Monthly Archives: October 2009

I couldn’t even count how many health insurance related discussions I’ve had in recent months. The current debate continues among friends, between politicians, within families, in Congress, at the workplace, on talk radio and even on Facebook. These days, you can be forgiven if your eyes start to glaze over at the mention of health insurance. While it’s an important debate, I think we’re all starting to suffer from health insurance fatigue. But if you are enrolled in Medicare, there’s …

Former NBAer Reggie Miller does it. Annie on TV’s 90210 did it. The View‘s Elisabeth Hasselbeck has even admitted to accidentally doing it. These days, there seems to be no shortage of stories about people who are sexting, or sending explicit photos and text messages via their cell phones or computers. The trend isn’t limited to celebrities and fictional TV characters. An increasing number of news reports focus on adults and minors who have run afoul of the law because …

As a kid, Halloween was one of my favorite holidays. My friends and I would plan elaborate costumes, map out routes that were guaranteed to maximize our candy collections, and set off immediately after dinner to spend a few hours trick or treating. Our only rules: Don’t eat candy that looks tampered with, don’t eat fresh fruit and don’t eat homemade treats. Halloween today bears little resemblance to the holiday I knew as a child of the 1970s, because today’s …

Before "Balloon Boy" stole the headlines last Thursday, another little boy was making the news. Zachary Christie is the cute first grader who bought a camping tool–which included a combo fork, spoon and knife–to school so he could use it when eating lunch. In doing so, Zachary inadvertently violated the school district’s zero-tolerance weapons policy. He was initially suspended and sentenced to 45 days in reform school before the school district came to its senses and let him return to …

It’s a common story: A woman is a superstar at work, but as soon as she announces that she’s pregnant, she’s falls out of favor with her supervisors. Or a woman goes on maternity leave, only to get laid off while she was away from her job. Or a woman applies for a job, but the prospective employer seems to lose interest when they learn she is pregnant. The Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, an amendment to Title VII of …