Cheney's daughter makes a baby and political statement

Mr. Dobson is the founder of Focus on the Family, a conservative activist group, and ordinarily I couldn't see eye to eye with him on the day of the week. But I agree with him about Mary Cheney.

He wrote about the vice president's pregnant, lesbian daughter in a Time magazine essay in December. Here's part of what he said:

"With all due respect to Cheney and her partner, Heather Poe, the majority of more than 30 years of social-science evidence indicates that children do best on every measure of well-being when raised by their married mother and father. That is not to say Cheney and Poe will not love their child. But love alone is not enough to guarantee healthy growth and development. The two most loving women in the world cannot provide a daddy for a little boy - any more than the two most loving men can be complete role models for a little girl."

In other words, fathers matter, something we seem to have forgotten, so busy are we pretending that women and men are interchangeable.

Mom charged for leaving baby in car

Penny Nicole Hume expected to spend just a few minutes at the Baldwin County Corrections Center on Friday afternoon, authorities said.

Instead, she was booked into the facility for the weekend.

The 21-year-old had parked her 1997 Oldsmobile Delta 88 LS in front of the Baldwin County Sheriff's Office, next to the jail, and left her infant son strapped in a car seat, according to Sheriff Huey "Hoss" Mack.

Hume of Robertsdale cracked the rear driver's side window and kept the doors unlocked.

Then she stepped out and approached the docket room, a few hundred feet away, and asked the officers about bail for her boyfriend, Cody Robert Johnson.

Johnson was charged Thursday night with driving on a suspended license, driving without insurance, speeding and having switched tags.

A new French exception? Having more babies

PARIS: Thirty years ago, the government of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing was urging the French to have "un troisième enfant pour la France!" But it is only now that they have taken the advice.
The national statistics agency says that in 2006 France had the highest birthrate in Europe. The average number of births by women of fertile age was slightly more than two.
Thus France becomes one of the two European Union states with a positive birthrate; Ireland is the other. The contrast with their neighbors is very marked. Germany, Italy and Spain all have birthrates under 1.4. The rates in the new EU members, Slovakia, Slovenia, Lithuania, the Czech Republic and even Roman Catholic Poland, are below 1.3.
French life expectancy in 2005 was also the highest in Europe, at 84 for women and 77 for men, and it increased last year by three and a half months for women and nearly five months for men.

Outdated Baby Food, Formula Found On Store Shelves

Outdated baby formula on local grocery store shelves -- it's not supposed to be there, but our KIRO 7 Consumer investigators found it.
Baby food and baby formula are the only foods required by the FDA to have a "use by" date printed on the cans and jars.
When that date comes and goes, that food and formula is supposed to be pulled.
But we found outdated food and formula still on the shelves -- and still for sale.
We took our hidden camera inside local grocery stores.
We found that of the 29 grocery stores, drug stores and other retailers, nine had baby formula on the shelves that was past the "use-by" date.
We found a can of powdered formula with a use-by date read August 2006. But it was still for sale in early January when we bought it.