A couple of local news stories…

1. Watchdog Group Gives Mass. D- For Child Protection. Yep, yet more proof that if you want to be a criminal, come to Massachusetts. You can beat your kids into a coma, even kill them, and the state does little to nothing. Okay, so in the Haleigh Poutre case, the adoptive father who abused her is going on trial…but where was the state before all of this happened? Why could this have not been prevented?

But I bet that if some guy accidentally bought his kid a Mike’s Hard Lemonade at Fenway Park, DSS would be all over him. This actually happened at Comerica Park, at a Detroit Tigers game. I blogged about that HERE. Yeah, the guy made a stupid mistake, but taking away the kid and banning the guy from his own home was WAY over the top. Meanwhile, I’m sure there are kids in Detroit who desperately need help, yet DSS there chose to mess with this guy instead.

New Hampshire, BTW, got an A from the same group.

2. Kids & Treadmills. This story was on the FOX-25 News last night, and it was yet another WTF? moment. They need a NEWS STORY to warn parents about this? Shouldn’t this be COMMON SENSE?

I guess not. Now that I think of it, when I’ve been in stores that sell exercise equipment, they almost always have signs that say to keep kids off of the floor models. But does anyone listen? Nope…I see kids playing on the treadmills and stuff all the time!

What gets me is that a lot of these machines have safety locks…but the idiot parents of one kid who got hurt left the key thing where the kid could find it!  It sucks that the kid got so very badly hurt, but I see it as parental negligence, and not the fault of the Evil Treadmill.

At least I don’t recall anything being said about suing the manufacturers of the treadmills.  That’s good.