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It’s been twenty years since that fateful winter night in the Colorado asylum and the Donnelly twins are all grown up. Elizabeth is a bit of a bounder with a taste for adventure and Renee… Well, Renee just wants to be normal. Like that’s ever going to happen. When tragedy strikes the Donnelly family and everything goes haywire, Renee finds herself scrambling alone in a race against time to solve the riddle of a lifetime, fix what’s broken and figure out how it all went so horribly wrong to begin with.

They were midflight when the trouble started. Raine had tried not to think about the deep disquiet that had settled in the pit of his gut when he and Sierra had boarded the plane. He had tried to concentrate instead on them simply taking their seats and had pushed the horrifying notion that something was going to go terribly wrong to the side of his consciousness. Clairvoyance was not among his many talents. For all that it was he was capable of, he could not see the future.

Sierra was all too happy to chatter somewhat aimlessly about cakes, food and decorations. She didn’t even care that Raine was only really listening with half an ear. She was completely involved in planning a graduation party for Renee and had successfully blocked out most everything else.

Elizabeth was supposed to be there, too. She had planned on taking time off of work to come and see her sister graduate from college. Elizabeth had chosen differently than her sister in life. While Renee had furthered her education, seeking a degree in neuroscience of all things, Elizabeth had thrown herself full tilt into the adult world immediately upon graduating high school. Sierra could not be any more proud of either of her daughters and she wasted no time bragging about them both to anyone who would listen.

Raine had seen the various consequences of his choice to keep moving the kids around after that fateful night at the mental institution all those years ago. After about six years of them moving around all the time and never staying in one place for more than a year, he and a “Higher Authority” as he liked to call them had reached a tentative agreement. He would not wreak havoc where ever he went, and they would leave his family alone to live and grow as was their right. They really had no other choice, he reflected bitterly. The girls and Sierra had grown tired of moving around from state to state to try to “keep under the radar” and he was ready to settle and live in the same place for awhile, as well. They needed stability in their lives and he knew the “Higher Authority” could keep them running forever. The “Higher Authority” knew that all Raine had to do was think it and they would be cleaning up frightful, massive messes that would have been all that would be left of a few good men. Tentative truce, indeed.

The years of moving around had taken their toll on the girls anyway. Elizabeth never stayed in one place for very long and Renee placed too much importance on staying in one place. Both girls had taken it too far to extremes. Elizabeth refused to even sign a lease on a place of her own, preferring instead to rent rooms where she could simply move in and out at will. She never dated any one man for very long and always spent most of her extra money running from party to party. She called it “the fun life” while Raine thought of it more as wandering aimlessly.

Renee had worked tirelessly during her college years and now had most of the money she needed to buy a home of her own. She had even gone so far as to state that she would never move again once she had the house she liked. Raine had asked her about it once being a worried father and she had said that she just wanted to wake in the same bedroom every morning for the rest of her life. It wasn’t that he could blame her, for he understood all too well. It was simply that he saw in her an uncompromising nature that could well make her life lonely and solitary and even though she had always been the introverted type, she would regret it later in life.

Raine thought about all this while he listened to Sierra talk about different foods for a graduation party and whether or not she might have it catered. He also began to see the flight attendants begin to urge passengers back to their seats. Their outward calm was unshakable, but the tension around their eyes was unmistakable. Their voices as they talked to one another were low and tense and here and there, some of them had darting gazes. Raine knew something was going on, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.

Then a voice came over the intercom, filled with forced calm and cheer and Raine felt the bottom drop out of his stomach. The voice stated that they were flying through some turbulence and the next few minutes would be a bit of a bumpy ride but that everyone could rest assured that they would be free of it very quickly and the rest of the flight would be smooth as silk. Flight attendants worked to secure passengers and then themselves. No one seemed to notice the slight temperature change in the air or the fact that the lights burned brighter for a moment.

Raine worked to try to control himself. He knew better than anyone else just how disastrous a loss of his self-control could be. More than once, he’d left people nearly dead when he lost his ever tenuous hold on his instinctive power. Sometimes, he simply couldn’t control it and the effects were devastating. Houses leveled, buildings crumbled and people driven utterly insane by the intruding presence in their heads. He’d rather just try to hold onto his errant talents and leave others safe.

He took deep breaths while the plane began to shimmy. Sierra stopped talking and looked at him with a vaguely alarmed expression and said, “It’s getting warmer in here, Raine.”

He tried to manage a small smile for her sake which probably looked more like a pained grimace and continued to breathe deeply. The plane dropped by several feet and then leveled again and some of the passengers stifled cries of alarm.

The lights flickered and temperature in the air rose by several degrees. No one but Sierra and Raine paid any attention to the flickering lights. No one thought anything of it. They were the only ones who knew what was going on and Raine fought with everything he was to try to stem the tide of power. Sierra began to kick him in the shin to try to shock him out of it. Sometimes it helped and others it didn’t. Sometimes it stopped him cold and sometimes, Sierra just earned an angry husband and a bruised foot for her trouble. There really was no telling what would happen.

Find it on Amazon at Inheritance (The Evolution Chronicles Book 2)

In All These Things I've Done by Gabrielle Zevin, Anya Balanchine ends up in juvie.  She "belongs" there because of all the things she's done to protect her older brother and younger sister.  Worst of all, though, is her relationship with the son of NYC's DA.  The Balanchines have been a crime family for a couple of decades.  Nuff said.

At the beginning of Because It Is My Blood, Anya is released and her life has changed.  Her family is fractured; her Nana dead, her older brother hidden away.  Only her younger sister is still around.  Anya wants her life to go back to pre-crime days when she tried so hard to keep everyone safe.  No school wants her.  The Legalize Cacao Movement is the only group who welcomes her and Anya needs to avoid them.  An indiscretion lands her back in Juvie and suddenly Anya is in hiding in Mexico.  When she, her younger sister and her brother are all threatened on the same night, Anya must return home to a family business in chaos and a bucket of grief.  The peace, freedom and deep friendship that she found in Mexico makes the violence and loneliness of her real life dismal in contrast.

An then there is Win, the ex-DA's son, who has never given up on their love.  And her best friend, Scarlett, has made a "pact" with one of Anya's devils.  It's a mess!  And a fabulous read!

By Elvin Lim

In 2004, the Republican’s hot button political issue du jour was same-sex marriage. 11 states approved ballot measures that defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman. Last week, a federal judge struck down California’s Proposition 8 (passed in 2008) because it “fails to advance any rational basis for singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license.”

However, Republicans politicians are not taking the bait to revisit this hot button political issue, despite Rush Limbaugh’s encouragement. One explanation is that Republican voters are already angry and motivated this year, and they are concerned about the economy and jobs. There is no need for Republicans to exploit a get-the-vote-out issue this year.

But, that is exactly what some Republicans have done, just not on the marriage issue. Instead, prominent Republicans like Senator Lindsay Graham and presidential hopeful Tim Pawlenty are directing their attention this year on repealing the 14th Amendment, and in particular the provision guaranteeing birthright citizenship.

So is it or is it not “the economy, stupid,” for Election 2010? I think it’s about something even bigger than the economy. It’s about the power of the federal government, which increased dramatically with the passage of the 14th Amendment.

Consider that the first sentence of Section 1 of the 14th Amendment (“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside”), which established the priority of national citizenship over state citizenship. While there were references to citizenship in the Constitution of 1789, the Framers did not define the content of citizenship in part because there was little need, at the time, to consider the idea of national citizenship as opposed to state citizenship. The nation as we know it today was not fully developed until the Civil War.

Read in totality, the first Section of the 14th Amendment isn’t so much a grant of birthright citizenship – the content of the first sentence – but a constraint on states’ rights, the point of the second: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” We know this to be historically accurate. Since the 1930s, the “equal protection” and “due process” clauses have been used against state actors to extend the scope and depth of federal governmental powers.

Fast forward to the 2010, and it is no coincidence that almost everything up for political debate today and in November has something to do with the power of federal government versus states’ rights, whether it be Arizona taking it upon itself to write its own immigration policy and the Obama administration insisting that immigration policy is a federal prerogative, or Missouri primary voters rejecting the federal (“Obamacare”) mandate that all individual citizens must buy health insurance, or Californians deciding in Proposition 8 that only marriages between a man and a woman are valid in their state. If the unifying thread in these agitations is the perception of a bloated, out-of-control federal government, it is also worth noting that the major resource for the aggrandizement of the government has been the 14th Amendment.

The Republican Party of 2010 is not the Republican Party of 1868, the year the 14th Amendment was ratified. The GOP, back then, believed in federal preemption of states’ rights. Democrats were the ones who were wary of federal power. The Rep