TGIF

Thank G-d that it's Friday. The weekend has started. Have a good one if you can. I still am trying to figure out whether or not I'll be home for the funeral.

You know that Evan Bayh supports responsibile fatherhood. Well, he's co-sponsoring legislation that is right up that alley. If this legislation is not passed, it would get blamed on the republicans.

U.S. Senators Evan Bayh, Tom Harkin (D-IA), Herb Kohl (D-WI), and Barack Obama (D-IL), today co-sponsored an amendment expressing the Sense of the Senate in support of maintaining funding for a federal program responsible for enforcing child support payments. The program is currently in danger of having its budget cut by 40 percent, despite its success in bringing back more than $4 in child support for every $1 spent on enforcement.
"Parents who try to skip out on their responsibilities to their children should know that the government will make every effort to hold them accountable for their actions," Senator Bayh said. "Child support payments provide critical advantages to children and help ensure that they have a good start in life, while saving taxpayers millions of dollars. This program ensures that parents live up to their responsibilities and helps provide a brighter future for millions of children."

Sixty percent of all children living apart from a parent receive child support payments as a result of the federal child support program, and 84 percent of low-income children depend on payments secured by the program. If funding for the enforcement program is cut as is currently suggested, children across the country would lose more than $24 billion in support payments over the next ten years, a loss that would likely increase reliance on services provided at taxpayer expense, such as Medicaid, food stamps and subsidized housing.[...]

As Governor of Indiana, Bayh launched a campaign against deadbeat parents, with wanted posters of the most egregious offenders posted throughout the state. As a result of his work, Bayh more than doubled the amount of overdue child support collected in Indiana from 1989 to 1995.

It looks like Senator Joe Lieberman is questioning the record of Judge Alito.

Not surprising. Jimmy Carter has critical words for United States policy. His son is running against Senator Ensign in Nevada.

After losing the presidency 25 years ago to an underestimated opponent named Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter finally admitted it Thursday.

"I can't deny that I'm a better ex-president than I was a president," the nation's 39th chief executive told reporters with that broad Georgia smile, and they all laughed. Many of them had covered his turbulent presidential years and the 1980 defeat that first deflated him before he bounced back.

For Carter, now 81, the past quarter-century has been a model of what former presidents can accomplish. He set up the Carter Center in Atlanta to help countries around the world, working for peace, promoting human rights and elections, and providing assistance. He helped presidents out of jams as a personal international emissary. And in 2002, he won the Nobel Peace Prize for his peacemaking efforts.

With all that behind him, Jimmy Carter is returning to politics again - not to run for the presidency, but to comment on it in a bold way that he has never done before. In a new book, entitled "Our Endangered Values," he lashes out at a religiously based "fundamentalism" in the Bush administration and in the Republican Party and says it is putting the country at risk.

It is likely to make him a much more controversial figure, something of a risk for a man who has engendered good feelings outside of politics. "It was (a book) that I wrote with some hesitation and trepidation," he said. "It is the first political book I have ever written."

Carter obviously meant the first political book in his ex-presidency, because his first, "Why Not the Best?" was a campaign tome designed to introduce him to the public in 1976, when he defeated Gerald R. Ford for the presidency.

Just to note, Senator Bayh will be celebrating his kids' birthday come Tuesday. I wish them a happy birthday.

I supported Senator Lieberman in 2004. I don't regret that. I do wish that this country does something with the genocide in Darfur.

All of which brings me to a proposal of sorts. Darfur presents, first and foremost, a foreign policy challenge that must be met by those in power--and soon. But it also presents a chance for liberals to clarify their worldview, for themselves and for the country they aspire to once again lead. Precisely because Darfur is an easy case, it should unite those liberals who favored the Iraq war and those who opposed it; those who consider themselves liberal hawks and liberal doves; those who supported Joe Lieberman in 2004 and those who preferred Dennis Kucinich. Anyone who considers himself a liberal idealist should know where to stand on Darfur, and what must be done. The only people left on the outside of this coalition will be the most hard-hearted of the liberal realists; and I'm not sure those people deserve to be called liberals anyway.

We have got to do something. I lost cousins to mass genocide. I never got to know those cousins. If this country does not do something, then our foreign policy is flawed.

President Bush has reached a new low in the recent poll showing his approval at 39%. I'm in the 60% that disapprove of the way he does his job.

Second City's Tour Co. is in Louisville this weekend.

That's all til this afternoon.