More Mathy Stuff

My 5yo thinks that negative numbers are cool and wants me to explain fractals. Fractals! I have no idea what a fractal is, beyond having seen a few pretty pictures. Needless to say, I spend a goodly amount of time trying to figure out mathy stuff so that I can help him satisfy his immense thirst. It's an interesting journey for me, since I left school convinced that I was math-impaired, and even went so far as to choose my major partly based on which of the options required zero math classes. (I studied Japanese. The math totally scared me off of astrophysics; I'm not so sure that I chose correctly.) Teaching this kid is fascinating because I'm learning so much. It has rocked my math world, and I'm discovering that this math stuff isn't so scary after all, and in fact, can be pretty interesting. Fun, even!

So, here are some of the things that I've been reading this week:

First of all, Let's Play Math is going into my feed so that I get to look at their stuff when they post it. That blog is fascinating.

Apparently, multiplication is NOT repeated addition. That idea (they say) works for integers, but no so much in other number sets. Like fractions. And mysterious things called "triangular numbers." And some other things that I don't believe that I've ever heard of. But, since Hero is starting to explore both multiplication and fractions a little, I'm trying to wrap my head around this idea at least a little bit before he decides that these topics are really interesting and inhales them. So here are a few of the articles I've been reading about this:

If It Ain't Repeated Addition, What Is It?
What's Wrong With Repeated Addition?
PUFM 1.5 Multiplication (This one has the pretty picture that spawned the, "What's a fractal?" question.)
It Ain't No Repeated Addition (This one's from a real live mathematician.)

We also watched some of Education Unboxed's videos. Education Unboxed is another awesome resource that I'll be visiting and revisiting. It's done by a homeschooling mom who started with Miquan, and has continued to collect teaching materials for doing math in that style, and made videos to share what she's learned. They're pretty cool. For instance, after watching this, Hero wants to build a pyramid with our rods tomorrow.

Cuisenaire Rods - Playing With Square Numbers from Education Unboxed on Vimeo.

And this one, also from Unboxed, is how I'll probably do multiplication with him the next time we play with that.


Introducing Multiplication and Division Concepts from Education Unboxed on Vimeo.

Though it may be a bit before we do that. He's enjoying doing "tricky math" which is 2 and 3 digit addition. He thinks giving me huge numbers, so I have to use our 1000 cube to answer his questions is pretty awesome. And he's getting pretty good with the addition, including carrying, though he hasn't seen it written out yet. We'll do that part soon.

Another thing I want to hit at some point with him, probably several points, is mental math. Only, I suck at mental math. Turns out, there are strategies for doing the stuff, and this post has a bunch of them.


Aaand, this one is not math, directly, but still related. It's a fun game to play with kids: How To Train Your Robot. Looks pretty awesome.

Oh, and those fractals he wants to know about? Turns out they're some kind of geometric shape. Like rectangles and pentagons, only different. And this site is for teaching kids about them. I'll definitely be going back there to check that out.

Making Memories

When Monkey was a baby and I first read The Well-Trained Mind, I loved Bauer's suggestion that talking to your child will help them to aquire language faster, and thus to read sooner and more easily. Plus, I like talking to my kids, and it was a great excuese to go through the day telling them what's going on. Turns out that sort of parenting probably also helps them develop their memories, and kids that get talked to a lot - especially about the past - remember earlier and more than other kids. Who'da thunk?
 

Real Friends

I've been reading about parenting tonight, and came across this fun "GOYBP"  site. That is, "Get Off Your Butt Parenting." So far, I like what I see quite a bit. I'm reading this page, and it's got some awesome thoughts, including a story that moved me to tears. But the thing that brought me to my blog was this, about a friend. A real friend.

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It’s humbling to admit that I didn’t realize my yelling was “that” bad.  Nor did I realize how often and how loud I was yelling, until a friend who cared enough to tell the truth did just that.  She told me my home sounded like her childhood home and though I was not yelling anything mean or shameful, my kids were still being affected by it.
I knew deep, deep down that she was right.  I knew I needed help and support.  I asked my dear friend if she would provide accountability in terms of yelling and 8 years later, she still asks me how I’m doing!

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I hope that Joanne knows how fortunate she is to have a friend with that kind of courage. It's hard to be the one who says, "Hon, I love you, but you're waaay off here." It's scary. It has to be important because it's risking the whole friendship. What if she hates what you say and it spoils everything? I have spoiled friendships this way, by trying to be that friend. The one who said the hard things. Friendship, real friendship, is hard work. Sometimes, like everything else in life, in friendship there is opposition.

If being this kind of friend is hard, it's no picnic being the person on the receiving end either. It's never comfortable to take a good hard look at yourself and realize that something is seriously out of place. It's no wonder that we sometimes get angry at the person holding up the mirror where we find such unpleasant things! It takes courage to say, "Maybe you're right; I'll think about it," rather than snarling and leaving. I hope that the next time someone tries to do this for me I have the courage to be the kind of friend that Joanne was in her story.

Perhaps the coolest part of the story of Joanne and her friend is the way that it's turned out. Not only does it look like Joanne learned some new skills, but she's written this cool website, and who knows how many people have benefited from her idea of GOYBP. It seems particularly appropriate to me that the story would be on her page about becoming a Grace-Based Parent, since it seems clear to me that she's become an instrument in the Lord's hands in teaching people about parenting, and friendship, and who knows what else.

I Needed This Today

Speaking The Truth in Love

Links Links Links

Just a bit of this and that from around and about.

I've been thinking that some obstacle courses this summer would be fun. Monkey's not rollerskating yet (though maybe we should find some), but this kid-made obstacle course looked like fun. Here was another idea.

I enjoyed seeing Rand Paul go after the energy folks in this clip. Go Mr. Paul!!



Harmony Art Mom had a good idea - put up a painting for your desktop wallpaper for art appreciation, and I chose this one by Degas.

And, last, here's a lovely article with a more realistic look at those pioneer foremothers' lives. Here's a favorite snip:

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Because the lure is there to think, Since I can never do as good a job of it as they did, why try at all?” or “Clearly I am not cut out for this. Some women were not meant to be homemakers, and I am one of them. I should go back to work, and things will be better.”

While it may seem like a silly and overblown reaction to the fact that pioneers grew their own food and we just found ourselves unable for the third year in a row to plant that vegetable garden we wanted, it is a mantra that is too familiar to many. There is a seductive whisper around us: “Just give up. You aren’t good enough. You can’t do this. Who do you think you are?” And we all know the one who would love for us to fall for those lies, don’t we? But we forget that we were not intended to be pioneer foremothers. God put us here, in this time, and with our own challenges. These challenges are different, sometimes less immediate, but quite often everywhere around us.

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Article: Natural Law: the ultimate source of Constitutional Law

The Founders DID NOT establish the Constitution for the purpose of granting rights. Rather, they established this government of laws (not a government of men) in order to secure each person's Creator­ endowed rights to life, liberty, and property. ...

Herein lay the security for men's individual rights - an immut­able code of law, sanctioned by the Creator of man's rights, and designed to promote, preserve, and protect him and his fellows in the enjoyment of their rights. They believed that such natural law, revealed to man through his reason, was capable of being understood by both the ploughman and the professor.

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Thought This Was Interesting

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Policies restricting food and liquid intake [during labor] date from an era when laboring women were routinely given general anesthesia and risked aspirating food into the lungs. Modern anesthetic techniques have virtually eliminated this risk, which is further reduced by the fact that only a tiny minority of laboring women, even among those who deliver via cesarean section, actually receive general anesthesia. ...

Elizabeth Allemann, MD [said,] “Women deserve to be fully informed about what the evidence actually shows, and it’s time that the medical profession abandoned policies based on the outdated and paternalistic idea that patients should play no role whatsoever in the decision-making process.” -The Big Push For Midwives press release

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The commentary above comes in response to a recent statement from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which uses phrases like "may be allowed to quench their thirst" and "women are not allowed to eat." Part of the Big Push's objection is to the paternalistic nature of such language: this is not words used by people who see themselves as a hired consultant, adviser, and emergency safety net. This is something said by people who think they have a right to order women around. The other objection is that this recommendation is not supported by research.

I'm currently reading The Thinking Woman's Guide to a Better Birth by Henci Goer, and she has a lot to say about how the "nothing by mouth" rules stack up next to the research. Chapter 4 is all about this topic, but I'll pull out some of the highlights.

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In the 1940's, back in the days when general anesthetics were administered through opaque masks, doctors began forbidding food to patients undergoing surgery because they realized that vomiting and inhaling food particles into the lungs (aspiration) was a grave and often fatal complication to surgery. Since laboring women during this time were usually heavily drugged and often had general anesthesia even for vaginal births, doctors extended the policy to childbirth. On on grounds whatever, and despite knowing that clear liquids empty rapidly from the stomach, the ban included drinking too. Thus, nothing by mouth... became standard practice before surgery and during labor.

Today, changes in anesthetic and obstetric practice have made aspiration a vanishingly rare event. Less than 2 per 1,000,000 pregnant women in the United States between 1988 and 1990 died of any anesthesia-related complication - not just aspiration - during delivery. ... Nonetheless [nothing by mouth] in labor remains the norm at many hospitals. ...

To begin with, eating and drinking in labor are safe. In three large U.S. studies totaling seventy-eight thousand women in labor who ate and drank freely, there was not one case of aspiration. The anesthesia-related maternal mortality rate in England and Wales, where oral intake in labor is usual, is identical to the rate in the United States, where it is not. ...

Why then the strenuous objections to oral intake and the insistence on routine IVs? What we have, once again, is an obstetric belief system that defines childbirth as a medical-surgical event. Eating and drinking do not fit this model. IVs do. ...

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In addition to being a direction that arose in circumstances that no longer exist, Goer goes on to point out that forbidding food and drink during labor not only makes the process of labor unnecessarily unpleasant, it may pose some risks to the baby as well:

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Hunger and thirst cause considerable discomfort. ... In addition, during pregnancy, starvation causes a faster, sharper drop-off in blood sugar levels, and an earlier switch to metabolizing body fat. Vigorous exercise - in this case, labor - accelerates this process. This is a problem when women fast in labor because metabolizing fat produces ketones. In animal studies, ketones have been shown to cross into fetal circulation, making the fetal blood more acidic (acidosis). Acidosis is a symptom of fetal distress... (Pages 75-79)

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Really makes that statement from the ACOG sound a lot less generous, doesn't it?

Article: Study Confirms Homeschool Academic Achievement

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Overall the study showed significant advances in homeschool academic achievement as well as revealing that issues such as student gender, parents’ education level, and family income had little bearing on the results of homeschooled students. ...


The extent of government regulation on homeschoolers did not affect the results.

Low state regulation—87th percentile
Medium state regulation—88th percentile
High state regulation—87th percentile ...

The question HSLDA regularly puts before state legislatures is, “If government regulation does not improve the results of homeschoolers why is it necessary?”


In short, the results found in the new study are consistent with 25 years of research, which show that as a group homeschoolers consistently perform above average academically. The Progress Report also shows that, even as the numbers and diversity of homeschoolers have grown tremendously over the past 10 years, homeschoolers have actually increased the already sizeable gap in academic achievement between themselves and their public school counterparts-moving from about 30 percentile points higher in the Rudner study (1998) to 37 percentile points higher in the Progress Report (2009).
Read more...

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Christmas Planning

It's not that long, and Christmas will be here, crazy as that seems. We're making our lists of gifts, and I'm figuring out what I need to make, what I need to buy, and we should probably think about getting our cards ready so we can get them out in the near future. I know from past years that Christmas cards are much more fun if you send them out early: we get many more back the years we do it early. Plus, it's much less stressful.

But all that is secondary to the real meaning of Christmas, and to the things we ought to be thinking about during the Christmas season. It seems like every year we reexamine our traditions to see if they are still serving us well, and tweak them a little bit. This year is no different. I ran across a very thoughtful post, over at The Apple Cider Mill.

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Advent literally means "coming," and it is a four-week season that precedes Christmas. It is meant to be a season of penitence, reflection, and fasting, but as we all know, this is hardly the tenor or focus of the four weeks that precede Christmas for most people. Usually, the season of Advent can be categorized for contemporary Americans by business, exorbitance, indulgence, and stress. Many Christians try to step back from the temptation to follow the crowd in this regard, but all too often what they end up with is a period of time that doesn't feel preparatory; it merely feels ordinary. We know that we don't want the weeks before Christmas to feel "ordinary," and so we feel torn between cutting back and giving into the secular siren call. In either case, how we usually feel by the time Christmastide rolls around is exhausted and dissatisfied.

Advent provides a wonderful balance. It is not ordinary time; it is a season set apart in anticipation of the great feast and celebration of Chistmas to come. The very penitent nature of the season prepares us to surrender completely to the celebration of Emmanuel, God with us. The more we surrender to Advent, the more our hearts will be ready to receive the gift of the Christ Child, just as Lent prepares our hearts for the gift of our Resurrected Lord.

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Now we, not being Catholic, don't celebrate Lent. But I think that she's onto something here. There is merit to the idea of planning, and her analogy about preparing for a baby coming (see the next quote) is an interesting one. I don't know that I want to separate "Advent" into its own season, but I can understand why she does and I think that we can take from the ideas. Actually, when you explain Lent like this, there may be more to it than I was previously aware of. I'd never had a good Catholic explain what it's all about before, and it never made a lot of sense to me. There is reverence and beauty in the symmetry of Bethany's celebration of Advent and Lent.

She has several suggestions for how to go about celebrating Advent - that is, how to focus on Christ during the Christmas season. I like quite a few of them. The first thing that Bethany suggests is an attitude adjustment.

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Remember that Advent is a season of PREPARATION for Christmas. Advent is not Christmas. This distinction may look different in different homes; it's the principle that counts. So start thinking about how your Advent can differ from you Christmastide.

For those who think Christmas just comes of its own accord and requires no preparation, I offer the analogy of a birth in the family. Of course, the baby is going to come at the end of gestation whether you prepare for it or not, but you do prepare. You go to lamaze classes, you set up a nursery, you pray, you reflect, you journal, you anticipate. At Christmas, we celebrate the birth of Christ. Moreover, we are looking forward with hope to His Second Coming. He's going to come, anyway, of course. But, it will be better for us if we're ready for the celebration!

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Go read the rest of her post. It's got some cool ideas for creating a lovely Christmas season and filling your home with the spirit of Christ.

One of Bethany's friends tried to leave her a post-length comment, which blogger wouldn't accept because it was too long. The friend emailed it instead, and Bethany posted it. It has some more great ideas, including this that would be great for the season:

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If you like classical music, there are so many wonderful pieces written for the celebration of Advent. Start with Bach's Cantata BWV 140. Read a translation of the text first (it's in German) and then listen to the cantata (really sit down and LISTEN without doing anything else - if you are out walking with your ipod, or riding in your car, it doesn't count...) and meditate on what the music and the text say about Christ, our relationship to him, and his second coming.

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An interesting thing that I notice in both these women's writing is the intertwining of not only Easter and Christmas themes, but also, within the Christmas celebration, an awareness of the Second Coming, and excitement about that. What a cool idea! Bethany's friend had some good ideas for this as well.

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Speaking of the second coming, which I was a few points ago, because Advent is a time of preparing to celebrate Christ's first coming (incarnation) as well as looking forward in anticipation and preparation for the second coming, I like to use Advent as a time to study parables about the kingdom of heaven and Bible texts about the wedding feast that is to come. Start with the story of the virgins and the oil, and go from there.

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Article: In Defense of Memorization

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The music of the verse was as entrancing to [my daughter] as to any grown-up. Without knowing it, a child who has learned a scrap of verse has been drawn into the civilizing interplay of music and language, rhythm and sound, melody and words—just as educational theory as far back as ancient Greece posits, according to Werner Jaeger in his classic account of Greek education, Paideia.

From The Cat in the Hat on up, verse teaches children something about the patterns and relationships that bind together the words of which it is composed. Poetry sets up an abstract system of order and harmony; the rhythm and the rhyme scheme are logical structures that a child can comprehend even before he understands the words themselves, just as he can grasp the rhythmic and harmonic relations of a piece of music.

What the child discovers, in other words, is not only aesthetically pleasing, but important to cognitive development. Classic verse teaches children an enormous amount about order, measure, proportion, correspondence, balance, symmetry, agreement, temporal relation (tense), and contingent possibility (mood). Mastering these concepts involves the most fundamental kind of learning, for these are the basic categories of thought and the framework in which we organize sensory experience. Kids need to become familiar with them not only through exercises in recitation and memorization, but also, as they proceed to the later grades, by construing, analyzing, and diagramming particular verses. In The Idea of a University, John Henry Newman called this close study of language “a discipline in accuracy of mind,” a “first step in intellectual training” that impresses on young minds notions of “method, order, principle, and system; of rule and exception, of richness and harmony.” And of course memorization is a kind of exercise that strengthens the powers of the mind, just as physical exercise strengthens those of the body.

Read more...

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This article is beautifully written, and I love what they have to say. I can say that the little bit of memory work Monkey has done has been surprisingly successful - he knows bits of "Who Has Seen the Wind" after only a few readings, and he's doing well with the scripture memorization we ask him to do, which seems like a lot of memorizing for such a little guy! For me, I was just amazed when I started doing memory work: not only was I able to memorize, but it made my brain work better all the time, I remembered more of everything, not just the verses that I had set myself to remember. No more Mommy-brain for me! My memory box takes care of that for me.

Article: Making Your Home a Haven

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When people visit my home now, their response when they walk through the door is not “Oh your home is so clean”, now I hear “Your home always feels so warm and inviting”.

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That sort of thing is my most favorite type of compliment to get on my home. It's a people-oriented attitude, rather than a stuff-oriented attitude. I'd never thought about what specifically I could do to make my house more warm and inviting more of the time. I think she's got some good ideas.

Masterly Inactivity in Action

Took a gander at the current Charlotte Mason Carnival, and found this:

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“Masterly inactivity,” an expression of Thomas Carlyle’s brought to life in detail by Mason, is the perfect balance between being a dictator and a doormat. It is a letting alone that is rooted in insight. A parent’s wise self-restraint is grounded in the authority and self-confidence of experience and knowledge, which the child lacks and needs.

“She must see without watching, know without telling, be on the alert always, yet never obviously, fussily, so,” Mason explains. “This open-eyed attitude must be sphinx-like in its repose.” ...

My kids went through a time when they would fill up on the main course and wouldn’t feel like eating a salad after it, as is the French custom. So I began to serve the salad first. I just got them to the table hungry and served the salad, while the main course was still cooking. I did not tell them, “I want you to eat salad. You must eat your salad. It’s good for you.” I knew what was going on but they didn’t need to know. They ate it and were happy.
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How Very Charlotte Mason of Her

...In her book, The Sense of Wonder, Rachel Carson describes waking her twenty-month-old nephew in the night and carrying him out to experience the majesty of a raging thunderstorm. When was the last time you took your family walking in the rain, wading in the stream-like gutters? When wind whips through the night or when fog lies so thick and low that streetlights become pale glowing orbs, do you venture out, all of you holding hands, without a flashlight? Have you simply slept under the stars in your own backyard?

Think of the attitudes parents convey to children in such experiences, not necessarily attitudes about thunderstorms or snakes, but about life and the joy of living! ... “Well, then,” the parent asks, “how do I teach my children about nature?” I’m an interpretive naturalist; “teaching” is my job. So I speak from experience when I say, “You can’t, yet. Not until you know that nature really can’t be taught; it can only be discovered. And we adults cannot share in discovery until we reawaken our own ability to see the world through childlike eyes.”

“Discovering nature” makes the common uncommon.

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Interesting Constitutional Commentary

Interesting commentary on the office of the President of the United States from the National Center for Constitutional Studies:

It is interesting that when the oath of office was administered there was some confusion and it had to be administered again. The thought, apparently, was that if one is committing to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution” it had better be done as perfectly as man could do it, lest there be any one say the Constitution was not being meticulously followed.

But if we are making every attempt to be true to the Constitution, why stop with the oath? ...

In Washington's day there were 350 civilian employees serving a population of 3 million. Today there are around 300 million or one hundred times more people, so if Washington were President today he would have to have at least 35,000 (350x100) civilian employees to provide the same level of service today that he maintained in the 1790s. But let's assume that our modern society is ten times more complicated, necessitating ten times the number of federal employees. That would be 350,000 employees today.

Since we have around 3.5 million federal employees, that makes the ratio of government workers over one hundred times greater in our day than in Washington's era. The question needs to be asked: Are we still just trying to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution as the oath requires? ...

The concentrating of all this power in the executive department may have been done with the best of intentions and with glowing promises. However, experience is demonstrating that this theory of "problem solving at the center" has turned out to be as counter-productive as the Founders warned it would be. Not only has it failed to fulfill its promises in the United States, but similar experiments have failed all over the world.

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Research Supports the Traditional Family

From an article titled, "Dan Quayle Was Right," printed in April 1993 in the Atlantic Online.

Taken together, the research presents a powerful challenge to the prevailing view of family change as social progress. Not a single one of the assumptions underlying that view can be sustained against the empirical evidence. Single-parent families are not able to do well economically on a mother's income. In fact, most teeter on the economic brink, and many fall into poverty and welfare dependency. Growing up in a disrupted family does not enrich a child's life or expand the number of adults committed to the child's well-being. In fact, disrupted families threaten the psychological well-being of children and diminish the investment of adult time and money in them. Family diversity in the form of increasing numbers of single-parent and stepparent families does not strengthen the social fabric. It dramatically weakens and undermines society, placing new burdens on schools, courts, prisons, and the welfare system. These new families are not an improvement on the nuclear family, nor are they even just as good, whether you look at outcomes for children or outcomes for society as a whole. In short, far from representing social progress, family change represents a stunning example of social regress.

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Happy Religious Freedom Day

“Religious freedom is the cornerstone of all freedoms we have,” said TVC [Traditional Values Coalition] Chairman Rev. Louis P. Sheldon. “This nation was founded upon a belief that God is the creator of our rights – not the government – and that religious freedom is closely linked to political freedom and limited government. TVC wholeheartedly supports Religious Freedom Day and urges every Christian to learn more about this important celebration of religious liberty.”

Read more - including the official proclamation of the holiday.

"Separation of Church and State"

I just read a great article about this. I learned a number of things:

1. Separation of Church and State is a phrase from a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote. It's not in the Constitution at all. I should have known this; I just read the Constitution recently, but I hadn't picked up on it and I'm glad that the article's author spelled it out.

2. The First Amendment, like so much of the Constitution, is about balance. Here's the text of the amendment:

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Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press; or the right of the people to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

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They call the first part, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" the establishment clause, and the second part, "or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;" the free exercise clause. They're supposed to balance and complement each other. Congress doesn't get to choose our religion. They don't even get to pick a favorite religion and give them special status. That's the establishment clause. Congress also doesn't get to make it difficult for us to practice our religion. Say, by telling us when and where to pray. Or not to pray, in the case of prayer in school. (That's also a violation of freedom of speech.)

3. There was a bunch of other interesting stuff too: a Supreme Court Justice that was also a member of the KKK, and the founder of the ACLU was a member of the Communist Party of America. Oh, and also what Jefferson was really talking about when he wrote about the separation of church and state. He certainly wasn't saying that churches should be barred from the political process! I highly recommend the article!

Temple Protests

From "Temple Protests Go Too Far" by Bob Lonsberry:

In the name of tolerance, great intolerance is shown. The biggest bigots in our society are the ones who routinely accuse others of bigotry. ...

Those who favor abortion rights do not protest outside the parishes and cathedrals of Catholicism. Those who denounce militant Islam do not march around American mosques. Supporters of Palestinian rights do not shout through loudspeakers outside synagogues.

If they did, we would be offended as a society, and see the impropriety of their deeds.

But thousands can hatefully mill outside the gates of the sacred buildings of Mormonism and do so with impunity, knowing that their actions and motives will go unchallenged, that the evening news will bring them nothing but the publicity they seek. ...

Which is why this is taking place. In an act of bigotry against houses of worship, supporters of the homosexual agenda are sending a shot across the bow of every church, mosque, synagogue and temple in the country.

Either keep your mouth shut, or get what the Mormons are getting.

Here’s hoping that that warning will be ignored, and that people of conscience will have the courage of their convictions – that people of all faiths will stand their ground. Contention must be avoided, but not at the cost of capitulation.

Americans do not lose their civil rights because they believe in God or worship with their fellow believers. People of faith are as free to vote and speak their mind as anyone else.

What this episode teaches is that people of faith had better stand together in the defense of their rights, or they will be picked off one by one.

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Third Party Presidential Debate

CSPAN TO AIR PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE LIVE!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Free and Equal is pleased to announce that CSPAN will be covering tomorrow night's [October 23rd] debate LIVE from 9:00pm to 10:30 EST. Constitution Party candidate Chuck Baldwin and Independent candidate Ralph Nader have confirmed their participation.
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Deep Thoughts

Wherein The Equuschick Draws Deep Life Lessons about Men and Women from Exploding Canning Jars.