Just so we're all clear here... buy your kid a lemonade and accidentally allow him to ingest a few ounces of alcohol at a baseball game and you lose your son.  Stick your boys with a freaking electric cattle prod, get charged, plead guilty and you get released and permitted to keep your youngest, most vulnerable child?  Something is very wrong with this picture.

As far as Ahmed's pronouncements that "we could have and should have done more," well, yeah, you probably should have but saying that now doesn't change a darn thing because we've heard you and your predecessor say it before.

Look, I am absolutely the last guy in the world to suggest that the government, any government, can prevent bad people from doing bad things.  If a cat's got bad intentions he's going to figure out a way to do some nasty things.  But when you're tearing families apart over a few accidental ounces of booze but you turn a blind eye to felony convictions stemming from the violent use of electric cattle prods all of those `would have, could have, should have's' sound a little hollow.

This is a DHS that hasn't just failed, it's failed spectacularly.  LITERALLY a year can't go by without someone somewhere in that department overlooking a rule, bypassing a regulation or ignoring the reddest of flags and the loudest of warning sirens while placing a child in a hyper-dangerous situation that ultimately leads to his death.  No hyperbole.  No BS.  Kids are dying!

They're not getting drunk, but they're dying.

It took five years of fatally flawed leadership in the department before the head of DHS finally stepped down, leading to Ahmed's appointment.  Worth noting, too, that his predecessor was hardly run out on a rail.  Marianne Udow walked away on her own terms, with the thanks of the governor and with a fat corporate contract in her back pocket.

Now we've got a new director and nothing has changed.

I don't know what the answers are.  I wish I did.  I wish I could find a genie and ask for world peace, for every parent to love his or her kids and for more wishes.  Unfortunately we're living in the real world and bad things are going to happen.  But they don't need to happen this frequently, this idiotically and this unevenly.  And we don't have to take this lying down.

Course, you know what they say about leadership... it starts at the top.  Jennifer Granholm and John Cherry have been sitting in the Executive office at the Capitol for five and a half years now and things are only getting worse.  I'm not asking for a miracle.  I'm not asking for pie in the sky.  A fancy press conference probably wouldn't do any of these kids any good either which way.

But it'd be nice if Granholm and Cherry showed as much interest in protecting the kids they were elected to defend as they do in luring the next Hollywood star to Lansing.  Nobody's going to die if James Van Der Beek doesn't show up in Grand Rapids.  But when the administration's bureaucrats fail to remove kids from parents convicted of felony child abuse with an electric cattle prod?

The buck has to stop somewhere.  It DOES stop somewhere.  We should all be pretty sick and tired of it stopping this often in the morgue.