What Fun!

Listening to the news these days is such fun! The world is coming apart at the seams and I feel a bit guilty enjoying it all so much, but it is like watching a bad movie, it is so surreal. My son-in-law Justin, when I said what a good time I was having with it all, said, "Spoken like a woman without a 401K". Well...yeah...I guess if you don't laugh, you'll cry...
So here's my solution for the automakers' crisis of potential implosion: Have the oil companies bail them out! The oil companies have been pulling in record profits every quarter for over a year (although maybe that has come to an end with oil at barely over $50 a barrel) so they can just consider it as an expanded version of R&D, which is where we keep hearing they are putting all those stupendous profits (do I sound doubtful? tsk, tsk).
As far as the bailout is concerned, I'm not sure I get it (maybe that's the point...to keep us all confused). Why not let anyone who is interested renegotiate their mortgage to a more reasonable payment (like maybe something affordable?), extend the length of the mortgage (I really think the time of 40 or 50 year home loans has come), and let the bailout catch up their payments for them with their mortgage companies. Then they are on their own. The folks stay in their houses, the banks start seeing payments every month again, and things can creak along ever so slowly. Sounds like a solution, but of course it isn't, because things just do not work that way. But I still don't understand why the bailout isn't directly with the homeowners that have these unaffordable mortgages, which incidentally, they were sometimes "tricked" into or they were approved for the loans with fancy footwork unbeknownst to the home buyer (we'll just add another '0' to your annual income on the loan application, then you can afford a $650,000 home on a $75,000 income). It seems as if we are rewarding the folks that created the problem in the first place...
My last bit of fun with the news is the problem that Nebraska is having with their "Safe Haven" law. This is a law that has been enacted in a number of states to keep from having infants dumped in dumpsters or dropped in alleys somewhere. An admirable law, to be sure, but Nebraska got in trouble when the legislators couldn't decide what age the cut off should be. So they just wrote the law using the word "child". Well, as of today, 34 children have been left at hospitals, the vast majority of them teenagers. Nebraska is kinda' freaking out at this...I mean, NOBODY wants an unruly teenager around, much less 20+ of them. So here is my solution, with some input from my husband (okay, okay, so it was his idea...nitpicker...) how about enacting a "safe haven" law for the parents??? Meaning the parents can drop themselves off somewhere, where it is quiet and no one is asking anything of them, where they can just be mindless for a while, do puzzles or read, or SLEEP, or watch stupid TV, or ANYTHING so they can recharge and not feel compelled to abandon their kids out of sheer anxiety and feelings of being overwhelmed? When my kids were little, my friends and I use to call the time between 3 pm and dinnertime, "arsenic hour" because you wanted to poison your kids. So incredibly politically incorrect to say now, and of course, it was only a joke, but it was the most difficult time of day. What I would have given for a bit of a "safe haven" for myself during those times. It makes me wonder how many of the kids in Nebraska were dropped off between 3 pm and dinnertime?