my wife took the citizenship test over 20 years ago, maybe 25. It was oral, and the procter clearly took a dislike to her - she's Asian, well-educated, assertive and articulate. And she failed the test the first time around, because of questions like "Name the entire congressional delegation for this state." Second time around they threw a few softballs and she passed, but, boy, she came home really honked off after that first test. Our conclusion was that INS (what the agency was called at that time) was a hangout for racists and xenophobes who are happy to see white males and commie refugees enter our land, but who reflexively dislike uppity women of non-white variety. The test is plainly nothing more than an arbitrary and capricious tool to enforce their ideas of who ought to come in, based on their own narrow prejudices.

a good friend from years ago, whom I don't see nearly often enough because of geography, Dorsey Green, has made study of this topic one of her life's works. Here's an excellent book by her and a colleague, if you haven't read it already:

http://www.amazon.com/Lesbian-Parenting-Book-Creating-Families/dp/1580050905/sr=1-3/qid=1167841347/ref=sr_1_3/102-5336497-3857705?ie=UTF8&s=books

And she speaks from not only research but experience on the topic.

that worries me - if, as Mark states, the government indeed has the authority embodied in the December signing statement by virtue of the FISA, then why bother with the signing statement. What is the gain that we're not seeing? Or did they who did this signing statement simply fail to realize they didn't really need it?

Vondo makes an excellent point about almost everyone being drawn in (again - torture vs abuse) by the misuse of language. To me, this looks like Bush et al maneuvering to place the withdrawal far enough into the future that the democrats can be blamed. McCain is being opportunistic as usual, positioning himself so that if this strategy works (or even if the escalation works) then he looks good. What bush co. claims to be doing is, as usual, not what they actually intend.

For instance, from 1990 to 2002 I was on faculty of a "heartland' medical school. During that time the sex ratio went from about 70% male to about 60% female. Clearly women who wished to enter health care no longer felt compelled to enter nursing, a change with huge implications for both nursing and the field of being a physician.

bush dwaddled for 2 months so he could sit on the democrats' first weeks leading congress.

I think Catherine has done a good job of picking up on matters of import such as the cross-sectional nature of the study and what that implies (inability to ascertain temporal sequence of cause-and-effect). She has clearly done more than read over the MSM's reports on the study, and has done a good job of explaining the conclusions the authors arrived at.

One thing I would add - granted, there's a long history of excluding women from cardiovascular disease studies, but a lot of those, including the two she cites, were interventional studies, i.e. medications were given. In the case of the MRFIT trial, one of the medications turned out to be harmful. Women were excluded because it was thought most efficient to focus intervention studies on the group who was most likely to develop the disease of interest. That meant middle-age or later men. A second concern was that investigators did not want study subjects who could become pregnant being exposed to those drugs. A third concern (essentially financial) was simply that because women are physiologically different enough that the study population would need to stratified by gender, the study sample would need to be doubled in size to achieve statistical significance.

fun and to feed her adrenaline addiction. The other day she was climbing at a gym we belong to which has a wall, the base of which is shared with the free-weight room. She was midway up the wall and executed a difficult, "dyno" move, ie one in which she had to shove herself upward off her more-or-less secure perch to the next hold. As sometimes happens, she had an audience, and one of them, your stereotypical power lifter, in awe said "That took big, hairy balls!"

She though about that a moment and decided she was complimented in a sort of disgusting way. But it being LA, as a previous respondent pointed out, the term "huevos" (Spanish slang for "balls") works fine.

but the usual ways of describing income gaps using percentiles misses most of the story - the distribution has far too long a tail....Stan Cox shows this very well:

http://www.alternet.org/story/16515/

on Saturday. She was downtown visiting an elderly woman in a hospital - she's a social worker in a large elderly residence - and stopped to take a look at the march. Friends from our Quaker Meeting were there, saw my wife and hauled her in to the march. Since one of said friends is a 92-year old woman, an actress who's not yet retired, my wife couldn't very well say no and in fact enjoyed the whole thing. There's a strong thread of irony to this since my wife, although naturalized, is of Korean origin and in fact comes from a class not known for protesting government policies - she's part of the old Korean royal family. Times change, eh.

Regarding the coverage picking up on the more unusual aspects, that's standard practice, if irritating. My voice teacher is a gay man who's a solid competitive swimmer. Last fall he went to the gay-lesbian national games in Chicago, enjoyed it thoroughly and competed well - but the coverage was all about the most outre fringe, the outrageous queens, the long boring speeches - same as the coverage of the Washington protest. Missing the point entirely.

he's wrong. Most likely he knows it.