- Colbert King:
Family, marriage and the contribution of fathers come together as topics for reflection on Father's Day. So I'd like to know why Barack Obama, a husband and a father in a family structure that encompasses bonds deemed essential to our society, is constantly and savagely attacked by conservative leaders whose personal circumstances undermine the family values they espouse?
Consider Obama: Raised by a single mother in a middle-class family where hard work and education were watchwords, Obama graduated from two of the top schools in the country, Columbia University and Harvard Law School. His legal scholarship was recognized when he became the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review. He married and, equally important, has stayed married to Michelle Robinson, a Princeton graduate and Harvard Law alumna. He lives with his wife, two children and his mother-in-law. Obama: constitutional law professor, civil rights lawyer, state legislator, U.S. senator, 44th U.S. president, family man.
Now let's turn to Obama's foremost critics: Rush Hudson Limbaugh III, Newton Leroy Gingrich and Sarah Palin.
- Eighty-five percent of Swedish fathers take parental leave. It's expected, both by employers and society as a whole.
In this land of Viking lore, men are at the heart of the gender-equality debate. The ponytailed center-right finance minister calls himself a feminist, ads for cleaning products rarely feature women as homemakers, and preschools vet books for gender stereotypes in animal characters. For nearly four decades, governments of all political hues have legislated to give women equal rights at work — and men equal rights at home.
Swedish mothers still take more time off with children — almost four times as much. And some who thought they wanted their men to help raise baby now find themselves coveting more time at home.
But laws reserving at least two months of the generously paid, 13-month parental leave exclusively for fathers — a quota that could well double after the September election — have set off profound social change.
- In 2002, a telecommunications engineer with dual Canadian/Syrian citizenship was seized from JFK airport, held in solitary confinement for two weeks without adequate access to an attorney, then sent to Syria, where he was imprisoned for a year and tortured. Then, he was released back to Canada. Jeralyn explains that although the Supreme Court denied cert in his civil lawsuit against U.S. officials, at least someone official is investigating. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
- Blackwater is awarded a new contract -- under another name, of course -- to guard U.S. consulates in Afghanistan. --Susan Gardner
- Republicans just can't help revealing their unhinged extremism, and no matter how many times they later backtrack, they are what they are.
The Republican nominee for a northern New Mexico congressional seat suggested during a radio interview that the United States could place land mines along the Mexican border to secure the international boundary.
Asked Monday to clarify, Tom Mullins emphasized that he does not advocate doing so.
He was just making conversation. Or something.
- Dahlia Lithwick:
Almost two weeks ago, former Supreme Court Justice David Souter gave the commencement speech at Harvard, a speech that's been variously described by some of my favorite legal writers as a denunciation of "originalism," a defense of "living constitutionalism," and a suggestion that "judicial activism" is a game both liberals and conservatives can play. But the striking aspect of Souter's remarkable speech is that it rejected virtually all of these easy ideological labels and addressed itself to two much simpler questions: Is the meaning of the Constitution clear? And is the task of divining that meaning easy? These incisive questions themselves beg an even more pressing constitutional question: Why must justices first leave the bench before they can speak seriously about the importance of the court?
- Science Daily:
Advances in high-yield agriculture over the latter part of the 20th century have prevented massive amounts of greenhouse gases from entering the atmosphere -- the equivalent of 590 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide -- according to a new study led by two Stanford Earth scientists.
- Andrew Lawler, in Science Magazine:
After decades of taboo and controversy, Pacific Rim archaeologists are finding new evidence that Polynesians reached South America before Europeans did, voyaging across the world's largest ocean around 1200 C.E.
- Cynthia Tucker's reaction to President Obama's energy speech was concise and pointed.
- Diego Valle makes a comprehensive analysis of the Drug War in Mexico. Suffice to say that the present strategy isn't working. If you don't have a lot of time, just scroll down to his conclusions.
- Europe's recession might bring down Germany's Merkel government, and is leading to a rise in xenophobia and racism.
- Markos linked this, last week, but it deserves an encore. After taking apart the canard that Social Security is going broke, digby ends with this gem:
Any deficit scold who doesn't put reducing health care costs at the very top of the agenda is just a demagogic crank doing the dirty work for the aristocratic overlords.
- Defense Secretary Robert Gates claims Iran could launch hundreds of missiles into Europe. At least he didn't claim it could be done in 45 minutes.
- Pretend you're surprised:
Recent setbacks in Afghanistan have intensified debate over the wisdom of the Obama administration's plan to begin withdrawing U.S. military forces next summer and highlighted reservations among military commanders over a rigid timeline.
At a Senate hearing Tuesday, Gen. David H. Petraeus, who oversees U.S. forces in the Mideast and Afghanistan, offered "qualified" support for President Obama's plan to begin withdrawing troops in July 2011.
You have to admire the logic. The worse things get, the longer we have to stay.
One of the problems I’ve always had with online eBook readers is that they just doesn’t have the same look and feel of a real book or magazine. When you hold a book in your hands, you can grip the corner of the page and curl it back just as your finishing the last few words on the page, and then quickly toss the page over to the next page so you can continue without pause. This is part of the experience of reading, and it’s something that is very hard to give up as you transition to the digital medium of the Internet.
Luckily, there are eBook reader devices that now incorporate an animated sort of “page turning.” Those features are awesome, but they don’t help you much when you’re trying to read an eBook on your computer when you’re not mobile. This is why I was very excited to discover an awesome desktop eBook reader called MartView.
MartView is a unique digital reader application for Windows (Mac version available soon) that recreates this “authentic” reading experience. Using this reader, you can also read regular PDF documents as well, such as a free PDF eBook download. You can slowly or quickly turn or bend pages, scroll through documents using a variety of methods and orientations, and much more.
MartView Makes Reading Digital Documents Enjoyable
What I love about the free MartView eBook reader is the design that’s very easy on the eyes, and the functionality that really does make you feel like you have ultimate control over the motion of the book and the flow of your reading. Once you download and install the application, it looks like this.
Normally, the top menu bar is hidden, but when you bring your mouse near the top of the screen, it drops down. There are a lot of cool options available for how you’d like to navigate through your eBook. You can simply flip through (my favorite), or you can opt for the standard horizontal or vertical slide formats of typical PDF readers.
In the image below, I’ve grabbed hold of the lower right corner of the page and I’m turning the page in the example eBook. This shows the page in mid-flip, but you can actually hold it there as you would with a normal book. You can put it back if you want, or continue on to the next page. It’s a very cool feeling to have so much control over the motion of the page, and the shading and animation really makes it feel like you’re looking at a real book.
Changing views is as easy as clicking on the drop-down menu bar. Here, I’ve instantly changed the navigation to the vertical slide option. In this format you can use the scroll-bar (or your mouse scroll) to scroll up and down the entire eBook.
Another very cool view is the “thumbnails” view. Rather than sifting through a table of contents to find the page that you’re looking for, why not browse a thumbnail of all pages of the eBook? This makes it very easy to find diagrams or images that you want to refer back to but don’t remember the exact page.
You can use the MartView reader as a standalone PDF or eBook reader, but it also has the ability to connect through your Internet connection and download from the huge library of free eBooks at the MartView website. You don’t need an account, all you need to do is install the reader and you can start downloading free eBooks.
You can also create and upload your own eBooks and store them on the MartView library.
You can create and upload an eBook to the MartView library from a PDF eBook, from a collection of your own personal images, or from an archived collection of images and share your eBook with the entire community.
The upload process is really simple and fast. Just select the file, give it a title that you’ll remember easily (and a good category), and upload it to MartView.
The coolest part of MartView, in my opinion, is the library. I love free reading material, and the volumes of free content that you’ll find at MartView is seemingly unlimited. There are entire collections of online magazines, sorted into categories like Business & Finance, Computers & Tech and a lot more.
Of course, you aren’t limited to downloading and reading MartView eBooks only. You can open up any PDF on your computer or that you download from any other PDF-based eBook site using your MartView reader. Here, I opened a free download of A Tale of Two Cities.
You’ll notice that the shading and appearance gives your PDF document the look and feel of a real book. Just start paging through and enjoy your reading experience!
As with many good things, there’s a downside. I did notice that MartView is a dog when it comes to memory consumption. It’s best used with all other applications shut down and devoting the entire screen to the reading experience. Unless you have some massive memory, I wouldn’t advise trying to accomplish much else with your computer while running MartView.
With that said, I really like the software and plan to use it whenever I have some free time to sit back and enjoy an e-magazine or a free eBook.
penis enlargement
One of my favorite hobbies is reading up on everything that has to do with personal finance. Although I have learned a great deal about where to save money, Nic and I still have a lot of room for improvement.
There are currently 4 great books adorning my shelves. Living Fiscally Fit, By Woman's Day; Personal Finance For Dummies, by Eric Tyson; The Everything Budgeting Book, by Tere Drenth; and Grow Your Money, by Jonathon D. Pond.
All of these books share the same advice for beginning to grow your wealth and get out of debt. Each one of them will tell you to list your debts in order, either with the lowest balance on top, or the higher interest rate. It's your choice. Pay the minimum due every month on all of the balances except the top one, which you will pay as much as you can until you have it paid off. If you chose the higher interest rate card first, then you will be saving money by knocking out interest the sooner you pay it off. The benefit of starting with the card that has the lowest balance is just psychological. Many people will stay motivated to continue paying down debt once they see a card with a $0 balance.
But do you use all of your extra money to pay down those debts? All of these books agree when they say NO! You MUST start saving. No matter how many excuses you can come up with about why you can NOT start saving right now, there are ways to do it, and it's important if you ever want to get out and stay out of debt. Even $5 a week. Think of it this way. You are in the process of paying down debt, and then an emergency arises, but because you do not have a savings account to tap into in this case, you have to put it on credit. It happens. We all know that if it's not one thing, it's another. The endless cycle of debt, and why my mother mistakenly tells me "it's a cycle, you can never really get out of debt." That's a LIE! One that is born out of ignorance. If you have the money in a savings account, then you will not need to tap into more credit, and can continue paying down those cards.
Another great reason to save, as long as you put that money in a fund or money market account, is that you earn compound interest. That is interest that you earn off of interest you previously earned. It just keeps building. A great calculator to use if you want to find out how much your money will grow in a certain amount of time with NO more contributions and WITH regular contributions can be found at http://www.americancentury.com/workshop/tools.jsp - scroll down and click on "Time Value Calculator". They have other calculators available on that page as well, so go ahead and try them out.
I won't get into the different areas of your life that you can "save" money, or come up with "found money" - which is a term I've often read in these financial books and articles.
My reason for writing this is just to show that wealthy people all think alike, and all started out the same way. They set a goal, and they stuck with it. They payed down their debt and they SAVED at the same time, increasing those savings as more debt is payed off, and finally, once they are debt free, putting a big chunk of their "extra" money into diversified investments for long-term goals, such as buying a house, putting the kids through college, and the most important - retirement.
It's all about saving, and paying down debt, and learning to live within your means. It is possible for all of us, regardless of your income. If you live 10% above your means when you are making $10,000/year, then chances are you will be living 10% above your means when you are making $50,000/year.
Out of the four books I previously mentioned, Personal Finance for Dummies is my favorite. The Everything Budgeting Book is invaluable as well, because of the 70+ worksheets that are spaced throughout. I wasn't very impressed with the Woman's Day version of Living Fiscally Fit, although they do give some great advice for teaching your kids how to be financially responsible - and THAT in itself is invaluable! I'm still reading through Grow Your Money, so I am not able to form a conclusion just yet, although it also has information on teaching your kids about finances, starting at an early age. Why NOT make the family budget a family affair?
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