So — if you need a break from playoff hockey — here are some nuggets:

• Via Nick Senzee: This item is nearly 6 months later, but I totally missed Joy Behar and George Lopez calling Todd Palin a “bum” for being an at-home dad. Political commentary aside, that’s a pretty low blow. And a partisan one. Because I don’t see anyone calling Daniel Mulhern a bum, even though his wife might end up becoming way, way more powerful than Sarah Palin.
• Last week, the Wall Street Journal looked at how tough it is for at-home dads to re-enter the workforce. Further evidence that the Daddy Wars may be heating up.
• I have a hard enough time keeping up with the images of dads on TV, let alone how they are being portrayed in literature. Fortunately, there is BookDads.com.
• This anecdote made me more optimistic about the future of work-life balance than anything I saw from the White House forum on flexibility. When big German banks see the wisdom of flexibility, the future is obviously bright.

*** I’m slowly ramping back up on Twitter, but I have to admit that I’m not keeping up with the people I probably should be watching. Please let me know — here or via @rebeldad — insightful dads I should start following, and I’ll start adding folks.

Ellen Galinsky of the Families and Work Institute was glowing about how the event suggested that three decade of work were paying off. And my friend and erstwhile college Katherine Lewis titled her post at about.com “My Workplace Flexibility Day to Remember.”

I think they offer important context. Please read what they had to say. But, at the end of the day, I’ll stick by Daddy Types take on the situation.

As for why I can still be cranky when work-life balance received the presidential treatment, I think my deep unease around the lack of governmental action comes back to something else I stumbled on today: Human Rights Watch — you know, the group that spends a lot of time advocating against systematic murder and torture – is apparently working on a report about parental leave in the United States. And while I don’t think anyone is comparing unpaid leave to torture, it is telling that on this particular issue, the United States looks pretty close to the bottom of the heap by international standards.

Here’s where I come down on the issue: there are two ways to make flexibility a reality. The first is that you change the laws to make damn sure that workers have some baseline protections when flexibility is a necessity. This is where paid leave is important. This is where paid sick days are important. And — unless I missed something — there were no solid proposals offered today for doing that.

That’s an opportunity lost.

The second is that men have to be involved. And when I say, “involved,” it needs to be acknowledged that men need flexibility for themselves, not flexibility for their wives, not flexibility in a business-decision sense. When President Obama said, ” Workplace flexibility isn’t just a women’s issue.  It’s an issue that affects the well-being of our families and the success of our businesses,” he only gets halfway there. Unless and until men get personally invested in the fight for workplace flexibility, “flexibility” will continue to be a niche issue that’s easy to pass off as a narrow “mommy” concern. We need Daddy Wars in order to take this issue to the next level.

But all of the official stuff around today’s meeting implied that what we’re dealing with is still a mommy concern. The very first paragraph of the official report from the Council of Economic Advisers on this issue notes that women are now half of the labor force “… yet, children still need to be taken to the doctor.” Immediately, the issue is framed as one that arises from the decisions of women.

That’s not to say that there wasn’t talk of solutions. There was a ton of talk of solutions. (The Fork did a great job of outlining the ideas put forth.) But I didn’t hear much that was novel. Again, the solutions aren’t rocket science. It’s the implementation that’s tricky. And not just implementation at the top, but the work required to make flexibility a value that every boss on down the organizational chart subscribes to. Those problem bosses exist all over the place. And they weren’t watching today’s webcast.

I’m hoping that today was the first small step in continuing to build this dialogue. But time is going to tell, and it’s not clear to me how this momentum gets sustained.

There was one bright spot. The highest-ranking at-home dad in the nation, First Gentleman of Michigan Dan Granholm Mulhern, spoke at once of the breakout sessions and made clear that the language and focus of the discussion has to be broadened to men (and what’s best for the kids). This is not about gender, he said. And he’s right. Absolutely right.

Of course, I can even be cynical about that. Google News tells me that there were well in excess of 100 stories written about the event. Not a single one cited Mulhern. The struggle continues …

So it was fortuitious that I saw this tweet by Kristin Maschka on WorkOptions.com’s Max Maternity Leave guidelines. This is a really smart and straightforward how-to for moms-to-be who are interested in having a baby and taking leave without blowing up a career. And while following this advice certainly doesn’t ensure that the maternal wall will be torn down, it’s certainly a start.

Now, the issue of guys taking paternity leave is fraught with issues that are different but just as tricky to navigate (if not more so). In a world of infinite time, I’d love to screw together this kind of resource for the guys, so that men who wanted to take full advantage of paternity leave could do so. My experience with leave was ultimately positive (and life-changing), but getting my employer to understand what the hell I was doing was far more complicated and dispiriting than I had expected.

If you have any tips on this, let me know in the comments …

But it doesn’t have to been a shooting war. The Australian site, dadsclub.au, ran a nice piece on why negotiation is so important in making sure that employers understand how important family time is. Of course, proactively talking about work-life balance isn’t instantly going to change a century-plus of misplaced expectations, but it’s a good start. (Thanks to Marc at Equally Shared Parenting for the link.)

Interestingly, the whole daddy wars topic has quieted down. It was really hip three or four years ago, when people started wondering if the growing number of at-home dads would somehow get dads to snipe at one another, but I haven’t heard that much lately. Right now, the biggest dad-inspired parenting battle is over whether it’s a good idea to take your kid out to the bars …