This is a good thing, not just for Obama’s administration, but for the credibility of the US overseas. Daschle may be talented, but his appointment would not have passed the ‘smell test’.

Tax issues with Killefer, who was to ‘be a chief performance officer’, allegations of corruption in the form of favourable treatment for political donors by Bill Richardson, who was to be Commerce Secretary, and other tax issues for Timothy Geithner, whose role would have included oversight of  the Internal Revenue Service…

There were suggestions from the press that the McCain campaign had fellen down in its vetting processes because Sarah Palin’s daughter was pregnant. I could never make any sense of this. It always seemed like unseemly gloating. How did that very human and normal family situation that didn’t involve anything she herself had done, diminish Sarah Palin’s capacity to function as vice-president?

But favours for mates, taxes unpaid, and goodness knows what hasn’t made it into the media? Unless backhanders to political donors and cheating on your taxes are not considered anything unusual in some circles, it is hard to understand how these things were not picked up before the nominations were made public.

Poor Britney. She has made some very foolish choices.

But it seems to me she is basically a decent person, who like most decent people, assumes everyone else will do the right thing. She does not seem to have had much luck in choosing her friends and advisors, many of whom seem to have seen her and their association with her as an  opportunity to enrich themselves at her expense. Especially that human sewer Ghalib.

I am not making any comment on the rights or wrongs of any particular legal matter. I just wish they’d leave the poor girl alone.

If it is true that Michael Phelps was smoking dope at a party, then he is a very silly boy. The four year ban for drug taking means that he would not be able to compete in the 2012 Olympic Games in London. 

On the other hand, I have looked pretty closely at that picture, and cannot see any signs of smoke. Add to this that he has had over 1500 drug tests and never failed one, and maybe there is room for some doubt here. A urine test should be able to confim either way. If it was me, and I was innocent, I would be rushing to the nearest testing centre.

But even if he was just mucking around with an empty bong, it is still a dumb thing to do.

I came across this self-righteous article yesterday. Apparently the mother of the octuplets born in California last week, had once filed for bankruptcy, and already has six children. According to the report this ‘casts an unflattering light’ on her.

The article goes on to report the mother’s mother as saying that her daughter had multiple embryos implanted last year and declined to abort any of them. Well, obviously she’s a ratbag.

There’s an unspoken assumption in the article that more children are a bad thing, that children are a burden, that people who have large numbers of them must necessarily be irresponsible.

In fact the woman had no way of knowing how many of the implanted embryos would take, and that she declined to abort any of them casts a more, rather than less, flattering light on her in my view. The rights and wrongs of IVF as a whole I leave for another time.

There’s not enough information in the article to judge whether the woman is irresponsible or not, and anyway, what’s so special about us that we should feel entitled to make such a judgement?

But that wasn’t what caught my eye in the article. Instead it was the claim by Dr. Charles Sophy, medical director of Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services that ‘it costs roughly $2.5 million to raise a child to adulthood.’ And according to the doc, that’s only enough for basic stuff, no extras like swimming lessons.

I have worked in ministry and other low paid jobs most of my life so far. I expect my lifetime working income to total about $1.6 million. According to Dr Sophy that’s enough to raise about two-thirds of a child, with nothing left over for a stamp collection.

Oh well.

A group of Melbourne girls invited a sixteen year old intellectually disabled girl to their home, saying they would be her friend. Then they took her to a nearby park where they beat her up so badly she could not stand up after the attack and had to be taken to hospital. Bad enough. A mob of other teenagers stood around shouting encourgement. Even worse.

But what made this story really horrific for me was that the mother of one of the girls videoed the incident on her phone (the video was later posted on MySpace) while shouting “Hit her, hit her harder,” “I taught you better than that” and “Hit her like your dad would”, and giving the girls advice about how do more damage while kicking the victim.

The story of the kidnapping of Sean Goldman has become much more widely known in the couple of days since the US Dateline report on January 30th.

For those who don’t know, Bruna Goldman took her son Sean ‘on vacation’ to her home in Brazil in 2004. She never returned. David Goldman has struggled ever since to regain custody of Sean.

Although David has US and international law on his side, and has made frequent trips to Brazil, Brazilian authorities have refused to allow him to return Sean to the US. The situation has been complicated by Bruna’s death in 2008, and subsequent battles for custody with Bruna’s Brazilian husband.

It is tragic situation in which David and his son Sean have been treated unjustly.

But one thing that concerns me a little is that nowhere on the Bring Sean Home website is there anything about what Sean wants, or what is best for Sean. In any custody dispute the deciding factor should be what is best for the child. Children are not possessions to be divided up.

Bringing Sean ‘home’ would in fact mean taking him from what he knows as home, to a country he does not know, to a father he by now barely remembers. There is no reason to think that David Goldman is anything other than a responsible and loving father. But there is also no reason to think that his step father does not genuinely love Sean, and certainly no reason to think that he cannot provide for Sean a safe home, medical care, education, etc.

Of course if Sean does stay in Brazil, then Sean’s stepfather will have won in the end by holding out for as long as possible. He is a lawyer, he knows the Brazilian system, and perhaps has been able to use the influence of his powerful family. This was wrong. It is unfair.

But the deciding factor cannot be what is fair or not for the adults concerned, but what is right for the child.

So no, don’t bring Sean back to a home he doesn’t know. Love him enough to let him stay in the caring home he has.