A few things to report on as 2006 begins:
We don’t know if we can take credit for any of it (although we’d be happy to if we could, as we got it into a couple of the right hands), but Rick Marco was soundly defeated in his attempt to elevate himself to the Medina municipal bench. Seems the public there didn’t care much for his being the stalking horse for Medina’s mayor, Jane Leaver, in her attempt to bring the city’s government under her total control; and they soundly re-elected incumbent Dale Chase with over 60 percent of the vote.
Anyone familiar with our website and/or Rick’s career with BBAS should have known, however, that he’s most at home doing dirty deeds for incompetent women who want total control. Fortunately Medina had an alternative; BBAS’s clients do not.
Unsurprisingly, too, Rick couldn’t do this without cutting a few ethical corners. According to a complaint filed by Medina County Democratic chairwoman Pam Miller (who was tickled pink by our website when we told her about it, and promised to spread it around) the day before the election, Rick, who had previously had to make up a required ethics class at the Ohio Supreme Court that he missed the first time, violated the state’s Code of Judicial Conduct a second time by appearing with Leaver in a photograph on a postcard mailed out to voters (judicial candidates may appear only with other judicial candidates, so as to avoid the perception of conflict of interest).
Probably came easy to Rick, though, after all the times he’s dissembled on Denise’s behalf to ODJFS and the BBB. Ignore enough rules, and eventually you don’t notice that they exist. But this time he’s gotten called on it, even if he just gets off with a mild fine or something.
Oh, one of our Ohio correspondents, while driving around the Medina area, noted that A Child’s Waiting’s offices had a Marco for Judge sign out front. Looks like the Marandos and BBAS are still tight.
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As 2005 ended, Janet Ostrander’s story reached another happy ending of sorts when she was able to adopt another domestic infant, a sister to her long-sought son. She still has no intention of signing BBAS’s confidentiality agreement as far as we can tell.
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We also discovered over the year that, to our horror but not surprise, BBAs had finally joined one of the major national adoption industry groups that lobby Congress. She had chosen not the Joint Council on International Children’s Services but ... the National Council for Adoption!!
Why, we don’t know. Perhaps Denise felt the JCICS didn’t offer enough non-protection for disgruntled agency clients. Or maybe they refused to take her on (since they’re the main international-adoption lobbying group, it’s quite likely they’ve heard of this website) not so much because they have standards (others’ experience with their member agencies has led us to doubt that) but because there’s too much bad publicity associated with BBAS because ... you guessed it!
Anyway, we decided to write them and tell them of our (and others’) experience with BBAS if they seriously valued their organization’s good name. We’ve heard from mutual acquaintances that the late Bill Pierce, the sometimes-reviled but not-without-honor founder of NCfA, was disenchanted late in his life with the direction the organization he started and built into practically the only serious adoption lobbying group (for much of its existence) was taking (or, to be fair, being taken in). In particular he had wanted little if anything to do with agencies which did primarily foreign adoptions, believing them to be too prone to corruption.
If BBAS has been let into the NCfA fold, that tends to suggest Pierce’s fears were not misplaced.
We don’t know what impact our letter had. It could have been the reason for Adam Whitney’s mealy-keyboarded attempt to use his wife’s “privacy” to bully us yet again on Denise’s behalf. We don’t know; it’s not like they sign those things when they send them our way. And we heard nothing from NCfA itself (which wasn’t surprising).
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You can confirm that BBAS is still a member of NCfA because that organization’s logo is on BBAS’s website, which also leads us to some more amusing asides.
First, we see this notice in the small type at the bottom of every page: “Permission not granted for reprint” (one assumes the text of that notice, however, is exempt). Paranoia strikes deep ... Into your life it will creep, huh, Denise?
The real fun, though, is this year’s page celebrating the summer picnic that we and any other client on this site never gets invited to (not that we could or would go even if we were, but we can’t speak for everyone else).
Click the link if you dare. Or if you’re about to take a long break away from your computer for some reason, like lunch (or, better yet, a two-week vacation to Tahiti).
Denise cutely credits “John Thomas our amateur photographer” for the images. She should, however, also give credit to herself, the amateur webpage designer, for putting no less than 42 images, none of which were optimized so they would take up less memory and thus load faster (much faster), on the page.
We recently made the switch to digital photography ourselves, so we understand that the ease of being able to transfer those images to one’s computer and email or post them on the web can blind one, at least initially, to understanding that the raw files that come out of a four- or five-megapixel camera can come to a megabyte or more apiece sometimes, overwhelming your friends’ dialup connections and taking a good bit of time to process through even most DSL or cable connections. Live and learn ... almost any image-editing software can help you reduce the photo to something that still looks good yet transmits much more quickly.
But how like Denise Hubbard to so thoughtlessly inconvenience her potential customers so they can appreciate all the great things she thinks she can do! We calculated that, at 1-1.6MB per image, there’s at least 50MB of data on that page! It took us about 15-20 minutes to download the whole thing (very few DSL connections ever function at their advertised speeds (though it’s still a lot faster than dialup, and we doubt most other viewers of the page even got that far (save, of course, Frau Direktor).
And it’s probably no surprise, given the ever-increasing cost of adopting through her agency, that “some” pictures means almost four dozen. After all, it costs you some money to use BBAS!
The scariest thing on the whole page, even if you don’t bother to sit through it, is the link below the photos, which even we didn’t click on:
“Page 2.”