“Home electronics can gobble energy – including “phantom” draw even when off. That’s why I like the Sony Bravia KDL-52VE5 Eco Series LCD TV: It has a motion sensor to shut down the unit when not in use, a high-efficiency backlight, and a switch to cut power entirely.”
A $1900, 52-inch hi-def television that’s “energy efficient” because if you’re too lazy to switch it off when you leave or fall asleep, it’ll notice it isn’t being watched eventually.
Bad Bro vis a vis Big Bro : the perils of the Intertube Age.
(Note: the first link is to a humorous situation that I found myself in. I had thoughts about contacting my cell phone carrier to ask about number blocks and such, a genuflection of sorts at the altar of Big Bro, but didn't follow through.)
Forget literary critics; see how famous authors eviscerate each others creative talent and output.
Examples:
Ernest Hemingway, according to Vladimir Nabokov (1972)
As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early 'forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.
John Keats, according to Lord Byron (1820)
Here are Johnny Keats's p@# a-bed poetry…There is such a trash of Keats and the like upon my tables, that I am ashamed to look at them.
John Updike, according to Gore Vidal (2008)
I can't stand him. Nobody will think to ask because I'm supposedly jealous; but I out-sell him. I'm more popular than he is, and I don't take him very seriously…oh, he comes on like the worker's son, like a modern-day D.H. Lawrence, but he's just another boring little middle-class boy hustling his way to the top if he can do it.
Oscar Wilde, according to Noel Coward (1946)
Am reading more of Oscar Wilde. What a tiresome, affected sod.
John Milton's Paradise Lost, according to Samuel Johnson
'Paradise Lost' is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is.
Jane Austen, according to Charlotte Bronte (1848)
Why do you like Miss Austen so very much? I am puzzled on that point. What induced you to say that you would rather have written 'Pride and Prejudice'…than any of the Waverly novels? I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses.
Gertrude Stein, according to Wyndham Lewis (1927)
Gertrude Stein's prose-song is a cold black suet-pudding. We can represent it as a cold suet-roll of fabulously reptilian length. Cut it at any point, it is the same thing; the same heavy, sticky, opaque mass all through and all along.
J.D.Salinger, according to Mary McCarthy (1962)
I don't like Salinger, not at all. That last thing isn't a novel anyway, whatever it is. I don't like it. Not at all. It suffers from this terrible sort of metropolitan sentimentality and it's so narcissistic. And to me, also, it seemed so false, so calculated. Combining the plain man with an absolutely megalomaniac egotism. I simply can't stand it.
Mark Twain, according to William Faulkner (1922)
A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven sure fire literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.
Emile Zola, according to Anatole France (1911)
His work is evil, and he is one of those unhappy beings of whom one can say that it would be better had he never been born.
William Faulkner, according to Ernest Hemingway
Have you ever heard of anyone who drank while he worked? You're thinking of Faulkner. He does sometimes — and I can tell right in the middle of a page when he's had his first one.
Marcel Proust, according to Evelyn Waugh (1948)
I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, according to Gore Vidal (1980)
He is a bad novelist and a fool. The combination usually makes for great popularity in the US.
Jane Austen, according to Mark Twain (1898)
I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read 'Pride and Prejudice,' I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.
Goethe, according to Samuel Butler (1874)
I have been reading a translation of Goethe's 'Wilhelm Meister.' Is it good? To me it seems perhaps the very worst book I ever read. No Englishman could have written such a book. I cannot remember a single good page or idea….Is it all a practical joke? If it really is Goethe's 'Wilhelm Meister' that I have been reading, I am glad I have never taken the trouble to learn German.
Gore Vidal, according to Martin Amis (1995)
Vidal gives the impression of believing that the entire heterosexual edifice — registry offices, 'Romeo and Juliet,' the disposable diaper — is just a sorry story of self-hypnosis and mass hysteria: a hoax, a racket, or sheer propaganda.
These are fifteen of the best shots. Check out the rest. (thanks to Angel Rivera)
You know what this is. Details here.
In actress Ingrid Bergman's autobiography, she describes an argument she had with director Ingmar Bergman while making Autumn Sonata, a film about a concert pianist who leaves her family to pursue a musical career and does not see her children for seven years. The actress explains that she did not understand how a mother could bear to be apart from her children for 'seven' years. This point of view, especially coming from a woman, would be totally unremarkable if we did not also know that Ms Bergman had herself left behind a very young daughter in Sweden to launch a career in Hollywood and she did not see the child for nearly five years. Is there then a magic number for how long a mother can stay away from a child without misgivings? And what would that be? One year, three, five, … seven? When does self fulfillment turn into selfishness and a necessary parting becomes abandonment? Or does it even matter?
Other than the existence of God, I doubt that there has been any other topic in human history that has generated more diverse opinions, heated debates, psychological examination, joy, guilt, pride and societal judgment than the role of a mother in child rearing. Women's status and role in the world have undergone drastic changes through the ages but the physical and emotional demands of motherhood remain almost unchanged. How women find the balance between the needs of a child and of their own, is a challenge as old as civilization. But the debate goes on – what makes a "good" or "bad" mother? I am not here to wax eloquent on the thorny question. Instead, I point you to this provocative article in Newsweek by Julia Baird which was published just before Mother's Day.
(painting by Padmakar Kappagantula)
When reporters told Doris Lessing she had won a Nobel Prize in Literature as she was hauling groceries out of a cab in 2007, she said: "I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one, so I am delighted. It's a royal flush." Few would dispute that she is a brilliant writer. Her work is lucid, inspiring, and provocative. But it would be hard to argue that she was a brilliant mother. When she fled to London to pursue her writing career and communist ideals, she left two toddlers with their father in South Africa (another, from her second marriage, went with her). She later said that at the time she thought she had no choice: "For a long time I felt I had done a very brave thing. There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children. I felt I wasn't the best person to bring them up. I would have ended up an alcoholic or a frustrated intellectual like my mother."
I like remembering women like Lessing on Mother's Day. They shock us now, those women who bucked convention and did things the way men have often done—just as selfishly and callously—denying maternity in a way that seems to defy nature. Take Dorothea Lange, the photographer who paid foster families to look after five of her children (and stepchildren) for months at a stretch while she traveled around California photographing migrant workers. Were these women bad mothers? Or talented, single-minded women who struggled to find ways to both create and give their children what they needed? They certainly make the rest of us seem outstanding—and put our ongoing, deafening, and dull debates about bad mothers in sharp relief. Today, women no longer need to escape their families to work or be happy—now they need to escape their own unrealistic expectations of what a good mother is. Guilt, judgment, and a distrust of female ambition are a hallmark of modern parenting, along with the literature about female fretting, which, over the past few years, has turned into a symphony of self-loathing. We spend more time with our children than women did in the 1950s, yet we consistently report higher levels of stress. Perplexingly, study after study has found that mothers are less happy than women without kids. And books about bad or uptight mothers are more anxious and defensive than defiant and liberating. Instead of giving the parenting police the bird on matters like food, sleep, work, and schools—or having a life—we write apologias. Haven't millions of years of evolution already determined that the vast bulk of mothers would sever their heads with an ax to protect their offspring? Enough. If you love your kids and are doing your best, if they are alive, safe, and sane, then your mind should simply be at ease.
There is more. But the funny thing is that when Baird speaks of her own mother to whom she turns for advice, her tone is considerably softer.
I recently asked my own mother—a woman of great grace and kindness—for one piece of advice about how to raise my children. She said we should love, accept, and forgive them—also teaching them, with luck, to love and accept us too. It's a calm model of parenting that has built into its core the idea of imperfection; theirs, ours, hers. Let's make 2010 the Year of Lowering the Bar. Or, perhaps, Going to the Bar. Happy Mother's Day.
Mmm'kay, Ms Baird. Point taken – we mothers don't have to be indefatigable heroes and martyrs. But one gentle reminder. Just because men do some things with impunity, doesn't make them either the best or the right choice.
Dan Solove talks about this at Concurring Opinions. According to news reports, Tiger Woods is going to insist on a confidentiality clause in their upcoming divorce contract / settlement agreement with Elin Nordegren.
The interesting question to me is: Why?
Tiger Woods has pretty much already had his reputation destroyed. Everyone in the world already knows about his eighty-five cocktail waitresses, pornstars, and other mistresses. Those who are interested can ready dirty text messages he sent by doing a quick search of The Google. What can Elin add? Or rather, what can Elin add that damages Tiger's rep? The fact that he was a lousy husband? Lousy father? That his actions were hurtful? Um, yeah, we know.
The interesting question to law professors is apparently: Will this (potential, future) agreement be contractually enforceable?
Um, yes.
I mean, that's extremely basic contract law. If they do have this agreement and she breaches it, he can sue and get some or all of his money back. But but but, the reasoning is wrong! There are first amendment implications (because she's agreeing to restrict her speech)! (But there aren't because the state isn't depriving her of her right to free speech.) And… I don't know. What I'm mostly taking out of this is that my excessive eye rolling probably means I have zero interest in becoming a law professor. Or that I'm not interested in theoretical contract and speech problems and I'm not smart enough to do the sort of stuff our friend Brian does.
In other, unrelated, news, the Flyers just won a hockey playoff series. The Onion is right — I didn't know.
In more unrelated stuff, this seems fitting with Monday fast approaching.
Rand Paul, the son of Texas Congressman Ron Paul beat the "mainstream" Republican candidate in last Tuesday's surreal election evening. The junior Paul seems to have emerged as the favorite of both the libertarian wing of the GOP as well as the conservative "stick a finger in your eye" Tea Partiers.
I watched the following exchange between Paul and MSNBC's Rachel Maddow with some fascination last evening. Maddow questioned Paul about his apparent rejection of the US Civil Rights Act. I don't think Paul is a racist. He was vehement about not having one racist fiber in his being and it may well be true. Also, he pointed out that he himself would not patronize a private establishment that discriminates on the basis of race or gender. I take him at his word. But I also think that he is foolishly arguing for philosophical and constitutional purity here without realizing how that provides a convenient cover for true racists who would like to hide behind First (and Second) Amendment arguments to repudiate the civil rights of others.
I think it is time that philosophers and lawyers came out and debated in public on ethical and not lawyerly grounds, that property rights, the right to carry guns or to shout foul slogans in public ought not to be morally equivalent in our collective judgment and conscience as the respect for and guarantee of an individual's civil rights as a human being.
Kentucky Senate candidate Rand Paul believes that the federal government blurred the lines between public and private property when it passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and made it illegal for private businesses to discriminate on the basis of race.
Paul explained his views on "The Rachel Maddow Show" Wednesday, just one day after wholloping his opponent in Kentucky's Republican primary.
Maddow focused on the Tea Party-backed candidate's civil rights stance after he publicly criticized parts of the Civil Rights Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Paul told Maddow that he agrees with most parts of the Civil Rights Act, except for one (Title II), that made it a crime for private businesses to discriminate against customers on the basis of race. Paul explained that had he been in office during debate of bill, he would have tried to change the legislation. He said that it stifled first amendment rights:
Maddow: Do you think that a private business has a right to say that 'We don't serve black people?'
Paul:I'm not in favor of any discrimination of any form. I would never belong to any club that excluded anybody for race. We still do have private clubs in America that can discriminate based on race. But do discriminate.
But I think what's important in this debate is not getting into any specific "gotcha" on this, but asking the question 'What about freedom of speech?' Should we limit speech from people we find abhorrent. Should we limit racists from speaking. I don't want to be associated with those people, but I also don't want to limit their speech in any way in the sense that we tolerate boorish and uncivilized behavior because that's one of the things that freedom requires is that
we allow people to be boorish and uncivilized, but that doesn't mean we approve of it…Paul argued that Maddow's questions weren't practical, but were instead abstract. She asked Paul to tell that to protesters who were beaten in their struggle for equal rights:
Maddow:… Howabout desegregating lunch counters?
Paul: Well what it gets into then is if you decide that restaurants are publicly owned and not privately owned, then do you say that you should have the right to bring your gun into a restaurant even though the owner of the restaurant says 'well no, we don't want to have guns in here' the bar says 'we don't want to have guns in here because people might drink and start fighting and shoot each-other.' Does the owner of the restaurant own his restaurant? Or does the government own his restaurant? These are important philosophical debates but not a very practical discussion…
More on why Rand Paul's obstinate position on the Civil Rights Act is flawed – here and here.
A few days ago, I asked my co-bloggers to comment on an excerpt in the Guardian from Globish, a book by Robert McCrum whose blurb reads:
How English erased its roots to become the global tongue of the 21st century.
'Throw away your dictionaries!' is the battle cry as a simplified global hybrid of English conquers cultures and continents. In this extract from his new book, Globish, Robert McCrum tells the story of a linguistic phenomenon – and its links to big money.
This particular portion of the Guardian piece dealing with Indian English caught author Narayan's attention:
The India of Hobson-Jobson has also found a new global audience. A film such as Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding is typical of the world's new English culture. The Indian bridegroom has a job in Houston. The wedding guests jet in from Melbourne and Dubai and speak in a mishmash of English and Hindi. Writing in the Sunday Times, Dominic Rushe noted that Bollywood English is "hard to reproduce in print, but feels something like this: "Yudhamanyus ca vikranta uttanaujas ca viryanavan: he lives life in the fast lane." Every English-speaking visitor to India watches with fascination the facility with which contemporary Indians switch from Hindi or Gujarati into English, and then back into a mother tongue. In 2009, the film Slumdog Millionaire took this a stage further. Simon Beaufoy's script, a potpourri of languages, adapted from an Indian novel, was shot in Mumbai, with a British and Indian cast, by Scottish director Danny Boyle, but launched worldwide with an eye on Hollywood's Oscars, where it eventually cleaned up.
India illustrates the interplay of British colonialism and a booming multinational economy. Take, for instance, the 2006 Man Booker prize. First, the result was broadcast on the BBC World Service from Delhi to Vancouver. The winner was The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai, an Indian-born writer who had attended writing classes in New York. So far removed from any English experience, though steeped in its literary tradition, was The Inheritance of Loss that, finally, the British critic John Sutherland was moved to describe Desai's work as "a globalised novel for a globalised world". The writer herself is emblematic of the world's new culture: educated in Britain and America, she wrote her novel in her mother Anita Desai's house in the foothills of the Himalayas, and boasts on her website of feeling "no alienation or dislocation" in her transmigration between three continents.
The Inheritance of Loss is the literary representation of a contemporary experience. Desai says that her book "tries to capture what it means to live between east and west, and what it means to be an immigrant"; it also explores "what happens when a western element is introduced to a country that is not of the west". She also asks: "How does the imbalance between these two worlds change a person's thinking and feeling? How do these changes manifest themselves in a personal sphere over time?" Or, she might have added, in a linguistic and cultural sphere.
Narayan found very little that was enlightening or even particularly clever in McCrum's observations. His response:
When then-Governor Palin resigned and left Alaska in other hands, the move was widely criticized. I don't know what she was thinking, I don't know what's going on in Alaska politics, and I'm not ready to praise the decision… but looking at Minnesota makes me think that it may have, as she insisted, been in the best interests of the citizens of Alaska.
Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty is not running for reelection in 2010, and he is certainly planning to run for United States President in 2012. Minnesota is a Democratic state with a Democratic legislature. The state falls somewhere around moderate to moderately liberal, and generally sane. I'm sure that the economic problems of the last few years are making governance somewhat difficult, but it shouldn't be that difficult. The problem is that governing Minnesota is at odds with garnering support from the national Republican base and Tea Party activists. Let's just say, this appears to be impeding his ability or willingness to govern.
Believe it (or in it) or not. That's the name of a scientific
paper published in a journal on the validity of the famed 'Mozart Effect'. I
love the name, more so that a scientist dared to use it in the actual
title of his paper.
"The transient enhancement of performance on spatial tasks
in standardized tests after exposure to the first movement “allegro
con spirito” of the Mozart sonata for two pianos in D major (KV
448) is referred to as the Mozart effect since its first observation by
Rauscher, Shaw, and Ky (1993). These
findings turned out to be amazingly hard to replicate, thus leading to
an abundance of conflicting results. Sixteen years after initial
publication we conduct the so far largest, most comprehensive, and
up-to-date meta-analysis (nearly 40 studies, over 3000 subjects),
including a diversity of unpublished research papers to finally clarify
the scientific record about whether or not a specific Mozart effect
exists…."
The clincher:
" On the whole, there is little evidence left for a
specific, performance-enhancing Mozart effect."
So much for
the tinkling sounds of Mozart's lullaby that played whenever I turned
the key of my kid's musical mobile, and then when the keys of his play gym
were pressed, playing the opening strains of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. Or
the ubiquitous Baby Einstein videos playing variants of Mozart in
millions of homes where anxious parents rushed to enhance their babies'
spatial skill abilities.
Regarding the role of music in general to enhance learning, this
recent study indicates it makes very little difference:
"Verbal learning during the exposure to different background
music varying in tempo and consonance did not influence learning of
verbal material. There was neither an enhancing nor a detrimental
effect on verbal learning performance. The EEG data suggest that the
different acoustic background conditions evoke different cortical
activations. The reason for these different cortical activations is
unclear. The most plausible reason is that when background music draws
more attention verbal learning performance is kept constant by the
recruitment of compensatory mechanisms."
This might
account for the effects of my listening to old Bollywood tunes on the
late night radio show. For a while, it contributed to lack of attention
to my studies and more to the music, as I tried to figure out the
lyrics. I took to noting them down in a blue diary. Once I was done, it
was relegated to the background the next time I heard it. I don't know
if it helped me in my exam preparations, but I was one of the "Most
Wanted" members of the class team for a game based on the starting lines of Hindi songs, since I had so many obscure lines memorized.
Check out the hilarious comments on this article. It looks like more people are terrified of the loss of Mozart as the easy method to IQ enhancement than are delighted by the results of this study. Oh the humanity! Kids have to learn to play music, rather than merely listening to it, to get brighter!
(Cross-posted from Fluff 'n' Stuff)
If this investigating professor is to be believed, it started several weeks before the Deepwater Horizon rig, positioned several miles offshore, drilling in 5000 ft deep ocean, was due to be capped and moved to another location for drilling. Based on his interviews with people who were involved in the rig's operation
"There was an "intense kick" of natural gas caused the rig to be shut down over fears of a catastrophic explosion just weeks before one such influx of gas did so."
Deepwater Horizon is one of the most advanced rigs of its kind. Or at least, it was, till it became an expensive piece of trash(albeit insured for up to $560 million), lying 1500 ft from its original position on the sea bed. The Swiss-based company Transocean, one of the largest contractors for oil drilling, owned and operated over 150 similar rigs for various oil company customers all over the world. Deepwater Horizon was being used to extract sweet crude for the BP oil company, moving from location to location as it completed the drilling, relying on precise positioning in the ocean locked in place by GPS systems.
After the drilling operation was completed, BP had another contractor, Halliburton, come in to cap the drilled location, and that was completed 'successfully', according to the parties involved. Until it wasn't, and 20 hours later, on April 20, the oil rig exploded catastrophically. The initial days were spent in looking for survivors and the rig sank on April 22. For a few days, reassuring statements regarding the small amount of oil spilling into the gulf were being put out, but not for long. The spill was growing at a tremendous rate and the amount released per day was eventually admitted to be five times as much as had been previously thought: 210,000 gallons a day, rather than 40,000.
Timeline (from chron.com)
In a hearing started yesterday in Congress, and continuing today, the blame-game of Musical chairs continues with full gusto, while the administration mulls its options to split the Mineral Management Services into separate bodies for regulation and lease oversight, given that the unholy nexus between the MMS officials and oil industry executives contributed considerably to lax regulation and this disaster.
"A top American executive for BP, Lamar McKay, said a critical safety device known as a blowout-preventer failed catastrophically. Separately, the owner of the rig off Louisiana's coast said that BP managed it and was responsible for all work conducted at the site. A third company defended work that it performed on the deepwater oil well as "accepted industry practice" prior to last month's explosion.
"We are looking at why the blowout preventer did not work because that was to be the fail-safe in case of an accident," McKay, chairman and president of BP America, said in testimony prepared for a Senate hearing Tuesday. A copy of his testimony was obtained by The Associated Press. "Transocean's blowout preventer failed to operate."
The chief executive for Swiss-based Transocean, which owned the oil rig and the blowout preventer, shifted blame to BP.
"All offshore oil and gas production projects begin and end with the operator, in this case BP," CEO Steven Newman said in his Senate testimony, also obtained by the AP. Newman said that BP was responsible for submitting a detailed plan specifying where and how a well is to be drilled, cased, cemented and completed.
Newman also said that BP's contractor, Halliburton Inc., was responsible for encasing the well in cement, putting a temporary plug in the top of the well, and ensuring the cement's integrity. That cementing process was dictated by BP's well plan, Newman said.
A Halliburton executive, Tim Probert, said the company safely finished a cementing operation 20 hours before the rig went up in flames. Probert said Halliburton completed work on the well according to accepted industry practice and at the direction of federal regulators."
Efforts to manage the spill ( now exceeding 3 million gallons and counting) included the use of a high-tech dome to cap the spill and siphon off the oil through a sort of funnel to a ship waiting above it. But this attempt was doomed, with methane ice-crystal formed inside the dome, buoying it up too high to contain the leak.
In a masterpiece of misstatement:
""I wouldn't say it failed yet," said Doug Suttles, chief operating officer of BP, the London-based company that owns the leaking well. "What I would say is what we attempted to do last night didn't work."
Low-tech attempts are being made as well, by volunteer groups such as Matter of Trust.
They are calling for donations of human and pet hair to use in creating home-made booms and mats to soak up the oil from the spill, based on prior experience with the Cosco Busan oil spill clean-up.
As we humans bemoan the loss of pristine beaches, now risking the messy tarballs that are washing up on beaches from Louisiana upto Galveston, and Florida, and the terrible smells wafting on-shore from the gazillion gallons floating on the surface as the spill takes on the dimensions of Texas in square miles, we are but the chickens while the birds, the fish and the shrimp are the pigs. ( Scrum terminology: Chickens are involved, but the pigs are committed.)
We've all seen the one gannet that seems to be the only bird being cleaned after the disaster, on myriad TV screens and internet article photos. But there are others, unseen and unsung, being presumably cleaned of the oil in their feathers. But no hard numbers seem to exist for these unfortunates.
One German expert went so far as to advocate euthanizing them, stating that their survival rates even after cleaning and release into the wild are not good.
But I suspect her advice stems from the use of older technology. Newer studies with more recent oil spills and cleaning methods have shown that while mortality is still higher than normal for cleaned and rehabilitated birds, released birds that make it past the initial month or so have as good a chance as any unaffected bird to survive in the wild.
As for aquatic life, the list of risks are too long to enumerate, all depending on the types of terrain along the coastline where the spill will come ashore.Ecosystems in the marshlands,lowlands and mangroves are most at risk compared with sand and gravel beaches,or even the deep sea, where fish populations can swim away and evade the worst effects of the spilled oil. But bottom-oriented populations of fish that live close to the ocean bed could be impacted by the tarry deposits that remain in the vicinity of the well-head. as will predator species that rely on them for food.
Fishing is done for several years, possibly, in the Gulf of Mexico. Maybe, some day as fishing trawlers move back into the zone, they may find a new kind of fish population, evolved to deal with the exigencies of surviving in polluted ocean waters, and not necessarily ready for human consumption for another generation.
Thoughts on the President's most recent nomination to the Supreme Court:
1. She's a woman. Had you heard? This would give us more female Justices than there have ever been on the Supreme Court — that's a good thing. It also could mean that when Justice Ginsburg retires, Obama won't feel constrained to replace her with another woman.
2. She's Obama's nominee. I mean, more than Sotomayor, more than the next one — she's it. Obama made her Solicitor General with the intention of giving her experience in front of the Supreme Court and giving her experience that virtually guarantees confirmability. Coupled with the fact that Kagan has served in two Democratic administrations, we clearly know who she is despite the lack of a paper trail. She's a Democrat. In general terms, she will support the President's legislative agenda. And given Obama's judicial philosophy, she will defer to Congress, assume that laws are constitutional, defer to agencies, and may be moderately liberal on hot-button social issues.
3. I'm not sure why people would get excited about this, on either side. She's the Obama nominee, and Obama is boring.
4. I could be wrong about some or all of the above.
(The Houston fundraiser for Save A Mother ends this coming Friday. Bringing this to the front of the page. My sincere thanks to those who have contributed. Your generosity will go a long way in facilitating the work of this deserving organization.)
This is the first time since the inception of this blog that I am initiating an on-site fund raiser for a charity. Occasionally in the past, I have pointed our readers to causes that I believe are worth supporting. But I have always directed them to the respective websites of the organizations. This time however, I am attempting to raise some funds right here by providing a donation link on the blog. (please see the Chip In logo on the left hand side column) As I indicated recently, I am a volunteer for the Houston chapter of Save A Mother, a non-profit organization that benefits poor women in rural India by educating them about pre and post natal maternal health as also, neo-natal child care.
The Houston arm of the charity is having its second annual fund raising event on May 7th, 2010 just prior to Mother's Day. We intend to solicit donations mostly in the real world from friends and family. But we also want to extend our reach into the cyberworld by facilitating on-line donations. Save A Mother already has a donation site where one can contribute any time. My link here is dedicated specifically to the Houston fund raiser. It will stay up only up to the 7th of May. All funds collected will go to the parent organization. I am requesting our readers to please read through the bottom half of this post where I bring forward the relevant information from my introductory post about the charity. If you are convinced of the value of the work done by Save A Mother, please consider donating a small amount. The link is set up to direct all donations directly to the main organization on behalf of the Houston branch. I am attaching an image of the invitation to the May 7th event below.
(Many thanks to Rahul Singhal of Save A Mother, for setting up the necessary widget for the donation link and also for patiently walking me through the process of embedding it on A.B.)
Accidental Blogger 