as supervised visitation, monitored visitation, and monitored exchange services to families affected by domestic violence.

(See the nice picture??)->_>_>_>_>

The Center provides a variety of children’s books, games and videotapes as well as beverages and snacks for children and parents to help provide a comfortable and nurturing environment where parents can work on building and strengthening their relationship with their child which so often is damaged by violence in the home.

The Center also collaborates with many other community agencies and accepts referrals from the courts and social services. {{NOw you understand the BUSINESS model…}} Currently we serve approximately 120 families and conduct over 4000 visits and exchanges per year at minimal cost to families.

And I do mean BUSINESS model:

The database simplifies the logistical work of coordinating a Visitation Center and reduces the time to prepare quarterly reports for funders.

Download sample report here

Purchase the visitation center database ($350.00) by visiting our online catalog

Beyond the pure financial collateral, there is also the professional collateral (prestige) and of course feeding much, much much more personal data into databases for further” research and demonstration” projects on how to — end violence against women.

I question why so few have questioned this model. Probably because of the powers behind it, and because those who have been affected by it are often destitute and experiencing PTSD. BY THE WAY — I HAD HEARD OF THIS AND ASKED FOR IT IN MY CASE, AND WAS FLATLY DENIED because there was no “money” for it. In other words, I, the mother, could not pay for it (already on the record) and he the father (being so far arrears in child support) obviously could not. however, when the father asked for — by refusing to acknowledge the court had ordered something different — ZERO contact, it took less than a few months to give this to him, and only one year (as opposed to the years previous I had sought actively seeking help, as single mother, and while personally having to negotiate my own safety, on a near-weekly basis) to retroactively attribute custody and modify the arrears owed ME as the caretaker of our daughters, and which didn’t come to them while living here — down to insignificant and unenforceable payments. Yet our state receives grants to facilitate access by the noncustodial parent. When I became one, I could not access them, either. go figure.

JACK didn’t recommend this model, although he was apparently asked to speak here. BUT – – His voice, too, has been ignored — MOST chiefly by the Duluth “Domestic Abuse Intervention Project” itself, apparently. This paradigm, I simply didn‘t find it once in operation — ever — anywhere — experientially. Our society simply does not accept this yet. And, FYI, there is a LOT of money in this venue bent on “transformational language” and “therapeutic jurisprudence.” Doing this is considered in many circles “good,” and not surprisingly, because many of our school systems share the same premise, they are “values transformation centers” and succeeding well at this, apparently.

Nor have I found someone who accepts this No-Visitation where there’s been Violence paradigm. (And I talk to Dads, not just Moms, and I research, a LOT, on–line. I have been in circles which don‘t believe women should speak, literally, and I have lived in which men did not confront violence towards “one of their own” by even TELLING the man to stop it! Let alone, intervening themselves in any manner to stop it. Ever since I finally took it upon myself to get someone from outside these circles to indeed stop it, I have been exposed, through the family law venue (and others) to a virtual nonstop “litany” of “just get over it” as if either the lethality risk, the economic abuse, the stalkings, and the implicit threat to escalate were somehow “over” in my case. My experience, lots of it, showed the precise opposite. Any attempt at independence was countered. this got tiring for such a person, and others were found and incited to participate in communal denial, a sort of catharctic self–cleansing ritual, I suppose.

AGAIN, I myself didn’t share this paradigm initially. However, this was because I had been enduring years of this type of threat/intimidation/etc. behavior and attempting — myself — to ‘reason” with this man, after it became clear — and from the OUTSET — that saying “no” or “Stop!” was likely to result in physical assault, or worse, and my friends, there IS a “worse.” Now, I have some perspective: 10 years living with a batterer, 10 years of attempting to separate from one. My perspective has changed, after i watched the reactions of society to my assertion of my right to say NO! and ENOUGH! I gave ENOUGH! in the “let’s negotiate” process, and shouldn’t have ever entered into it or been encouraged to. These were the PRIME working years of an intelligent, responsible, and law-abiding woman and mother. Now, I would like some change to happen. i would like the truth of the situation OUT, and I am taking it (obviously) to the blogosphere, and my local Congressperson, AND up the chain, as are others. The truth of the situation is that this paradigm that Jack and Kendall discuss, was not taken seriously by their colleagues then, nor was it ever likely to be. Like him, I have immense respect for Barbara J. Hart (can anyone say “lethality risk assessment”?) But — today or tomorrow, probably — I am about to post the $$ figures of some of these “helping” groups and ask — where’s the help? Moreover, show us the books! I will show the grants, at least from the sources I have. But what I want to see is expenditures, processes, and evaluation tools. I want to see DOCUMENTED fewer homicides, suicides, infanticides, child-kidnappings, and wasted years in the family law system. And if these are not being documented, then what was all the hub-bub about?

IN this “paradigm” all “fallout” from abuse either didn‘t exist (that‘s the “fantasy world” Straton refers to, I suppose) or was exclusively my responsibility to fix, as the mother. However, when I then sought to address this in my own manner, I was again given marching orders, a drumbeat of 3-word myths, and told to get in line. I didn‘t. Consequently, two adolescent girls were removed from my custody and replaced in the care of the man they grew up witnessing threaten, impoverish, assault, abuse animals, deprive of access to transportation and ffinances that a “normal” family would not do, even when I worked at times, and be subjected to repeated lectures on how to behave – – sometimes even on a stool!.

Therefore, as seemingly re–assuring, or validating as these talks may be, that I refer to today, they are most definitely the “minority opinion” in this field. They show me I am not alone in my perspective at what‘s sensible and what‘s not, but these premises were never moved into practice.

There‘s reasons they were not, and THAT should be the topic of a “responsible citizen” male or female, parent or not, in this country. WHY they were not is a public issue, not a “domestic dispute.” The topic of this issues is not just “where are my children?” but “where are my taxes going? as well as “what kind of leaders is this next generation, if we get that far, going to consist of? children accustomed to trauma, abuse, and participating in the cycle themselves?

I suspect the answer, at this point, MIGHT be “YES” but I am not yet resigned to the fatalistic, fundamentalist “I‘m not of this world” passivity when it comes to social justice. I must speak up!

STRATON, Ph.D., Ct’d…..

In the process, I am going to talk today about the effects of male power and control over children, not about parental power and control. I know that it is popular these days to de-gender family conflict, to talk about “spouse abuse” and “family violence” rather than “wife beating” and “rape.” I know that we want a society in which men nurture children to the same extent that women do.

I know that fathers and mothers should both be capable parents. But if you ask “What about the kids?” I want to give you a serious answer. I cannot seriously entertain the myth that our society really is gender neutral, so to consider “What about the kids?” while pretending such neutrality is to engage in denial and cognitive dissonance. I cannot hope to arrive at an answer that will positively affect reality if my underlying assumptions are based on fantasy.

I would like to say more about the history of these movements (which I am still learning), but readers deserve a break:

Have a nice weekend. Again, I’d rather see a sermon than hear one any day.

While this essay is music (the voice of logic, of common sense truth) to my ears, but it’s not a tune many people like these days. Because it actually addresses the impact of role-modeling and personal responsibility upon the next generation.

There are only two places to really put the responsibility: Either on the INDIVIDUAL (which is actually empowering, it acknowledges choice), or on the “THERAPIST” or “SOCIETY AS COLLECTIVE THERAPIST.” Either/or, my friends.

Benefits of putting the responsibility on the INDIVIDUAL. :: If we are indeed EQUAl and ENDOWED with certain UNALIENABLE RIGHTS, then we are also ENDOWED with certain UNALIENABLE RESPONSIBILITIES as to how we exercise them. This leaves a LOT more government time and resources and study, etc., upon maintenance of DUE PROCESS.

It also removes the excuse for killing people, for assault, for rape, for destruction. There IS no excuse. The question comes of up of what about “war”? My answer is, how is what we are seeing now take place towards women attempting to leave abuse, with children, too, not a real war — not a “virtual” war. When there are casualties, that comprises a REAL war.

Moreover, most wars are about ideas to start with. Sometimes they are about basic human lusts couched in more palatable ideas.

SO, check the dogma it’s vitally important, and it’s vitally important also that “foreigners” — people to whom actually facing abuse, having a life on the line, having lost a child, having had to comfort an abused or traumatized child while in trauma onesself — are not to be setting policy. Moreover, those who set policy are not to do so from a particular chip they have on their shoulder, that every one should carry the burden of relieving. And this happens (You can see my chip on the shoulder” here, obviously, but I’m not recommending the undermining of due process in the courts, and re-defining criminal activity as non-criminal. THAT’s Cognitive Dissonance for sure!

(Well, I’d better back out this post fast. Feedback appreciated! My exit takes place Here: XX.

Anything below was added earlier)

This was written Pre-VAWA and Pre-National Fatherhood Inititative, which one theme of this blog has been showing what these cost, and how they attempt to cancel each other out.

Yesterday, I saw a significant DV initiative that was also receiving thousands under “promoting Responsible fatherhood” as well. Same source, different themes entirely. The fatherhood movement has positioned itself as FIRMLY anti-VAWA and in its writings, and in people responding to its writings, says to clearly. Many of them also position themselves as religious, which is true in the WORST (not best) sense of the word, as I understand it. They identify a common enemy, which is feminism, and feminISTS. The prelude to identifying an enemy is attacking it, and this means people. Typically (not always) “feminists” are, my friends, women, and this is who is often getting severely attacked for separating.

The VAWA movement, it has different characteristics, but I do not believe it started out of man-hating. It started out of hating to see beaten up women, and recognizing this has a true social cost.

Both these movements have “morphed” and are now in the higher stratospheres (translation: best-funded organizations) collaborating. In these collaborations they share many things — primarily the design and structure of FAILING TO INCLUDE THOSE MOST DRASTICALLY AFFECTED IN THE COLLABORATIVE PROCESS, and “SALVATION AS A MARKET NICHE.” (in essence). What else is (not) new in the world!

Perhaps THIS ESSAY, THEN (below) can be a reference point from how far off base is society (specifically, government and nonprofits addressing: Violence Against Women, Responsible Fatherhood, and Healthy Marriages — and failing abysmally in terms of the human toll — on all counts, across the nation. (And, world). Perhaps (though I doubt it) some common sense will “redeem” us from all that debt, with so little dent in the problems the debt is incurred to address….Policies get MORE and more pervasive, self-replicating and intrusive, and still we have things like an 11 year old abducted from a bus stop, held captive in a back yard by a (incidentally, MARRIED couple) – – for 18 years — and being used as a personal sex slave and baby-making machine. In a nice suburb, eh? So much for suburbia and “family-oriented” safe communities.

Police missed an opportunity to rescue Jaycee Lee when they visited her captor’s house in 2006 Photo: REUTERS

Officer Ally Jacobs sat in on a meeting with Mr Garrido and his daughters after he requested permission to distribute leaflets on the Berkeley campus of the University of California.

But her suspicions were aroused by the strange behaviour of the two girls – and led to the eventual release of their mother, Jaycee Lee Dugard, after nearly two decades of captivity.

She said Mr Garrido arrived with the girls, aged 11 and 15, who stared at their father “like God” during the meeting. “They had this weird look in their eyes, like brainwashed zombies,” she said.

She spoke out as police said that Mr Garrido’s home has been searched for evidence of a link to the unsolved murders of several prostitutes in the early 1990s, and as Garrido, 58, and his wife, Nancy, 54, denied charges of kidnapping, rape and false imprisonment in connection with Miss Dugard’s disappearance at their first court appearance.

When Officer Jacobs asked the younger girl about a bruise near her eye, the 11-year-old said it was an inoperable birth defect.

(I NOTE: THIS WAS A FEMALE POLICE OFFICER, AND HER JOB ENTAILS NOTICING THINGS THAT DEAL WITH LIFE AND DEATH, POTENTIALLY. HER JOB ENTAILS NOTICING “ANOMALIES.” THERE WAS FACT-CHECKING IN THIS CASE, AND THE FACTS CHECKED RESULTED IN FREEDOM AND DELIVERANCE, THOUGH AFTER 18 YEARS, FOR 3 WOMEN, JAYCEE’S MOTHER, JAYCEE’S STEPFATHER, AND MOST IMPORTANTLY, FOR HER — AND HER CHILDREN.

A NICE, MARRIED COUPLE . . . . HAD MR. GARRIDO HAD THE SAME CRIMINAL BACKGROUND, AND ACTUALLY BEEN JAYCEE’S FATHER, IN MY EXPERIENCE, HIS KIDNAPPING WOULD HAVE BEEN OVERLOOKED, AND HIS EX-WIFE SEEKING TO SEE HER DAUGHTER BEEN TOLD (as I was) TO JUST GET ALONG WITH IT, OR GIVE IT UP, NO CONTACT WITH YOUR DAUGHTER BECAUSE YOU JUST CAN’T GET ALONG WITH THIS PARENT. CASE IN POINT: WE WERE GIVEN A COURT ORDER THAT EXPOSED US TO CONTINUAL ACCESS AND ABUSE BY A MAN THAT MY DAUGHTERS HAD WITNESSED ASSAULT THEIR MOTHER. EVENTUALLY, A DRASTIC (and criminal) EVENT HAPPENED on an overnight.

TODAYS’ POSTED ARTICLE, 20 YEARS OLD, QUESTIONS THE POLICY ~ ~ REALLY, THE DOGMA ~ ~ THAT WOULD EVER, EVEN ONCE! ~ ~ALLOW SUCH THINGS TO TAKE PLACE. U.S.A. . . . . .

OR – – – OR – – – – THINGS LIKE THIS ONE, A MISSING FOSTER CHILD TURNED INTO A HOMICIDE VISITATION. AGAIN, HAPPENED IN A VERY YUPPIE NEIGHBORHOOD, ALSO NEAR BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA.

HASSANI CAMPBELL (see my recent post on ‘AMBER ALERTS’ for more photos)

Foster Parents Arrested Over Missing Boy

AP

OAKLAND, Calif. (Aug. 28) – The foster parents who held vigils pleading for the safe return of a missing 5-year-old boy with cerebral palsy have been arrested on suspicion of murder, Oakland police said Friday.

Louis Ross and Jennifer Campbell, who is the boy’s aunt, were being questioned by investigators in the case of Hasanni Campbell, who disappeared on Aug. 10 after Ross said he briefly left the boy outside his car in the parking lot of an upscale Oakland neighborhood shoe store where Campbell works.

REGARDING “THERAPY” FOR BATTERERS:

I think Lundy Bancroft says it well — there are certain indicators that one is wasting one’s time. I’ve read them, and you can too, HERE: I am not quoting Mr. Bancroft because he’s an expert, but because i already experienced what he gave voice to. I had no idea who the author was in picking up the book.

While I am thankful for Mr. Bancroft’s insight and observations (and have featured it elsewhere on this blog), I think that the failure to look OUTSIDE the family court system and INTO the funding behind it, which consists of a powerful government grants system, underwritten in some cases by conflicting actual laws (I refer to “supervised visitation” vs. “Access visitation” premises, which are BOTH funded — in a huge way — and which DIRECTLY oppose each other in fundamental premises, creating chaos — not just “disorder” — but literal “CHAOS” in the courts. Why? Because what’s fought over is power, control, and money. I do not, therefore, agree that training to eradicate deeply held prejudices or myths — when applied to JUDICIAL professionals (court-related) any more than when applied to batterers — is a critical solution. I believe that we should pull the plug on the profit system, which it clearly (my research shows) is. That said, in about 2003, had his not book been there (and this above book) for a point of reference WRITTEN BY A MAN for me emotionally, as I exited another life-changing and mind-numbing session with a mediator, I might be a different woman today.

Women, and mothers, do indeed have instincts. I believe these are God-given, and they are protection-related. Moreover, as a DV survivor, and beyond that, professionally a teacher and musician, it has been my job to pay attention to group dynamics in relationship to a standard! The accuracy of my instincts, and speaking up about them, has been ignored in the courtroom. This told me something about family courts, when I accurately predicted a child-snatch, and was shouted down in advance AND afterwards about the same matter.

Two Female Officers (above) accurately noticed, reported — and because they were cops, apparently, and because this was NOT a family law venue, they were not a litigating parent — they were HEARD and lives were saved.

In the Jaycee Dugard case (above), I heard on TV that a woman (neighbor) HAD called 911, saying this man was psychotic, she was very disturbed. Was her call not heard because she was female? I watched Sheriff Rupf apologize on TV that their county law enforcement had “missed it” in this case.

Our current administration has a lot of TALK, but very little RESPECT for mothers in general. Our pro-active protective and active involvement in our children’s lives is viewed with suspicion after separating from their father in particular after marriage. . . . The fact is, I believe, our involvement is a perceived threat to a child-care-based, employee-driven, dependent-family-substrate economy. (which is not today’s topic).

These instincts are not in operation all the time, and along with Phyllis Chesler (Dr.), I acknowledge fully “Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman” exists, and is horrific. And some men (I have known them) notice more than some women. This is also called “CARING.” Such men are also sometimes castigated as “feminine” by fellow-men, and deal with this in whatever manner they choose to.

However, I take a look at who are some of the most vehement women I personally have had to deal with (not including certain judges, whose behavior cannot be logically accounted for somewhere other than financial reward, which I WILL be finding one of these days, and I am not the only person who has had this happen, same judges), I can see where either their childhood was severely messed up, OR, they never got to have children themselves. Some key component of the logic system (the part that doesn’t acknowledge court orders!) is out of commission, and when confronted on this, reacts in a retaliatory manner as if the threat were personal, when the statement was, I want court orders respected! I have already demonstrated the ability to respect court orders I don’t agree with, for years, but the double standard has been devastating to our family.

The other category which comes into play is “second wife” syndrome. While there are I’m sure (and I’d love to be one, some day!) healthy second wife scenarios, all too often a batterer will go specifically SEEK a woman in order to extract the children from the first wife, when he couldn’t otherwise. That 2nd woman lends a seeming credibility, and yet, sometimes these women can be more vicious than the men they married to start with. An abusive man is not going to pick a second woman who is likely to confront him on his abuse!!

WELL, this post is now over-worked, but I wanted to include the Jaycee and Hassani case above, to make a few points. It also has helped me get past another few hours in a day in which, I have no visual contact with either daughter, as one of them is entering college and the other one is, at this point, alienated, a thing I never inflicted upon her father while they lived here. They have HAD to make some sense of their existing world. Their existing world included a sudden, and COMPLETE elimination from their mother’s input and involvement, without a chance to say goodbye. They were involved in keeping secrets (and induced to) before the event, for over a year, on pretenses of the adults around them. The facts surrounding this event are still not out, and I happen to believe that my absent daughters are not yet aware of what was said on paper about them. I know that they are not exposed to the penalties my family has exacted upon me (subsequent) for continuing to speak up.

This is a HOW -TO for the intergenerational transmission of trauma and abuse. IF the goal is to do this, I am looking at the HOW of it. All that REALLY needs to be sacrificed, in the bottom line analysis, to stop it, is a LOT of pride in high places, and what I call dogma and others call social science, policy, or probability-driven practices (it’s called “evidence” but the actual “evidences” considered are often summaries of “probability.”)

AS TO THE 1989 ARTICLE (BELOW):

I’m not in agreement with his theme that men can be taught not to abuse. I think men mostly respond to what they’re taught in this society — authority, and taking control. Women are taught to negotiate and submit, overall (I didn’t realize HOW much til confronting others after leaving my own violent marriage, and then, in shock, realizing it was expected I should take orders. I said no, and took this to the institutions available (first, the courts) to set boundaries and standards. Then I was in for even a ruder awakening to the state of affairs.

So just consider the fall-out, the social fall out from these things, the canaries in the coal mine. it’s also a good part of the present NATIONAL economic distress and contributing to it, do not kid yourself! Asking Big Brother to coach, teach, punish, reward, analyze, and rationalize the common ethical issues of life — BIG, mistake. This is called farming out thinking to others. In the process, we are paying people to also form our own ethics, when these were formed and stated long ago in the US Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights, PLUS the fact that these stemmed from a refusal to become the colony of a distant king.

Figure it out — the distance these days may not be so geographic as in worlds apart in perspectives. The colonization part still seems to apply. Children are the MOST attractive and fertile field for TOO many people, and they are hurt in this unnatural process, a constant interruption to their lives. I saw this happen to my own, there was a point in time (a certain season, when others saw the personal gain in our divorce and and custody issue) that –because of a badly written visitation schedule — I watched my daughter who, prior to this, had been able to adjust to separation with regular visitation, and retain their personal integrity — they became performers. It was clear that they were collateral in the fight, and I believe knew this too. They talked about it, too. It was unfair to them, and to me as their mother.

SOURCE —

http://members.shaw.ca/pdg/wife_abuse_child_custody_visitation.html

Note: “Last updated Nov. 2008”

(More of my comments below, for once!)

Stop Violence Against Women
A project by The Advocates for Human Rights

Copyright 2003 Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights.
Permission is granted to use this material for non-commercial purposes. Please use proper attribution.

(THESE documents do not appear to have stopped violence against women. I used to read and read from this International Source, but no matter — the people most directly involved with our lives chose NOT to read, or accept, some of these writings. So what good have they done, other than to increase the frustration level, the awareness of the discrepancy between reasonable, and unreasonable? Sometimes, I wonder.

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(Best read in the original HTML, but here:

Wife Abuse and Child Custody and Visitation by the Abuser,

Kendall Segel-Evans, 1989.

Wife Abuse and Child Custody and Visitation by the Abuser

by Kendall Segel-Evans

originally published:
ENDING MEN’S VIOLENCE NEWSLETTER, Fall, 1989

{{Let’s Get Honest has decided to interrupt the article more than to put :}}

MAIN POINTs?:____________________ after each paragraph, in hopes that a thoughtful reader will think about what was just said.

Again, one of the greatest motivations for THINKING about various policies, doctrines, and dogmas, is if something valuable is at stake in the mix. Plus, if one has developed the habit of THINKING with this in mind, throughout — as if not just “someone’s” life or livelihood, but as if “your own” life, or your child’s, were at stake in the matter. THAT is responsible government hood (along with respecting civil rights and due process). COLLECTIVELY, what we all have at stake is to acknowledge that what we may think is “common” sense is nothing of the sort, and that the view gets foggier the less time one spends at street level — and I mean on a regular basis. Dwelling in courtrooms only is NOT “street level” in the sense of, what happens after the court order is written?)

I recently read the National Organization for Changing Men’s statement on child custody, and the position taken that, in general, sole custody by the previously most involved parent is preferable to joint custody. I would like to elaborate on this position for families where there has been violence between parents (i.e. woman-abuse). The following includes the main points of a deposition I was asked to provide to a lawyer for the mother in a child custody case. I do not believe this is the last or best word on the subject, but I hope that it will simulate useful dialogue about the effects on children of wife-abuse and the treatment of wife-abusers. I also wish to further discussion on the issue of how we are going to truly end men’s violence. Clearly, I believe that the treatment of wife-abusers should not only be held accountable to the partner victim/survivors, but also to the children, and to the next generation.

MAIN POINTs?:____________________

I would like to mention that I will speak of husbands and fathers abusing wives and mothers, because that is the most common situation by far, not because the reverse never happens. It also seems to be true that when there is wife to husband violence it is usually in self-defense and usually does not have the same dynamics or effects as wife abuse. I will use the words violence and abuse somewhat interchangeably, because, in my opinion, domestic violence is not just about physical violence. Domestic violence is a pattern of physical, sexual, economic, social and emotional violence, coercion, manipulation and mistreatment or abuse. Physical violence and the threat of such violence is only the part of the pattern that is most visible and makes the other parts of the pattern difficult to defend against. Once violence is used, its threat is never forgotten. Even when the violence is stopped by threat of legal action or by physical separation, the coercion, manipulation and abusiveness continue (Walker and Edwall, 1987).

MAIN POINTs?:____________________

Accompanying this pattern of behaviors are common styles of coping or personality characteristics – such as the tendency to blame others for ones problems and impulsiveness – that most batterers share. Almost every man I have worked with has a tendency to see his partner (or his children) as responsible for his pain when he is upset. This leads to seeing his partner (or his children) as an enemy who must be defeated before he can feel better. This is destructive to emotional health even when it does not lead to overt violence.

MAIN POINTs?:____________________

In my opinion, it would be better, in most cases, for the children of homes where there has been domestic violence not to be in the custody of the abusive parent at all. In many cases it is even advisable that visitation be limited to controlled situations, such as under a therapist’s supervision during a therapy session, unless the batterer has been in batterer’s treatment and demonstrated that he has changed significantly in specific ways. “Merely” observing ones father abuse ones mother is in itself damaging to children. My clinical experience is consistent with the research literature which shows that children who witness their father beat their mother exhibit significantly greater psychological and psychosomatic problems than children from homes without violence (Roy, 1988). Witnessing abuse is more damaging in many ways than actually being abused, and having both happen is very damaging (Goodman and Rosenberg, 1987). Studies show that a high percentage (as high as 55%) of fathers who abuse their wives also abuse their children (Walker and Edwall, 1987). In my experience, if one includes emotional abuses such as being hypercritical, yelling and being cruelly sarcastic, the percentage is much higher. The damage that children suffer is highly variable, with symptoms ranging from aggressive acting out to extreme shyness and withdrawal, or from total school failure to compulsive school performance. The best way to summarize all the symptoms despite their variety is to say that they resemble what children who suffer other trauma exhibit, and could be seen as a version of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (Walker and Edwall, 1987).

MAIN POINTs?:____________________

Equally serious is the long term effect of domestic violence – intergenerational transmission. Children who observe their mothers being beaten are much more likely to be violent to a partner themselves as adults. In one study, men who observed violence towards their mother were three times more likely to be abusive than men who had not observed such violence (Strauss et al., 1980). The more serious the abuse observed, the more likely the men were to repeat it. Being abused also makes children likely to grow up to be violent, and having both happen increases the probability even more.

MAIN POINTs?:____________________

How children learn to repeat the abuse they observe and experience includes many factors. One of the more important is modeling. When they grow up, children act like their parents did, consciously or not, willingly or not. Several of the boys I have worked with have been terribly conflicted about being like their father, of whom they were afraid and ashamed. But they clearly carried parts of their father’s behavior patterns and attitudes with them. Other boys from violent homes idealized their father, and they were more likely than the others to beat their wives when they grew up (Caesar, 1988). Several of the men I have worked with in group have lamented that they told themselves that they would not beat their wives the way their mother was beaten when they were children. But when they became adults, they found themselves doing the same things their father did.

MAIN POINTs?:____________________

One reason for this is that even if the physical abuse stops, if the children still have contact with the batterer, they are influenced by his coping styles and personality problems. As Lenore Walker observes (Walker and Edwall, 1987, p. 138), “There is also reason for concern about children’s cognitive and emotional development when raised by a batterer who has a paranoid-like pattern of projecting his own inadequacy and lack of impulse-control onto others.” Dr. Pagelow agrees, “It may become desirable to avoid prolonged contact between violent fathers and their sons until the men assume control over their own behavior and the examples of ‘manhood’ they are showing to the boys who love them, (Pagelow, 1984, p. 256). If the abusive man has not sought out domestic violence specific treatment for his problem, there is no reason to believe that the underlying pattern of personality and attitudes that supported the abuse in the past have changed. There is every reason to believe it will impact his children.

MAIN POINTs?:____________________

Additionally, in a society where the majority of wife-beatings do not lead to police reports, much less to filings or convictions, it is easy for children to perceive that abusiveness has no negative consequences. (One study, by Dobash and Dobash, found that 98% of violent incidents between spouses were not reported to the police [reported in Pagelow, 1984, p. 437]). Some children, seeing who has the power and guessing what could happen to them if they opposed the power, will side with the abuser in custody situations. Often, children will deny that the abuse ever happened. Unfortunately, the children who side with the abuser, or deny the abuse, are the most likely to be abusive themselves as adults. It is very important that family court not support this by treating a wife-beating father as if he were just as likely to be a good parent as the woman he beat. As Gelles and Strauss point out in their book Intimate Violence (1988), people are violent in part because they believe they can get away with it. Public consequences are important for preventing the intergenerational transmission of violence. Boys, particularly, need to to see that their father’s abusiveness leads to negative, not positive results.

MAIN POINTs?:____________________

Lastly, I would like to point out that joint legal custody is likely to be damaging to children when there has been spousal violence. My experience with my clients is definitely consistent with the research results reported by Judith Wallerstein to the American Orthopsychiatric Association Convention in 1988. The data clearly show that joint custody is significantly inferior to sole custody with one parent when there is parental conflict after the divorce, in terms of the children’s emotional adjustment as well as the mother’s safety. Most batterers continue their abusiveness after the marriage, into the divorced parent relationship, in the form of control, manipulation and harassment over support payments, visitation times, and parenting styles. The children are always aware of these tensions and battles, and sometimes blame the mother for not just giving in and keeping the peace – or for being too submissive. The batterer often puts the children right in the middle, taking advantage of his belief that she will give in to avoid hurting the children. The damage to the children in this kind of situation is worse because it is ongoing, and never is allowed to be resolved or have time to heal.

MAIN POINTs?:____________________

Because I work with batterers, I am sympathetic to the distress they feel at being separated from their children for long periods of time. However, the men who truly cared about their children for the children’s sake, and not for what the children do for their father’s ego, have been willing to do the therapeutic work necessary to change. They have been willing to accept full responsibility for their violent behavior, and however reluctantly, have accepted whatever restrictions on child visitation existed for safety reasons. They have been willing to be in therapy to deal with “their problem.” They have also recognized that they were abused as children themselves, or witnessed their mother being abused, or both, and are willing to support interrupting the intergenerational transmission of violence.

MAIN POINTs?:____________________

Kendall Segel-Evans, M.A. Marriage, Family and Child Counselor 4/15/1989

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Caesar, P. Lynn., “Exposure to Violence in the Families of Origin

Among Wife Abusers and Maritally Violent Men.” Violence and Victims , Vol. 3, No. 1, Spring, 1988.

Davis, Liane V., and Carlson, Bonnie E., “Observation of Spouse Abuse

– What Happens to the Children?” Journal of Interpersonal Violence, Vol. 2, No. 3, September 1987, pp. 278-291, Sage Publications, 1987.

Dutton, Donald., The Domestic Assault of Women, Allyn and Bacon, 1988.

Gelles, Richard J. and Strauss, Murray A., Intimate Violence, Simon and Schuster, 1988.

Goodman, Gail S., and Rosenberg, Mindy, S., “The Child Witness to Family Violence:

Clinical and Legal Considerations. Ch. 7, pp. 47ff. in: Sonkin, Daniel. Ph.d., Domestic Violence on Trial, Springer, 1987.

Pagelow, Mildred Daley, Family Violence, Praeger Publications, 1984.

Roy, Maria., Children in the Crossfire, Health Communications, Inc. 1988.

Roy, Maria., The Abusive Partner, Van Nostrand, 1982.

Sonkin, Daniel. Phd., Domestic Violence on Trial, Springer, 1987.

Strauss, Murray A., et. al., Behind Closed Doors, Anchor Books, 1980.

Walker, Lenore E.A., and Edwall, Glenace E.

“Domestic Violence and Determination of Visitation and Custody in Divorce.”

Ch. 8, pp. 127ff. Sonkin, Daniel. Phd. Domestic Violence on Trial, Springer, 1987.

Wallerstein, Judith., Report to the American Orthopsychiatric Association Convention, 1988.

Some of the above professionals listed here, from what I understand, have either changed their tune, or found more profit in conferences funded by the shared-custody, father’s-rights, premises that women are equally as violent and dangerous as men in marriage. Or, that what is said above, here, about role modeling and responsibility to the NEXT generation, doesn’t apply. I have seen them (I think even Dutton was seen in my last post, at such a conference.). Nevertheless, read what he wrote!

And I can show you, in approximately $millions$$ (as I have been at times in news headlines) the cost of these premises, in particular to the next generation. But what kind of generation IS it that can’t see right/versus wrong, principles of values as defined by what is and is NOT criminal behavior, when they see an age gap. How does gender pre-empt behavior, or youth pre-empt age? Why must women be held to a higher standard of accountability as parents then men, and men be paid — by the U.S. Government through the states through the courts, prisons, child support systems, mediation, supervised visitation, parenting education classes — and AFTER many times a K-12 (or almost 12th in some cases) educational system that itself is a major public expenditure. . . . Moreover, WHY should programs supposedly aimed at low-income people (as if such people had fewer human rights, common sense, or were less entitled to due process and informed consent about what’s happening! than others) are being utilized by sometimes some very well to do individuals in the divorce arena. For example, google the Alanna Krause case. This does not make “sense” to me.

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Speaking personally, the exchanges where were the problems occurred in our case. I asked (for YEARS) for help with this, and got none. Then finally on an overnight, I stopped seeing my daughters again.

I think that had COMMON SENSE PREVAILED long ago, our own family would be much more prosperous, and I doubt life with me would’ve been so stressful for the girls, after all, each weekend was likely to become a scene, or not come a scene. I could scarcely relax much around that. Add into the mix child support issues, and we have a decade of devastation, at least from my point of view.

And WHY? To support some new theories and professions? How about the professions Moms were in beforehand? (Many of us were, FYI).

To support: marriage and family therapists, mediators, custody evaluators, trauma specialists?

When a society either refuses to deal with — OR cannot agree on the source and causes of the ongoing sources of trauma, SOMEONE will have to pay the cost of a traumatized populations, just as any war-torn country, or AIDS-ravaged country, there is collateral damages to go with the death, shock, poverty and collapse of infrastructure. In the United States, this plays out entirely differently, of course, because we still have a significant infrastructure, or at least many of the population believe we do, and those not so badly hurt by it as others wish to, apparently, maintain the myths that it’s sustaining something valid.

And yes, I repeat, those are myths.

Where is the real moral, let alone economic, validity in paying multiple professionals to deal with one recalcitrant, overentitled, or person unwilling to seek help with his REAL problems, rather than to alleviate the symptoms of his REAL problems, such as being separated from his children. I had to face this in marriage, and now with family of origin, and again in the family law system? I find a fundamental flaw, and the truth of the matter, the difference is in worldview of (1) humanity and (2) whether or not law applies to all, or only to some. I.e., the “double-standard” mentality.

And that typically falls on the gender divide. Other times, it falls on the Economic Divide. While it’s common for rich to blame poor for being poor in a matter that an abuser blames his victim, there is wiggle room in both viewpoints, and the institutions we live in and deal with ARE not formed, historically, by poor people. They aren’t. Rather, they tend to impoverish. The familyy law system is GOING to do this. It is going to move wealth around, and afterwards, SOMEONE is going to be impoverished under this theme that it’s not an adversarial system, its’ “really” all about the children.

For child-molesters, this may be true. For those who see $$ when they see custody to one parent or the other, in a sense it might be.

But it’s NOT about the children’s welfare, not like this.

If the individual is unwilling to separate his behavior from himself as a person, after being offered multiple opportunities to do so, and go through equivalent shock of personal changes, as did his victim(s) and bystanders affected, then THAT is the issue.

MOREOVER, if the family system surrounding this individual is ALSO unwilling or unable to confront own criminal behavior, life-threatening and life-changing behavior, in one of its own, what’s that family FOR? that is precisely the family that should be dismantled, yet a system says, no it shouldn’t. (Theoretically, although I know plenty of mothers who can’t see their children under this theory. When the pedal hits the metal, that’s how it plays out, too often).

Voices from the even further past, still valid today:

Too bad we’re more religious than actually a truly God-conscious society — because of the simplicity and beauty with which truths are stated:

“Even a child is known by his doings, whether they be good or whether they be bad.”

“Ye shall know them by their fruits.”

As to who to socialize with, who to take on as business partner or close friends:

“Evil communications (this just means “associations”) corrupt good manner (ethos).”

The book of “Proverbs” (31 in all) was directed to young people, and talks about not associating with an angry man or a furious man “lest you learn his ways.” Family law says, if it’s supervised, it’s OK, and a child must, because it’s his father. Today’s essay talks about that…. Proverbs talks about not meddling with them that are given to sudden change. That’s common sense! Sudden change could be backstabbing, betrayal, turning on you. That habit, done ONCE, is cause to separate if not confronted, admitted, and changed. FAST. We have a RIGHT to be once burnt, twice shy. . . . . . Yet this family law system attracts such characters, accepting hearsay as evidence when it’s not, suppressing evidence when it’s found too often; it keeps the litigation going, and exposing parents and children to a series of sudden shocks, disrupting their entire lives and livelihoods, sometimes everything. We should not have to do this. And Proverbs ALSO talks about not associating with fools: “He that walketh with wise men shall be wise, but a companion of fools shall be ashamed.”

When our children are forced to break these simplicities, for a different ideology, this is in effect using parents, particularly mothers, to produce children for the state. That’s not what we went through nine months for, or labor! No woman goes through this in order to raise a fool, a criminal, or have her kid hurt and taught values that will lead that child to sometimes a lifetime of it. Or to have no coherent set of values but personal survival!

(Note on quoting Bible verses here: I quote them as what’s in my thinking, others may (if they wish) look some of them up on-line at “http://bible.cc” (KJV) or elsewhere. My quotes may not be verbatim.)

What mother would WANT a son or daughter to join a gang of criminals? Yet they do, or sometimes they die for NOT being in a gang. It’s not only the risks, but the values systems.

What about a government gang? What about a system that robs parents of years of productive work based on a theme that someone is somehow to be deciphered psychologically, apart from his or her behaviors? What about a system that would bring ongoing conflict onto growing children — and do so for financial and personal profit — based on the belief that freedom of association does NOT belong to (typically) their mother?

It’s nice to have a lot of professions spring up on how to stop violence against women, I suppose, BUT how about the professions Moms were in beforehand? (Many of us were, FYI). The professionals I most needed in the early 2000 would’ve been a criminal (not family) defense attorney. Then again, where was the funding going to come from?

Surely! a NY State Supreme Court Justice wouldn’t extort or solicit a bribe. (Oh– and the extortion involved a family law case…)

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This illustrates why I think the many problems in the family law arena are due to judges (etc.) “just not understanding” and that more federal grants money (million$, in fact, nationwide and over the years) should be poured into organizations that “educate” and “train” judges in what’s right (after the original hundred$ of thousand$ to first research, study, and figure out what’s right), rather than into efforts to make sure all of them DO what’s right.

And when they are caught with their pants down — excuse me, their hands out (wrong case) — then whether or not this should be taken seriously should be left up to the discretion of ANOTHER judge, All that’s at stake, after all, is judicial accountability and justice, and public respect for what the courts do, and how business is conducted in them. Respect for the law, . . . .

An interesting case, and if you put on the lens of “evidence,” I still see mostly hearsay and a LOT of politics. That said, whether or not he gets 10 years, or 20, or the “standard” 2 to 3-1/2 (for the mere crime of betraying public office for personal profit), or, nothing, is up to the discretion of another judge. At least this one is off the bench and disbarred. Some of the case appears to hinge on a dubious sting, and the testimony of a personal injury attorney with a divorce case before the judge (Hmm…). In the long run, it hinges on our faith in the Judicial Commission and the US DOJ.

I am not investing more time in formatting today, but thought the topic relevant and of public interest.

Moral: Never attempt to shake down a successful PI attorney

POINT: Search for “@@@” which shows my point in posting this:

Script is below. It takes a while to sort out the characters, but there sure is a moral involved, here.

My comments are in quotes, the actual quote (article) is not.

(Font size changes are out of control; just deal with it, OK?)

Former N.Y. Judge Convicted of Attempted Extortion and Soliciting Bribes

Jeff Storey
New York Law Journal
August 28, 2009

Former New York Supreme Court Justice Thomas J. Spargo has been found guilty of attempting to shake down lawyers appearing before him to help pay the substantial legal bills he had incurred in fighting an ongoing investigation into his conduct by the Commission on Judicial Conduct.

The types of complaints that may be investigated by the Commission include improper demeanor, conflicts of interest, intoxication, >>bias, prejudice, favoritism, corruption<<, prohibited business or political activity, serious financial and records mismanagement, >>assertion of the influence of judicial office for the private benefit of the judge or others,<< and other misconduct on or off the bench. Physical or mental disability may also be investigated.

The Commission does not act as an appellate court and does not review the merits of a judge’s rulings or alleged errors of law. The Commission does not have the authority, for example, to raise or reduce the amount of bail or change the sentence imposed upon a defendant. The Commission does not issue advisory opinions, give legal advice or represent litigants.

The Commission’s jurisdiction is limited to judges. Complaints against other court personnel or lawyers are not investigated. When appropriate, the Commission refers complaints to other agencies. {{SUCH AS? How is it decided when this is appropriate?}}

{{NOTE: THEREFORE, THIS WILL NOT HANDLE: CUSTODY EVALUATORS, MEDIATORS, COURT-APPOINTED ATTORNEYS, FAMILY LAW ATTORNEYS, FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGIST ETC. ETC. ETC. THEREFORE, THIS IS A LIMITED VENUE OF REVIEW WHEN IT COMES TO THE REALM OF FAMILY LAW, I WOULD PRESUME.}}

{{NOW perhaps we have an idea why certain organizations (pronounce after me: “A-F-C-C,” for example) are so VITALLY interested in farming out custody decision-making input AWAY from judges and AWAY from the courtroom?}}

At the close of a three-day trial in Albany, and after deliberating for seven hours, a Northern District of New York jury on Thursday convicted Spargo, 66, of both counts in the indictment against him: attempted extortion and soliciting a bribe.

The Albany Times-Union reported that Spargo smiled at times after the verdict, hugging one supporter in the courtroom.

Outside, Spargo told reporters, “The jury system works whether you like it or not.”

(An odd comment for a judge….?)

E. Stewart Jones of Troy, N.Y., Spargo’s attorney, in an interview called the verdict “overkill” and “excessively punitive” to Spargo, who was removed in 2006 from the Albany Supreme Court bench at the recommendation of the conduct commission.

A spokesman for the U.S. Department of Justice said Spargo faced a maximum sentence of 20 years on the extortion charge and 10 years on the bribery charge, plus a fine of up to $250,000 on each count.

However, the sentence he receives from Judge Gary Sharpe in December will likely be much less. Jones said the advisory sentencing range was two to 3 1/2 years. In any case, he pointed out that the judge had the discretion to eschew a prison term entirely.

{{So much for taking it seriously, the mis-use of judicial power for personal gain. This kind of reminds me of not taking violations of RESTRAINING ORDERS or STALKING seriously either. With this kind of mentality, how hard is it going to really hit Judge Sargo? What was his salary? Will he lose his cronies? Will he lose the support of any family? }}

Jones said the sentence will play a big part in his client’s decision whether to appeal.

Under state law, Spargo also will be disbarred.

Note: I bet THAT law has an interesting background….. Probably judges that were getting disciplined were NOT getting disbarred (and continuing practice) before it was passed??

Jones accused the conduct commission, and its administrator, Robert H. Tembeckjian, of referring the case to federal authorities after the agency “already had exacted its pound of flesh.”

Jones added that he had argued to the jury that Spargo had paid the price for defending the First Amendment rights of judges in the commission proceedings.

Tembeckjian denied in an interview that the commission had initiated the federal case. Rather, he said his agency merely responded to requests for information from the federal prosecutors whose probe was already under way. Spargo’s removal from office “ended the matter for us,” he said.

“This case was not about the First Amendment but about abusing judicial office for personal financial gain,” Tembeckjian added in a statement. “The commission fulfilled its responsibilities honorably. Its decision and the jury verdict speak for themselves.”

Point: The extent of the Commission on Judicial Conduct’s effort was to get the guy off the bench, not set or make an example that extortion and bribery are, well, criminal and will be punished. They are not the criminal prosecutors. It was basically then, apparently, “damage control.”

The commission’s probe figured prominently in the Albany trial. Tembeckjian was subpoenaed and although he did not testify, his cross-examination of Spargo before the commission was read into the record. Moreover, several commission witnesses appeared at the trial.

EXTORTION CHARGES

The government alleged that Spargo, while presiding in Kingston in 2003, had tried to extort thousands of dollars from three of Ulster County’s most successful personal injury lawyers. {{Only one of who is named in this article, so possibly the strongest case??}}

((Their success might be another interesting story.))

In particular, prosecutors said Spargo had called Bruce Blatchly of New Paltz into his chambers and attempted to solicit $10,000. @@@When Blatchly balked, the judge followed up with a second solicitation in a phone call during which he observed that he and Albany County Surrogate Cathryn Doyle, a close friend, had been assigned to handle Blatchly’s Ulster County cases, including Blatchly’s own divorce.@@@

{{The chamber of horrors??}}

{{Acknowledging cronyism….}}

NOTE: We now enter the realm of FAMILY LAW. An indication by this disbarred judge that he would rig a case (against) an attorney who refused to pay up

suggests that this practice exists, and may not be uncommon.

The judge suggested that if the attorney did not play ball, those cases would be in jeopardy, the government sought to prove.

MY COMMENTS:

Without a phone tap, or written evidence, it’s still hearsay. Then I would imagine, it would get down to sworn statement, and whether the person making sworn statement is a credible witness. In this field, it’d be a hard call to tell who is and who is not a credible witness, for sure!

This shows right here how bribes and extortion would happen — of course, typically, a person doing this would not want evidence. They would happen in private, casually, unrecorded, off the record. this is why CHARACTER is so important in those in public office, and it’s really up to the PUBLIC to ensure this somehow. Somehow . . . . .

With what I’ve been exposed to so far (which isn’t the whole nine yards, but still sickening in nature, scope and impact on people’s lives!), as far as I, an onlooker, am concerned, and as far as evidence here, how do I know there wasn’t some other interests in prosecuting this particular judge. Maybe he had crossed the wrong people. Maybe he was going to go down, and someone didn’t want to be associated with him. Or maybe this story played out just like it did, and the “Commission on Judicial Conduct” really are good, ethical guys.

When punishment for extortion and bribe is weak, that communicates to the rest of us (and I do mean across the country) that it’s not a “big deal” to the courts. It is discouraging to litigants.

Jones said Spargo, an expert in election law active in Republican Party circles, was “disappointed and saddened” by the jury verdict, but observed that winning an acquittal, never easy in federal court, had been made even more of an “uphill struggle” by facts and circumstances of the case that were difficult to explain.

Jones did not present any witnesses because “we had nothing to add.” He told the jury on summation that Spargo was an innocent man who would not have risked extorting money while under investigation by the commission.

The commission began investigating Spargo in 2000 when he was a part-time town justice. By 2003, his legal bills had reached $140,000 and were continuing to mount, Jones said. Jones also represented Spargo before the commission.

JUST FOR A POINT OF REFERENCE, THIS IS 2009. Removal from the bench happened after 3 years. What does that say about who gets to the Supreme Court level, that he did?

NINE YEARS TO BEAR FRUIT, AND THAT’S WITH FEDS INVOLVED.

SO, IF WE ARE TALKING THE LIFE OF A GROWING CHILD, THAT CHILD WOULD’VE BEEN HALF-GROWN. MOREOVER, THIS COMMISSION HAS NO POWER TO AFFECT DECISIONS ALREADY MADE, JUST GET BAD JUDGES OFF THE BENCH.

Jones acknowledged in the interview Thursday that lawyers had been asked to contribute money on Spargo’s behalf but said the approach had been made by another lawyer without Spargo’s knowledge.

Jones praised Judge Sharpe’s handling of the case but stopped short of saying whether his client had received a fair trial. He said Thursday that he first wanted to investigate the impact of a “hearsay” report in the Times-Union.

Jones had argued before the jury that the government was obligated to produce Surrogate Doyle as a witness since prosecutors alleged Spargo had used her in his effort to extort Blatchly. Surrogate Doyle did not testify at trial.

Jones told the jury the government was hiding the surrogate because she would hurt its case. He said Thursday that his argument to the jury may have been undermined by what he said was a false report in the Times-Union that the surrogate was present in the courtroom.

The case was prosecuted by Senior Trial Attorney Richard C. Pilger and Kendall Day, a trial attorney from the Justice Department’s Criminal Division in Washington.

“It is a sad day indeed when a judge breaks the laws that he is sworn to enforce,” Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer said in a statement.

IS IT SAD ENOUGH FOR ACTUAL PRISON TIME? if not, then other such judges will also presume, well, not THAT sad…..

“Judges are supposed to serve the people who elected them, not their own self-interests. What Spargo did is nothing more than old-fashioned extortion,” said FBI Special Agent in Charge John F. Pikus.

That’s true, and we appreciate the good work in this case. Now about the others . . . . . ??

JUDGES SIGN COURT ORDERS. NEXT TO THOSE WHO ENFORCE THE SAME ORDERS, THESE ARE SOME OF THE MOST IMPORTANT GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES AROUND, AND THEY ARE PAID WELL FOR IT.

NOTE, THAT LIKE A TYPICAL BUSINESS PERSON, JUDGE SPARGO ATTEMPTED TO PAY HIS LAWYER’S FEES. NOT IN A LEGAL MANNER OF COURSE, BUT HE DID TRY TO “PASS IT FORWARD” WHEN IT CAME TO THE ACTUAL COSTS.

WHAT KIND OF BREEDING GROUNDS ARE THESE COURTROOMS, PARTICULARLY WHEN IT COMES TO USING EXTORTION, AND THE THREAT IS TO THROW A DIVORCE CASE?

If that’s the characteristic of divorce court (and this wouldn’t be the first NY judge to be caught with taking bribes over divorce cases), then it would behoove EVERY divorcing couple in which neither is indeed a criminal, to work out their own divorces.

Of course, if they had that capacity to start with, perhaps they might’ve worked out their own marriages as well. . . . .

Just FYI, when it comes to cases with a history of domestic violence, the “extortion” isn’t just throwing a case, it’s hurting someone — whether ex-spouse, relative, or child. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

(2) Tembeckjian

NYT, section, “Opinion” OP-ED.

How Judges Hide From Justice

Published: May 22, 2005

By ROBERT H. TEMBECKJIAN

N the last three months, the New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct has publicly disciplined four metropolitan-area judges: two from Brooklyn, one from Manhattan and one from Westchester. Apart from some intense public commentary over the merits of these decisions – three public censures and one removal from office – these cases had at least one thing in common. They were all conducted in secret. That should be changed

Judges are among the most powerful of public servants. They decide who goes to jail, who wins or loses millions of dollars and who gets custody of children. Public confidence in their integrity and impartiality is essential to the rule of law. While a vast majority of judges are honorable, there will always be some who engage in unethical behavior. Disciplining such judges is important business that should be transacted in public, just as any civil or criminal trial would be.

In 38 states, judicial misconduct hearings are indeed open to the public. Not so in New York, where proceedings that stretch over months are held behind closed doors. Only when the results are announced does the public even learn such cases existed. By then, it is usually too late to convey in a meaningful way the strength of the case, the credibility of the witnesses and the merits of the defense. The four recent decisions in New York offer cases in point.

The commission voted to remove a Surrogate’s Court judge in Brooklyn for awarding a long-time friend millions of dollars in fees from estates where there was no executor, without confirming that he had done enough work to earn such fees. The judge is appealing the decision.

The commission censured a Westchester Family Court judge who attempted to influence other judges and court workers on behalf of friends in two divorce and custody cases, and who testified in a manner she conceded was inaccurate. It also censured a Brooklyn Criminal Court judge for coming off the bench in unprovoked anger and grabbing and screaming at a defense lawyer. Finally, it censured a Manhattan Civil Court judge for presiding over a personal injury case involving a litigant who was also a lawyer with whom she continued to socialize, and to whom she awarded a fiduciary appointment worth about $80,000 in fees, while the case was pending.

Reasonable people may differ with these decisions. As the prosecutor of judicial misconduct cases in New York, I myself am sometimes at odds with the commission. Yet while some criticized the removal as severe, and others derided the censures as lenient, most tended to miss the context and nuance of the deliberations. The subtleties of an individual disciplinary decision tend to get short shrift in the news. Were the press and public able to follow along as these cases unfolded, the disciplinary process would not seem so sudden and mysterious, and citizens would be better informed along the way. For example, the case against the Brooklyn Surrogate’s Court judge lasted 22 months, and the record was over 13,000 pages long. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to capture the complexities of such a proceeding in a single article that reported the final result.

New York’s chief judge, Judith Kaye, proposed legislation in 2003, which the commission endorsed, to open up the disciplinary process at the point when a judge is formally charged with misconduct. Unfortunately, the Legislature did not act. Perhaps the commission’s recent decisions might spur the Senate and Assembly to revisit the issue. The more citizens know about what goes on at the commission, the more likely they will appreciate that no case is as cut and dried as a critic may suggest. The press and public could follow the arguments as they develop, rather than try to digest them all at once when the decisions are rendered.

Moreover, an open proceeding would shed important light on the rare instance in which a formal charge against a judge is dismissed without any disciplinary action. It would provide the public with the means to assess that a dismissal was deserved and the system was honest.

In short, a public process would transform judicial discipline from a secretive game to one in which the commission’s judgments were open to scrutiny and improvement as we went along, while there was time enough to make a difference. Public confidence in the judiciary, and in the disciplinary system that holds them accountable, requires nothing less.

Robert H. Tembeckjian is administrator of and counsel to the New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct.

Queens Judge Accepts Call For Transfer (June 15, 2004)
(THAT one is quite a read, too — I just did! Talk about political influence in courtrooms!!)

JUDICIAL COMMISSION MEMBERS, as of 2008 (on page 4 of this:)

(Shows who appoints them — some by a Governor, some from Legislature, some by a Chief Judge, one by a former governor).

(3) BLATCHLY

How’d you like to go up against this person in your divorce?

(If I remarry, remind me NOT to remarry an attorney….)

Blatchly & Simonson
3 Academy Street
New Paltz, New York 12561
Phone: (845) 255-4600
Fax: (845) 255-2627
E-Mail: bdbxx@hvc.rr.com

Family Law

In our family law practice, we will work closely with you to seek favorable resolution of disputes related to your divorce. For many families, making the decision to divorce means agreements must be reached on a variety of related matters, such as:

Child Custody & Visitation

Child Support

Spousal Maintenance (Alimony)

Division of Marital Assets & Debts

Now is a time when you need knowledgeable and experienced advocates working on your behalf. Whether your issues can be resolved through negotiation or we proceed to litigation, we will be here to protect your interests and advocate for you every step of the way. Just because your marriage is ending, it does not mean you should be taken advantage of or lose all that you have worked hard for.

Every divorce essentially involves resolution of the same four issues; grounds (your entitlement to a divorce), custody (joint, sole or shared), support (spousal and child) and equitable distribution of your assets. A solid understanding of these issues and how they impact on your life is essential to understanding what your options in a divorce are and planning for your future during and after the divorce proceedings.

Unlike most civil litigation, divorce results in legal issues that survive dissolution of the marriage and continue to occasionally require legal work as custody arrangements and support are periodically adjusted. We continue to work with you as your circumstances change and you require modification of custody and/or support

(4) SPARGO

http://www.judicialaccountability.org/articles/spargofightscommission.htm

This is very interesting reading if you have the time, and talks about a controversial “sting” attempt by the AG, the process of selecting judges, and so forth (several articles).

Ex-NY Judge Loses Bid to Squelch His Indictment

By Joel Stashenko
New York Law Journal
New York Lawyer
July 28, 2009

The commission found that Mr. Spargo invited Ulster County attorney Bruce Blatchly into his chambers in November 2003 and, after asking his clerk to leave, told the lawyer that he wanted $30,000 from members of the local bar. Mr. Blatchly, who said he did not contribute, was the only person who presented evidence to the commission that Mr. Spargo was directly involved in soliciting funds.

The commission also contended that Mr. Blatchly was asked by Sanford Rosenblum, an Albany attorney who is close to Mr. Spargo, for a $10,000 donation to Mr. Spargo’s defense fund.

Mr. Spargo, 65, vehemently denied before the commission that he asked any attorneys for money.

Yesterday’s indictment does not identify the lawyer who allegedly gave Mr. Spargo $10,000, other than as “an Ulster County attorney practicing before him.”

{{Was this part of a sting, or business as usual? Did they plea-bargain said attorney in exchange for testimony?}}

As grounds for its removal recommendation against Mr. Spargo, the commission cited the alleged shakedown of Mr. Blatchly as well as Mr. Spargo’s handing out drinks, food and convenience store coupons while campaigning for the Supreme Court in 2001.

It also found he committed misconduct by not disclosing when hearing cases involving the Albany County District Attorney’s Office that he once represented the district attorney and was still owed $10,000 by him.

Written by Let's Get Honest|She Looks It Up

August 28, 2009 at 12:15 PM

Posted in History of Family Court

Tagged with Bribery, Divorce/Custody Cases as political collateral, Due process, Extortion, family law, Judge/attorney cronyism, Judicial Ethics Commissions (state), social commentary, U.S. Govt $$ hard @ work..

Mixed Sentiments — from a different battlefield — on the Passing of Senator Ted Kennedy, who valiantly fought: Brain Cancer, for Not Leaving Children Behind, and for Caring for the nation’s Health.

with 2 comments

AUGUST 26, 2009

I rarely sleep, and as the TV flashed with news of this lion of a personality, and carrier of the family name, it coincided unfortunately with the third year since I lost my daughters to felony child-stealing, in retaliation for reporting, in seeking asylum from domestic violence.

I struggle with respecting this event, with discomfort about our nations hyper-respect of public figures. Senator Ted apparently was a womanizer as well as struggled with alcohol, and eventually married a woman 22 years his junior; do his many public accomplishments compensate, is this just the way of “famous men” that change society?

He lost two brothers to assassination, assassinations that affected our country.

I am currently reviewing the work of a young woman, local, that lost a sister and a brother to murder, for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and probably also wrong color. She too is near the end of her dynasty — both parents gone. Her mother took the loss of two children hard, and also was fighting cancer. Her older sister was seen talking to some people in a van. She was found later, hog-tied, stabbed many times, raped many times, and thrown out like trash in a dumpster. Her SISTER. Her brother was stabbed in the heart for confronting someone trailing other women. Why do I run across people like this? I don’t know, except I don’t live in a castle or gated community, and I find people’s stories interesting. I have been cut out of my own daughters’ stories by a top-heavy, supposedly well-intentioned system that knew that two bright girls were not going to escape its radar or grasp, and that mother must therefore disappear.

Unlike me, she figured out FAST that a system was not going to protect her own two sons, and found a trusted friend to become guardian, so at least she can see them. Like others, for a fee. Like me, she wants some version of the truth to survive for her children.

We are allowed to give birth, but too often, not to also speak.

How famous is Senator Ted, then, and how much more important his story, and his contributions? Should I mourn him more than others? And yet it’s clear he worked hard, campaigned hard, pushed initiatives through, and changed our society. How can I handle this today, when I shouldn’t be blogging but doing something more self-preserving. Do I share the national regret and awe?

Quite honestly, no, but I mean no harm in saying so.

How long can I afford to pause and commemorate?

Probably shouldn’t have today, but i did.

it is easy and common to pick heroes and praise them, and transfer parts of our identity to heroes who gave their lives in service, and forget the non-heroes, some of whom I commemorate below.

I am not sure where Senator Ted falls in this mix. I think the metaphor of this book has come to the rescue. It seems both to symbolize the federalism and the poverty, and the reporting of it that go together in the topic “FAMOUS.”

“Let us Now Praise Famous Men“

The book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men grew out of an assignment the two men accepted in 1936 to produce a magazine article on the conditions among white sharecropper families in the U.S. South. It was the time of U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt‘s “New Deal“ programs designed to help the poorest segments of the society. Agee and Evans spent eight weeks that summer researching their assignment, mainly among three white sharecropping families mired in desperate poverty. They returned with Evans’ portfolio of stark images—of families with gaunt faces, adults and children huddled in bare shacks before dusty yards in the Depression-era nowhere of the deep south—and Agee’s detailed notes.

As he remarks in the book’s preface, the original assignment was to produce a “photographic and verbal record of the daily living and environment of an average white family of tenant farmers.” However, as the Literary Encyclopedia points out, “Agee ultimately conceived of the project as a work of several volumes to be entitled Three Tenant Families,though only the first volume, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, was ever written.” Agee considered that the larger work, though based in journalism, would be “an independent inquiry into certain normal predicaments of human divinity.“

The resulting single book is a critically praised opus that leapt over the traditional forms and limitations of journalism of the time. By combining factual reportage with passages of literary complexity and poetic beauty, Agee presented a complete picture, an accurate, minutely detailed report of what he had seen coupled with insight into his feelings about the experience and the difficulties of capturing it for a broad audience. In doing so, he created an enduring portrait of a nearly invisible segment of the American population.

My father had a love, and some ear, for poetry, and always claimed he could hear the rhythm of the Lord’s Prayer (or possibly it was the 23rd psalm) in Agee’s “Knoxville, Summer of 1915.” Ever the critic (and unable to carry a tune himself) he tried to talk me out of both music, and Christianity (unsuccessful in both cases), and we had something of a truce. I do not have, emotionally or socially, a family at this point; I have made my own in life, and as to the one with whom I share DNA, it’s the two daughters only (now gone) and the deceased Dad, and my memories of him will have to do. . . .

So perhaps the Agee reference, the federalism, and my wish to point out, that deep poverty and distress still exist, sometimes still caused by either the basic human lusts, or the governmental god-like posturing, will make up for my mixed sense of duty in perhaps failure to “note” with enough awe, the passing of another member of the Kennedy dynasty, regardless of on how wide a screen and with how broad a stroke for how long, he painted his visions of what the United States should be. For one, as a woman, a mother, and a Christian, I do not share his multiple visions on how to help the poor and educate America. I do not think this is the original American vision, a totalitarian welfare state, an inverted pyramid building the 21st century equivalent of pyramids of social structure. I think this “nation/religion” is the way of Egypt, milennia ago. No, I do not. But still, Let us Now Praise Famous Men.

One of the follies of humanity is poor choice of who to praise and with whom to associate — famous preempts worthy.

Throughout the book, Agee and Evans use pseudonyms to obscure the identity of the three tenant farmer families. This convention is retained in the follow-up book And Their Children After Them.

lthough Agee’s and Evans’ work was never published as the intended magazine article, their work has endured in the form in which it finally emerged, a lengthy, highly original book. Agee’s text is part ethnography, part cultural anthropological study, and part novelistic, poetic narrative set in the shacks and fields of Alabama. Evans’ black-and-white photographs, starkly real but also matching the grand poetry of the text, are included as a portfolio, without comment, in the book.

Although at its heart a story of the three families, the Gudgers, Woods, and Ricketts (pseudonyms for the Burroughs, Tengles and Fields) the book is also a meditation on reporting and intrusion, on observing and interfering with subjects, sufficient to occupy any student of anthropology, journalism, or, for that matter, revolution.

THE ACCOMPLISHMENTS OF SENATOR EDWARD M. KENNEDY 1962-2009

August 26, 2009

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Senator Kennedy has authored more than 2,500 bills throughout his career in the United States Senate. Of those bills, several hundred have become Public Law. Attached is a sample of some of those laws, which have made a significant difference in the quality of life for the American people. Download the PDF document of his accomplishments here.

Reflections:

Who old enough does not remember? the assassinations, the plane crash, and now we have newsbroadcasts, and a nation commemorating the legacy of this Senator from Massachusetts. It is healing to commemorate, with respect, men who have changed the face of the nation. Last night, I watched on TV, Charlie Rose seeking to know this man through former friends and writers, and also speaking with the Senator also. As I saw the shock of white hair, the broad, broad charismatic smile, and listened to Senator Kennedy promote Education and Health Care, his two major federal programs and passions, I had a hard time. I heard the Senator talk about how America cannot be left behind in globalization and MUST give EVERY child the capacity to succeed in a global economy.

I thought, where are the memorials for the people who were not born into Kennedy family, but still died?

Viet Nam Memorial

By thee have I run through a troop and leapt over a wall

Psalm 18:

1 I will love thee, O LORD, my strength.

2 The LORD is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer; my God, my strength, in whom I will trust; my buckler, and the horn of my salvation, and my high tower.

3 I will call upon the LORD, who is worthy to be praised: so shall I be saved from mine enemies.

4 The sorrows of death compassed me, and the floods of ungodly men made me afraid.

5 The sorrows of hell compassed me about: the snares of death prevented me.

6 In my distress I called upon the LORD, and cried unto my God: he heard my voice out of his temple, and my cry came before him, even into his ears.

. . . .

With the merciful thou wilt shew thyself merciful; with an upright man thou wilt shew thyself upright;

26 With the pure thou wilt shew thyself pure; and with the froward thou wilt shew thyself froward.

27 For thou wilt save the afflicted people; but wilt bring down high looks.

28 For thou wilt light my candle: the LORD my God will enlighten my darkness.

29 For by thee I have run through a troop; and by my God have I leaped over a wall.

30 As for God, his way is perfect: the word of the LORD is tried: he is a buckler to all those that trust in him.

31 For who is God save the LORD? or who is a rock save our God?

32 It is God that girdeth me with strength, and maketh my way perfect.

33 He maketh my feet like hinds’ feet, and setteth me upon my high places.

34 He teacheth my hands to war, so that a bow of steel is broken by mine arms.

35 Thou hast also given me the shield of thy salvation: and thy right hand hath holden me up, and thy gentleness hath made me great.

36 Thou hast enlarged my steps under me, that my feet did not slip

WHO MOURNS THESE?

Deborah Ross (51) and Ersie Charles Everette (58)

2009 Tried to break up, Shot to death at work, in a Tollbooth, and her male friend in a parking lot, ambushed

Cross said the shootings appeared to stem from a domestic dispute as Burris and Deborah Ross, 51, a California Department of Transportation toll booth collector, had recently broken up.

“He clearly had no regard for human life, so we wanted to apprehend him as soon as possible,” Cross said. “We had authorities all throughout Northern California trying to find this guy.”

Burris apparently opened fire with a shotgun shortly before 6 p.m. Tuesday, killing Ross and Ersie Charles Everette, 58, of San Leandro, Calif., who was sitting in his truck in the toll plaza parking lot.

Ross and Burris had shared a house in Richmond, and neighbors said the two had been having financial problems. Richmond Police were called to the house on Saturday, police spokeswoman Sgt. Bisa French said Wednesday. It is unknown what the nature of the call was as no report was taken, French said.

Although their relationship had just ended, Burris was aware of Everette, who drove Ross to work Tuesday, Cross said.

“Somehow, he knew the guy was there at her job, there’s a connection between the two victims, but what that relationship is, we don’t know at this time,” Cross said.

Everette, known as “Chuck” by those who knew him, was a longtime, well-respected bus driver for Golden Gate Transit who had received numerous accolades, spokeswoman Mary Currie said Wednesday.

“He was a likable guy, a good guy,” Currie said. “Passengers liked him. His co-workers liked him.”

Tuesday’s shootings occurred at the bridge over the northern portion of San Francisco Bay that connects well-to-do Marin County with Richmond and other East Bay suburbs. Witnesses said a man used the butt of a shotgun to shatter the window of the No. 3 toll booth, then fired at least three times inside, stunning rush-hour commuters in the westbound lanes before fleeing in the van owned by Western Eagle Shuttle of San Rafael, Calif.

Officers found Ross’ body inside the booth, while Everette was discovered slumped over in a white pickup truck in a nearby parking lot.

> > >

2009/2008 Torres, Catalina (44) & Eustacio (41), Sgt. Paul Starzyk

Brother, Sister, both domestic violence workers, both murdered by an “ex”

According to the San Francisco chronicle, on the evening of July 19th, Eustacio Torres was shot by his ex-girlfriend at a converted garage that Torres was renovating. Torres and his girlfriend, Bernadette Agustin, met about five years ago when Torres was renovating her house. They became partners in that business for a few years. The market started to tumble downhill, and their buildings went into foreclosure causing them to lose money. This caused tension between the couple. After some time, their relationship started to become difficult for both of them. Torres realized that Agustin was dangerous; however he never got a restraining order against her. On the evening on July 19th Agustin went to meet Torres at the garage. Prior to this incident she bought a pistol. She brought shot him with it.

About a year ago Eustacio Torres’ sister, Catalina Torres, a volunteer for a battered women’s group, was shot and killed inside of her Martinez apartment while trying to protect one of her customers in a beauty salon.

Her customer’s husband, Felix Sandoval, entered the beauty salon raged at his wife who had a restraining order against him. Catalina and her customer jetted out of the beauty salon. Sandoval couldn’t find his wife so he followed Torres to her apartment and shot her in the head, simply because she was affiliated with the incident. He then shot at the door and hit Sgt. Paul Starzyk. He still busted in and shot and killed Sandoval.

Since these two murders are a year apart and both victims come from the same family, the Torres family is suffering deeply from these two tragedies.

It is sad, yet ironic how both tragedies happened in the way that they did. They were related and both incidents happened a year apart. Considering the fact that Eustacio, Catalina’s brother had to help bury her, it is sad that he got killed also. They both worked together in a domestic violence group together. Now the Torres family has lost two of their family members to similar incidents.

MARTINEZ — Last September, Catalina Torres’ family struggled to find answers about why she died at the hands of an estranged in-law who also killed a Martinez police sergeant.

> > >

Less than a year later, they find themselves again trying to find clarity after the slaying late last month of her brother, Eustacio Torres, by an estranged girlfriend in San Diego.

According to San Diego police, the bodies of Eustacio Torres, 41, and Bernadette Agustin, 52, were discovered by his nephew — Catalina Torres’ son — in the early-morning hours of July 20 at his home on in the Paradise Hills area. Investigators believe that Agustin shot Eustacio Torres and herself.

Eustacio Torres’ death follows the slaying of his sister Sept. 6, 2008, by Felix Sandoval. Sandoval burst into a Martinez beauty salon looking for his wife. She was not there, and he confronted her cousin, Catalina Torres, at a nearby apartment. While she shielded one of the home’s residents, Sandoval shot and killed her.

Sandoval then shot at police approaching the apartment, mortally wounding Sgt. Paul Starzyk. But Starzyk’s final act was to kill Sandoval, saving the others in the apartment.

Sandoval was in the midst of a divorce from his wife, who had filed a restraining order against him, and Catalina Torres had been supporting her separation from him. In San Diego, Eustacio Torres was severing ties with Agustin. Although the Torres family has experienced two devastating losses, Noe Torres, youngest of the six siblings, said they do not feel like victims.

A memorial fund has been established in Eustacio Torres’ name. Donations can be made at any Wells Fargo Bank branch to the account number 2629533015.

Since these two murders are a year apart and both victims come from the same family, the Torres family is suffering deeply from these two tragedies.
It is sad, yet ironic how both tragedies happened in the way that they did. They were related and both incidents happened a year apart. Considering the fact that Eustacio, Catalina’s brother had to help bury her, it is sad that he got killed also. They both worked together in a domestic violence group together. Now the Torres family has lost two of their family members to similar incidents.

2008 account “Details emerge in Martinez triple shooting:

Catalina Torres survived domestic abuse and became a strong advocate for a nonprofit group that helps victims of domestic violence.

“She was a battered woman who became an advocate,” said Maria Preciado, Torres’ close friend. “She took negative experiences and turned them into positive things.”

In a tragic turn of events, the 44-year-old STAND Against Domestic Violence volunteer lost her life Saturday, an innocent bystander in a deadly domestic disturbance involving her cousin’s estranged husband.

Officers were called to the salon about 11:35 a.m. Saturday on reports of a domestic disturbance. Sandoval broke the salon’s front window with his hand and entered holding a gun, police said. According to witnesses, he was looking for his estranged wife, salon owner Margarita Sandoval.

Martinez police Chief Tom Simonetti said Felix Sandoval, who was waving the gun around, never fired a shot in the salon, but confronted his teenage daughter in the parking lot behind the salon and told her he was going to kill his wife and his other children. Sandoval ran to an upstairs apartment on the opposite side of the parking lot where Torres, an unidentified woman and three of Sandoval’s children were, the chief said.

Elnora Caldwell, 46

She asked for protection

SEPTEMBER 2008, This beautiful woman Tried to Leave, Died, Stabbed, on side of the road

Contra Costa sheriff building death penalty argument in wife stabbing

Investigators said Monday that they are trying to build a death penalty case against an Oakland man who allegedly stabbed his estranged wife near the Caldecott Tunnel and pushed her out of his pickup in front of stunned motorists. Robert Woods, a 47-year-old former maintenance worker for the city of Oakland, was arrested on suspicion of murdering Elnora Caldwell, 46. Caldwellobtained a restraining order against Woods earlier this year, saying she was afraid of him. She was stabbed to death Saturday night and pushed from the pickup on a stretch of Fish Ranch Road that passes over the east end of the Caldecott Tunnel. ..Caldwell’s family members believe she was kidnapped Saturday from her Oakland home, perhaps by someone other than Woods.

Police and witnesses said Woods went to Caldwell’s Oakland apartment and washed up, then turned himself in to an Oakland police officer in the area. More than a dozen motorists stopped to help Caldwell. Some gave her chest compressions and others jotted down the license plate number of the GMC pickup. Alameda County Superior Court records show that Caldwell applied for a domestic violence restraining order against Woods on April 29, and that the order was to be active until 2013.

Caldwell wrote in her application for the restraining order that Woods had shoved her after showing up unannounced at the Nordstrom department store in San Francisco where she worked and accusing her of infidelity. In 2007, she wrote, Woods pulled her hair during an argument in his truck, forcing her to flee and take a taxi home.

In a third incident, Caldwell said, her husband broke a glass sliding door at her apartment.

“It has to stop,” Caldwell wrote of alleged verbal and physical abuse.

Court records show that Woods was fired from his job as a maintenance worker for the city of Oakland last year for allegedly doing drugs and threatening to kill co-workers.

? ? ?

Domestic Violence Murder/Suicides – Here’s a summary:

In the U.S., estimates from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) are that more than three women a day are killed by their intimate partners. Women are killed by intimate partners more often than by another acquaintance of stranger.Most of these murders involved were preceded by physical and psychological abuse.

Outside the domestic realm, males are killed much more often than females; they are killed most often in fights with other men.

According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, 1,055 women and 287 men were murdered by their intimate partners in 2005. These figures are striking, because in the past, in the 1970s and earlier, the numbers of men and women so victimized were about even. In other words, there has been a significant decline in the numbers of men killed by their partners but not for women.

The number of men who were murdered by intimates dropped by 75% between 1976 and 2005 (BJS). The number of black females murdered in this time has declined but the number of white females murdered has dropped only by 6%. Statistics Canada (1998, 2005), similarly, reveals a sharp decline in the numbers of male domestic homicide victims but not of female victims of homicide.

The reason that women are resorting less to murder of their partners is most likely because many of these women were battered women who felt trapped in a dangerous situation. Today, the presence of violence prevention programming and the availability of shelters are paving the way to other options. The fact that domestic violence services apparently are saving the lives of more men than women is a positive, though unintended consequence of the women’s shelter movement (see van Wormer and Bartollas, 2007).

Nina Reiser (31), mother of 2. No asylum in America

2006, Russian-born Oby/Gyn tries to divorce Hans Reiser (WIKIPEDIA) but disappears on exchange of children

Hans Reiser Admits to Murdering Nina Reiser, Pleads to Reduced …

In 1998, while working in Saint Petersburg, Russia, Hans Reiser reportedly selected from a mail-order bride catalogue,^[9] and subsequently married, Nina Sharanova (Нина Шаранова), a Russian-born and trained obstetrician and gynecologist^[10] who was studying to become an American licensed OB/GYN. Reiser himself stated that he met Nina when he went to a date set up by a Russian dating service; Nina had come along to translate for his date. . . .

In May, Nina Reiser alleged in court filings that her husband had failed to pay 50 percent medical expenses and childcare expenses as ordered by a judge and was in arrears for more than $12,000. ^[13]

Recovery of Nina’s body and sentencing

According to officials, prosecutors agreed to a deal whereby Reiser would reveal the location of his wife’s body in exchange for pleading guilty to second-degree murder. The deal was made with the agreement of Nina’s family, but was subject to final approval by Judge Goodman.^[45]^[46] On Monday, July 7, 2008, Reiser led police to Nina’s body buried in the Oakland hills. Reiser’s attorney, William DuBois, who was handcuffed to Reiser and accompanied by a heavy police guard to the site, said that the remains were found buried on the side of a hill between Redwood Regional Park and the Huckleberry Botanic Regional Preserve, less than half a mile (< 800 m) from the home on Exeter Drive where Reiser lived with his mother, and where Nina Reiser was last seen alive on 3 September 20

Anastasia Melnitchenko, 22, unmarried, No asylum in America

2005 Tried to break up, stalked; a clearly preventable homicide — her body found in car trunk

Body-in-trunk suspect got lots of counseling

‘Doing satisfactorily’ after 6 months of weekly sessions

He was fulfilling that obligation Oct. 19, two days before Melnitchenko disappeared, when he attended a weekly session of a program in Richmond run by Priority Male Center for Positive Peaceful Living

Jaxon Van Derbeken, Chronicle Staff Writer

Wednesday, October 26, 2005

The El Sobrante man charged with murdering a woman he had repeatedly terrorized attended a two-hour counseling session for domestic violence offenders just days before the slaying, authorities said Tuesday.

McAlpin was on probation stemming from eight felony convictions in two separate cases for stalking, threatening and attacking Melnitchenko on several occasions from 2001 to 2004. Part of his sentence in the most recent case was that he attend a yearlong domestic violence prevention program.

THE BEST WAY TO “PREVENT” VIOLENCE IS TO SEND A CLEAR MESSAGE TO GIVE NO QUARTER TO PERPERTRATORS. MCALPIN WAS A COCKY OVERENTITLED YOUNG MAN WITH NO RESPECT FOR THE WOMAN, OR THE LAW — AND FROM THE STORY, IT’S CLEAR WHY HE HAD NO REASON TO RESPECT THE LAW, TOO. I DNR BUT I SUSPECT HE WAS WHITE. I DON’T THINK THIS POOR WOMAN EVER EVEN LIVED WITH HIM. THEY DATED BRIEFLY. SHE DIED. THE STORY OF HER DEATH INTERSECTS WITH THE STORY OF A JUDGE WITH A MISSION; I MAY TELL IT ANOTHER TIME. THIS EVENT INTERSECTS WITH MY ATTEMPTS TO GET HELP IN 2005, THE SAME YEAR. I REMEMBER TRYING TO TELL MY FAMILY THAT THIS STALKING, THESE INDICATORS, SPELLED TROUBLE! MY PROBLEM WAS WHO I TOLD, WHO I SOUGHT HELP FROM, AS WAS ANASTASIA’S.

Taking matters into their own hand; two brothers kill widow & her relatives:

**Winta Mehari, 28; her brother Yonas Mehari, 17;**

and their mother, 50-year-old Regbe Bahrengasi

Widow and HER relatives killed in revenge, seeking money, by deceased husband’s relatives. 2 year old involved.

2006 – No Asylum for Eritrean Family from revenge, greed,

extortion? in the Golden State

Planned to exterminate family during Thanksgiving Dinner?

ALAMEDA — A dispute over money was the cause of the shooting deaths of three members of an Eritrean family in Oakland on Thanksgiving Day, a relative of the victims alleged Tuesday after the suspects in the case were arraigned on charges that could bring them the death penalty.

Asmeron Gebreselassie, 43, the suspected gunman, and 39-year-old Tewodros Gebreselassie were each charged Tuesday with three counts of murder; one count of attempted murder for the non-fatal shooting of Yehtram Mehari, the brother of Winta and Yonas; one count of kidnapping for allegedly taking Winta Mehari’s 2-year-old son from the scene; and two counts of false imprisonment involving two other family members, Angersom Mehari and Merhawi Mehari.

They also were charged with two special circumstances murder allegations that could earn them the death penalty: multiple murder and murder during the course of a kidnapping.

The victims and the defendants were all members of Oakland’s sizable Eritrean community. About 50 members of that community, many dressed in traditional Eritrean clothing, packed Tuesday’s court hearing.

Oakland police say they think the motive for the shooting at the Keller Plaza apartment complex at 5301 Telegraph Ave. in Oakland about 3 p.m. on Thanksgiving was that the Gebreselassie brothers wanted revenge for the death of their brother, Abraham Tewolde, 42, on March 1.

Police said Abraham Tewolde’s cause of death was undetermined and his brothers were suspicious of Winta Mehari, his widow.

Keflezighi said Tewolde died of natural causes but Tewolde’s family members asked Mehari’s family members to give them money.

I REMEMBER THIS ONE. I WAS DRIVING TO EAT DINNER, TAKEN CHARITABLY IN, NOT WITH MY DAUGHTERS, BECAUSE THEY’D ALREADY BEEN TAKEN, COMPLICIT WITH MY OWN FAMILY AND AROUND MONEY ISSUES ALSO. I RAN INTO POLICE CARS & TV CAMERAS BLOCKING THE WAY.

Was this misogyny? Was this something like an honor killing? What WAS this? A young man, apparently a good one, was killed, victim to two men seeking revenge on his mother. His crime? Being a brother, apparently!

Meanwhile, students and teachers at Berkeley High School were mourning the death of Yonas Mehari. The boys varsity soccer team, which he played on, wore black armbands in his honor and dedicated its season to him Monday night.

All the victims and suspects were immigrants from Eritrea, and the killings have shocked the East Bay’s tightly-knit community from that small East African nation. Many people packed the courtroom today, and others without seats waited in the hallway.

Hundreds of mourners have been visiting the apartment complex, home to a large number of Eritreans and Ethiopians, to pay their respects. Many have also brought food for the family and donated money for transporting the three bodies to Eritrea for burial, for medical bills for others injured in the attack and for care of Winta’s Mehari’s son.

Police said the brothers, who also live in the apartment complex, were angry at Winta Mehari over the unexplained death of their brother, Abraham Tewolde, 42, who was her husband. A mechanic who ran a small auto shop on Broadway, Tewolde collapsed and died March 1. An autopsy was unable to determine the cause of his death, coroner’s officials said.

Police said the Gebreselassie brothers suspected Winta Mehari had some role in her husband’s death. Tewodros Gebreselassie, an engineer, attended the party at the Mehari’s third-floor apartment on Thanksgiving, and police said he admitted to helping his brother plan the attack.

Witnesses told police that Tewodros Gebreselassie was talking on his cell phone and said, “Yeah, they’re all here,” according to court records. Minutes later he opened the apartment door for Asmeron Gebreselassie, who then opened fire on the Mehari family. When the shooting started, Tewodros Gebreselassie grabbed his 2-year-old nephew, Winta Mehari’s son, and carried him back to the second-floor apartment where the Gebreselassie lived, witnesses said.

Asmeron Gebreselassie also shot his brother-in-law Yehtram Mehari in the foot, witnesses told police. Another brother, Angersom Mehari, jumped out a window and suffered a broken back. A third brother, Merhawi Mehari, hid in the closet and avoided injury.

Police found the boy unharmed after the two brothers surrendered to a SWAT team following a brief standoff at their apartment. The guns he allegedly used were later found, police said.

At Berkeley High School, students, teachers and counselors spent Monday and today remembering the 17-year-old Yonas Mehari, who played soccer, ran cross country and helped tutor other students.

“I’ve known him for four years, and I really saw him as a leader, an independent thinker and just a really sweet kid to be around,” said Kristin Glenchur, athletic director at Berkeley High. “He was always around volunteering for something” such as working the scoreboards during football games or the concession stands, she said.

His slain mother was active in the Eritrean Orthodox Church in Oakland and was popular among her immigrant community, estimated by the Eritrean consulate in Oakland at to be about 3,000 people.

Donations to the Mehari Family Fund can be deposited at any Bank of America branch under account number 0560942210.

SUMMARY:

Sometimes there is no refuge from family violence — members take the law into their own hands; oftentimes greed is a factor, as in many cases above. McAlpin appears to have just been a man with a mission intersecting with a system with a different mission. She got cross in the cross-fire of attempts to reform a man after: kidnapping, stalking, assault, and threats to kill.

How IMPORTANT is it that the United States set the standard that misogyny is “anathema” it’s unacceptable?

I fear that Senator Ted, Presidents Bush, Clinton, and now Obama, have failed to do this. Moreover, women’s groups also, subject to the same human emotions, claw and fight each other sometimes to the top, seeking scarce prestige, or abundant federal funds. This is also a spinoff of misogyny. We who watch such things don’t see such huge, huge divides among the men’s groups. We have now an older Republican white President, a young and charming (and philandering) white President, and an even younger and MORE charming African-American President, all united in fixing the crises of fatherlessness, and making sure that mothers don’t actually get to (safely) fulfil their motherhood unless a man is present, and it’s CLEAR we do not have have equal protection or rights under law, despite the claims to the contrary. If so, where are all the dead men on the side of the road simply for leaving? Where are the women blowing away a few family generations to take the law into their own hands? They just aren’t there!

I should be more respectful, and I will take another day to be so, of the passing of a major political figure this week, Senator Ted Kennedy.

I wish I did not have a troubling memory of his womanizing, of the two programs he promoted the mOST (education/health) which have negatively affected my family the MOST. I wish that the date of his passing did not coincide with the date my kids were stolen, yet remain within (at last sighting) driving distance, but inaccessible to me, because I simply took a stand against misogyny and violence.

I took a stand for telling the truth in court, and not mincing words. Perhaps I am very disrespectful.

I wish I were not thinking of how he endorsed our current President, for whom I too voted, not being fully aware of his stance on the ubiquitous and impoverishing, endangering to women “fatherhood” movement. It is never enough, never enough — always another initiative, another grant, through churches, through family members when they are themselves swept up and confronted by their failure to confront, and through family law system, and through an unbelievably condescending virtual caste system by the elite making it near impossible for less fortunate to escape the economic abuse that would enable them to escape threats of injury, death, having children abducted, either by the ex or through the courts or (case in point) both, and through violence to our civil rights within this nation.

They said Sen. Kennedy worked like a dog, and i believe it. Some of us do, too, on a single issue that doesn’t often go away. I never tried to raise his offspring, and I do not appreciate his or any other administration , or their programs, just because they have the platform, prating on about how to raise mine, married or single, through a burdensome system that doesn’t even impart decent values, let alone decent academics. And in 20 years of THIS battle, I’ve never had a hand laid on any of mine, anything that was mine, or on ME, from someone who openly said he or she hated me or wanted to hurt me.

It was always from the “helpers” and those “concerned.” Sure. . . .

But in re:

Kennedy’s Battle With Cancer Lost

U.S. has lost a great statesman, obviously. But before this, long before this, we have lost something else. We have lost self-respect as individuals, and transferred it to our leaders, HOPING in them. This is misplaced hope too often, and it’s unwise.

Jeremiah was a prophet who watched and spoke out against the deterioration of his nation: For this, he got left in a pit without water, and would’ve starved there, were he not later rescued. Later, Jesus Christ, also preaching “repent” got crucified.

Jeremiah 17

.

5 Thus saith the LORD: Cursed is the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the LORD.

6 For he shall be like the heath in the desert, and shall not see when good cometh; but shall inhabit the parched places in the wilderness, a salt land and not inhabited.

7 Blessed is the man that trusteth in the LORD, and whose hope the LORD is.

8 For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out his roots by the river, and shall not fear when heat cometh, but his leaf shall be green; and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit.

9 The heart is deceitful above all things, and it is desperately sick: who can know it?

10 I the LORD search the heart, I try the reins, even to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his doings.

11 As the partridge that gathereth young which she hath not brought forth, so is he that getteth riches, and not by right; in the midst of his days they shall leave him, and at his end he shall be a fool.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

For the past 20 years, I have sought refuge in my home, from my home, from my family’s close resonance to the tune my ex-husband played. I have a logical mind, and mind seeks logic to piece a life together, even if the logic is to accept chaos. But I HAVE found a logic to the, what I will call, narcissistic, self-referential habit of federal domination of the markets — well MOST markets. Education, family design, health care, welfare, child-bearing practically, and reform.

The U.S. is succeeding at incarceration — we are the world’s LARGEST jailor — and failing at education. The reason we are failing at education is because we have trusted our leaders to design a system. Instead, they designed an ECONOMY to support themselves, and placed our children at its mercy. This was a transformational system of values sold as good, but not in practice good. It is possible to succeed very well in this educational system and be an utter failure as a person. It is also possible to fail in this system and be a business success. Or to fail all round.

I am 50-plus. At this age, I had to pick WHAT to dedicate what’s left of my life to; and it was a hard choice between Family Law system and Educational System. Both systems hurt my kids and my family, and are creating the tiered society, while claiming to provide the opposite. I have a relative with her own children run through a private school system that took offence that i too — in a different way — opted out of the local public schools. In truth, I believe that if our daughters succeeded without wealth at what she’d sacrificed to become wealthy and with wealth BUY, it would somehow show up her life plan. Our respective nieces might be competing for similar college slots – – I don’t know.

But I have watched close up, and then system-wide, forced failure and social exclusion for simply doing something about it. So have many fellow-blogger mothers (see right column).

Look at this graphic:

(it’s an old one) from “America, What Went Wrong“? An book that documents the destruction of the middle class.

An INDEPENDENT middle class, with time to think, and understanding basic business principles, will hold its government accountable. A DEPENDENT (upon professional jobs, many of them government-sanctioned or supplied), which my generation came from (but not my parents) will indeed do the dirty work and bidding of the top group, keeping the heirarchy in place.

From 1990 to 2009, I have been overexposed to impoverishment, and how it’s manufactured. I watched my husband do this, in order to keep himself on top, he was willing that the ship should go down. Nothing more mattered, and all discussions were moot (or off) that didn’t first establish this dominance. Neither I nor our children were actually to show up as people, or with needs, but as performers.

Now, according to the myths taught in public school (and elsewhere) about HOW government works (which dealing with in-home abuse didn’t really leave time for an official study of), it should be possible to leave the situation. No one should care HOW I leave it, so long as it’s done legally and without harm to our children. However once we showed up as a household, without a resident male, in waltzed the “experts,” ignoring the facts, the danger, the track record, and proudly proclaiming situations that didn’t exist as though they did.

Having some exposure to the Bible and its language, this was easy to detect as playing “god.” And naturally, I protested.

And so, the divide and conquer of the middle class, overeducated fools (lots of academia, insufficient truly hard times), scrabbling to assert their intellectual dominance and right to explain away that violence happened in their family, and they, too, failed to report.

In the long run, I chalk it up to basic human emotions of (1) pride (2) fear (3) greed (4) prejudice (THIs kind, “misogyny.”) Where logic fails, dominance by gender — or age (it keeps flipping around, the varieties of messages I get), only a few years — or marital status, or SOMETHING to preserve the us/them, Object/subject relationship which is not a human relationship. Because surely they didn’t misdiagnose a situation, the judges were wrong, I was wrong, the statistics were wrong, everyone else was wrong, and this intact family unit (sort of) was “right.” Or else. . . . . Social shunning was tried, and I didn’t repent, to the antes were upped, and my kids were stolen, and all contact cut off.

Perhaps it is because of working so hard on these issues, I have been watching politics from afar.

Perhaps it is because of these issues, I have a different “take” on the passing of a Senator that was compared last night to Daniel Webster and Henry Clay. The words “dynasty” may apply, but these are NOT words coherent with the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Here’s a woman talking sense:

In THE SHOCK DOCTRINE, Naomi Klein explodes the myth that the global free market triumphed democratically. Exposing the thinking, the money trail and the puppet strings behind the world-changing crises and wars of the last four decades, The Shock Doctrine is the gripping story of how America’s “free market” policies have come to dominate the world– through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries.

At the most chaotic juncture in Iraq’s civil war, a new law is unveiled that would allow Shell and BP to claim the country’s vast oil reserves…. Immediately following September 11, the Bush Administration quietly out-sources the running of the “War on Terror” to Halliburton and Blackwater…. After a tsunami wipes out the coasts of Southeast Asia, the pristine beaches are auctioned off to tourist resorts…. New Orleans’s residents, scattered from Hurricane Katrina, discover that their public housing, hospitals and schools will never be reopened…. These events are examples of “the shock doctrine”: using the public’s disorientation following massive collective shocks – wars, terrorist attacks, or natural disasters — to achieve control by imposing economic shock therapy. Sometimes, when the first two shocks don’t succeed in wiping out resistance, a third shock is employed: the electrode in the prison cell or the Taser gun on the streets.

This is the theme of the National Fatherhood Initiative, there is a “crisis in fatherlessness.” I have watched these manufactured crises on a personal level and also a national level and have begun to get an understanding of some of the causes and sources, ONE of which is most definitely the educational system. Divide and conquer, and assume control of assets and assessments. That’s elementary. One very empowering activity, to young people, is the arts, and self-sufficiency. No problem. Delete the arts, if possible, and free time, and uninterrupted quantities of time for reflection, and also do not study (honestly) either history or the economic system, in particular not the history of any system one is currently in. Again, I saw this in my marriage, how the most basic amenities were threatening to my “intimate partner.” THE most threatening one apparently was access to a steady cash flow. If I got this by working, the reserves must be eliminated by his working less, or making the process of getting to/from work more burdensome and timesconsuming. Rooms got trashed or re-arranged while I was out, at class or working or with the kids. There was no stability. Once you get the pattern, it’s only a matter of breaking it. My writing (I was also journaling the abuse) threatened this person. I exported the journals. He exported his behind and friendship to the people into whose care I’d put them. I went and got them back. . . . . But it was too late. They had to be turned, I guess (?).

Here’s another one which speaks to it about “lockdown” of the fortress continents. Care must be taken to incorporate cheap labor:

Fortress continents

The US and Europe are both creating multi-tiered regional strongholds

There is so much in life to be considered, but in considering memorials, again, I keep coming back to scripture:

“Pray for kings and all that are in authority, that we may live a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty.” (I Tim. 2:1).

“It is not good to have respect of persons.” (James).

You know what, with all due respect, it’s not. LIFE is about what you respect, and who you honor: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, soul, mind and strength, and thy neighbor as thyself.”

There is not to be a tiered respect of people according to how MUCH of this world they’ve changed. We, ALL of us in the U.S., are to respect ourselves, and the founding principles of this country, which then allow us to respect at LEAST our neighbors.

“Love worketh no ill towards his neighbor.”

Sometimes it’s simply in what one does NOT do, that love.

So, below are my unforgiveable (??) thoughts, in respect that a Senator has died, on seeing the extensive television recognition of this man, and hearing about what he had been doing while I was across the country, trying to stay afloat and keep the pilot light lit in my own life, spiritually and physically.

And I have to go about what’s left of this day, seeking funds sufficient for today and build something to tomorrow.

I saw a charming, Robert-Redford smile, and I thought about Chappaquiddick,

about this man’s marriage to a woman 22 years his junior, a 38 year old divorced attorney single mother, and wondered things that were less respectful than appropriate. I thought about the CFDA pie chart I know, where his two most passionate areas: Education and Health — were THE largest and most impoverishing segments of the budget; and the effect of this incredible top-heavy Federal language transformation into a welfare state directing lives of the lowly.

It did not help when I learned that this person was a prime author of the “No Child Left Behind” act and a real pusher of Head Start. Trust the elite to prescribe for the poor every time. It is also quite unfortunate that his death this week commemorates about 3 years fo the “death” of my relationship with my own daughters, and primarily because I REFUSED to accept that poverty resulting from violence should result in becoming a surrogate womb for childless narcissistic relatives convinced that, having not experienced what my daughters and I did, or accepted court rulings already made, that they, TOO, “knew what was best” for three females leaving family violence. When I refused, I was punished by these people, and part of the punishment was declaring what I provided for our daughters, either was irrelevant and did not exist, and what they wished instead, was somehow superior.

The punishment included the gradual deletion of the arts, the dumbing down of my children, the deletion of jobs in my profession (in the arts) because of the need to fight family!, and eventually the criminal removal of children (minors) from my household in order to, ostensibly, “rescue” them somehow, by totally removing all contact with a law abiding, working, intelligent, informed and independent mother. I have had cause and many years to reflect on the benefits and fallbacks of my own, and my ex-spouses public educations amid dysfuncitonal families, mine in a different way from his, and the values that differ.

This gives a totally different perspective on “No Child Left Behind,” when one realizes that the children of those promoting this policies (if such exist) do not always attend public schools, and if they did, they are not in lower-income neighborhoods. To me, the mark of acceptability is, if it’s good enough for YOUR child, then I’ll listen.

I’ll finish with this well-written summary:

MichaelMoore.com Commemoration

August 26th, 2009 2:25 am
Ted Kennedy Dies of Brain Cancer at Age 77

‘Liberal Lion’ of the Senate Led Storied Political Family After Deaths of President John F. Kennedy, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy

ABC News

Aug. 26, 2009 — Sen. Ted Kennedy died shortly before midnight Tuesday at his home in Hyannis Port, Mass., at age 77.

The man known as the “liberal lion of the Senate” had fought a more than year-long battle with brain cancer, and according to his son had lived longer with the disease than his doctors expected him to.

“We’ve lost the irreplaceable center of our family and joyous light in our lives, but the inspiration of his faith, optimism, and perseverance will live on in our hearts forever,” the Kennedy family said in a statement. “He loved this country and devoted his life to serving it.”

Sen. Edward Moore Kennedy, the youngest Kennedy brother who was left to head the family’s political dynasty after his brothers President John F. Kennedy and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated.

Kennedy championed health care reform, working wages and equal rights in his storied career. In August, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom — the nation’s highest civilian honor — by President Obama. His daughter, Kara Kennedy, accepted the award on his behalf.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, known as Ted or Teddy, was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor in May 2008 and underwent a successful brain surgery soon after that. But his health continued to deteriorate, and Kennedy suffered a seizure while attending the luncheon following President Barack Obama’s inauguration.

For Kennedy, the ascension of Obama was an important step toward realizing his goal of health care reform.

At the Democratic National Convention in August 2008, the Massachusetts Democrat promised, “I pledge to you that I will be there next January on the floor of the United States Senate when we begin the great test.”

Sen. Kennedy made good on that pledge, but ultimately lost his battle with cancer.

Kennedy was first elected to the Senate in 1962, at the age of 30, and his tenure there would span four decades.

A hardworking, well-liked politician who became the standard-bearer of his brothers’ liberal causes, his career was clouded by allegations of personal immorality and accusations that his family’s clout helped him avoid the consequences of an accident that left a young woman dead.

But for the younger members of the Kennedy clan, from his own three children to those of his brothers JFK and RFK, Ted Kennedy — once seen as the youngest and least talented in a family of glamorous overachievers — was both a surrogate father and the center of the family.

And certainly it was Ted Kennedy who bore many of the tragedies of the family — the violent deaths of four of his siblings, his son’s battle with cancer, and the death of his nephew John F. Kennedy Jr. in a plane crash.

Kennedy, Youngest Kennedy Brother, Led Political Dynasty in Wake of Tragedy

Edward Moore Kennedy was born in Brookline, Mass., on Feb. 22, 1932, the ninth and youngest child of Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy.

His father, a third-generation Irish-American who became a multimillionaire businessman and served for a time as a U.S. ambassador to Britain, had risen high and was determined that his sons would rise higher still.

Overshadowed by his elder siblings, Teddy, as he was known to family and friends, grew up mostly in the New York City suburb of Bronxville, N.Y., and attended private boarding schools. He was expelled from Harvard during his freshman year after he asked a friend to take an exam for him.

After a two-year stint in the Army, Kennedy returned to earn degrees at Harvard and then the University of Virginia law school. He married Virginia Joan Bennett, known by her middle name, in 1958. The couple would have three children, Kara, Teddy Jr. and Patrick.

By the time he reached adulthood, tragedy had already claimed some of his siblings: eldest brother Joe Jr. was killed in World War II, sister Kathleen died in a plane crash, and another sister, Rosemary, who was mildly retarded, had to be institutionalized following a botched lobotomy.

But then the family hit its pinnacle in 1960, when John F. Kennedy became president.

His brother’s ascension created a political opportunity, and Joe Kennedy decided he should take over JFK’s Senate seat. Ted Kennedy was only 28 at the time — two years short of the required age — so a family friend was found to hold the temporary appointment.

In 1962, Ted Kennedy — backed by his family money and the enthusiasm his name generated among Massachusetts’ Catholics, was elected to the Senate.

The Only One Left

In 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. His brother Robert became the focus of the family’s — and much of the country’s — dreams.

Following the tragedy in Dallas, Robert and Ted Kennedy became closer than they had ever been as children.

“When I was working for Robert Kennedy, there was hardly a day in which the two of them didn’t physically get together, I would say at least three or four times,” said Frank Mankiewicz, who served as an aide to Robert Kennedy. “I mean, if, if Sen. Robert Kennedy wasn’t in his office, and nobody knew where he was, chances are he was seeing Ted about something.”

Five years later, while pursuing the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968 against Lyndon Johnson, Sen. Bobby Kennedy was shot and killed. That left Ted as the only surviving Kennedy son.

“He seriously contemplated getting out of politics after Robert’s death,” said Kennedy biographer Adam Clymer. “He thought, you know, it might just be too much. He might be too obviously the next target and all of that. But he decided to stick it out and as he said on more than one occasion, pick up a fallen standard.”

Kennedy was seen by many as his brothers’ heir, and perhaps he could have won the White House had he stepped into the presidential race then. But he didn’t. And the very next year there occurred a tragedy that would forever block Ted Kennedy’s presidential ambitions.

In July 1969, following a party on Martha’s Vineyard, Kennedy drove off a bridge on the tiny Massachusetts island of Chappaquiddick. The car plunged into the water. Kennedy escaped, but his passenger did not.

Kennedy later said he dived into the water repeatedly in a vain attempt to save Mary Jo Kopechne, one of the “boiler room girls” who had worked on Bobby Kennedy’s campaign. But Kopechne, 28, drowned, still trapped in the car.

Questions arose about how Kennedy had known Kopechne — he denied any “private relationship,” and Kopechne’s parents also insisted there was no relationship — and why he failed to report the accident for about nine hours.

Kennedy pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of leaving the scene of an accident. He received a two-month suspended sentence and lost his driver’s license for a year, but the political price was higher.

Kennedy was re-elected to the Senate in 1970, but the accident at Chappaquiddick effectively squashed his presidential hopes.

He ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination in 1979 against incumbent President Jimmy Carter.

Once when his daughter Kara, then 19, was passing out campaign leaflets, a man took one and said to her, “You know your father killed a young woman about your age, don’t you?”

Kennedy Curse: Political Power, Personal Tragedy

Sen. Ted Kennedy was not done confronting personal tragedy.

In 1973, 12-year-old Teddy Jr. was diagnosed with bone cancer, and he had to have a leg amputated. Kennedy’s marriage to Joan deteriorated. Some blamed her drinking, others cited his alleged womanizing. The couple divorced in 1981.

In contrast, Kennedy’s career in the Senate continued to flourish.

He supported teachers’ unions, women’s and abortion rights, and health care reform. He sponsored the Family and Medical Leave Act. And he was seen as a stalwart of the Democratic Party, delivering several rousing speeches at conventions.

Former Boston Glober reporter Tom Oliphant, who covered Kennedy’s career in Washington, observed, “It’s not all back slapping and, and personal relationships. I think one of the things that sets Kennedy’s politics apart is his, what I call his dirty little secret. He works like a dog.”

Political analyst Mark Shields said Kennedy’s “concerns were national concerns, but his forum for achieving his ends and changing policy, became the Senate. And he mastered it like nobody else I’ve ever seen.”

But another family incident exposed Kennedy’s vulnerabilities and held him up to public censure.

A nephew, William Kennedy Smith, was accused of raping a woman at the family’s estate in Palm Beach, Fla. The case generated lurid headlines around the world. Kennedy was at the estate at the time of the alleged attack and had been at the bar where Smith met his accuser.

Eyebrows were raised even further when a young woman who had been with Kennedy’s son Patrick that night revealed that she had seen the senator roaming around the house at night, wearing an oxford shirt but no trousers.

Smith was acquitted following a highly sensational trial, but the incident definitely left a dent in Kennedy’s armor. His alleged heavy drinking and womanizing were widely lampooned, and in October 1991 he thought it prudent to be low-key in his opposition to Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, who had been accused of sexually harassing a former subordinate.

Kennedy’s life, both professional and personal, took a turn for the better in 1992.

He married Victoria Reggie, a divorced attorney with two children from a previous marriage, Curran and Caroline. That year Kennedy also supported Bill Clinton, an open admirer of the Kennedy clan.

“Well, sometime during our courtship, I realized that I didn’t want to live the rest of my life without Vicky,” Kennedy said about his wife of nearly 30 years. “And since we have been together, it’s made my life a lot more fulfilling. I think more serene, kind of emotional stability.”

Elected in 1992, President Bill Clinton appointed Kennedy’s sister, Jean Kennedy Smith, ambassador to Ireland. And in 1994, Kennedy had the satisfaction of seeing his son Patrick elected to the House of Representatives from Rhode Island.

But tragedy returned that year.

In May 1994, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis died of cancer. Kennedy had remained close to his sister-in-law, who once quit her job at a publisher’s after it came out with an unflattering biography of Ted.

Kennedy’s Battle With Cancer Lost

Kennedy had served as a surrogate father for many of his nephews and nieces, but he may have been closest to Jackie’s children, Caroline and John F. Kennedy Jr.

He was horrified when in July 1999, five years after Jackie’s death, John Jr. and his bride of two years, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, along with her sister Lauren Bessette, were killed when the small plane John was piloting crashed off the Massachusetts island of Martha’s Vineyard.

Sen. Kennedy led the family during the harrowing wait for information as Coast Guard crews searched for the missing plane.

When the bodies were retrieved from the ocean, Kennedy and his two sons went to identify the remains. The senator’s eulogy for his nephew who “had every gift but length of years” and “the wife who became his perfect soul mate” touched grief-stricken Americans.

It was an all-too-familiar sight for those who remember Ted Kennedy mourning the deaths of his brothers John and Robert, and helping the family bear up after the deaths of Robert’s sons David and Michael.

For decades, it was Ted Kennedy who carried the burden and led the way as the patriarch of a family seen as America’s answer to royalty.

With all due respect, we do not need any more royalty in this country. We need to set our sites on something invisible, something written, but something of principle, that unites us. Our leaders need to stick to that, and out of respect to OURSELVES ,we should demand that.

Written by Let's Get Honest|She Looks It Up

August 27, 2009 at 1:49 PM

Only $118,310,126 (last year), in hopes of Healthy Marriages and Responsible Fathers

leave a comment »

Set this Press Release to the “SPIN” Cycle:

California Healthy Marriages Coalition Says GM Bankruptcy Could Create More
Than Financial Devastation for Families

SAN DIEGO, June 11 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The GM Bankruptcy is causing six
dealerships around California to be closed. These closures will create more
bad news for California's economy by increasing the already high unemployment
rate of 11 percent, and adding financial stress to the families involved in
these cutbacks. Statistics show that financial strain is one of the leading
causes of divorce and that divorce itself places additional strains on the
economy and on business. This is a distressing cycle for which California's
leading marriage-support organization offers some new reassurance.
{{Just "trust" our press release, statistics show.  Which, or should we say "whose", is
not mentioned..}}
 


{{And HOW did this premiere marriage-support organization (at least according to itself) race 
to the forefront of all California's marriage support organizations??  Clearly 
it must be on its own merits. . . . blood, sweat, tears, ingenuity (that's true), 
and entrepreneurship, standing on the shoulders of giants.  Seriously, the Dept. of Health
and Human Services IS indeed a giant, funding this group from the top down, and some of the
other coalitions under its w - i - d - e umbrella from the bottom up.)






Target Population:
Married and Unmarried persons in California, ages 15 and
older, of all racial, cultural and economic backgrounds


Federal Award Amount:
$2,342,080/year


Program Name:
California Healthy Marriages Coalition


Project Period:
9/30/2006 - 9/29/2011




. . . 
SOURCE  California Healthy Marriages Coalition
 

Yes, alas, ’tis true. . ..  
 
recently, as well as, well,  not so recently, it seems clear from the various newspaper headlines that many marriages are not very healthy.  Also, the same could be said of divorces.      But, for those readers who, as either (U.S.) employees or employERS, actually pay taxes, I would like to reassure you that the U.S. Government is on it, it has a PLAN.  You may or may not be in on the plan, but I assure you it has many plan to fix the overall unhealthiness of both marriages, and the lack of safety attendant to divorce from, well, a spouse that doesn’t believe in divorce.  It would also like to assure you to trust the experts (its hired ones and delegated ones)  To analyze and fix the situation.  This IS, after all, what governments exist for right?  I seem to foggily remember something about the purpose of governments in the Declaration of Independence, and about the word “consent.”     It seems to me that somewhere along the line “We the People” got turned into a version of “You People,” and the posse of experts got called in to fix families.  What they actually ended up doing is breaking the legal system, by turning it into a behavioral health marketplace, clearly infringing on the niche of the faith institutions, for example, I heard that recently the Knights of Columbus, on behalf  of Catholics everywhere, have launched a(nother) fatherhood initiative, lest we somehow forget who’s the boss, called:  http://FathersForGood.org.  
 

 
Notice anything missing from the logo there?
 

(this time, WITH a Mom..)
And now again, this time with a little more style…
 
Now for all those little pieces of education that add up to $118, 310, 126 – – for 2008 — enjoy the panorama of organizations that are addressing this problem of, well, unhealthy marriages and irresponsible fathers.  (I have omitted “Abstinence Education,” because it would overload this post’s, well, capacity).
This wordpress page can only carry one year’s worth of links at a time.  Moreover these are alphabetical by Grant Recipient, nationwide, and not by state (although zip codes are listed).  The fun part is, they are “click-able,” meaning, you can click on an institution’s name and see what else it’s been up to, for how long and for how much.  Perhaps I might show a few more ways to search, but someone of basic intelligence (and motivated) can learn a lot simply by looking.  Another trick you might try is searching its name on “usaspending.gov” and see what kind of cute bar charts and stats show up.  
Thus one can get an overview of almost any CFDA number BUT this one, 93.086, on a certain database.  
Is this inintentional?  If part of required Civic Literacy was understanding the federal grants system, if rather than whine, moan, or complain — or complain to elected representatives –MORE AVERAGE JOES & JANE DOES (the alive ones) started monitoring our home states, state by state and agency by agency, we might stop asking why states are running out of money for domestic violence shelters and general assistance, because the answer would be obvious.  Instead, we would ask intelligent, and pointed questions from the point of view, these are public funds, and (if government) you are public servants, and (if nonprofit) you’re tax exempt for a reason — how does this fulfil the reason, and who is evaluating, and by what standard? 
And then question the standards if they are unreasonable, inconsistent, or do not exist.
Alternately, we could chug along and say, “isn’t so and so handling this? Because I’m busy, and have my own life to handle.”



Sure they are.  That’s why inbetween talking about this, I can’t keep up with the healines, or follow up with the last ones before there are new ones.  That’s why protective orders protect, law enforcement enforces (consistently), child support is collected (consistently and without gender bias), and welfare helps people be better.  AND, (case in point) marriages are clearly getting healed — either that, or they can’t keep up with the new babies (despite Abstinence Education, which I omitted from this list, but is still going strong).
(OK, that’ll have to be another post — WOW, I just pulled 653 records under one code, 93.010 (community-based A.E.)
(not a searchable code in “usaspending.gov,” at least not readily…)
However, top 5 programs with the keyword “abstinence” in the PROJECT title:



93.010: Community-Based Abstinence Education (CBAE)
$128,610,003


 98.001: USAID Foreign Assistance for Programs Overseas
$11,058,644


 93.279: Drug Abuse and Addiction Research Programs
$9,561,182


 93.995: Adolescent Family Life_Demonstration Projects
$8,064,374


 93.273: Alcohol Research Programs
$6,222,97



AND as far as WHO is really interested in why people don’t abstain and trying to get them to:
Top 10 Recipients



 FAMILY HEALTH INTERNATIONAL (FHI)
$3,593,286


 SCRIPPS RESEARCH INSTITUTE
$2,551,682


 PROGRAM FOR APPROPRIATE TECHNOLOGY IN HEALTH
$2,233,162


 HERITAGE COMMUNITY SERVICES INC
$2,000,000


 BROWN UNIVERSITY
$1,672,760


 POPULATION COUNCIL INC
$1,613,000


 PATH
$1,500,000


 NEUROBEHAVIORAL RESEARCH INC
$1,466,239


 NEW HOPE CENTER INC
$1,399,907


 CENTER FOR SELF-SUFFICIENCY, INC.
$1,399,300



Results 1 to 500 of 653 matches.  restricted to “NEW” only, I got 240 new grants:
(AFTER ALL THIS, WILL YOU BE ABLE TO “ABSTAIN” FROM LOOKING FURTHER INTO THESE?)
Here’s a quick partial look:
 



Fiscal Year
Grantee Name
State
Award Title
Budget Year
CFDA Program Name
Award Class
Principal Investigator
($$)Sum of Actions



 
 
 



2009 
Columbus Hospital 
NJ 
COMMUNITY BASED ABSTINENCE EDUCATION 
2 
Community-Based Abstinence Education (CBAE)  
DISCRETIONARY 
BERNADETTE VISSANI 
$- 739,820 


2009 
METRO ATLANTA YOUTH FOR CHRIST, INC 
GA 
COMMUNITY-BASED ABSTINENCE EDUCATION 
3 
Community-Based Abstinence Education (CBAE)  
DISCRETIONARY 
CINDY MILLER 
$ 300,186 


2009 
Saint Michael`s Medical Center, Inc 
NJ 
COMMUNITY BASED ABSTINENCE EDUCATION 
1 
Community-Based Abstinence Education (CBAE)  
DISCRETIONARY 
BERNADETTE VISSANI 
$ 677,551 


2008 
A WOMAN`S PLACE MINISTRIES, INC. 
FL 
ABSTINENCE EDUCATION 
1 
Community-Based Abstinence Education (CBAE)  
DISCRETIONARY 
MICHAEL LAYTON 
$ 600,000 


2008 
A WOMENS CONCERN, INC. 
MA 
HEALTHY FUTURES ABSTINENCE EDUCATION INITIATIVE 
3 
Community-Based Abstinence Education (CBAE)  
DISCRETIONARY 
ELIZABETH SNYDER 
$ 600,000 


2008 
ABSTINENCE & MARRIAGE EDUCATION PARTNERSHIP 
IL 
COMMUNITY BASED ABSTINENCE EDUCATION 
1 
Community-Based Abstinence Education (CBAE)  
DISCRETIONARY 
SCOTT PHELPS 
$ 512,500 


2008 
ABSTINENCE EDUCATION CONSULTANTS,INC. 
KS 
COMMUNITY-BASED ABSTINENCE EDUCATION 
1 
Community-Based Abstinence Education (CBAE)  
DISCRETIONARY 
LOIS THEIS 
$ 600,000 


2008 
ABSTINENCE TIL MARRIAGE EDUCATION 
OH 
COMMUNITY BASED ABSTINENCE EDUCATION 
3 
Community-Based Abstinence Education (CBAE)  
DISCRETIONARY 
CATHERINE E WOOD 
$ 600,000 


2008 
AIDS RESOURCE CENTER OF WISCONSIN, INC 
WI 
COMMUNITY BASED ABSTINENCE EDUCATION 
1 
Community-Based Abstinence Education (CBAE)  
DISCRETIONARY 
SCOTT STOKES 
$ 600,000 


2008 
ALPHA CENTER 
SD 
COMMUNITY BASED ABSTINENCE EDUCATION 
1 
Community-Based Abstinence Education (CBAE)  
DISCRETIONARY 
KIMBERLY MARTINEZ 
$ 600,000 


2008 
ALTERNATIVE COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT SERVICES 
TX 
COMMUNITY BASED ABSTINENCE EDUCATION 
1 
Community-Based Abstinence Education (CBAE)  
DISCRETIONARY 
SHARI L CARROLL 
$ 454,922 


2008 
ARIZONA MEXICO BORDER HEALTH FOUNDATION 
AZ 
COMMUNITY BASED ABSTINENCE EDUCATION 
1 
Community-Based Abstinence Education (CBAE)  
DISCRETIONARY 
ALBERT MORENO 
$ 550,000 


2008 
AWARE, INC. 
WA 
WASHINGTON STATE: COMMUNITY-BASED ABSTINENCE UNTIL MARRIAGE PROJECT 
1 
Community-Based Abstinence Education (CBAE)  
DISCRETIONARY 
JAMES N GRENFELL 
$ 499,849 


2008 
About Our Kids, Inc. 
MO 
STRATEGIES FOR ABSTINENCE AND VIRTUE EDUCATION (SAVE) 
2 
Community-Based Abstinence Education (CBAE)  
DISCRETIONARY 
ALICIA HUMES 
$ 600,000 


2008 
Abstinence the Better Choice, Inc. 
OH 
ABSTINENCE THE BETTER CHOICE 
3 
Community-Based Abstinence Education (CBAE)  
DISCRETIONARY 
CHERYL BIDDLE 
$ 600,000 


2008 
Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Inc. 
AZ 
POWER FITNESS ABSTINENCE PROGRAM- TEACHING YOUTH AGES 12 THROUGH 18 THE SOCIAL, PSYCHOLOGI 
3 
Community-Based Abstinence Education (CBAE)  
DISCRETIONARY 
EVA GODDARD 
$ 600,000 



 
 
 
and $427 mil (see above link “still going strong”) for another code 93.235, plain old “A.E.” Then I searched the word “abstinence” as a keyword in the project title, and got 
 
 
 
 
 In these venues, (once under the facuet of grants and publications  –  alittle easier to do while not being stalked, or in a court case onesself) talking (and publishing) about problems pays more than solving them, in fact, a LOT more.   This also provides an incentive to try to keep actual problem-solvers (like those who have observed and been hurt by the system, and been taking names and notes, too) OUT of the  talkfests, or decision making process, if they are heard.  And, more and more, out of being informed that the decisionmaking process is not where it should be — as to legal matters, in the courts, not the psychologists’ offices.  
Solving problems cuts off cash flow.  There’s  a clear disincentive.  Ask someone who’s life, or whose child’s life is at stake (and who has not got a history of perjury in the case file already) and SHE will tell you, safety first, shared parenting second.  Child’s right not to suffer abuse or be threatened (let alone the mother’s) or kidnapped supersedes person with history of threatening or abuse’s right to see the child. In re:  “healthy marriages,” her /their (if children) right not to be hurt or killed, or traumatized in fear of this happening, or expose her children to being abused, and deal with frequent exchanges with a former batterer (even if the children were not directly battered) supersedes 53 professionals’ need to reconsider this.  At what point are professionals to be forced to read these headlines that we read, and sometimes analyze, kind of like sitting through traffic court and watch graphic accident footage after one was caught speeding. 
I have been through this.  I have been IN a court case, same month, and domestic violence murder going on, same city, and one could not tell from the demeanor on the outside.  My case had a history of violence, injury, repeated disregard of laws, and treats to abduct (which in fact had just happened).  No matter, we are in la-la-land again. . . .   I had a PTSD incident in the courtroom.  No matter. . . .   
SO, my hope is that the general public will become generally acquainted with how this works, so that if one of THEIR friends is involved (and, of course this presumes that my readers are interested in justice, not perverting it) (which may or may not be wise) – – they can at least see where things went.  $$ wise.  This year.
 
Experts are being churned out at an alarming rate.  Grants go to this, too.  Grants sometimes drive the field of expertise, and very much so in this field of fatherhood and families.  I have looked, and can say this.  Have you?  Could you rebut that assertion with data from the top universities around the country, and colleges?  (Not unless several programs disappear fast….)
Do yourself and others a favor — become a LITTLE more expert in this today than you were yesterday.
And show someone else.  OK?
 
One philosophical question I have from time to time is how much of our adult lives (let alone growing up) are spent OUTside any government institutions to start with.  I mean, what part of our lives are NOT regulated, measured, examined and evaluated (at our own expense) to drive policiesi (without our informed consent, really) that will further tinker with the dynamics of eat, sleep, breed, marry, divorce, educate (let’s not omit that) and re-educate, regulate, and direct.    I have an unfortunate independent streak, and I tend to think there are often better ways to do things.  As a woman, I don’t think needlessly repetitive tasks are the natural inheritance of my gender biologically, and although sometimes there’s a comfort in them, there should be other ways to do one thing or another.  
 
Like better, or less wasteful.  The benefit is, getting more done.  Take for example, deleting religion from public school systems (supposedly) and then trying to re-inject it after criminal behavior, or during the divorce/separation scenarios.  Take for example, a system that itself stresses and dismantles families, and then another (equally chaotic and burdensome to the general public) system to put them back together again.  Take for example, the talk about “separation of church and state” and then nationally calling upon “faith-based organizations” to, though they are largely tax-exempt, at public expense put them back together again.  To WHOM are any of the organizations below accountable, and what demonstration of effectiveness are they showing, or are the “exempt” from that as well as (those that are) from taxes, too?
 
Anyhow, I give you a single “CFDA” (Category of Federal Domestic Assistance) called “Healthy Marriages Promoting Responsible Fatherhood.”  I guess it is assumed that mothers will be healthy without extra coaching and bribing.  Or, that if you get a responsible father (i.e., buy one, and this is explained through another grants systems as well, this IS indeed the premise in practice here – – one has to look at the child support system’s role in divorce).  . . .     or perhaps this acknowledges that for whatever reasons (let’s not mention any OTHER programs this same Of/By/For the people government might have had its hands in), there is a social crisis not just of “fatherlessness” but of “irresponsible fatherhood.”
 
I can vouch for the one I know — father of my children.  He’d rather fight than work any day, which process eventually put me out of work.  No matter, the government stepped in, through family court matters, enter mediation, exit civil rights, eventually exit my contact with my offspring (they did spring out of me, physically.  I pushed, they sprang. . ..  whatever… I was awake for the process and can verify:  I had two children a very long time ago).  And then out they go, to work their own way through life, lest Dad be humiliated by paying much of his child support arrears, which was partly what the battle was about to start with.  I felt that one of us should work, and offered the alternatives of (1) stop messing with me, so I could (since it doesn’t appear you want to) or (2) pay up.  Version (1) entailed requesting a restraining order renewal, or 2nd one, or  . . . . or . . . .   and version (2) required — and I pursued this through the assigned agency – – court-ordered child support should actually be collected before our daughters became adults.  However the MAIN conversation was not about what’s good for the children, but who gets to give orders — forever, basically.    I categorically disagreed with this philosophy as being anti-Constitutional and anti-civil rights and anti-reasonable.  My right to disagree was disagreed with, which makes the situation a GREAT pickings for the family law venue, it LOVES “high-conflict” situations — this draws federal moneys and justifies many professions.   
Anyhow, here they are:  the helpers, last year (2008):
While not all of these were birthed, or even nurtured, by California Healthy Marriages Coalition (“the coalition of coalitions model.”  Sounds kind of like the “war to end all wars,” I don’t know….), they were perhaps started as a gleam in SOMEONE”s eye, having been informed of what’s available from Big Brother, who, on behalf of us all, will make all those ouchies better, soon, soon . .       When we “consent” to taxes, it’s good to know what we have consented for them to be distributed to, well, do.    For example,   ///
CFDA Number = 93086 Fiscal Year = 2008  Recipient: ACTIVE RELATIONSHIPS CENTER  Recipient ZIP Code: 75205



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0037
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$550,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$550,000.00



Recipient: AS DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH  Recipient ZIP Code: 96799



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0054
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$450,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$450,000.00



Recipient: AUBURN UNIVERSITY  Recipient ZIP Code: 36849



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0001
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$1,899,487.00


Award Subtotal:
$1,899,487.00



Recipient: AVANCE – AUSTIN CHAPTER  Recipient ZIP Code: 78704



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0063
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$261,825.00


Award Subtotal:
$261,825.00



Recipient: AVANCE – CORPUS CHRISTI CHAPTER  Recipient ZIP Code: 78415



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0071
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$250,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$250,000.00



Recipient: AVANCE – HOUSTON CHAPTER  Recipient ZIP Code: 77092



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0084
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$236,851.00


Award Subtotal:
$236,851.00



Recipient: AVANCE, INC. – EL PASO  Recipient ZIP Code: 79902



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0100
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$250,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$250,000.00



Recipient: Alliance for North Texas Healthy & Effective Marriages  Recipient ZIP Code: 75246



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0072
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$903,425.00


Award Subtotal:
$903,425.00



Recipient: Archuleta County Department of Human Services  Recipient ZIP Code: 81147



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0055
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$200,000.00


2008
90FR0055
2
ACF
1
 07-31-2008
$0.00


Award Subtotal:
$200,000.00



Recipient: Arizona Youth Partnership  Recipient ZIP Code: 85741



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0136
3
ACF
0
 09-17-2008
$550,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$550,000.00



Recipient: BARAGA-HOUGHTON-KEWEENAW CHILD DEVELOPMENT BOARD, INC  Recipient ZIP Code: 49931



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0018
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$250,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$250,000.00



Recipient: BEECH ACRES PARENTING CENTER  Recipient ZIP Code: 45230



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0100
2
ACF
1
 07-31-2008
$0.00


2008
90FE0100
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$550,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$550,000.00



Recipient: BEST FRIENDS FOUNDATION  Recipient ZIP Code: 20015



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0058
3
ACF
0
 09-25-2008
$500,724.00


Award Subtotal:
$500,724.00



Recipient: BETHANY CHRISTIAN SERVICES  Recipient ZIP Code: 49501



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0057
3
ACF
0
 09-17-2008
$500,000.00


2008
90FE0098
3
ACF
0
 09-26-2008
$499,980.00


Award Subtotal:
$999,980.00



Recipient: BETTER FAMILY LIFE, INC.  Recipient ZIP Code: 63108



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0023
3
ACF
0
 09-25-2008
$1,097,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$1,097,000.00



Recipient: BILL WILSON CENTER  Recipient ZIP Code: 95052



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0096
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$243,469.00


Award Subtotal:
$243,469.00



Recipient: BOAT PEOPLE S.O.S. INC.  Recipient ZIP Code: 22041



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0032
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$545,806.00


2008
90FR0038
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$250,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$795,806.00



Recipient: BOONEVILLE MUNICIPAL SEPERATE SCHOOL DISTRICT  Recipient ZIP Code: 38829



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0036
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$532,675.00


2008
90FE0036
2
ACF
1
 07-31-2008
$0.00


Award Subtotal:
$532,675.00



Recipient: Brighter Beginnings  Recipient ZIP Code: 94601



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0099
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$250,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$250,000.00



Recipient: CAMBODIAN ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA, INC  Recipient ZIP Code: 90806



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0065
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$450,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$450,000.00



Recipient: CATHOLIC CHARITIES  Recipient ZIP Code: 67214



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0112
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$530,368.00


Award Subtotal:
$530,368.00



Recipient: CATHOLIC CHARITIES OF ORANGE COUNTY, INC  Recipient ZIP Code: 92705



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0080
3
ACF
0
 09-26-2008
$550,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$550,000.00



Recipient: CECIL COUNTY GOVERNMENT  Recipient ZIP Code: 21921



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0018
3
ACF
0
 09-26-2008
$500,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$500,000.00



Recipient: CENTER FOR SELF-SUFFICIENCY, INC.  Recipient ZIP Code: 53211



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0013
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$1,096,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$1,096,000.00



Recipient: CENTERFORCE  Recipient ZIP Code: 94901



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0004
3
ACF
0
 09-26-2008
$481,554.00


Award Subtotal:
$481,554.00



Recipient: CHARACTER COUNTS IN MAINE  Recipient ZIP Code: 04116



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0122
3
ACF
0
 09-17-2008
$500,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$500,000.00



Recipient: CHILD & FAMILY RESOURCES INC  Recipient ZIP Code: 85716



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0059
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$500,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$500,000.00



Recipient: CHILD & FAMILY SERVICES OF NEW HAMPSHIRE  Recipient ZIP Code: 03101



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0077
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$315,830.00


Award Subtotal:
$315,830.00



Recipient: CHILD ABUSE COUNCIL, INC.  Recipient ZIP Code: 33609



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0052
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$250,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$250,000.00



Recipient: CHILD AND FAMILY RESOURCE COUNCIL  Recipient ZIP Code: 49503



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0038
2
ACF
1
 09-14-2008
$0.00


2008
90FE0038
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$1,016,258.00


Award Subtotal:
$1,016,258.00



Recipient: CHILD DEVLOPMENT RESOURCES, INC.  Recipient ZIP Code: 23127



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0043
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$249,999.00


Award Subtotal:
$249,999.00



Recipient: CHILD, INC  Recipient ZIP Code: 78751



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0078
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$511,133.00


Award Subtotal:
$511,133.00



Recipient: CHILDREN’S FRIEND AND SERVICE  Recipient ZIP Code: 02903



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0030
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$250,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$250,000.00



Recipient: CHILDREN`S AID SOCIETY IN CLEARFIELD COUNTY  Recipient ZIP Code: 16830



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0118
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$226,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$226,000.00



Recipient: CHILDREN`S INSTITUTE , INC  Recipient ZIP Code: 90005



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0076
2
ACF
1
 09-25-2008
$0.00


2008
90FR0076
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$500,000.00


2008
90FR0088
3
ACF
0
 09-25-2008
$1,000,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$1,500,000.00



Recipient: CHOANOKE AREA DEVELOPMENT ASSOCIATION, INC  Recipient ZIP Code: 27869



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0001
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$245,296.00


Award Subtotal:
$245,296.00



Recipient: CHW DBA CALIFORNIA HOSPITAL MEDICAL CENTER  Recipient ZIP Code: 90015



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0071
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$250,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$250,000.00



Recipient: CIRCLE OF PARENTS  Recipient ZIP Code: 60611



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0098
3
ACF
0
 09-25-2008
$1,000,000.00


2008
90FR0098
2
ACF
1
 06-06-2008
$0.00


Award Subtotal:
$1,000,000.00



Recipient: CJH Educational Grant Services, Inc.  Recipient ZIP Code: 27620



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0059
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$550,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$550,000.00



Recipient: CO DEPARTMENT OF HUMAN SERVICES  Recipient ZIP Code: 80236



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0085
3
ACF
0
 09-25-2008
$2,000,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$2,000,000.00



Recipient: COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY  Recipient ZIP Code: 80523



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0028
3
ACF
0
 09-25-2008
$482,687.00


2008
90FE0028
2
ACF
1
 03-18-2008
$0.00


Award Subtotal:
$482,687.00



Recipient: COMMUNITY ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT ASSN OF COOK COUNTY  Recipient ZIP Code: 60604



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0089
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$450,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$450,000.00



Recipient: COMMUNITY SERVICES FOR CHILDREN, INC  Recipient ZIP Code: 18109



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0033
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$228,603.00


Award Subtotal:
$228,603.00



Recipient: CONFEDERATED SALISH & KOOTENAI TRIBES  Recipient ZIP Code: 59855



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FN0007
2
ACF
1
 09-14-2008
$0.00


2008
90FN0007
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$149,940.00


2008
90FR0006
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$465,494.00


Award Subtotal:
$615,434.00



Recipient: CONFEDERATED TRIBES OF SILETZ  Recipient ZIP Code: 97380



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FN0009
3
ACF
0
 09-25-2008
$149,918.00


2008
90FN0009
2
ACF
1
 09-14-2008
$0.00


Award Subtotal:
$149,918.00



Recipient: COOK INLET TRIBAL COUNCIL, INC  Recipient ZIP Code: 99508



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0066
2
ACF
1
 07-31-2008
$0.00


2008
90FR0066
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$418,832.00


Award Subtotal:
$418,832.00



Recipient: CORNERSTONE OF HOPE CHURCH  Recipient ZIP Code: 46221



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0119
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$350,560.00


Award Subtotal:
$350,560.00



Recipient: COUNCIL ON PREVENTION & EDUCATION SUBSTANCES, INC  Recipient ZIP Code: 40204



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0007
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$259,532.00


2008
90FR0015
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$499,968.00


Award Subtotal:
$759,500.00



Recipient: CRECIENDOS UNIDOS/GROWING TOGETHER  Recipient ZIP Code: 85006



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0010
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$275,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$275,000.00



Recipient: CT ST DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL SERVICES  Recipient ZIP Code: 06106



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0031
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$1,000,000.00


2008
90FR0031
2
ACF
1
 07-31-2008
$0.00


Award Subtotal:
$1,000,000.00



Recipient: CURATORS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI  Recipient ZIP Code: 65211



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0130
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$499,775.00


Award Subtotal:
$499,775.00



Recipient: CUYAHOGA COUNTY BOARD OF COUNTY COMMISSIONERS  Recipient ZIP Code: 44113



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0052
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$533,730.00


Award Subtotal:
$533,730.00



Recipient: California Healthy Marriages Coalition  Recipient ZIP Code: 92024



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0104
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$2,400,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$2,400,000.00



Recipient: Child Find of America, Inc.  Recipient ZIP Code: 12561



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0020
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$250,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$250,000.00



Recipient: Community Marriage Builders, Inc.  Recipient ZIP Code: 47714



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0034
3
ACF
0
 09-17-2008
$543,303.00


Award Subtotal:
$543,303.00



Recipient: Comprehensive Youth Services of Fresno, Inc.  Recipient ZIP Code: 93726



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0053
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$250,000.00


2008
90FR0053
2
ACF
1
 07-31-2008
$0.00


Award Subtotal:
$250,000.00



Recipient: DC DEPARTMENT OF HUMAN SERVICES  Recipient ZIP Code: 20032



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0087
3
ACF
0
 09-26-2008
$2,000,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$2,000,000.00



Recipient: Denver Indian Family Resource Center  Recipient ZIP Code: 80226



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0081
2
ACF
1
 09-26-2008
$0.00


2008
90FR0081
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$198,280.00


Award Subtotal:
$198,280.00



Recipient: Detroit Workforce Development Department  Recipient ZIP Code: 48202



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0073
3
ACF
0
 09-26-2008
$500,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$500,000.00



Recipient: EAST CAROLINA UNIVERSITY  Recipient ZIP Code: 27858



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0017
3
ACF
0
 09-26-2008
$525,161.00


Award Subtotal:
$525,161.00



Recipient: EAST LOS ANGELES COMMUNITY UNION  Recipient ZIP Code: 90022



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0056
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$1,100,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$1,100,000.00



Recipient: EL PASO CENTER FOR CHILDREN  Recipient ZIP Code: 79930



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0088
3
ACF
0
 09-17-2008
$550,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$550,000.00



Recipient: ELIZABETHS NEW LIFE CENTER  Recipient ZIP Code: 45405



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0035
3
ACF
0
 09-17-2008
$1,859,692.00


Award Subtotal:
$1,859,692.00



Recipient: Employment Opportunity & Training Center of Northeaster  Recipient ZIP Code: 18503



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0060
3
ACF
0
 09-26-2008
$225,608.00


Award Subtotal:
$225,608.00



Recipient: Exchange Club Center for the Prevention of Child Abuse  Recipient ZIP Code: 34981



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0025
3
ACF
0
 09-25-2008
$242,822.00


Award Subtotal:
$242,822.00



Recipient: FAMILY & CHILDREN’S SERVICE, INC.  Recipient ZIP Code: 74120



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0007
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$250,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$250,000.00



Recipient: FAMILY RESOURCES INC  Recipient ZIP Code: 33733



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0132
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$1,100,000.00


2008
90FE0132
2
ACF
1
 07-31-2008
$0.00


Award Subtotal:
$1,100,000.00



Recipient: FIRST A M E CHILD DEVELOPMENT CENTER  Recipient ZIP Code: 98122



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0032
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$250,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$250,000.00



Recipient: FIRST NATIONS COMMUNITY HEALTHSOURCE  Recipient ZIP Code: 87108



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0061
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$300,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$300,000.00



Recipient: FIRST THINGS FIRST  Recipient ZIP Code: 37405



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0031
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$1,099,953.00


Award Subtotal:
$1,099,953.00



Recipient: FOREST COUNTY POTAWATOMI COMMUNITY  Recipient ZIP Code: 54520



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FN0006
2
ACF
1
 09-14-2008
$0.00


2008
90FN0006
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$150,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$150,000.00



Recipient: FOREST INSTITUTE OF PROFESSIONAL PSYCHOLOGY  Recipient ZIP Code: 65807



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0110
3
ACF
0
 09-17-2008
$940,669.00


Award Subtotal:
$940,669.00



Recipient: FORTUNE SOCIETY, INC (THE)  Recipient ZIP Code: 10011



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0017
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$250,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$250,000.00



Recipient: FOUNDATION FOR A GREAT MARRIAGE  Recipient ZIP Code: 54115



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0108
3
ACF
0
 09-25-2008
$550,000.00


2008
90FE0124
3
ACF
0
 09-17-2008
$550,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$1,100,000.00



Recipient: FOUNTAIN OF LIFE INTERNATIONAL MINISTRIES  Recipient ZIP Code: 33027



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0073
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$438,383.00


Award Subtotal:
$438,383.00



Recipient: FRIENDSHIP WEST BAPTIST CHURCH  Recipient ZIP Code: 75232



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0117
3
ACF
0
 09-25-2008
$542,025.00


Award Subtotal:
$542,025.00



Recipient: Family Guidance, Inc.  Recipient ZIP Code: 15143



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0103
3
ACF
0
 09-25-2008
$1,510,098.00


Award Subtotal:
$1,510,098.00



Recipient: Family Service Center at Houston and Harris County  Recipient ZIP Code: 77006



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0082
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$477,539.00


Award Subtotal:
$477,539.00



Recipient: Family Service, Inc  Recipient ZIP Code: 01840



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0087
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$227,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$227,000.00



Recipient: Family Services of Westchester, Inc.  Recipient ZIP Code: 10573



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0036
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$497,812.00


Award Subtotal:
$497,812.00



Recipient: Fathers & Families Resources/Research Center  Recipient ZIP Code: 46208



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0048
3
ACF
0
 09-17-2008
$550,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$550,000.00



Recipient: Florida State University  Recipient ZIP Code: 32306



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0022
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$530,009.00


Award Subtotal:
$530,009.00



Recipient: Future Foundation  Recipient ZIP Code: 30344



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0045
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$402,632.00


Award Subtotal:
$402,632.00



Recipient: GA ST DEPARTMENT OF HUMAN RESOURCES  Recipient ZIP Code: 30303



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0064
3
ACF
0
 09-25-2008
$225,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$225,000.00



Recipient: GOODWILL INDUSTRIES INC  Recipient ZIP Code: 55104



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0068
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$500,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$500,000.00



Recipient: GOODWILL INDUSTRIES OF CENTRAL TEXAS, INC  Recipient ZIP Code: 78753



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0051
2
ACF
1
 09-25-2008
$0.00


2008
90FR0051
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$240,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$240,000.00



Recipient: GOODWILL INDUSTRIES OF PITTSBURGH  Recipient ZIP Code: 15202



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0063
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$225,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$225,000.00



Recipient: GRANATO COUNSELING SERVICES  Recipient ZIP Code: 22182



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0006
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$548,932.00


Award Subtotal:
$548,932.00



Recipient: GWINNETT CHILDRENS SHELTER  Recipient ZIP Code: 30515



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0104
2
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$250,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$250,000.00



Recipient: HEALTHY FAMILIES COUNSELING & SUPPORT  Recipient ZIP Code: 64119



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0008
3
ACF
0
 09-25-2008
$500,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$500,000.00



Recipient: HEALTHY FAMILY INITIATIVES  Recipient ZIP Code: 77074



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0081
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$537,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$537,000.00



Recipient: HEALTHY START, INC.  Recipient ZIP Code: 15208



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0103
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$900,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$900,000.00



Recipient: HOOPA VALLEY BUSINESS COUNCIL, EDUCATION DEPARTMENT  Recipient ZIP Code: 95546



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FN0001
2
ACF
1
 09-26-2008
$0.00


2008
90FN0001
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$146,750.00


Award Subtotal:
$146,750.00



Recipient: Healthy Families/Thriving Communities Collaborative Cou  Recipient ZIP Code: 20009



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0049
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$500,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$500,000.00



Recipient: High Country Consulting LLC  Recipient ZIP Code: 82001



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0025
3
ACF
0
 09-25-2008
$549,952.00


Award Subtotal:
$549,952.00



Recipient: IOWA FAMILY POLICY CENTER  Recipient ZIP Code: 50327



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0126
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$550,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$550,000.00



Recipient: Identity, Inc  Recipient ZIP Code: 20877



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0090
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$250,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$250,000.00



Recipient: Imperial Valley Regional Occupational Program  Recipient ZIP Code: 92243



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0075
2
ACF
1
 03-18-2008
$0.00


2008
90FE0075
3
ACF
0
 09-17-2008
$515,615.00


Award Subtotal:
$515,615.00



Recipient: Indiana Department of Correction  Recipient ZIP Code: 46204



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0019
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$249,896.00


2008
90FR0101
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$400,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$649,896.00



Recipient: Indiana Youth Institute  Recipient ZIP Code: 46204



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0086
2
ACF
1
 09-26-2008
$0.00


2008
90FR0086
3
ACF
0
 09-25-2008
$999,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$999,000.00



Recipient: JOHN BROWN UNIVERSITY  Recipient ZIP Code: 72761



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0004
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$544,782.00


Award Subtotal:
$544,782.00



Recipient: Jewish Family & Children`s Service of Sarasota-Manatee,  Recipient ZIP Code: 34237



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0068
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$494,943.00


Award Subtotal:
$494,943.00



Recipient: Kanawha Institute for Social Research & Action, Inc.  Recipient ZIP Code: 25064



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0012
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$497,514.00


Award Subtotal:
$497,514.00



Recipient: Kentucky River Foothills Development Council, Inc.  Recipient ZIP Code: 40475



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0125
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$490,680.00


Award Subtotal:
$490,680.00



Recipient: LATIN AMERICAN YOUTH CENTER  Recipient ZIP Code: 20007



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0072
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$250,000.00


2008
90FR0072
2
ACF
1
 04-29-2008
$0.00


Award Subtotal:
$250,000.00



Recipient: LAUGH YOUR WAY AMERICA  Recipient ZIP Code: 54481



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0005
3
ACF
0
 09-17-2008
$274,933.00


Award Subtotal:
$274,933.00



Recipient: LIGHTHOUSE YOUTH SERVICES, INC  Recipient ZIP Code: 45206



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0005
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$500,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$500,000.00



Recipient: LIVE THE LIFE MINISTRIES  Recipient ZIP Code: 32317



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0077
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$549,985.00


Award Subtotal:
$549,985.00



Recipient: LONGVIEW WELNESS CENTER  Recipient ZIP Code: 75601



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0091
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$1,500,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$1,500,000.00



Recipient: LUTHERAN SOCIAL SERVICES OF SOUTH DAKOTA  Recipient ZIP Code: 57105



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0097
2
ACF
1
 09-14-2008
$0.00


2008
90FR0097
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$500,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$500,000.00



Recipient: MARRIAGE SAVERS OF CLARK COUNTY  Recipient ZIP Code: 45503



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0009
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$540,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$540,000.00



Recipient: MD ST DEPARTMENT OF HUMAN RESOURCES  Recipient ZIP Code: 21201



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0091
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$899,991.00


2008
90FR0092
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$441,514.00


Award Subtotal:
$1,341,505.00



Recipient: MODEL CITIES – EL PASO  Recipient ZIP Code: 79935



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0053
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$499,758.00


Award Subtotal:
$499,758.00



Recipient: MOREHOUSE COLLEGE  Recipient ZIP Code: 30314



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0066
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$549,147.00


Award Subtotal:
$549,147.00



Recipient: Madison Cty Com Health Centers, Inc  Recipient ZIP Code: 46015



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0039
3
ACF
0
 09-17-2008
$546,983.00


Award Subtotal:
$546,983.00



Recipient: Meier Clinics Foundation  Recipient ZIP Code: 60187



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0011
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$2,000,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$2,000,000.00



Recipient: Metro United Methodist Urban Ministry  Recipient ZIP Code: 92116



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0016
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$268,349.00


Award Subtotal:
$268,349.00



Recipient: Minnesota Council on Crime and Justice  Recipient ZIP Code: 55406



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0028
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$400,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$400,000.00



Recipient: Montrose County Health and Human Services  Recipient ZIP Code: 81401



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0079
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$249,552.00


Award Subtotal:
$249,552.00



Recipient: NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF MARRIAGE ENHANCEMENT  Recipient ZIP Code: 85022



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0040
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$250,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$250,000.00



Recipient: NATIONAL FATHERHOOD INITIATIVE  Recipient ZIP Code: 20877



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FB0001
3
ACF
0
 09-25-2008
$999,534.00


Award Subtotal:
$999,534.00



Recipient: NATIONAL MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS SOCIETY  Recipient ZIP Code: 10017



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0090
2
ACF
1
 06-06-2008
$0.00


2008
90FE0090
3
ACF
0
 09-17-2008
$495,285.00


Award Subtotal:
$495,285.00



Recipient: NATIONAL ORGANIZATION OF CONCERNED BLACK MEN, INC  Recipient ZIP Code: 20006



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0047
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$250,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$250,000.00



Recipient: NEW MEXICO STATE UNIVERSITY REGENTS  Recipient ZIP Code: 88003



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0135
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$494,996.00


2008
90FR0057
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$218,336.00


Award Subtotal:
$713,332.00



Recipient: NJ ST DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS  Recipient ZIP Code: 08625



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0026
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$394,248.00


Award Subtotal:
$394,248.00



Recipient: NORTHWEST FAMILY SERVICES  Recipient ZIP Code: 97213



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0079
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$1,100,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$1,100,000.00



Recipient: NW Marriage Institute  Recipient ZIP Code: 98682



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0041
3
ACF
0
 09-25-2008
$275,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$275,000.00



Recipient: New York Youth At Risk, Inc.  Recipient ZIP Code: 10038



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0093
3
ACF
0
 09-25-2008
$225,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$225,000.00



Recipient: Northwood-Apppold United Methodist Church  Recipient ZIP Code: 21218



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0062
3
ACF
0
 09-17-2008
$400,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$400,000.00



Recipient: Nueva Esperanza  Recipient ZIP Code: 19140



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0069
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$550,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$550,000.00



Recipient: OAKLAND FAMILY SERVICES  Recipient ZIP Code: 48053



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0070
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$200,170.00


Award Subtotal:
$200,170.00



Recipient: OAKLAND/LIVINGSTON HUMAN SERVICES AGENCY  Recipient ZIP Code: 48056



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0010
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$368,555.00


Award Subtotal:
$368,555.00



Recipient: OH St Governor`s Office of Faith Based & Comm Initiativ  Recipient ZIP Code: 43215



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0109
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$544,140.00


Award Subtotal:
$544,140.00



Recipient: OK ST DEPARTMENT OF HUMAN SERVICES  Recipient ZIP Code: 73125



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0030
2
ACF
1
 03-18-2008
$0.00


2008
90FE0030
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$549,791.00


Award Subtotal:
$549,791.00



Recipient: OPERATION KEEPSAKE  Recipient ZIP Code: 44087



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0021
2
ACF
1
 03-18-2008
$0.00


2008
90FE0021
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$459,419.00


Award Subtotal:
$459,419.00



Recipient: OPPORTUNITIES INDUSTRIAL CENTER OF AMERICA, INC  Recipient ZIP Code: 19122



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0016
3
ACF
0
 09-25-2008
$550,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$550,000.00



Recipient: Osborne Association, Inc.  Recipient ZIP Code: 10455



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0050
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$448,856.00


2008
90FR0050
2
ACF
1
 07-31-2008
$0.00


2008
90FR0056
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$250,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$698,856.00



Recipient: PAIRS FOUNDATION  Recipient ZIP Code: 33332



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0029
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$990,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$990,000.00



Recipient: PARENTS PLUS  Recipient ZIP Code: 54952



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0113
3
ACF
0
 09-17-2008
$549,629.00


2008
90FE0113
2
ACF
1
 07-31-2008
$0.00


Award Subtotal:
$549,629.00



Recipient: PEACE, INC  Recipient ZIP Code: 13202



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0107
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$465,937.00


Award Subtotal:
$465,937.00



Recipient: PEER ASSISTANCE SERVICES, INC  Recipient ZIP Code: 80231



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0020
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$525,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$525,000.00



Recipient: PERSONAL INVOLVEMENT CENTER  Recipient ZIP Code: 90003



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0092
3
ACF
0
 09-26-2008
$550,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$550,000.00



Recipient: PITTSBURG PRESCHOOL COORDINATION COUNCIL, INC.  Recipient ZIP Code: 94565



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0012
3
ACF
0
 09-25-2008
$550,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$550,000.00



Recipient: PREGNANCY SUPPORT CENTER OF STARK COUNTY  Recipient ZIP Code: 44708



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0055
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$535,075.00


Award Subtotal:
$535,075.00



Recipient: PRIVATE INDUSTRY COUNCIL OF WESTMORELAND FAYETTE INC.  Recipient ZIP Code: 15601



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0075
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$250,000.00


2008
90FR0075
2
ACF
1
 07-31-2008
$0.00


Award Subtotal:
$250,000.00



Recipient: PROJECT S.O.S., INC.  Recipient ZIP Code: 32224



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0074
3
ACF
0
 09-17-2008
$454,332.00


Award Subtotal:
$454,332.00



Recipient: PUBLIC STRATEGIES INC  Recipient ZIP Code: 73116



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0026
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$1,000,000.00


2008
90FH0001
3
ACF
0
 09-29-2008
$3,250,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$4,250,000.00



Recipient Recipient: PUERTO RICAN FAMILY INSTITUTE, INC  Recipient ZIP Code: 10011



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0013
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$900,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$900,000.00



Recipient: Parents as Teachers National Center, Inc.  Recipient ZIP Code: 63146



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0080
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$250,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$250,000.00



Recipient: Professional Counseling Resources, Inc.  Recipient ZIP Code: 19805



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0046
3
ACF
0
 09-26-2008
$250,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$250,000.00



Recipient: QUILEUTE INDIAN TRIBE  Recipient ZIP Code: 98350



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FN0002
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$150,000.00


2008
90FN0002
2
ACF
1
 09-26-2008
$0.00


Award Subtotal:
$150,000.00



Recipient: RECAPTURING THE VISION, INTERNATIONAL, INC.  Recipient ZIP Code: 33157



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0043
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$550,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$550,000.00



Recipient: RED CLIFF TRIBE  Recipient ZIP Code: 54814



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FN0003
2
ACF
1
 09-14-2008
$0.00


2008
90FN0003
3
ACF
0
 09-25-2008
$146,672.00


Award Subtotal:
$146,672.00



Recipient: REGION II COMMUNITY ACTION AGENCY  Recipient ZIP Code: 49204



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0078
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$203,854.00


Award Subtotal:
$203,854.00



Recipient: REGION XIX EDUCATION SERVICE CENTER  Recipient ZIP Code: 79925



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0042
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$900,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$900,000.00



Recipient: RIDGE Project, Inc  Recipient ZIP Code: 43527



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0044
2
ACF
1
 06-06-2008
$0.00


2008
90FR0044
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$412,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$412,000.00



Recipient: ROCKDALE HOSPITAL & HEALTH SYSTEM  Recipient ZIP Code: 30012



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0014
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$455,510.00


Award Subtotal:
$455,510.00



Recipient: ROSALIE MANOR  Recipient ZIP Code: 53210



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0037
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$500,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$500,000.00



Recipient: Read To Me International Foundation  Recipient ZIP Code: 96815



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0062
3
ACF
0
 09-25-2008
$250,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$250,000.00



Recipient: Relationship Research Foundation, Inc.  Recipient ZIP Code: 92612



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0058
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$250,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$250,000.00



Recipient: Resource, Inc  Recipient ZIP Code: 55404



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0022
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$250,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$250,000.00



Recipient: Resources for Children`s Health  Recipient ZIP Code: 19102



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0040
2
ACF
2
 09-26-2008
$0.00


2008
90FR0040
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$250,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$250,000.00



Recipient: SAMARITAN COUNSELING CENTER  Recipient ZIP Code: 87102



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0067
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$549,961.00


Award Subtotal:
$549,961.00



Recipient: SAMARITAN COUNSELING CENTERS  Recipient ZIP Code: 97212



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0121
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$462,919.00


Award Subtotal:
$462,919.00



Recipient: SOUTH PUGET INTERTRIBAL PLANNING AGENCY  Recipient ZIP Code: 98584



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FN0004
3
ACF
0
 09-25-2008
$150,000.00


2008
90FN0004
2
ACF
1
 09-14-2008
$0.00


Award Subtotal:
$150,000.00



Recipient: SOUTHERN UNIVERSITY AND A&M COLLEGE  Recipient ZIP Code: 70813



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0027
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$249,548.00


Award Subtotal:
$249,548.00



Recipient: SOUTHWEST KEY PROGRAMS, INC.  Recipient ZIP Code: 78704



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0034
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$460,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$460,000.00



Recipient: ST MARY COMMUNITY ACTION AGENCY  Recipient ZIP Code: 70538



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0094
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$230,092.00


Award Subtotal:
$230,092.00



Recipient: SUNY, STONY BROOK  Recipient ZIP Code: 11794



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0131
2
ACF
1
 09-14-2008
$0.00


2008
90FE0131
3
ACF
0
 09-25-2008
$549,910.00


Award Subtotal:
$549,910.00



Recipient: SUQUAMISH & KLALLAM HEALTH PLAN  Recipient ZIP Code: 98346



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FN0010
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$150,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$150,000.00



Recipient: Sacramento Healthy Marriage Project  Recipient ZIP Code: 95821



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0015
2
ACF
1
 09-26-2008
$0.00


2008
90FE0015
3
ACF
0
 09-25-2008
$549,256.00


Award Subtotal:
$549,256.00



Recipient: Scholarship and Guidance Association  Recipient ZIP Code: 60603



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0042
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$483,333.00


2008
90FE0137
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$242,770.00


Award Subtotal:
$726,103.00



Recipient: Shalom Task Force  Recipient ZIP Code: 10274



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0106
3
ACF
0
 09-17-2008
$480,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$480,000.00



Recipient: Shelby County Division of Corrections  Recipient ZIP Code: 38103



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0067
2
ACF
1
 09-14-2008
$0.00


2008
90FR0067
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$500,000.00


2008
90FR0095
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$485,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$985,000.00



Recipient: South Coast Business Employment Corporation  Recipient ZIP Code: 97420



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0023
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$400,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$400,000.00



Recipient: St. Louis Healthy Marriage Coalition  Recipient ZIP Code: 63103



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0133
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$1,099,882.00


2008
90FE0133
2
ACF
1
 06-06-2008
$0.00


Award Subtotal:
$1,099,882.00



Recipient: TANANA CHIEFS CONFERENCE  Recipient ZIP Code: 99701



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FN0005
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$146,016.00


2008
90FN0005
2
ACF
1
 09-14-2008
$0.00


Award Subtotal:
$146,016.00



Recipient: TEEN-AID, INC  Recipient ZIP Code: 99207



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0102
3
ACF
0
 09-26-2008
$495,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$495,000.00



Recipient: TEXAS ARMS OF LOVE (dba, PEOPLE OF PRINCIPLE)  Recipient ZIP Code: 79761



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0102
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$425,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$425,000.00



Recipient: TEXAS HEALTH & HUMAN SERVICES COMMISSION  Recipient ZIP Code: 78711



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0019
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$900,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$900,000.00



Recipient: TEXAS STATE UNIVERSITY-SAN MARCOS  Recipient ZIP Code: 78666



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0128
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$497,641.00


Award Subtotal:
$497,641.00



Recipient: THE DIBBLE FUND FOR MARRIAGE EDUCATION  Recipient ZIP Code:



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0024
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$550,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$550,000.00



Recipient: THE FAMILY HEALTH AND EDUCATION INSTITUTE, INC.  Recipient ZIP Code: 20706



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0084
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$500,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$500,000.00



Recipient: THE HIVE CREATIVE GROUP  Recipient ZIP Code: 36303



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0093
3
ACF
0
 09-26-2008
$550,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$550,000.00



Recipient: THE VILLAGE FOR FAMILIES & CHILDREN, INC`  Recipient ZIP Code: 06105



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0045
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$250,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$250,000.00



Recipient: THERAPY HELP, INC  Recipient ZIP Code: 80220



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0123
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$550,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$550,000.00



Recipient: TLINGIT & HAIDA TRIBES CENTRAL COUNCIL  Recipient ZIP Code: 99801



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FN0008
3
ACF
0
 09-25-2008
$150,000.00


2008
90FN0008
2
ACF
1
 09-26-2008
$0.00


Award Subtotal:
$150,000.00



Recipient: TRINITY HEALTH-ST JOSEPH MERCY-OAKLAND  Recipient ZIP Code: 48341



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0099
3
ACF
0
 09-17-2008
$545,730.00


Award Subtotal:
$545,730.00



Recipient: The Family Life Line, Inc.  Recipient ZIP Code: 87124



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0115
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$495,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$495,000.00



Recipient: The South Carolina Center for Fathers and Families  Recipient ZIP Code: 29204



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0021
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$499,456.00


Award Subtotal:
$499,456.00



Recipient: Trinity Church, Inc  Recipient ZIP Code: 33168



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0060
3
ACF
0
 09-25-2008
$550,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$550,000.00



Recipient: UNITED WAY OF JACKSON COUNTY, INC  Recipient ZIP Code: 49201



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0138
2
ACF
0
 02-11-2008
$1,099,461.00


Award Subtotal:
$1,099,461.00



Recipient: UNIVERSITY BEHAVIORAL ASSOCIATES  Recipient ZIP Code: 10467



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0086
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$495,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$495,000.00



Recipient: UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS FOR MEDICAL SCIENCES  Recipient ZIP Code: 72205



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0041
2
ACF
1
 08-26-2008
$0.00


2008
90FR0041
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$250,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$250,000.00



Recipient: UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL FLORIDA  Recipient ZIP Code: 32826



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0003
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$273,293.00


Award Subtotal:
$273,293.00



Recipient: UNIVERSITY OF LOUISVILLE RESEARCH FOUNDATION  Recipient ZIP Code: 40292



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0002
3
ACF
0
 09-25-2008
$542,920.00


Award Subtotal:
$542,920.00



Recipient: UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL  Recipient ZIP Code: 27599



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0094
2
ACF
1
 06-06-2008
$0.00


2008
90FE0094
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$530,482.00


Award Subtotal:
$530,482.00



Recipient: UPPER DES MOINES OPPORTUNITY, INC  Recipient ZIP Code: 51342



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0082
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$225,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$225,000.00



Recipient: UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY  Recipient ZIP Code: 84322



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0129
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$417,324.00


Award Subtotal:
$417,324.00



Recipient: Urban Ventures Leadership Foundation  Recipient ZIP Code: 55408



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0033
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$250,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$250,000.00



Recipient: VISITING NURSE ASSOCIATION  Recipient ZIP Code: 05401



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0029
2
ACF
1
 07-31-2008
$0.00


2008
90FR0029
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$250,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$250,000.00



Recipient: VISTA COMMUNITY CLINIC  Recipient ZIP Code: 92084



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0024
3
ACF
0
 09-26-2008
$250,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$250,000.00



Recipient: WAIT Training  Recipient ZIP Code: 80111



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0051
3
ACF
0
 09-26-2008
$1,010,330.00


Award Subtotal:
$1,010,330.00



Recipient: WAYNE METROPOLITAN COMMUNITY ACTION AGENCY  Recipient ZIP Code: 48192



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0008
2
ACF
2
 06-06-2008
$0.00


2008
90FR0008
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$250,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$250,000.00



Recipient: WELD COUNTY RESOURCES DEPARTMENT  Recipient ZIP Code: 80632



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0134
3
ACF
0
 09-25-2008
$974,358.00


Award Subtotal:
$974,358.00



Recipient: WOMEN’S OPPORTUNITY AND RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT, INC.  Recipient ZIP Code: 59802



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0054
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$212,399.00


2008
90FR0054
2
ACF
1
 06-06-2008
$0.00


Award Subtotal:
$212,399.00



Recipient: WSOS COMMUNITY ACTION COMMISSION, INC  Recipient ZIP Code: 43420



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0011
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$249,492.00


Award Subtotal:
$249,492.00



Recipient: YORK COUNTY COMMUNITY ACTION CORPORATION  Recipient ZIP Code: 04073



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0014
2
ACF
1
 06-06-2008
$0.00


2008
90FR0014
3
ACF
0
 09-25-2008
$245,333.00


Award Subtotal:
$245,333.00



Recipient: YOUTH DEVELOPMENT, INC  Recipient ZIP Code: 87105



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0047
3
ACF
0
 09-25-2008
$900,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$900,000.00



Recipient: YWCA OF SAN ANTONIO  Recipient ZIP Code: 78205



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FE0127
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$529,585.00


Award Subtotal:
$529,585.00



Recipient: YouthLaunch, Inc.  Recipient ZIP Code: 78731



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0069
3
ACF
0
 09-14-2008
$243,315.00


Award Subtotal:
$243,315.00



Recipient: enFAMILIA, Inc  Recipient ZIP Code: 33033



FY
Award Number
Budget Year of Support
Agency
Award Code
Action Issue Date
Amount This Action


2008
90FR0039
3
ACF
0
 09-22-2008
$250,000.00


Award Subtotal:
$250,000.00



 



Total of all awards:
$118,310,126.00



   FOR OUR NEXT “CLASS” WE WILL LEARN HOW TO EXAMINE ONE OR TWO OF THESE GRANT RECIPIENTS.     ///
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Written by Let's Get Honest|She Looks It Up

August 24, 2009 at 2:32 PM

Posted in Cast, Script, Characters, Scenery, Stage Directions, Designer Families, Funding Fathers - literally, Organizations, Foundations, Associations NGO Hybrids, public education

Tagged with Abstinence Education, Declaration of Independence/Bill of Rights, Education, fatherhood, Healthy Marriages Promoting Responsible Fatherhood, HHS-TAGGS grants database, obfuscation, Responsible Citizenhood, social commentary, Studying Humans, U.S. Govt $$ hard @ work.., USASPENDING.GOV database

Ocean County NJ — 2009, it “spiraled out of control,” 2008, “a perfect storm of DV”, but $86 mil still for “NJ Public Law & Safety” 2007-2009

with 6 comments

(More on the dangers of love and romance in New Jersey, and in faulty misplacement of trust in law enforcement, prosecution, and public safety entitites:)

This wide-ranging post comes from asking more “why?” on the Frisco/Zindell murder-suicide and a third article on the topic is enclosed, along with my usual comments, conclusions, and wide-ranging observations. WHY did the court release Frank Frisco without paying his past-due support, if this was the basis of holding him? Who has a copy of that order? Within 5 hours, he had his revenge; seems to me the authorities knew this man. Ocean County has a low homicide rate, and a major one happened like it (same result — let out, killed the girlfriend) in only January 2008. Likelihood or no likelihood, sad or not, just FYI — I haven’t heard of a witness to the killing(s), and I haven’t heard WHY he was released. Have you? If so, please comment and send a link.

Although this incident wasn’t entirely a “family court” matter — this couple had no children together — the man did.

Keep in mind also — statements are made, but what weight to give them, in context. Is there evidence? Was there a witness?

Also, seeing this, I decided to add another website page (in process), showing prior decisions in prior cases that went south. The bottom line, of course, is be strong, think smart, and stay alive. We are entirely too passive and dependent in this society, which mindset “exports” the basic aspects of life (of which self-defense and self-defense smarts) is one. When the system fails, we try to fix the system. Endlessly.

(Now THAT’s a market niche . . . . . ) Better, know thyself, know they friends, know the landscape and help each other.

BUT FIRST, A FEW SERIOUS WORDS — and this is not a help site, but I feel it’s important:

A 30 year old woman (sorry, I care less about the man that killed her… and himself) in NJ who had a real track record of success behind her, a passion to serve, smarts — but not enough of the right kind, here — and hope, a desire for a family — and her own family was down a father, recently, she also didn’t have brothers in sisters. She was working in a Department of NJ that dealt with children and families.
This young lady was smart enough to say “no” to following through with the marriage, but somehow neither she nor all the surrounding experts had “SURVIVAL” attitude to realize how severe a “SURVIVAL” situation she was in. There was SOME realization, but not enough follow-through to keep her alive.
Below is a link to US Army training manual, 1992. I just looked it up. yes, it’s about wilderness survival, but Chapters 1 & 2 count. You want to learn how to “survive”?? Learn from the principles here — because clearly all the lethality indicators, domestic violence indicators, and millions of $$ to “prevent violence against women” are not reliable to save women’s lives, and men’s and children’s. They may and I bet DO help, but are they reliable enough to stake one’s life on? Would you stake someone else’s life on them? How about children’s? In this case, speaking up and trusting someone else to handle it proved fatal! Would you stake your life on these, then? $86 million of help to NJ, or not?
I’d say, no.
I am preaching to myself also in this matter, because I am having diffficulty with “indecision” in some issues here also. I recommend, though, overall, being 150% safe if possible, and then you’re also a better person for it. PART of 150% safe is knowing one’s teammates. Ms. Zindells’ teammates loved her, cared about her, warned her, and helped, her, but did not save her. Nor did she save herself. I can’t say I would in her situation (and am probably her by the grace of God only, as well), BUT – — perhaps we can learn what NOT to do for the next 53 women, in this state alone, that have similar situations to deal with.
This isn’t even current, but it has some common sense in it. Not “expert theory.” But hey, Boy Scout motto, “Be Prepared,” right?

U.S. Army Survival Manual FM 21-76 (link)

June 1992

I attached Chapter 1 — Intro & a few excerpts. There’s a Chapter 2 – psychology, also.

S U R V I V A L

S — SIZE UP YOUR SITUATIONS

U – USE ALL YOUR SENSES – UNDUE HASTE MAKES WASTE

R – REMEMBER WHERE YOU ARE

V – VANQUISH FEAR AND PANIC

I – IMPROVISE

V – VALUE LIFE!

A – ACT LIKE THE NATIVES

L – LIVE BY YOUR WITS, BUT FOR NOW LEARN BASIC SKILLS.

(SOME EXCERPTS & COMMENTS)

S – Size Up the Situation

If you are in a combat situation, find a place where you can conceal

yourself from the enemy.

OK — this was not a domestic dispute, it had just suddenly changed to, literally, a “combat situation,” although this may not have been immediately evident. . . . . When she confronted this man and said NO, when his hopes and intensity had been so high on YES, her entire terrain immediately changed. Her teammates needed to really “see” this, but fact is, most of our society is NOT structured this way. It is structured with top-heavy government doing the dirty work (alas, alas, when they fail, each time, and back to expecting them to do it right next time). Groups who attempt to not rely on this are castigated and sometimes outcast, in various areas of government expertise (I’m thinking about schooling, among others). . . .

Remember, security takes priority. Use your senses of hearing, smell, and sight to get a feel for the battlefield. What

is the enemy doing? Advancing? Holding in place? Retreating?

{{Boy, THOSE are not terms you hear so often in domestic violence counseling or treatment, or issuing of restraining orders, right?}}

You will have to consider what is developing on the battlefield when you make

your survival plan.

Size Up Your Surroundings

Determine the pattern of the area. Get a feel for what is going on

around you. Every environment, whether forest, jungle, or desert, has

a rhythm or pattern. This rhythm or pattern includes animal and bird

noises and movements and insect sounds. It may also include enemy

traffic and civilian movements.

There is definitely a pattern to the “field” of domestic violence, expert talk about it, and prosecutor, etc. responses to it. That “pattern” is that women are still getting killed when they leave, or going homeless. Another “pattern” is that men leaving one wife need a 2nd one either to live, or to justify the first failure OR (case in point) for money, not just a warm bed or a companion. The pattern IS that there was probably more than one side to the story of why he left that bitch, the mother of his kids. . . . Right now, this issue has come up with the home my children are in. The woman there is intently sure that I’m still the culprit, but has also acknowledged that her “man” (father of our children) wasn’t what he put himself out as, and, what’s more apparently targeted her for a certain function in his life. At least, that was one conversation.

Size Up Your Physical Condition

The pressure of the battle you were in or the trauma of being in a

survival situation may have caused you to overlook wounds you received.

Check your wounds and give yourself first aid. Take care to prevent

further bodily harm. For instance, in any climate, drink plenty of water

to prevent dehydration. If you are in a cold or wet climate, put on

additional clothing to prevent hypothermia.

Size Up Your Equipment

Perhaps in the heat of battle, you lost or damaged some of your

equipment. Check to see what equipment you have and what condition

it is in.

The “equipment” of this situation, for Ms. Zindell included: restraining order, courts, prosecutors, friends (for safety) car, and so forth. The “equipment” included many things, suddenly needed, that a normal life otherwise wouldn’t need. Like — I still wonder how much warning she was given about this person’s release, and whether she actually got it and became poperly alarmed enough.

Now that you have sized up your situation, surroundings, physical condition,

and equipment, you are ready to make your survival plan. In doing

so, keep in mind your basic physical needs—water, food, and shelter.

{{Guess what: in this situation, job wasn’t a basic physical need, priority wise. She was smart, and let go of the house, but . . .. . }}

U – Use All Your Senses, Undue Haste Makes Waste

You may make a wrong move when you react quickly without thinking

or planning. That move may result in your capture or death. Don’t move

just for the sake of taking action. Consider all aspects of your situation

(size up your situation) before you make a decision and a move. If you

act in haste, you may forget or lose some of your equipment. In your

haste you may also become disoriented so that you don’t know which

way to go. Plan your moves. Be ready to move out quickly without

endangering yourself if the enemy is near you. Use all your senses

to evaluate the situation. Note sounds andtemperature changes. Be observant.

VANQUISH FEAR AND PANIC

The greatest enemies in a combat survival and evasion situation are

fear and panic. If uncontrolled, they can destroy your ability to make an

intelligent decision. They may cause you to react to your feelings and

imagination rather than to your situation. They can drain your energy

and thereby cause other negative emotions. Previous survival and

evasion training and self-confidence will enable you to vanquish fear

and panic.

{{AND THE REST YOU CAN READ ON THE SITE, OR FIND ELSEWHERE. BUT KNOW THAT IT’S FIRST AN ATTITUDE, AND SECOND TRAINING TO UNDERSTAND PRINCIPLES, AND PRACTICE THEM. THIS WOULD REQUIRE HELP.}}

A woman ending a romantic relationship of some depth — particularly if the reasons doing so relate to safety or fear- / violence — is in a changed landscape, and needs to recognize this quickly and act appropriately. Note: The institutions involved do not encourage this attitude, and it’s challenging, after the isolation of perhaps the relationship, to then understand a different way of thinking while it is ending and until the danger is past. It took me a long time to realize the difference in urgency between the groups I sought help from (their concern: funding, grants — it’s a bottom line; mine: justice, safety — its my bottom line).

Back to my regularly scheduled post. . . .

You can’t judge a rolling stone by its cover: Best to ask for ID. . . . . This dangerous, middle-aged loiterer without ID (or the mike) was picked up by two young policemen in the NJ shore area last Saturday, so they took precautionary measures:

Saturday August 15, 2009, 8:08 AM

http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2009/08/bob_dylan_stopped_by_long_bran.html

“

The police officer drove up to Dylan, who was wearing a blue jacket, and asked him his name. According to Woolley, the following exchange ensued:

“What is your name, sir?” the officer asked.

“Bob Dylan,” Dylan said.

“OK, what are you doing here?” the officer asked.

“I’m on tour,” the singer replied.

A second officer, also in his 20s, responded to assist the first officer. He, too, apparently was unfamiliar with Dylan, Woolley said.

The officers asked Dylan for identification.

This incident ended without incident and, presumably the concert afterwards. The Times, they are indeed a-changin’.

A young bank robber (Ocean County) last April was caught and imprisoned, as was the girlfriend who enabled it. They were put in jail and kept there a while:

Ocean County man is sentenced for robbing bank

Ocean County man is sentenced for robbing bank while girlfriend waited with kids
by The Associated Press
Saturday April 04, 2009, 11:42 AM

An Ocean County man will spend at least the next nine years in prison for robbing a bank last year while his girlfriend waited outside with her two young children.

A state Superior Court judge in Ocean County has sentenced Jason Conway to 11 years for robbing a Bank of America branch in Brick. The 32-year-old Conway will have to serve at least 85 percent of the sentence.

Prosecutors said Conway went in to rob the bank while girlfriend Jessica Faulkenberry waited outside with her two children and a change of clothing for Conway.

Police dogs eventually tracked Conway to the apartment where the couple lived.

Faulkenberry, who is 23, was sentenced to three years in prison after she pleaded guilty to two counts of child endangerment

Which goes to show, prosecution can happen, and crime often requires some enablement, somewhere along the line.

Child sexual abusers (sometimes) are kept in prison even too long, on the basis of their danger to society:

Supreme Court to review sex offender law

The top court agrees to assess a law that lets the US government indefinitely detain sex offenders even after they have served their sentences.

By Warren Richey | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the June 22, 2009 edition WASHINGTON – The US Supreme Court has agreed to decide the constitutionality of a law that allows the federal government to indefinitely detain a person deemed “sexually dangerous,” even after that person has finished serving a full prison sentence.

The issue arises in the case of a man who has been confined to a North Carolina federal prison for more than two years after completing his three-year sentence for receiving child pornography. The man, Graydon Earl Comstock, has no firm release date. (When it comes to child safety in particular) {{WHO WAS DISTRIBUTING IN THAT CASE?}}

The provision in question was passed as part of the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006. It authorizes the attorney general to seek the court-ordered, open-ended civil commitment of any “sexually dangerous person” already in US custody.

The measure is controversial in part because it relies on anticipation of future dangerousness to society, rather than actual or planned violations of law.

Although this is being appealed, someone decided to keep the person in jail, just as they decided to check out Bob Dylan.

However, the buff, stalking Frank Frisco with a criminal record was released, to allegedly commit murder & suicide. So much for nearly 20 years of lethality assessments from experts. 5 hours later, she were both dead, making him a murderer. He then hung himself. Was it the mental hospital time? The indignation of being arrested for a crime? The distraught rebuffed suitor? The debt? The inability to handle loss?
Who knows, but it WAS someone letting this man out of jail before that woman was truly safe.

Go figure…

Now let’s have an honest talk about expecting protection from public officials or actions, after reading this editorial (not article) on the same murder/suicide that happened 5 hours after he was released, obviously hopping mad on a few accounts: marriage cancelled, thievery being caught (he’d stolen from his fiance), public humiliation at last-minute cancellation of the marriage, probably anger at child support arrears, and being caught at THAT, plus being called on his behavior in public. He had been twice rejected (or failed) in marriage and was apparently not about to “get some” in the home front, and in short, the guy had been confronted on his behavior. I also read (elsewhere) that Ocean County employment was 6.2% last year, and 10% this year. Who knows what the terms of his divorce were? But this does not appear to be the type of guy who is going to go too long without a woman companion (judging by the overlap between EX and NEW).

[Same murder/suicide, Toms River, editorial]: Tighter Restraints Needed on Domestic Violence: app.com editorial

A police-officer friend of Letizia Zindell says she “did everything right” in abiding by the rules of the permanent restraining order she had against her ex-fiance. Each time he violated it, she called the police and he was arrested. That didn’t stop him from getting out of jail on obscenely low bail and killing her. . . .

STOP! Correction! Was it a jailbreak or was he let out on obscenely low bail? I read, he made bail and was then kept longer due to child support arrears, and then “inexplicably” — and until I see a court document or minutes of a hearing or decision, I don’t have the explanation) he was released. This required an order, and someone following an order. I also haven’t seen or heard how or when this woman was notified of his release.

Earlier last year [2008], Ocean County Prosecutor Marlene Lynch Ford vowed to change the way domestic violence cases were handled in Ocean County after a Stafford woman was stabbed to death by her ex-boyfriend two hours after he was released from jail when charges against him for a domestic violence incident were downgraded. One assistant prosecutor called the events leading up to the murder a “perfect storm of domestic violence.” Sadly, Zindell’s murder shows perfect storms aren’t rarities.

In other words — it not being their lives, their families at stake — the prosecutor reframed the truth back then, too, diverting the discussion away from system failures to the generic term “domestic violence. This does not appear to have stemmed the flow of federal funds to stop exactly this type of event (see subject line, see resources at end of this post).

The similarities in the two cases are striking. Bruce Burgess, who killed Tesha Lightsey on Jan. 8, 2008, was arrested on consecutive days for domestic violence disturbances. He was released from jail five days later, after the Prosecutor’s Office decided not to pursue an indictment on charges that he threatened her. Frisco, who was arrested repeatedly and phoned and e-mailed Zindell after his restraining order was made permanent, also was released after five days. He met bail on domestic violence charges the Friday he was arrested, but was held in jail until Wednesday because he owed more than $25,000 in back child support. Inexplicably, he was released without paying any of it.

When Lightsey was killed last year, concerns were raised that the brief jail time for domestic violence offenses was looked upon by the justice system as a “cooling off” period. In the Lightsey and Zindell cases, those five days were more likely a time of festering emotions – emotions that culminated in two deaths only hours after the attackers were released.

State Sen. Robert Singer, R-Ocean, sits on the Health, Human Services and Senior Citizens Committee. He should work with the county Prosecutor’s Office and state law enforcement groups to develop legislation aimed at better protecting victims of domestic violence from their abusers.

Zindell did everything right. It wasn’t enough to save her life. The laws need to be changed to prevent others from suffering a similar fate.

No, Zindell did not do everything right. First of all, she had everything going for her, was still relatively young (maybe not in shore culture, but she was!) and went picked the wrong man — or let him pick her. Why become involved with an older man, an ex-wife, 3 boys and debt? What was the prior history with relationships — was he the first significant one?

She lacked information to realize who this man was, and apparently didn’t run a criminal background check on the guy before he moved in. She was still young (relatively) and perhaps didn’t realize what this guy had at stake in “winning,” and like a lot of 2nd women is taken in, thinking the difficulties perhaps must have been that first “bitch” woman treated him wrong Of course I have no idea of Ms. Zindell thought this, but I’ve seen it plenty. There are vulnerabilities.

I can understand her not wanting to give up a good career and move out of state. But this ended up with loss of life (so much for job first). She possibly (been there, done that) was thinking that sending a clear message would be heard by this person. She thought the police would do the right thing, the prosecutors would do the right thing, and being probably involved in her job, wasn’t paying close attention to the statistics, the “DV” stuff that someone who’s gone through it might. I cannot say of course anything about what wa sin the mind, but the fact is, the responsibility to protect DOES lie with the individual, and one of THE most dangerous things any woman could do (or attitudes to adopt) is to think that anything less than full safety and full protection is acceptable. She did not have children by this man (which changes dynamics). She didn’t have sufficient people around her urgently enough (or trusting them if they were urgent) to know a good one from a bad one based on behaviors, or past behaviors.

Even so, Ocean County screwed up, and doesn’t seem very apologetic about it. Judge accordingly, if this is a situation of someone you care about, or yourself. Assumptions are not bliss, facts are.

Let’s read this account — there are a few points where more vigilance might have saved a life — do you know or see what they were? Do you see how the vulnerability? The following is the most complete article I’ve seen yet, giving more of her background, more details on the arrest record (although NOTHING on why he was released!), and who she packed up and was moving out.

http://beta.app.com/article/20090814/NEWS/90815005/1401/news05

. . . .

She was an only child.

She was a young superstar with a big heart, obviously, and dedicated in social service and helping others (like this dude, too).

Her father had died, after approving the marriage to this man (DAD, where was YOUR head at?)

A male friend left her alone after she packed some things to move out. DID SHE KNOW HE”D BEEN RELEASED? REALLY?

Although someone posted bail for the theft, bad checks and restraining order charges, the court ordered him held on outstanding child support of $25,870.36, officials said. The court then released him Wednesday without the payment. {{THAT”S WHAT TO INVESTIGATE!}} On Wednesday at 5:10 p.m., Zindell learned he was being released, authorities said. {{This is hearsay, at least to us. Where’s the proof?}}

That evening, she and a male friend went to her Lafayette Avenue home and she packed some of her things. They parted about 10 p.m. — ((And that was the last fatal mistake. Better to “book it” with the clothes on her back — and out of the area, FAST, NOW — then think later. #2 — if her friends knew, why was she ever left alone, especially being so popular? A woman’s life was at risk — surely someone could have taken her in, or a shelter…. )) the last time she was seen alive, police said.

Now, about that NJ $86 million for public safety and law . . . . .

WIKIPEDIA:

The New Jersey Department of Law and Public Safety is a governmental agency in the U.S. state of New Jersey that focuses on protection of the lives and property of New Jersey residents and visitors. The department operates under the supervision of the New Jersey Attorney General. The department is are responsible for safeguarding “civil and consumer rights, promoting highway traffic safety, maintaining public confidence in the alcoholic beverage, gaming and racing industries and providing legal services and counsel to other state agencies.”^[1]

^{Notice: public confidence in (several income-producing industries in NJ) and providing legal services and counsel — not to individuals, but to state agencies. Atlantic City (Southern Jersey, where this crime occurred) is a center of these industries.}

(The NJ Attorney General is an office, per wikipedia, that goes back to 1704, pre-U.S., and is too colorful to deal with here, although I note that in recent years, a Latina Attorney General, “Farber” was forced to resign over driving and traffic ticket and alleged ethical violations but in the larger context, well, she wasn’t Republican….. . .Despite the traffic record / behaviors, she sounds like an amazing person, having come from Cuba at age 16 to later become Attorney General of NJ!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zulima_Farber

NJ.Gov Offfice of Attorney General Bio

However, my interest in this department comes from the amount of federal funds it is receiving under prevention of Violence Against Women, including “formula grants” to prevent violence against women. I want to know why Frisco was given a low bail.

This department prosecutes public corruption as in (this just in Aug. 14th):

Morris County Sheriff’s Officer Pleads Guilty to Extortion for Demanding Money from Inmate for Special Treatment in Jail

TRENTON – Attorney General Anne Milgram announced that a suspended Morris County sheriff’s officer pleaded guilty today to demanding $60,000 from an inmate in the county jail in return for giving him special treatment.

According to Criminal Justice Director Deborah L. Gramiccioni, Lee C. Maimone, 43, of Mount Olive, pleaded guilty to second-degree theft by extortion before Superior Court Judge John B. Dangler in Morris County. Under the plea agreement, the state will recommend that Maimone be sentenced to five years in state prison. The state required him to forfeit his job as a sheriff’s officer and be permanently barred from public employment in New Jersey.

In pleading guilty, Maimone admitted that he demanded that an inmate in the Morris County Jail pay him $60,000 in return for favorable treatment. Maimone admitted that he offered to provide favorable testimony or information about the inmate in disciplinary matters in the jail if he was paid, but threatened to withhold such information if he did not receive the money. Maimone admitted that he accepted $2,000 as partial payment of the money from an undercover New Jersey State Police detective posing as the inmate’s girlfriend.

Maimone has been suspended without pay from his job with the Morris County Sheriff’s Office since Feb. 26, when he was charged by criminal complaint.

Maimone was charged as a result of an investigation by the New Jersey State Police Official Corruption Unit, the Division of Criminal Justice and the Morris County Prosecutor’s Office. The Morris County Sheriff’s Office assisted in the investigation.

Kind of makes you think, eh? Why wasn’t Frisco’s behind in jail? Another article I reviewed showed that WITHIN about 5 hours of his release, he had killed Ms. Zindell. Ms. Zindell was staying with “friends” however, he had been at a rehearsal dinner, and likely knew who some of her friends were. See donnasavage.com — Victim Safety Plan.

OR, announced August 5, 09 (2007 crimes)

Hillside Police Officer Pleads Guilty to Stealing Funds from Homelessness Prevention Program

TRENTON – Attorney General Anne Milgram announced that a Hillside police officer pleaded guilty today to stealing funds from the Homelessness Prevention Program administered by the state Department of Community Affairs.

According to Criminal Justice Director Deborah L. Gramiccioni, Vitor “Victor” Pedreiras, 32, of Hillside, pleaded guilty to third-degree theft by deception before Superior Court Judge Robert Billmeier in Mercer County. The charge was contained in an Aug. 14, 2007 state grand jury indictment.

Now, this was the tip of the iceberg, apparently in stealing from the “Homelessness Prevention Program (HPP) by Dept. of Community Affairs (“DCA”) — read on:

Judge Billmeier scheduled sentencing for Oct. 29. The state will recommend a sentence of 364 days in county jail as a condition of a term of probation. The judge today signed an order removing Pedreiras from his job as a police officer and permanently barring him from public employment. He had been suspended by the police department since the indictment was returned.

In pleading guilty, Pedreiras admitted that he falsely submitted – and assisted his girlfriend in falsely submitting – four fraudulent applications for grants totaling $14,963 under the Homelessness Prevention Program. Pedreiras’ girlfriend, Joana Pereira, 27, of Newark, formerly known as Joana Rodrigues, pleaded guilty on Feb. 21, 2007 to charges of third-degree theft by deception. Under their plea agreements, Pedreiras and Pereira are required to pay restitution to the Department of Community Affairs of $14,963.

Pereira, a landlord, admitted she submitted the four fraudulent HPP applications with one of her tenants, Tashime Mitchell, 35, of Irvington, who shared the proceeds with her. Three applications listed Joana Pereira as landlord and listed as tenant either Mitchell, a relative of Mitchell, or a fictitious person. The fourth listed Vitor Pedreiras as landlord and a relative of his as the tenant. Pereira is scheduled to be sentenced by Judge Billmeier on Sept. 3.

The false applications were submitted to Robin Wheeler-Hicks. Wheeler-Hicks, 50, of Elizabeth, who was formerly the DCA-Union County senior field representative who had responsibility for processing HPP cases in the county, pleaded guilty in March 2006 to stealing more than $866,000 from the Homelessness Prevention Program.

Let’s run this one by again: The “senior field representative responsible for processing these cases in the county, stole more than $866,000 from Homeless People who the program existed to serve!

She is also scheduled to be sentenced by Judge Billmeier on Sept. 3. The state will recommend that she be sentenced to seven years in state prison.

The Homelessness Prevention Program (HPP) provides grants to eligible individuals and families who, through no fault of their own, are in jeopardy of becoming homeless. It provides money to pay rent to keep a family in a current home, and provides applicants with two months rent and security deposit for a new residence if they have been forced out of their home.

Guess what — were this my state, this would refer to me. I do not feel responsible for any of the crimes committed against me, for failing to report them, and failing to avoid becoming a target of them. Nevertheless, there is this other system, called “family law” which does not fully recognize criminal behavior as criminal. A major organization and conferencer, publisher, writer, and (some of us have recently learned) co-recipient of grants to STUDY domestic violence, has itself stated, in its own “about us” history, that it wishes to de-emphasize the “old-fashioned” terminology in criminal law in favor of, well, more behavioral terminology. The systems of grants affects this.

Pause for Homespun wisdom:

Public service does indeed attract public servants, as a field. Fields of public service which entail a lot of authority over others’ lives also attract people who really LIKE a lot of authority over other people’s lives. AND, grant streams attract both public servants, who wish to help the intended recipients of those grants, AND people of criminal intent (or act least actions) who realize they can DIVERT such funds for themselves, relatives, girlfriends/boyfriends, and so forth. This goes up to judge level and attorney level, and at some point, one has to understand and accept that human nature throughout society runs the gamut from bad to good. The assumption that all in certain programs are “good” is simply naive. And all too common.

I found out about this AFCC after years of criminal behavior towards my daughters and me, and one other relative, resulting in chronic poverty from chronic employment loss, underemployment, related distresses (including PTSD, which was gone, and returned in a certain year), and returning to an “at-risk” situation I wasn’t in beforehand:

WHO IS AFCC (briefly, organization website):

What is AFCC?

AFCC is the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts – an interdisciplinary and international association of professionals dedicated to the resolution of family conflict.**

{{NOTE: THIS DOES NOT SAY “LAW” OR ENSURING JUSTICE. Though many court professionals are AFCC members, law and order are not — not even on the mission statement — of this organization. }} {{i.e., They are a self-appointed, evangelistic in nature organization on a mission to heal families. That’s fine, but that’s not what the legal process is about, which is ensuring due process and a just decision based on the facts in evidence.}}

**Quick Glossary/jargon primer: Remember last post, when (at bottom), I mentioned that the word “abuse” is a downgrading (minimization) of the word “violence” when referring to “domestic violence”??? Well the word “conflict” is a further downgrading of the same word. Even though “family conflict” {which attributes mutual responsibility} gets people killed, the truth is, People kill People, not abstract nouns! In the purpose of government and “unalienable rights” the FIRST one of them is “Life.” After that, Liberty and pursuit of happiness. So the rule is, FIRST, protect LIFE. That’s what government exists for, at least a modicum of protection of human life, both male and female, young and old.

(Seems to me Ms. Zindell fell in the cracks somewhere between first and second marriages, and a host of agencies well funded to protect her, and education public, and others, about what to do in these situations, PLUS even more agencies funded to “promote healthy marriages” (nationwide) AND another agency to collect child support on behalf of Mr. Frisco’s 3 (now fatherless) boys – – and this might be partly why.

Things just keep getting rephrased and reframed. Or, correctly phrased, and framed, but when a situation develops, the right actions — the safety actions — don’t happen. When lives are at stake, mistakes are unacceptable. Just as when housing (above) is at stake, racketeering, and stealing funds from the program to prevent homelessness by a program employee is not acceptable, either. And that time, got caught. . . . . . .

So back to AFCC (and yes, this DOES relate)…..

AFCC members are:
Judges	Lawyers
Mediators	Psychologists
Researchers	Academics
Counselors	Court Commissioners
Custody Evaluators	Parenting Coordinators
Court Administrators	Social Workers
Parent Educators	Financial Planners

[[What about “parents” ?? Are they invited/welcomed/recruited, too??]]

{{As such, these professionals, about whom many litigants are blissfully (til their decisions are handed down) unaware, are participating in an organization which has a mission to transform society and use the legal venue for behavioral science purposes. This, it has done.}}

That’s a whole lot of people dedicated to addressing family conflict. (And a whole lot of livelihoods. If this issue of family conflict were actually fixed, or drastically reduced, what would these people then do for a living?). Incidentally, the term “court commissioners” is where the child support appears to come in, at least in my state. This also seems (to me) to show a certain conflict of interest. Do you see the category “parents” in there? While many of these, naturally ARE themselves parents, one has to wonder how the parents themselves, the litigants, are going to be able to financially sustain the burden of all those professions.

The good news is, they don’t. See federal grants to states.

The bad news is, the federal government still gets its money from taxes. And when AFCC professionals faced with a divided interest between AFCC goals and US Constitution goals, they are as likely as you or I to say, what’s in it for me, where’s the money, and go with those they know better and have longer-term social and professional relationships with. In other words, it’s an ethical issue.

They push through policies without clearing it with the American public. This is an “in loco parentis” situation, and wrong.

Maybe these conflict of interest, or diversion of tax funds (by artificially prolonging court cases, and referring jobs to cohorts) is just a sporadic exception, and not really significant.

Kind of like domestic violence. I mean, abuse. I mean family conflict. I mean a domestic dispute. Like that one that erupted recently at a California toll plaza. Oops, excuse me, the 2nd article said it was a cold-blooded setup, not a hot-blooded distraught person.. . . . . . Maybe it’s not that common. . . . .

OK, CONTEXT: AFCC wishes to downgrade the use of criminal language in family conflict contexts:

The [Family Court] Review began to establish itself as a significant publication, having grown in size and scope and served as a harbinger of things to come for family courts worldwide. The September 1970 issue featured an article titled, “The Modern Family Rescue Team—Judge, Lawyer and Behavioral Scientist,” by Andrew S. Watson, M.D. (M.D., not “J.D.” !!) . . .

In that same [1970] issue, Jack Bradford and Jean Brindley, marriage counselors from the Third Judicial Circuit in Detroit, wrote about group orientation and group intake processes, a precursor to the parent education programs that would proliferate so dramatically two decades later.

In 1975, Review Editor Meyer Elkin editorialized on the language of family law:

Why do we continue to use the language of criminal law in family law? Is it primarily tradition that causes us to continue to use the old words in family law? ..We need to develop new words…Family law is entering a new period. There is now present an opportunity [sic] for introducing new practices and procedures—and words that will represent the combined expertise of both law and the behavioral sciences . . .

No thank you. The law has a form of reason in it, and procedures and safeguards. The behavioral sciences are a created industry with a humanistic view, and in the hands of people with religious zeal to transform society — well the history of religion has its own bloody footprints. No thank you. I’ll go for sound reasoning and truth, every time — factual truth. As did this prosecution team which caught a county employee for a homeless program stealing money from the homeless it was intended to serve!

. . .

who, after all, are equally concerned and have similar goals {{false!}} regarding the strengthening of the family. {{false! The law is about due process and justice, for individual torts (civil) and crimes (penal codes)}}. Let us now start the search for the words.

AFCC members and courts continued to lead the way in developing new services throughout the 1970s. In 1973, the Los Angeles Conciliation Court began a pilot program to mediate custody and visitation disputes. ((When criminal violence and life-threatening or injury-causing behavior has already occurred, it does not comprise the situation “disputes” and calling it that is a falsehood, and intentional twisting of meaning for a desired purpose)).

Back to: Hillside [NJ] Police Officer Pleads Guilty to Stealing Funds from Homelessness Prevention Program, in context of NJ Dept. of Public Law & Safety, and their $86 million to save people like Zindell and Frisco, and the others listed in my last post, state of NJ, 1998-2008, one newspaper’s accounts only, excerpts only:

Mitchell and Renita Livingston, 35, of Hillside, previously pleaded guilty to assisting Wheeler-Hicks in submitting numerous false HPP applications. Mitchell pleaded guilty to bribery and was sentenced on Nov. 3, 2006 to five years in prison. Livingston pleaded guilty to conspiracy and was sentenced on Dec. 15, 2006 to three years in prison. Mitchell was ordered to pay $29,000 in restitution, and Livingston, $10,500.

The charges resulted from an investigation by the Division of Criminal Justice and New Jersey State Police. Nine other defendants have pleaded guilty, including two former DCA employees who received probation and four corporations. All of the defendants were required to pay restitution to DCA.

HAVE they? Are the other defendants in jail? If so, why are the former DCA employees on probation and not in jail. Are the four corporations still doing business, and where can the NJ public be told who they are?

The Department of Community Affairs (DCA) alerted the Division of Criminal Justice when program officials uncovered questionable applications and transactions involving the Homelessness Prevention Program in Union County. The DCA provided administrative resources and investigative assistance to the Division of Criminal Justice and State Police throughout the investigation.

In other words, although fully 5 DCA employees were corrupt, we got lucky and the DCA self-reported this corruption. Maybe it was a few good eggs. Maybe it was enough good eggs afraid of being associated with the bad eggs. This is why I MUCH prefer the, let’s have the citizens go get accountability for programs involved in our lives — ourselves — rather than hope some appointed, funded experts are doing it. This isn’t Disneyland, and our minds shouldn’t be living there. Maybe Disney has something to do with why public minds went one way, while criminal minds, the other, I don’t know.

NJ, admittedly, has its hands full with “real” crimes, as opposed to domestic family disputes — drugs, gangs, and so forth, as was (coincidentally, same day as this article on the homeless program embezzlements) announced earlier this month:

Governor Corzine Announces Dramatic Decline in Homicides in Camden City

as Statewide Violence Reduction Initiative Nets More than 980 Arrests in 14 Months

Homicides in Camden this year down 46 percent

GOVERNOR’S STRATEGY FOR SAFE STREETS AND NEIGHBORHOODS (MAP SHOWS NJ HOMICIDES BY COUNTY)

Governor Corzine and Attorney General Milgram Announce Dramatic Decline in Homicides in New Jersey as Statewide Violence Reduction Initiative Nets More than 4,200 Arrests in 14 Months
New CrimeTrack program unveiled

Yet there was funding to help this situation coming to NJ, per the OAG website. I had some trouble with select, copy, paste, and encourage viewers to check the URL instead: I just saw several that related to violence against women, that’s all:

STOP Violence Against Women Act (VAWA)

The STOP Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) Grant Program provides the State Office of Victim-Witness Advocacy (SOVWA) a formula grant allocation under the Violence Against Women Act, authorized for funding in the 1994 Crime Bill. Federal rules allow 10% of the total VAWA award to be used to administer the grant program. The balance of the funding must be allocated as follows: 25% to law enforcement, 25% to prosecution, 30% to victims services, 15% discretionary and 5% to courts. Pursuant to new federal regulations, in 2003 the Division of Criminal Justice and SOVWA formed a statewide VAWA Advisory Committee to develop a Three-Year Implementation Plan, approved by the Office of Violence Against Women, to ensure continuation of services, opportunities for program expansions and introduction of new program

VOCA Victim Assistance Program

The Office of Victims of Crime (OVC) provides the State Office of Victim-Witness Advocacy (SOVWA) formula allocations under the Victims of Crime Act (VOCA) Victim Assistance Grant Program. SOVWA awards these funds to subgrantees who provide direct services to crime victims. VOCA guidelines allow for up to 5% of each year’s grant to be used to administer the Program. State grantees also have the option of retaining up to 1% of each year’s grant for conducting statewide and/or regional trainings for victim services staff. VOCA enumerates the types of direct services eligible for funding under this grant program. A minimum allocation of 10% must be awarded to subgrantees providing direct services to crime victims in each of the four categories: sexual assault, domestic violence, child abuse, and underserved populations as victims with disabilities, language barriers, living in isolated locations and homicide survivors (as determined by the state grantee). This allocation requirement may be waived if the state grantee can document to OVC that a category of crime victims is currently receiving a significant amount of financial assistance from the state or other funding sources, a smaller amount of financial assistance or no assistance is needed or crime rates have diminished for the particular type of crime. VOCA funds are awarded to each of the 21 County Prosecutors’ Offices of Victim-Witness Advocacy, SANE/SART programs and DCJ programs (NJ VINE, Bias Crimes, Victim Services). SOVWA also provides direct funding to non-profit victim services agencies through the competitive Notice of Availability of Funds (NOAF).

NJ Victim Assistance Grant Program

The federal Office for Victims of Crime provides the State Office of Victim Witness Advocacy (SOVWA) formula allocations under the VOCA Victim Assistance grant program. These funds are used by the SOVWA to provide direct services to crime victims. The Victims of Crime Act enumerates the kinds of services that are eligible for funding under this grant program. Funds from this program are awarded to the county offices of Victim Witness Advocacy in each of the 21 county Prosecutors’ offices. Additionally, the SOVWA also provides direct funding to victim services agencies through the competitive Notice of Availability of Funds (NOAF) process.

Were there not program initiatives to help Ms. Zindell make a healthier marital choice? I mean this is definitely a going concern:
Healthy Marriages and Promoting Responsible Fatherhood. Here are the current grantees, nationwide, under both categories (BUT- – one program#, making it a little hard to differentiate fatherhood programs from abstinence programs, from what-nots.

NJ’s only recent “current” grants — although this is only relative to the website above) Fatherhood program was:

5	New Jersey Department of Corrections	Trenton	NJ	$334,366

Maybe that might take a little consideration — are we missing something, between the Steven Stosny’s Compassion Boot Camp philosophy, as expressed through court-ordered batterer’s treatment programs run by Catholic Charities, and going into prisons to teach fatherhood, but somehow, something missed Mr. Frisco in the mix. I guess choice still exists…

I think it possibly likely that Ms. Zindell did not see herself as a victim of domestic violence, although it’s clear she took protective measures. She was living with, but not married to this man. The amount of resources by county, available in NJ, is almost stunning:

http://www.state.nj.us/dca/divisions/dow/resources/countyresourcesdv.html

However the only reference in OCEAN county is to Catholic Charities. Even so. . . . one needs the vocabulary and understanding to take action. In looking at these NJ departments, there are some for “Children and Families” and for “Human Services” but none that actually SAY “Women” on them. There is a Victim Services department. Typically, we do not exist as a gender, only as a family function, too often (I say). There are no children without women’s participation. And yet, we don’t have an identity. “Children” do. “Families” do. Interesting.

http://www.state.nj.us/nj/gov/deptserv/

Some funding that went to NJ Public Law and Safety — straight to the government, per a site “USASPENDING.GOV”

(use with caution, but it’s at least an indicator).

The bar chart represents the years this database covers: 2000 – 2009

Federal dollars: $86,760,774
Total number of recipients: 4

(actually, this is one recipient with

4 different versions of its name;

there is a common recipient ID number for this database that I used to search on).
Total number of transactions: 39

Categories of assistance (these are “program ID” numbers).

16.803	$29,754,315
16.575: Crime Victim Assistance	$19,037,000
16.738: Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant Program	$10,412,521
16.588: Violence Against Women Formula Grants	$9,335,840
16.540: Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention_Allocation to States	$3,176,040

Top 5 Known Congressional Districts where Recipients are Located

New Jersey 04 (Christopher H. Smith)

$85,588,583

Top 10 Recipients

New Jersey Department of Law and Public Safet	$84,274,079
State of New Jersey, Department of Law & Publ	$2,263,250
State of NJ, Dept. of Law & Public Safety	$188,445
State of New Jersey, Department of Law and Pu	$35,000

Recipient Type

Government	$86,760,774
Other	$0
Nonprofits	$0
Higher Education	$0
For Profits	$0
Individuals	$0

This is all I can handle for today. I just reviewed some of the scams caught by this agency. I still think $86 million is a lot to account for, and wonder “what happened” in this incident. However, by the time someone figures out, there will be more, and similar. Take care of those closest to you and assume nothing.

As to faith-based institutions, NJ at least caught these folks. . . . BUT — notice the fields they earned money in!

Pastors of Morris County Church to Reimburse Congregants for Misappropriated Donations

NEWARK – The pastors of a Randolph-based church who were accused of diverting congregation donations for their own personal use, including purchase of 78-foot schooner and a $1.6 million property in Mendham, have agreed to reimburse donors and immediately resign from the church’s board.

Additionally, a fiscal monitor will take control of the banking and financial accounts maintained by Church Alive, Inc., which also is known as Randolph Christian Church, Inc. The church is a non-profit corporation located at 791 Route 10 in Randolph.

Eric Simons and his wife, Marianne, who are pastor and assistant pastor of the church, and Philip DuPlessis, an assistant pastor at the church, also are barred for 10 years from serving on any financial board. DuPlessis’ wife, Sharon, is an assistant pastor at the church but she is not a respondent in this settlement.

“These church leaders asked for donations for the betterment of the congregation but in reality they misused these monies for their own personal gain,” Attorney General Anne Milgram said. “We remain vigilant in enforcing the state’s charities laws and we will continue to hold accountable those who attempt to cheat donors.”

Congregants were told their donations would be put into a Building Fund. Instead, the donations were comingled with other church funds that were solely controlled by the Simonses and DuPlessises. In addition to the schooner and property, they paid themselves “honorarium” totaling $150,000 and also spent $39,395 on “life-coaching” classes and a “life-coaching” license for Eric Simons. Simons operates a for-profit “life-coaching” business. The church itself holds the license.

<<GEE, sounds like National Fatherhood Initiative (same business!)>>

“These pastors violated the trust of donors, claiming the donations would fund a new building. Instead, by controlling the donated funds without any oversight, they spent lavishly on themselves. Donors need to be vigilant and check with our Charities Registration Unit before giving their hard-earned dollars to any charitable or non-profit group,” said David Szuchman, Consumer Affairs Director.

{{{DOES THIS ALSO APPLY TO OUR FEDERAl, STATE, COUNTY & LOCAL GOVERNMENTS GIVING TO CHARITABLE ORGANIZATIONS?}}

The church is required to appoint an official board within 30 days, under terms of the Consent Order with the state. The board is required to review the employment status of all church employees, including the Simonses and DuPlessises, as well as all financial records and report back to the Division of Consumer Affairs.

The board will determine the sales prospects for the Mendham property, which is located at 14 Kingsbrook Court. The Simonses currently reside there.

The DuPlessises are required to repay the church $125,000 and turn over title and registration to the schooner. Eric Simons and Philip DuPlessis each must repay $50,000, the honoraria which were used to purchase the schooner.

Eric Simons and Philip DuPlessis also must repay a total of $14,495 as reimbursement for “life-coaching”education. The state will be reimbursed $60,917 for its investigative and legal expenses.

Deputy Attorneys General Anna M. Lascurain, Chief, Securities Fraud Prosecution Section, and Isabella T. Stempler represented the state in this legal proceeding. Supervising investigator Larry Biondo led the investigative work.

An online directory of charitable organizations registered in New Jersey can be found atwww.state.nj.us/lps/ca/charity/chardir.htm. Consumers also can call the Charitable Registration Hotline at 973-504-6215. Religious organizations are exempt from having to register but they must comply with the state’s Charities and Non-Profit Corporation laws.

Written by Let's Get Honest|She Looks It Up

August 18, 2009 at 4:03 PM

Posted in "Til Death Do Us Part" (literally), After She Speaks Up - Reporting Domestic Violence and/or Suicide Threats, Fatal Assumptions, Lethality Indicators - in News, Split Personality Court Orders

Tagged with Bribery Extortion Fraud Racketeering-public funds, domestic violence, Frisco/Zindell (NJ 2009), murder-suicides, NJ-Toms River, retaliation for reporting, social commentary, U.S. Govt $$ hard @ work..

Let's Get Honest! Absolutely Uncommon Analysis of Family & Conciliation Courts' Operations, Practices, & History

Posts Tagged ‘U.S. Govt $$ hard @ work..’

Supreme Court to review sex offender law

The top court agrees to assess a law that lets the US government indefinitely detain sex offenders even after they have served their sentences.

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Cold,Hard.Fact$ (Links similar but not identical to one off-ramped to Widgets post. I may off-ramp this one soon too..//LGH mid-Aug. 2019

Ltrs to/from US Presidents ~ Federal Agencies

ColdHardFact$ Posts

(Note: I don't use consistently)

Copyright “fair use” doctrine cited USC Title 17 Ch 1 SEC. 107

Target Population:	Married and Unmarried persons in California, ages 15 and older, of all racial, cultural and economic backgrounds
Federal Award Amount:	$2,342,080/year
Program Name:	California Healthy Marriages Coalition
Project Period:	9/30/2006 - 9/29/2011

93.010: Community-Based Abstinence Education (CBAE)	$128,610,003
98.001: USAID Foreign Assistance for Programs Overseas	$11,058,644
93.279: Drug Abuse and Addiction Research Programs	$9,561,182
93.995: Adolescent Family Life_Demonstration Projects	$8,064,374
93.273: Alcohol Research Programs	$6,222,97

FAMILY HEALTH INTERNATIONAL (FHI)	$3,593,286
SCRIPPS RESEARCH INSTITUTE	$2,551,682
PROGRAM FOR APPROPRIATE TECHNOLOGY IN HEALTH	$2,233,162
HERITAGE COMMUNITY SERVICES INC	$2,000,000
BROWN UNIVERSITY	$1,672,760
POPULATION COUNCIL INC	$1,613,000
PATH	$1,500,000
NEUROBEHAVIORAL RESEARCH INC	$1,466,239
NEW HOPE CENTER INC	$1,399,907
CENTER FOR SELF-SUFFICIENCY, INC.	$1,399,300

2009	Columbus Hospital	NJ	COMMUNITY BASED ABSTINENCE EDUCATION	2	Community-Based Abstinence Education (CBAE)	DISCRETIONARY	BERNADETTE VISSANI	$- 739,820
2009	METRO ATLANTA YOUTH FOR CHRIST, INC	GA	COMMUNITY-BASED ABSTINENCE EDUCATION	3	Community-Based Abstinence Education (CBAE)	DISCRETIONARY	CINDY MILLER	$ 300,186
2009	Saint Michael`s Medical Center, Inc	NJ	COMMUNITY BASED ABSTINENCE EDUCATION	1	Community-Based Abstinence Education (CBAE)	DISCRETIONARY	BERNADETTE VISSANI	$ 677,551
2008	A WOMAN`S PLACE MINISTRIES, INC.	FL	ABSTINENCE EDUCATION	1	Community-Based Abstinence Education (CBAE)	DISCRETIONARY	MICHAEL LAYTON	$ 600,000
2008	A WOMENS CONCERN, INC.	MA	HEALTHY FUTURES ABSTINENCE EDUCATION INITIATIVE	3	Community-Based Abstinence Education (CBAE)	DISCRETIONARY	ELIZABETH SNYDER	$ 600,000
2008	ABSTINENCE & MARRIAGE EDUCATION PARTNERSHIP	IL	COMMUNITY BASED ABSTINENCE EDUCATION	1	Community-Based Abstinence Education (CBAE)	DISCRETIONARY	SCOTT PHELPS	$ 512,500
2008	ABSTINENCE EDUCATION CONSULTANTS,INC.	KS	COMMUNITY-BASED ABSTINENCE EDUCATION	1	Community-Based Abstinence Education (CBAE)	DISCRETIONARY	LOIS THEIS	$ 600,000
2008	ABSTINENCE TIL MARRIAGE EDUCATION	OH	COMMUNITY BASED ABSTINENCE EDUCATION	3	Community-Based Abstinence Education (CBAE)	DISCRETIONARY	CATHERINE E WOOD	$ 600,000
2008	AIDS RESOURCE CENTER OF WISCONSIN, INC	WI	COMMUNITY BASED ABSTINENCE EDUCATION	1	Community-Based Abstinence Education (CBAE)	DISCRETIONARY	SCOTT STOKES	$ 600,000
2008	ALPHA CENTER	SD	COMMUNITY BASED ABSTINENCE EDUCATION	1	Community-Based Abstinence Education (CBAE)	DISCRETIONARY	KIMBERLY MARTINEZ	$ 600,000
2008	ALTERNATIVE COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT SERVICES	TX	COMMUNITY BASED ABSTINENCE EDUCATION	1	Community-Based Abstinence Education (CBAE)	DISCRETIONARY	SHARI L CARROLL	$ 454,922
2008	ARIZONA MEXICO BORDER HEALTH FOUNDATION	AZ	COMMUNITY BASED ABSTINENCE EDUCATION	1	Community-Based Abstinence Education (CBAE)	DISCRETIONARY	ALBERT MORENO	$ 550,000
2008	AWARE, INC.	WA	WASHINGTON STATE: COMMUNITY-BASED ABSTINENCE UNTIL MARRIAGE PROJECT	1	Community-Based Abstinence Education (CBAE)	DISCRETIONARY	JAMES N GRENFELL	$ 499,849
2008	About Our Kids, Inc.	MO	STRATEGIES FOR ABSTINENCE AND VIRTUE EDUCATION (SAVE)	2	Community-Based Abstinence Education (CBAE)	DISCRETIONARY	ALICIA HUMES	$ 600,000
2008	Abstinence the Better Choice, Inc.	OH	ABSTINENCE THE BETTER CHOICE	3	Community-Based Abstinence Education (CBAE)	DISCRETIONARY	CHERYL BIDDLE	$ 600,000
2008	Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Inc.	AZ	POWER FITNESS ABSTINENCE PROGRAM- TEACHING YOUTH AGES 12 THROUGH 18 THE SOCIAL, PSYCHOLOGI	3	Community-Based Abstinence Education (CBAE)	DISCRETIONARY	EVA GODDARD	$ 600,000

FY	Award Number	Budget Year of Support	Agency	Award Code	Action Issue Date	Amount This Action
2008	90FE0037	3	ACF	0	09-14-2008	$550,000.00
Award Subtotal:						$550,000.00

Posts Tagged ‘U.S. Govt $$ hard @ work..’

1. Letters to Authorities (facts vs. report)

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Oh No!

JUNE 17,1999, Congressional Chronicle(tm)

Topic: National Fathers Return Day

2008:

2004:

2009, June 2:

Overview

I. Enabling Legislation

II. Allowable Services

III. Annual Funding

IV. State Administration

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OK, everyone, your marriages should look like this (and make sure you marry, too. And abstain until you do):

White, 40-something, and one cute little blond boy between, everyone happy, strong, strong strong family bonds:

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3. How it feels (reflect, describe, (OK, complain)):

2. Paradigms, Tools to Pry Loose, Places to stand and the Lever of Language

2A. Dude, it’s about the money. That’s the paradigm to understand in understanding the family law system. This means child support and federal grants have to be examined as well, as well as job referrals, and private conflicts of interest among professionals on the same case.

2B. Anything that is obviously, over time, a moot point, then this is not the reigning paradigm, even if you wish it were or thought it should be. Another one is actually primary. is the goal to change the system or win your case

(and which first? Because one timeframe is shorter than the other. This is where many organizations, with a cash flow, employees, business offices, and a little momentum, have a different world view than mothers, who have fast-growing children and fast-changing situations personally.)

2C. GENGHIS KHAN: Who was he? Who was his army? How did they conquer so much territory?

Another place to stand to move the world.

When I finally Decided to Leave / Moot Points.

Wall painting in theStanzino delle Matematiche in theGalleria degli Uffizi(Florence, Italy). Painted by Giulio Parigi (1571-1635) in the y

“Give me somewhere to stand and I will move the earth.”

Moot point (http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/moot-point.html)

“That they be not forced to sue the lawe, wrapped with so infinite crickes and moot poyntes.”

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Our Mission

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This voice from the past (1989 to 2009 = 20 years!) —

1992

Have a nice weekend. Again, I’d rather see a sermon than hear one any day.

While this essay is music (the voice of logic, of common sense truth) to my ears, but it’s not a tune many people like these days. Because it actually addresses the impact of role-modeling and personal responsibility upon the next generation.

This was written Pre-VAWA and Pre-National Fatherhood Inititative, which one theme of this blog has been showing what these cost, and how they attempt to cancel each other out.

Wife Abuse and Child Custody and Visitation by the Abuser,

Speaking personally, the exchanges where were the problems occurred in our case. I asked (for YEARS) for help with this, and got none. Then finally on an overnight, I stopped seeing my daughters again.

Voices from the even further past, still valid today:

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Moral: Never attempt to shake down a successful PI attorney

JUST FOR A POINT OF REFERENCE, THIS IS 2009. Removal from the bench happened after 3 years. What does that say about who gets to the Supreme Court level, that he did?

NINE YEARS TO BEAR FRUIT, AND THAT’S WITH FEDS INVOLVED.

IS IT SAD ENOUGH FOR ACTUAL PRISON TIME? if not, then other such judges will also presume, well, not THAT sad…..

That’s true, and we appreciate the good work in this case. Now about the others . . . . . ??

(2) Tembeckjian

RELATED ARTICLES

(3) BLATCHLY

(4) SPARGO

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AUGUST 26, 2009

We are allowed to give birth, but too often, not to also speak.

“Let us Now Praise Famous Men“

August 26, 2009

WHO MOURNS THESE?

Deborah Ross (51) and Ersie Charles Everette (58)

2009/2008 Torres, Catalina (44) & Eustacio (41), Sgt. Paul Starzyk

2008 account “Details emerge in Martinez triple shooting:

Elnora Caldwell, 46

She asked for protection

Recovery of Nina’s body and sentencing

Anastasia Melnitchenko, 22, unmarried, No asylum in America

Body-in-trunk suspect got lots of counseling

‘Doing satisfactorily’ after 6 months of weekly sessions

Taking matters into their own hand; two brothers kill widow & her relatives:

Winta Mehari, 28; her brother Yonas Mehari, 17;

and their mother, 50-year-old Regbe Bahrengasi

Kennedy’s Battle With Cancer Lost

Jeremiah 17

I saw a charming, Robert-Redford smile, and I thought about Chappaquiddick,

MichaelMoore.com Commemoration

Kennedy, Youngest Kennedy Brother, Led Political Dynasty in Wake of Tragedy

The Only One Left

Kennedy Curse: Political Power, Personal Tragedy

Kennedy’s Battle With Cancer Lost

With all due respect, we do not need any more royalty in this country. We need to set our sites on something invisible, something written, but something of principle, that unites us. Our leaders need to stick to that, and out of respect to OURSELVES ,we should demand that.

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Set this Press Release to the “SPIN” Cycle:

**Winta Mehari, 28; her brother Yonas Mehari, 17;**