Rep. Sharice Davids Promotes Bipartisan Affordable Childcare Act, Aiming to Ease Financial Strain on Families with Expanded Tax Credits

Yesterday, Representative Sharice Davids joined a Shawnee family to pick up their children from day care and discussed her bipartisan Affordable Childcare Act with them. The bill aims to ease the financial burden on parents by doubling three different tax credits, directly increasing their savings. With a report showing that working parents are spending 24 percent of their income on child care, Davids is advocating for urgent measures to reduce these costs.

Representative Sharice Davids’ bipartisan Affordable Childcare Act, introduced earlier this year with Representative Marc Molinaro (R-NY-19), proposes several significant enhancements:

Doubling the Child and Dependent Care Credit: This credit helps families offset child care and dependent care expenses. The Act increases the credit to $6,000 for one dependent and $12,000 for two or more, aiding working families in managing rising child care costs.

Doubling the Employer-Provided Child Care Credit: This credit allows businesses to claim expenses for providing child care facilities or services to their employees. The Act raises the credit to $300,000 per year, covering 25 percent of qualified child care facility expenses and 10 percent of child care resource and referral expenses, to encourage greater business investment in employee child care support.

Doubling Dependent Care Flexible Spending Account Contributions: This benefit allows employees to use pre-tax dollars for eligible dependent care expenses. The Act increases the contribution limit to $10,000, allowing parents to save more for qualifying caregiving costs. “Child care is essential not only for giving kids like Eli and Colby Zigtema a strong start, but also for allowing parents to earn a living and support their families,” said Davids. “Growing up with a single mom, I know how much a little extra money in the bank account can mean. That’s why I introduced bipartisan legislation to help the Zigtemas and other hardworking Kansas families afford the quality child care they need.”

Rep. Sharice Davids Promotes Bipartisan Affordable Childcare Act, Aiming to Ease Financial Strain on Families with Expanded Tax Credits

What’s this dog?

(Tuesday, I got the flu and the Covid vacs in my left arm. I got a bunch of stuff done-except posts-in case I get some side effects; for me, usually chills, aches, and fatigue from the Covid; I’ve never taken both together, but flu tires me out a bit, too. So far, at 8PM Tues, my left arm is quite painful but Bio Freeze really helps, and I’m tired. My hope is that tomorrow, or today when this posts, it’ll be over, and I can get more work done. Meanwhile, enjoy the video! This guy makes great videos.)

OT: Cover Snark

Enjoy at your leisure!

Cover Snark: Pit Check

I’m very sorry to read this, too.

James Earl Jones, acclaimed actor and voice of Darth Vader, dies at 93

By MARK KENNEDY Updated 8:03 PM CDT, September 9, 2024

NEW YORK (AP) — James Earl Jones, who overcame racial prejudice and a severe stutter to become a celebrated icon of stage and screen — eventually lending his deep, commanding voice to CNN, “The Lion King” and Darth Vader — has died. He was 93.

His agent, Barry McPherson, confirmed Jones died Monday morning at home in New York’s Hudson Valley region. The cause was not immediately clear.

The pioneering Jones, who in 1965 became one of the first African American actors in a continuing role on a daytime drama (“As the World Turns”) and worked deep into his 80s, won two Emmys, a Golden Globe, two Tony Awards, a Grammy, the National Medal of Arts and the Kennedy Center Honors. He was also given an honorary Oscar and a special Tony for lifetime achievement. In 2022, a Broadway theater was renamed in his honor.

He cut an elegant figure late in life, with a wry sense of humor and a ferocious work habit. In 2015, he arrived at rehearsals for a Broadway run of “The Gin Game” having already memorized the play and with notebooks filled with comments from the creative team. He said he was always in service of the work. (snip-MORE)

https://apnews.com/article/james-earl-jones-dies-19ea259ff3f44b91b2ed8730b702c23f?utm_source=copy&utm_medium=share

Monday at the Movies on Tuesday

reblog from hecatedemeter:

Monday at the Movies

Peace & Justice History for 9/10:

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryseptember.htm#september10

The clown doctor will see you now – and you’ll get better, quicker

September 9, 2024 Ellen Phiddian

(Back in the 80s I heard a story of Norman Cousins putting his apple juice in a specimen cup, then later taking a sip while listening to a visitor. I think of Norman Cousins when I see headlines like this one. I don’t believe he was a clown, but others’s mileage may vary, as to humor in the hospital, also Norman Cousins, not to mention clowns.)

Child looks suspiciously at medical clown in hospital — Credit: FatCamera / Getty Images

Medical clowns are known to have a positive therapeutic impact on kids in hospitals for a range of health issues, and now it’s been shown they can reduce the length of stay and antibiotic use for children with pneumonia.

A study, done on 51 children, found that those visited by medical clowns on average left hospital more than a day earlier than those who weren’t.

“Medical clowns undergo specific training to work in hospitals,” says Dr Karin Yaacoby-Bianu, a researcher at the Carmel Medical Centre and Israel Institute of Technology, Israel.

“They have been shown to reduce pain and alleviate stress and anxiety in children and their families during medical treatment, and have been gradually integrated into many aspects of hospital care.

“But their impact on children being treated for pneumonia has not been investigated.”

Yaacoby-Bianu presented her team’s research at the 2024 European Respiratory Society Congress.

“Community acquired pneumonia is one of the leading causes of hospitalisation in children, globally,” she says.

The team split 51 children, aged between 2 and 18, who had been hospitalised with pneumonia, into 2 groups.

They all received standard care, but one group also had four 15-minute visits from a medical clown from the Dream Doctors Project during their stays.

Photo of medical clown — Medical clown ‘tres jolie’. Credit: Dream Doctors/European Respiratory Society

The clowns did a variety of activities including music, singing, and guided imagination.

The group visited by clowns stayed in hospital for 43.5 hours on average, while the control group stayed in hospital for 70 hours on average.

Children visited by clowns needed an average of 2 days of IV antibiotic treatment, while the control group required 3. Other medical markers, like heart rate and inflammation, were lower in the clown group.

“While the practice of medical clowning is not a standardised interaction, we believe that it helps to alleviate stress and anxiety, improves psychological adjustment to the hospital environment and allows patients to better participate in treatment plans like adherence to oral antibiotics and fluids,” explains Yaacoby-Bianu.

“Laughter and humour may also have direct physiological benefits by lowering respiratory and heart rates, reducing air trapping, modulating hormones, and enhancing the immune function.”

Dr Stefan Unger, a paediatrician at the Royal Hospital for Children and Young People Edinburgh, UK, who wasn’t involved in the research, says the study shows the positive effect humour can have in healthcare. (snip-MORE)

https://cosmosmagazine.com/health/body-and-mind/medical-clowns-pneumonia/

How fast can a fruit fly walk – scientists built mini treadmills and found out

September 8, 2024 Evrim Yazgin

(I want to guess that it’s the same everywhere, and ask: did they put these treadmills on bananas?)

Fruit flies on treadmills are giving scientists insights into how insects walk in ways that previous, more invasive techniques could not.

Cartoon illustration of an imaginary fruit fly wearing sports apparel and running on a treadmill — Fruit fly on a treadmill. Illustration by Alice C. Gray.

Researchers want to understand how insects’ nervous systems respond to rapid changes underfoot. All animals must navigate potential hazards and changes in terrain, otherwise injury from falls would be likely (send this to your clumsy friend or relative).

Animals as diverse as flies, cockroaches, rats and humans all show similar ways of readjusting after a trip, for example.

Studying how insects adjust their walking will help scientists understand proprioception: how the body continually senses its articulation and movement.

These techniques have been helpful in evaluation and treatment of people, such as stroke patients, who have locomotive issues.

Fly on a treadmill — Graphical abstract. Credit: B G Pratt et al. Current Biology.

University of Washington researchers published in Current Biology their findings when fruit flies – Drosophila melanogaster – were put on specially-designed miniature treadmills.

Fruit flies are a good model for mapping neural locomotion control because they have a compact, fully mapped nervous system. Previous studies have also given scientists a suite of genetic tools to perform precise and specific manipulations of the fly’s nervous system.

Traditionally, researchers have studied insect locomotion either free walking or tethered.

Tethered insects have a small camera mounted on a stick attached to their backs. Unsurprisingly, this method is not the most comfortable for the insect, but an advantage of this approach is that it allows the fly’s movements on 3D surfaces to be studied.

“One disadvantage of studying locomotion in tethered flies is that their posture is constrained and normal ground reaction forces may be disrupted, which could affect walking kinematics,” the authors of the new study write.

Enter the Drosophila’s very own treadmill.

The researchers were able to track fly walking over long periods of time. Split-belt treadmills were used to investigate how the flies reacted to belts with different speeds on either side of the body.

Without the burden of a tethered camera, the flies were able to strut their stuff freely.

“At the extremes, flies on the treadmill were able to sustain walking at a max belt speed of 40 mm/s and surpassed an instantaneous walking velocity of 50 mm/s [about 0.18km/h], which is the fastest walking speed ever reported for Drosophila melanogaster,” the researchers say. (snip-MORE)

https://cosmosmagazine.com/science/biology/fruit-flies-insect-walking-treadmill/

Peace & Justice History for 9/9:

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryseptember.htm#september9

The Cases of January 6th

AP News

(I debated about putting this here; the page is a bit complicated for copy-pasting, but the material is important, as sometimes the passage of time blurs memories. There is work for justice being done on these cases and the whole of it, and here’s a nice gathering of information to date. Maybe a thing to read when you’ve got a few minutes. It is longer, but not TL;DR. You’ll want to know this stuff. )

by Michael Kunzelman, Alanna Durkin Richer, and Cal Woodward

Snips:

The Associated Press has spent more than three years tracking the nearly 1,500 Capitol riot cases brought by the Justice Department. AP reporters have reviewed hours of video footage and thousands of pages of court documents. They have sat through dozens of court hearings and trials for the rioters who descended on the Capitol and temporarily halted the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory. These videos represent a mere fraction of the evidence that prosecutors have presented to juries and judges deciding these cases.

Inside Washington’s federal courthouse, there’s no denying the reality of Jan. 6, 2021. Day after day, judges and jurors silently absorb the chilling sights and sounds from television screens of rioters beating police, shattering windows and hunting for lawmakers as democracy lay under siege.

But as he seeks to reclaim the White House, Donald Trump continues to portray the defendants as patriots worthy of admiration, an assertion that has been undercut by the adjudicated truth in hundreds of criminal cases where judges and juries have reached the opposite conclusion about what history will remember as one of America’s darkest days.

The cases have systematically put on record — through testimony, documents and video — the crimes committed, weapons wielded, and lives altered by physical and emotional damage. Trump is espousing a starkly different story, portraying the rioters as hostages and political prisoners whom he says he might pardon if he wins in November.

There are no broadcast television cameras inside the E. Barrett Prettyman federal courthouse on Constitution Avenue. But the real story of Jan. 6 is found in the mounds of evidence and testimony judges and juries have seen and heard behind the doors of the courthouse where hundreds of Trump’s supporters have been convicted in the attack. (snip-go read when you have a little time)

https://apnews.com/projects/january-6-cases/