Editor’s note: A nationally syndicated columnist, Roland S. Martin is the author of “Listening to the Spirit Within: 50 Perspectives on Faith” and “Speak, Brother! A Black Man’s View of America.” Visit his Web site for more information. For the next few months, he will be hosting “No Bias, No Bull” at 8 p.m. ET on CNN while Campbell Brown is on maternity leave.

Roland Martin says rules in the U.S. should be loosened to encourage adoption of American children.

(CNN) — Pop star Madonna is back in the news; this time, heading back to the African nation of Malawi to adopt her second child.

You might remember all of the drama a few years ago when Madonna adopted a Malawi boy. Now she wants to adopt a girl, and a judge has said she will have to wait until Friday to see if she will get the go-ahead.

Madonna has been quoted in the Malawi newspaper Nation as saying, “Many people, especially our Malawian friends, say that David should have a Malawian brother or sister. It’s something I have been considering, but would only do if I had the support of the Malawian people and government.”

It seems that anytime we hear about celebrities like Madonna adopting, the children are from another country. I’m not at all opposed to children being adopted from Africa, China or any other country, but it does raise the question: What’s wrong with adopting American children?

Now I’m not against anyone providing a secure, loving home for a child, but it seems to me that these stories often reinforce a growing public image of adoption for many Americans: that of a rich, famous individual going to a developing country to adopt a child.

According to various adoption and governmental agencies, more than 500,000 American children are under foster care, and many of them are waiting for adoption. From coast to coast, babies to toddlers to teens are desperately looking for a home where they can be loved, nurtured and provided for.

Now, it would be easy to blast these celebrities by saying it’s the hip thing to walk around with an international child, but truth be told, we’ve got a serious adoption problem in this country.

Single mothers have a difficult time adopting a child, and several I know personally have gone overseas. And let’s not even talk about the red tape and bureaucracy!

American parents are made to jump through enormous hoops, and the process takes years, instead of months. And all too often, single people and married couples simply grow disenchanted with the process.

We can sit here and criticize Madonna all day, but enough with ripping her. Our energy should be put into a call for massive adoption reform. Don’t just bang out an e-mail or blog and get caught up in the celebrity hype.

If you think it should be easier to adopt American children, demand that your local, state and federal election officials clear the pathway to make the process easier. And let’s have more consistency. Having 50 different states set their own policy, is frankly, nonsense. With so many rules, no wonder folks throw their hands up and move on.

The goal of adoption is to put children in loving homes and not have them be the responsibility of the state. Making it harder to adopt affects you in your pocketbook because taxpayer money is spent to care for the children. So changing the laws not only helps the child, but also is fiscally prudent.

So what are you prepared to do?

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Roland Martin.

Commentary: Why aren’t celebrities adopting U.S. kids? – CNN.com.

CHRIS PALADINO, a Microsoft employee who was hired in 2006, didn’t worry too much about his job when the economy began to sour last fall. The company employs nearly 90,000 people.

“I thought Microsoft was so stable, it wouldn’t be touched,” he said. Now, as one of the 1,400 employees who received layoff notices in January, Mr. Paladino is worried — about making the mortgage payments on his home.

Mr. Paladino gathered user feedback for the Xbox games division of Microsoft. This month he started his own consulting company, Promethium Marketing, with two colleagues who were also laid off.

But, “I would never have chosen to leave Microsoft,” he said. “I had a great job. I worked with a great team.”

Leaving the company has not always been so traumatic. Microsoft has a long history of making employees part-owners of the company, by granting them stock and stock options.

From executive to secretary, many employees received thousands of stock options. Microsoft’s stock price rose from about $2.50 a share in 1992 to almost $60 in 1999, and roughly 10,000 of those employees became millionaires.

When employees left the company in those days, it was overwhelmingly by their own choice. They were off to a new adventure, starting a business or a charity, or just planning to have fun, said Rob Horwitz, the chief executive of Directions on Microsoft, an information technology analyst firm that has been tracking the company for 17 years.

Notable alumni from that time rebuilt the Professional Bowlers Association; created the charity Room to Read, which builds schools in poor countries; and founded the Cranium game company (which was sold to Hasbro).

Other Microsoft alumni started venture capital firms or followed more personal dreams, creating enterprises like the Cameron Catering Company of Seattle, which focuses on green events, or the Casa Cupula, a bed-and-breakfast for gay travelers in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. One alumnus built his own airplane and another rode along with Russian cosmonauts on a space mission. The sky was literally the limit.

The economy has changed all that. With Microsoft’s stock price now below $20 a share, any stock options granted in the last 10 years have little to no value, and the outright stock grants have lost value.

So rather than leaving on their own terms for a new adventure, some recently separated employees are now looking for any professional job they can get. (Microsoft declined to comment for this article.)

Read More…

A New Crop of Job Hunters, With Microsoft Résumés – NYTimes.com.

REMEMBERING The historian John Hope Franklin took pains to remind us of how much of his and our history we would like to forget.

When he was a boy in segregated Oklahoma, where he was born in 1915, John Hope Franklin used to indulge in a subversive bit of wordplay like a small act of public and private theater.

“My mother and I used to have a game we’d play on our public,” Dr. Franklin said not long ago, his voice full of artful pauses, words pulled out like taffy. “She would say if anyone asks you what you want to be when you grow up, tell them you want to be the first Negro president of the United States. And just the words were so far-fetched, so incredible that we used to really have fun, just saying it.”

Even in a country where the far-fetched, for better and for worse, so often becomes reality, few historians achieved the stature, both as scholars and as moral figures — and as combinations of the two — that Dr. Franklin did. When he died last week, at the age of 94, an American epoch seemed to vanish with him.

Dr. Franklin was first and foremost a major historian, whose landmark book, “From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African-Americans,” first published in 1947, was a comprehensive survey that sold more than three million copies. The book also permanently altered the ways in which the American narrative was studied.

“What distinguishes his history or historiography is that he, like few other historians, wrote a book that transformed the way we understand a major social phenomenon,” said David Levering Lewis, the New York University historian, who like Dr. Franklin studied under Theodore Currier at Fisk University in Nashville.

“When you think of ‘From Slavery to Freedom,’ there’s before and there’s after, there’s the world before and then we have a basic paradigm shift,” he said. “Before him you had a field of study that had been feeble and marginalized, full of a pretty brutal discounting of the impact of people of color. And he moved it into the main American narrative. It empowered a whole new field of study.”

Dr. Lewis and others argue that Dr. Franklin’s work helped empower not just African-American studies, but the whole range of alternative stories — of women, gays, Hispanics, Asians and others — now so much a part of mainstream academia.

Dr. Franklin accomplished this not through advocacy but rather through the traditional means of scholarly inquiry. In his discussion, for instance, of the intersection of race and imperialism at the turn of the 20th century, Dr. Franklin observed: “The United States, unlike other imperial powers, had a color problem at home and therefore had to pursue a policy with regard to race that would not upset the racial equilibrium within the United States. In Puerto Rico, for example, approximately one-third of the population was distinctly of African descent, and many so-called white Puerto Ricans had sufficient black blood in their veins to qualify as African-Americans in the United States.”

Complete Story Here…

John Hope Franklin, Scholar and Witness – NYTimes.com.

WASHINGTON — The White House said more than 64,000 people watched President Obama answer questions on Thursday in the first live Internet video chat by an American president. But in declaring itself “Open for Questions,” on the economy, the White House learned it must be careful what it wishes for.

More than 100,000 questions were submitted, with the idea that Mr. Obama would answer those that were most popular. But after 3.6 million votes were cast, one of the top questions turned out to be a query on whether legalizing marijuana might stimulate the economy by allowing the government to regulate and tax the drug.

“I don’t know what this says about the online audience,” Mr. Obama said, drawing a laugh from an audience gathered in the East Room, which included teachers, nurses and small-business people. “The answer is no, I don’t think that is a good strategy to grow the economy.”

The marijuana question later took up a good chunk of the daily White House press briefing, where Robert Gibbs, the press secretary, suggested that advocates for legalizing marijuana had mounted a drive to rack up votes for the question.

Those advocates included Norml, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, which urged supporters to “let the president know that millions of American voters believe that the time has come to tax and regulate marijuana.”

But however the marijuana query rose to the top of the White House list, it provided one of the livelier moments in the mostly staid 70-minute event.

Mr. Obama did make a sliver of news, disclosing that he intended to announce in the next couple of days what kind of help his administration would give the auto industry. A senior White House official said no decision had yet been made; Mr. Gibbs hinted that the announcement would most likely occur on Monday.

“We will provide them some help,” Mr. Obama said, as he has in the past, while also talking tough, as he has done previously, by insisting that the auto makers would have to make “drastic changes” to restructure the way they do business.

Full article…

Obama Makes History in Live Internet Video Chat – NYTimes.com.