I knew watching Howard Dean would be fun.

Some quotes from the DNC chair, Howard Dean:

"You think people can work all day and then pick up their kids at child care or wherever and get home and still manage to sandwich in an eight-hour vote? Well Republicans, I guess can do that. Because a lot of them have never made an honest living in their lives. "

Democrats are not the only ones who work all day, pick up their kids at child care, *and* manage to vote.

- "The Republicans are all about suppressing votes."

*yawn*

- "And the young lady piped up and said, now, Governor, just a second, I'm an Evangelical Christian. and we don't think there ought to be separation of church and state. We think this is a Christian Nation. And you could have heard a pin drop.....And after dinner I was thanking everybody for coming and contributing and everything. and I went up to her and said how is it that you managed to support me as an Evangelical Christian? There's some things you can't possibly agree with me on, such as Civil Rights for all Americans and a woman's right to make up her own mind about what kind of health care she has."

Code words here: Civil rights for all Americans=gay marriage, women's health care=abortion

- "We need to have pension portability, so that pensions as we move from job to job to job, the pensions follow us. They don't stay in the company. That great Democrat, Jim Jeffords has been introducing this for 15 years."

Just for the record, Jeffords is an Independent.

Could the Democratic party please stand for something other than hating Bush and the Republicans? They're getting rather repetitive.

Hat tip to Ankle Biting Pundits!

---Katie

Rock your baby if you want kids with rhythm

This is from The Telegraph in the UK:

Parents who bounce their babies to a song and rock them to a lullaby are unwittingly helping their brains to appreciate music, scientists have discovered.

The ability to feel the strong and weak beats in a rhythm allows people to move and dance in time to music.

Now the corresponding way that movement shapes our appreciation of the complex structures of music has been revealed by a team at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.

"The simultaneous experience of listening and moving to a rhythm wires the brain so that different senses work together," said Prof Laurel Trainor, co-author of a paper published today in Science magazine.

She has shown that the way seven-month-old infants interpret a rhythm is influenced by the way they are bounced to that beat.

"It has long been known that infants are attracted to music and responsive to its emotional content. Our findings provide evidence that the experience of body movement plays an important role in musical rhythm perception," she said.

However, she stressed that parents should not blame themselves if their children are not musical.

"The individual differences between people in musical ability probably stem from a combination of genetic and experiential effects," she said.

All of my kids were rocked and bounced and sang to...and they are all musical. Hmm.

---Katie