I was (amazingly) the first commenter on this story, and spoke of at least two grandmothers who didn't want to take care of or look after their grandchildren.

To be clear, this is not to do with their sons/daughters wanting to dump their own kids on granny. No. This is about even when the kids themselves want to spend some alone time with grandma, grandma doesn't want to have anything to do with it.

In terms of us living in a selfish culture where we dump kids on grandparents because we want to go do our own thing, let me remind everyone here that in most of the world, the family unit is far more connected and interdependent than the United States/Western world. You expect grandparents to take care of little ones because you're also taking care of the grandparents. It all works together. Of course, in the US, and especially in the middle and upper-middle class, we're more accustomed to the grandparents being self-sufficient, income-wise. And our families are fragmented to begin with - we're expected to move out and be on our own once we graduate high school, ferchrissakes. So maybe the whole grandma-watching-grandkid thing isn't just about mom getting a chance to get the grocery shopping done in peace, or (god forbid) some time to herself once in a while. Maybe it's also about connecting generations, and that might be becoming less and less important in the US. Which is sad.

My family is kind of a mix of both - three generations live in one big house, and then others of us live close by. We see each other occasionally. I would never expect my mothers (I'm including the in-laws) to watch my kids, but my father-in-law and mother-in-law have already offered, even though I don't have any yet! Baby pressure, much?

So maybe grandmothers in the US shouldn't be obligated to babysit, but I think the discussion is not just about that, but about whether grandmothers want to spend any alone time with their grandchildren at all.

That is all.

I know at least two grandmas who only take care of their grandkids under extreme duress, and even then will complain about all the stuff they're missing because of it.

So a trend? I don't know. But it happens.

This is incredibly disturbing. And, yet again, I feel a sense of helplessness. I know your job is to report and not to direct toward action - but what can we do to protest and ultimately try to stop this?

I voted for Obama and am pleased with some of the things he's done, but this is still scary, scary stuff. I think many of us voted for him because we thought he would not do this. So what do we do now?

When the body is sick, it gets a fever that helps to work the virus out. The fever is a sign of the body correcting itself, ridding itself of the things that made it sick.

Which is to say, I don't think this is a bad thing. I mean, it's terrible that people are losing their jobs, homes, etc. - that is truly awful. But this is what happens when the markets run rampant, unchecked, and based on too much speculation, too much consumer debt. As Robert Reich wrote in his Salon piece on the economy, 1% of the population controlled 20% of the wealth going into this recession, and the last time that happened was just before the Great Depression. Hmm... what do they say about those who don't know their history? Republicans (and Dittoheads in particular, since they seem to be flocking to the Limbaugh stories here) like to pretend that it wasn't greed that got us into the Great Depression, and it wasn't big government spending that got us out of it.

We live in a play-by-play, 24-hour news cycle, and all of us have developed a very short attention span. This will all start to correct itself in a few months, or at worst a couple of years. In the meantime, we have to raise taxes to pay for the national deficit, and get smarter about how average people work and live and consume. People do need to start paying off their debts, and living within their means, and building savings (which economists are wringing their hands over now - we've been overconsuming for so long it's difficult to deal with regular consumption levels).

And this country has to use these tough times to innovate. Innovation is the best driver of a strong economy. Innovation means production, which means jobs. This is why Obama and others want to invest in green energy (though "clean coal" is a fallacy... I'm talking about truly green energy), because it creates production-based jobs that are more sustainable. It takes the long view, not the short one.

So I'm not convinced that everything the current administration is doing is the absolute best, but it's certainly far better than the last administration. And things may get worse before they get better, but they will get better, if both parties on the Hill can agree that it's time to rethink how this country has been doing business for the last 30 years.