Remind me again why that was supposed to be offensive, to anybody. Sorry, gotta go. I have a long list of friends I have to e-mail the link to.

I am a female lawyer with a school-age child. A few years back, I worked on a matter as a contract lawyer, with a room full of other contract lawyers. I was the only one there with a family. We reviewed documents and entered data on a shared database, all day long. We billed by the hour. Because I had a school age child, I could only manage to bill four hours per day, while they each billed around ten a day. However, they had a tendency to chat, to stall, and to take long lunches, while I spent my time trying to get everything done in four hours. I was so defensive about being branded a malingerer (because we all know what freeloaders working mothers are) that I used to target 25 entries before I took a break, then I sat and did another 25 entries. Although I occasionally had lengthy documents that took longer than expected, it was typical for me to complete 50 entries in the space of four hours.

One day, I figured out how to search the database to see how many entries each one of us had completed, which meant at the beginning of each day I could see a tally of how much each of us was accomplishing.

The other lawyers (all childless, of course) were averaging about 20 entries a day, working 10 hour shifts -- or at least billing 10 hours. This was consistent over the course of more than a year. I was averaging 50 entries a day in four hours during the same time period.

After that, I stopped worrying about whether I was going to get in trouble over my short hours.

I'm of the opinion that IF Al Qaeda did take over the oil reserves, their religious fanaticism would be overwhelmed by the profit potential, and they'd fall apart squabbling over who was gonna be in charge. At best, they'd wind up like Saudi Arabia: the fact that the Great Satan is their biggest customer, while galling to them, would serve as a major disincentive to wiping us off the planet. Nobody wants to destroy the hand that feeds them, and we're the ones paying $4.00 a gallon for oil.

The practice is particularly difficult to stop because families' preference for boys has deep cultural roots: Boys don't require dowries, they stay home after they get married, and they're allowed to light their parents' funeral pyres

It's more than "just staying home" after marriage: Boys are expected to grow to adulthood and ultimately live with, and support, their parents, in exchange for which they are treated like princes. Girls are expected to take up the family resources and ultimately leave their home to serve their husbands and in-laws, in exchange for which they are treated like servants. This means that resources spent on raising a boy child will ultimately pay off in security for his parents in their old age. A daughter will merely exhaust the family's resources to the benefit of her in-laws in their old age.

I'm not an Obama supporter, but I thought that speech was okay. What distracted me -- and I fully acknowledge how shallow this is -- was that, here's this guy who's trying to portray the image of the Regular Guy, shake off all that elitist stuff, and appeal to working people. That's the kind of people who need to check the price tags at Target, and standing immediately behind him were not one, not two, but THREE blazing huge obvious Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirts. And he's trying to pry support away from Clinton? Does he have any advisors who are, let's say, working mothers with teenage kids? My husband and I sat there incredulously watching, and finally he went on Drudge to check out if anyone else had noticed the product placement.

Not suprisingly, they had.

Oh, and Barak: Please don't call people "folks". It just reminds me of when Bush is trying to pass himself off as a Regular Guy.