Senior Women Web

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  • Bills Introduced for Possible Enactment

    Here are the bills introduced last week by the US House and Senate that might interest women, as provided by Women’s Policy, Inc:

    Abortion

    S. 314 — Sen. Mike Johanns (R-NE)/Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (2/10/11) — A bill to ensure that women seeking an abortion are fully informed regarding the pain experienced by their unborn child.

    Child Nutrition

    H.R. 576 — Rep. Joe Baca (D-CA)/Education and the Workforce (2/9/11) — A bill to require each local educational agency participating in a program authorized by the Richard B. Russell National School Lunch Act or the Child Nutrition Act of 1966 to include under the local school wellness policy established by the agency a requirement that students receive 50 hours of school nutrition education per school year.

    Crime

    H.R. 578 — Rep. Ben Chandler (D-KY)/Judiciary (2/9/11) — A bill to ensure that sex offenders and sexually violent predators are not eligible for parole.

    Education

    S. 294 — Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT)/Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (2/7/11) — A bill to enhance early care and education.

    H.R. 555 — Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH)/Education and the Workforce (2/8/11) — A bill to assist states in establishing a universal prekindergarten program to ensure that all children three, four, and five years old have access to a high-quality, full-day, full-calendar-year prekindergarten education.

    Employment

    H.R. 616 — Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY)/Oversight and Government Reform, House Administration (2/10/11) — A bill to provide that four of the twelve weeks of parental leave made available to a federal employee shall be paid leave, and for other purposes.

    Miscellaneous

    H.R. 655 — Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY)/Oversight and Government Reform (2/11/11) — A bill to honor Susan B. Anthony by celebrating her legacy on the third Monday in February.

    H. Res. 90 — Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX)/House Administration (2/11/11) — A resolution recognizing the 75th birthday of the Honorable Barbara Charline Jordan, American politician, leader of the Civil Rights movement, first African-American elected to the Texas Senate, first Southern black woman ever elected to the United States House of Representatives, inspirational figure in the Progressive movement, and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom Award.

    Violence Against Women

    H. Res. 87 — Rep. John Lewis (D-GA)/Judiciary (2/11/11) — A resolution supporting the goals and ideals of National Teen Dating Violence Awareness and Prevention Month.

  • 2011 Conservative Political Action Conference Flaunts Its Youth

    by Jo Freeman

    Youth swelled the ranks of the 38th Conservative Political Action Conference held in Washington, DC February 10-12. Estimates ran as high as fifty percent of the 11,000 people were under 25. Significantly more men than women wore student conference badges.

    CPAC has long actively recruited students and given them significant fee discounts, but this year’s crop was particularly bountiful. All of the ones I spoke to were subsidized. Many came in under the umbrella of a CPAC sponsor, others got money from their state or local Republican organization. Quite a few told me that their travel was paid for by their schools. CPAC provided room and board to those who volunteered for the many conference tasks.

    Campaign for Liberty, founded by Cong. Ron Paul (R TX), brought in 1,200 supporters in order to repeat last year’s success in the straw poll. This year, thirty percent of the 3742 who voted said Paul was their first choice for the Republican nomination for President. Last year 31 percent of 2395 people gave Paul their vote. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney ran second in both years. 

    There was a big gap between these two and the other 13 names listed in the 2011 poll. Tea-Party favorite Michelle Bachmann received 4 percent of the vote, while Sarah Palin, the only other woman on the list, got 3 percent. Bachmann was a major speaker at CPAC; Palin did not come, though her PAC paid to be a co-sponsor.

    Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour received 1 percent of straw poll votes, while relative unknown Herman Cain, the former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, got 2 percent. Both were featured speakers. Barbour, who grew up in Yazoo, MS during the civil rights movement, gained some notoriety recently for his ignorance about racism in his home state. Cain, who grew up in Georgia, is black.

    Voting in the straw poll is optional, but all those young people had an impact. Although the American Conservative Union which puts on CPAC every year, favors “traditional values” and a strong defense, only nine percent of those polled said that the former “comes closest to your core beliefs and ideology” and only six percent said it was “safety at home and abroad.” The third choice, “individual freedom by reducing the size and scope of government” got 84 percent of the votes. 

    Speakers generally got a polite reception, but there were some exceptions. When former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld came on stage to receive a “Defender of the Constitution” award, about half the audience cheered and the other half booed. Former Vice President Dick Cheney, who introduced him, got a warmer reception, with only about ten percent boos. But “draft dodger” and “where is bin Laden” shouted from the audience could be heard loud and clear.

    Libertarian hero Ron Paul on the other hand was greeted like a rock star. The line outside the ballroom waiting to hear him speak was younger and much longer than the crowd for any other speaker, even such popular perennials as Ann Coulter. 

    As libertarians flowed into this year’s CPAC, traditional conservatives flowed out. The possibility that GOProud, a two-year-old conservative gay group, would return to CPAC in 2011 prompted several traditional conservative groups to stage a boycott. The Family Research Council, Concerned Women for America, and the Heritage Foundation said they would not participate if GOProud was present.

  • Any Human Heart … Will More Than Do

    Watch the full episode. See more Masterpiece.

    A trio of great British actors play the different life stages of Logan Mountstuart, the hero of William Boyd’s novel about a writer, lover, art dealer, and spy living by his wits in the tumultuous 20th century. Masterpiece Classic presents a three-part adaptation of this tale of adventure, romance, and heartbreak on Any Human Heart airing Sundays, February 13, 20, and 27 on your local PBS stations.

    Oscar-winner Jim Broadbent stars as Mountstuart in his dotage, with Matthew Macfadyen (you may remember him as Mr. Darcy in the film version Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice) as the hero in his prime and Sam Claflin as the eager seducer in his impetuous youth. Adapted by Boyd, the production was hailed as “an absolute treat” by The Guardian during its recent UK broadcast. The review celebrated the series as “a witty, touching, intimate romp through one man’s life, and through a big chunk of the 20th century, directed with panache, and with fine performances wherever you look.”

    Joining the chorus of praise, The Times  of  London wrote, “this is the story of one extraordinary everyman, whose appeal on the page — and now on the screen — lies in his humanity, and his fallibility.” Any Human Heart also stars Hayley Atwell (who appeared in The Duchess and as Julia Flyte in the new film version of Brideshead Revisited), Kim Cattrall, Gillian Anderson, Tom Hollander, Ed Stoppard, Samuel West, and Richard Schiff.

    Mountstuart’s trajectory takes him to Paris in the ’20s, the Spanish Civil War in the ’30s, British intelligence in the ’40s, the New York art scene in the ’50s, a left-wing terrorist cell in the ’70s  …  and that’s not all. Along the way he befriends Ernest Hemingway and Ian Fleming, meets Winston Churchill, and becomes a favorite of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, the abdicated British king and his controversial American wife.

    But his most intense relationships are with a succession of women that he loves, marries, or otherwise gets to know. Any Human Heart takes its title from Henry James’s short story Louisa Pallant, which opens: “Never say you know the last word about any human heart.” Indeed, the hearts that Mountstuart wins and loses are as inscrutable as the great currents of history that sweep him up and carry him on his remarkable life’s journey.

    Pictured above are Matthew MacFayden and Hayley Atwell .

    The first chapter of Louisa Pallant written 1890 by Henry James begins:

  • A Valentine’s Day Budget: A Scarlet Tie Laced Through With FY 2012

    Dressed conservatively (though this isn’t a political reference) in a dark grey single-breasted suit relieved by a scarlet tie laced through with white dots, White House  Office of Management and Budget Director, Jack Lew, introduced an explanatory preview of the 2012 Administration Budget. Referring to the White Board illustration of the budget’s deficit downward trajectory, Mr. Lew made note of the fact that when he left office in 2001 in his previous stint as OMB director, as a government, “we were running a surplus of $5.6 trillion over the next ten years. Since then we’ve taken a dramatic turn. ” … we’re running very deep deficits, as you can see.”

    “The challenge that we face as a country is that we need to get from a place which is just unstainable to a place where we can actually pay our bills and have a stable, secure future.”

    “I’d like to show you what the President’s budget can do:”

    “There’s no one side that has all the answers. We know that you have to stabilize where we’re going, before you can move on, and solve the rest of the problem.This budget does that. It does it in a way that we look forward to working, on a bipartisan basis, to make policy for our country.”

    The White House’s White Board page advises “Look for much more detail here at WhiteHouse.gov Monday afternoon.”

  • Rosalind Cartwright: The Queen of Dreams

    By Elaine Soloway

    It was a humorous gesture — a gold paper crown included — when Chicagoan Rosalind D. Cartwright, PhD. was honored with the title, “The Queen of Dreams.” While the bestowing occurred years ago at a meeting of the Association for the Study of Dreams in London, Dr. Cartwright’s continuing work on sleep and dreams makes her even more deserving of the symbolic title.

    Dr. Cartwright, professor emeritus in the Graduate College of Rush in the Neuroscience Section, is the author of the recently published, The Twenty-four Hour Mind: The Role of Sleep and Dreaming in Our Emotional Lives. (Oxford University Press, 2010).

    This queen’s journey into sleep research began at Cornell University where she received her Ph.D. in psychology. After teaching at Mount Holyoke College, she left to conduct research on the effectiveness of client-centered psychotherapy at the University of Chicago with the eminent psychologist Carl Rogers.

    After that, Dr. Cartwright became director of psychology at the University of Illinois College of Medicine. While there, she created a sleep laboratory to study the function of dreaming and REM sleep (Rapid Eye Movement) funded by NSF (National Science Foundation), NIH (National Institute of Health) and NIMH (National Institute of Mental Health).

    When asked what sparked her interest in dreams, Dr. Cartwright said, “I was the daughter of a poet who used the imagery of her dreams in her creative work. This usefulness of dreams intrigued me. I was lucky, because when I was ready to investigate what dreams could add to our creativity, researchers had already learned we could capture dreams by having people sleep in a laboratory. In that setting, we could wake them whenever their eyes began to move rapidly. We knew this was a sign they were dreaming.”

    “The lab gave me the chance to retrieve three, four or five dreams every night and to investigate the differences in how dreams progressed across the night, and how well or poorly our sleepers recalled their dreams the next morning.”

    While researching dreamers, Dr. Cartwright also became convinced that sleep problems were continuing to plague a growing number of people. So, in 1977, when she was named professor and chairman of the department of psychology at Rush University Medical Center — a position she held for 30 years — she launched a Sleep Disorder Service — the first in Illinois. “The most common complaint patients brought was insomnia,” Dr. Cartwright said, “often triggered by an ongoing emotional problem. We learned that this continuing insomnia was a frequent symptom of depression.”

    “Now, I became curious about the difference in the dreams of those who recovered from depression on their own and those who did not. This started me on a series of studies of people going through a particular emotional problem — divorce. After studying 150 people over a period of years, I discovered that dreams have a specific function: In the healthy person, dreams regulate mood. In some depressed people, the dreams are self-correcting over time, but other people need additional help.”

    Sleep apnea caught this reseacher’s interest, too. At Rush, Dr. Cartwright assembled a team of neurologists, pulmonologists, and psychologists to treat patients who were experiencing a variety of sleep-related problems. With funding by the Heart, Lung, and Blood Section of NIH, she tested the first oral appliance for the control of snoring and mild sleep apnea. NIH also funded her studies on “positional apnea” for people who snore and stop breathing when sleeping on their back. She trained these sufferers to “side sleep.”

  • The Role of Neural Pathways; Whether we develop and overcome fears

    By Yasmin Anwar

    Why do some people fret over the most trivial matters while others remain calm in the face of calamity? Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have identified two different chinks in our brain circuitry that explain why some of us are more prone to anxiety.

    Their findings in the journal Neuron, may pave the way for more targeted treatment of chronic fear and anxiety disorders. Such conditions affect at least 25 million Americans and include panic attacks, social phobias, obsessive-compulsive behavior and post-traumatic stress disorder.

    In the brain imaging study, researchers from UC Berkeley and Cambridge University discovered two distinct neural pathways that play a role in whether we develop and overcome fears. The first involves an overactive amygdala, which is home to the brain’s primal fight-or-flight reflex and plays a role in developing specific phobias.

    The second involves activity in the ventral prefrontal cortex, a neural region that helps us to overcome our fears and worries. Some participants were able to mobilize their ventral prefrontal cortex to reduce their fear responses even while negative events were still occurring, the study found.

    “This finding is important because it suggests some people may be able to use this ventral frontal part of the brain to regulate their fear responses – even in situations where stressful or dangerous events are ongoing,” said UC Berkeley psychologist Sonia Bishop, lead author of the paper.

    “If we can train those individuals who are not naturally good at this to be able to do this, we may be able to help chronically anxious individuals as well as those who live in situations where they are exposed to dangerous or stressful situations over a long time frame,” Bishop added.

  • Pew Researches Faith on the Hill; The Religous Composition of the 112th Congress

    Gabrielle Giffords embracing Barack Obama

    President Barack Obama embracing Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords before delivering his speech at the 2012 State of the Union. Pete Souza, Wikipedia Commons

    Many analysts described the November 2010 midterm elections as a sea change, with Republicans taking control of the US House of Representatives and narrowing the Democratic majority in the Senate. But this political overhaul appears to have had little effect on the religious composition of Congress, which is similar to the religious makeup of the previous Congress and of the nation, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life.

    The 112th Congress, like the US public, is majority Protestant and about a quarter Catholic. Baptists and Methodists are the largest Protestant denominations in the new Congress, just as they are in the country as a whole.

    A few of the country’s smaller religious groups, including Episcopalians, Presbyterians and Jews, have greater numerical representation in Congress than in the general population. Some others, including Buddhists and Muslims, are represented in Congress in roughly equal proportion to their numbers in the adult US population. And some small religious groups, such as Hindus and Jehovah’s Witnesses, are not represented at all in Congress.

    Perhaps the greatest disparity between the religious makeup of Congress and the people it represents, however, is in the percentage of the unaffiliated — those who describe their religion as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular.” According to information gathered by CQ Roll Call and the Pew Forum, no members of Congress say they are unaffiliated. By contrast, about one-sixth of US adults (16%) are not affiliated with any particular faith. Only six members of the 112th Congress (about 1%) do not specify a religious affiliation, which is similar to the percentage of the public that says they don’t know or refuses to specify their faith.1

    These findings are based on a comparison of the religious affiliations of members of the new Congress with data on the U.S. public from the US Religious Landscape Survey, conducted by the Pew Forum in 2007 among more than 35,000 US adults. CQ Roll Call gathered information on the religious affiliations of members of Congress through questionnaires and follow-up phone calls to members’ offices. The Pew Forum supplemented that information with an extensive review of media reports on candidates in 2010 House and Senate races. It should be noted, however, that there is an important difference between a confidential telephone survey of a sample of US adults and media inquiries about the religious identification of an elected official or candidate. Media inquiries may find fewer “unaffiliated” people because those inquiries are more public.

    The New, 112th Congress

    Of the 535 members of the new Congress, 304 — or 57% — are Protestants, which is slightly higher than the share of Protestants in the US adult population (51%). Compared with the previous Congress, the 112th Congress has added 12 Protestants, an increase of roughly two percentage points.

  • A Close Look at Art in All the Right Places

    Google unveiled the Art Project, a unique collaboration with some of the world’s most acclaimed art museums to enable people to discover and view more than a thousand artworks online in extraordinary detail.

    Over the last 18 months Google has worked with 17 art museums including, Altes Nationalgalerie, The Freer Gallery of Art Smithsonian, National Gallery (London), The Frick Collection, Gemäldegalerie, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, Museo Reina Sofia, Museo Thyseen – Bornemisza, Museum Kampa, Palace of Versailles, Rijksmuseum, The State Hermitage Museum, State Tretyakov Gallery, Tate, Uffizi and Van Gogh Museum. The results of this partnership, which can be explored at www.googleartproject.com involved taking a selection of super high resolution images of famous artworks, as well as collating more than a thousand other images into one place. It also included building 360 degree tours of individual galleries using Street View ‘indoor’ technology.

    Works of art included in the project range from Botticelli’s ‘Birth of Venus’ to Chris Ofili’s ‘No Woman, No Cry’, Cezanne’s post impressionist works to Byzantine iconography. From the ceilings of Versailles to ancient Egyptian temples, a collection of Whistlers to Rembrandts all over the globe. In total, 486 artists from around the world have been included.

    Explore museums with Street View technology: Using this feature, people can move around the gallery virtually on www.googleartproject.com, selecting works of art that interest them and clicking to discover more or diving into the high resolution images, where available.  The info panel allows people to read more about an artwork, find more works by that artist and watch related YouTube videos.

    A specially designed Street View trolley took 360 degree images of the interior of selected galleries which were then stitched together, enabling smooth navigation of over 385 rooms within the museums. The gallery interiors can also be explored directly from within Street View in Google Maps.

    Super high resolution feature artworks: Each of the 17 museums selected one artwork to be photographed in extraordinary detail using super high resolution or gigapixel photo capturing technology. Each such image contains around 7 billion pixels, enabling the viewer to study details of the brushwork and patina beyond that possible with the naked eye. Hard to see details suddenly become clear such as the tiny Latin couplet which appears in Hans Holbein the Younger’s ‘The Merchant Georg Gisze‘. Or the people hidden behind the tree in Ivanov’s ‘The Apparition of Christ to the People’.

    In addition, museums provided images for a selection totalling more than 1000 works of art. The resolution of these images, combined with a custom built zoom viewer, allows art-lovers to discover minute aspects of paintings they may never have seen up close before, such as the miniaturized people in the river of El Greco’s ‘View of Toledo’, or individual dots in Seurat’s ‘Grandcamp, Evening‘.

    Create your own collection: The Create an Artwork Collection feature allows users to save specific views of the artworks and build their own personalized collection. Comments can be added to each painting and the whole collection can then be shared with friends and family. It’s a tool for students or groups to work on collaborative projects or collections.

  • Valentine’s Day Apps

    by Elaine Soloway

    While shopping at Target on Sunday, my husband and I paused before entering the checkout lane. We looked at each other then split in opposite directions. Upon returning to our goods, Tommy dropped into the cart — among the Diet Coke, No Caffeine and Vanity Fair Everyday Napkins — a heart-shaped box of Russell Stover candies. I tossed in a glittery card, “To My Wonderful Husband, Happy Valentine’s Day.” With no attempt to hide our purchases, we headed toward the shortest line. Who says romance is dead?

    That’s us, maybe not you. So, as a favor to those who mush about the upcoming holiday, I’ve gathered some apps to help make hearts flutter.

    1. Be Mine Lite is a free Valentine’s Day Card Creator. It comes loaded with backgrounds, hearts, cupids, kisses and more. You can save your cards, send them through email, or share on Facebook. It’s universal, which means you can use it on an iPhone, iPad or iPod touch.

    2. iCelebrate ~ Valentine’s Day app costs $0.99, but that’s not much to pay to set a romantic tone for the night. It streams love-inspired Smooth Jazz, Easy Listening, and Soul/R&B music. It can display either candlelit tables, a big red heart, or a New York City balcony at night.

    3. Flower Coach by Teleflora is free and helps you write the perfect romantic greeting, including sweet, sexy, silly, traditional, Shakespeare-ish and hip-hop. And, you’ll save 10% on your next bouquet.

    4. Instant Poetry HD is a bit pricier at $1.99. But think of the fun you’ll have as you create beautiful, passionate, and romantic poetry. Use your own pictures as backgrounds, tap a button to pop up some words, then drag them around the screen to design your masterpiece.

    5. Open Table is free and uses your current location to provide a list of available restaurants. Search by city, neighborhood, cuisine or price. Valentine’s Day is notoriously busy and expensive, but if you’re undeterred, use this app to find a description, photos and reviews. Bon appetit!

    6. Kiss N Blow costs $0.99. You blow a kiss into your iPhone, and have it sent to your Valentine via email or text messaging. Select from a variety of themes: Green Kiss (environmentally friendly), Eskimo Kiss (with your nose) Romantic Kiss, and Scuba Kiss, (from Underwater).

    7. Now, if all of the above leaves you nauseous rather than excited, here’s an app you might prefer: Love Sucks, a $0.99 app that recognizes Valentine’s Day isn’t for all. It displays anti-Valentine’s Day candy heart images of Love Sux, You Suck, and I’m Cheating.

    Happy Valentine’s Day!

    ©2011 Elaine Soloway for SeniorWomen.com

  • EPI Economic Snapshot: Income Inequality; It wasn’t always this way

    The Economic Policy Institute’s most recent Economic Snapshot:

    In recent decades, the bulk of income growth in America has gone to the top 10% of families, but that was not always the case. Throughout most of the 20th Century, the bottom 90% claimed a much larger share of income growth than they have in recent years.

    The Chart, from EPI’s new interactive State of Working America Web site, compares the distribution of income growth over two periods. Between 1948 and 1979, a period of strong overall economic growth and productivity in the United States, the richest 10% of families accounted for 33% of average income growth, while the bottom 90% accounted for 67%. The overall distribution of income was stable for these three decades. In an extreme contrast, during the most recent economic expansion between 2000 and 2007, the period that led up to the Great Recession, the richest 10% accounted for a full 100% of average income growth.

     

    In other words, while average annual incomes over the seven-year period between 2000 and 2007 grew by $1,460, that growth was extremely lopsided. Average incomes for the bottom 90% of households actually declined. The interactive feature When income grows, who gains?, on the new State of Working America Web site, lets users look at income growth and distribution patterns for any time frame between 1917 and 2008.

    This new feature lets users choose any two years between 1917 and 2008 to see how much the top 10%, versus the bottom 90%, contributed to growth in average incomes. Because income growth can change a lot during periods of recession, researchers tracking trends in inequality often chart movements between the peaks of different business cycles in order to avoid comparing a high point in one business cycle to a low point in another. The interactive feature on income distribution also shows how an increasing amount of income growth has been flowing not just to the top 10%, but to the richest 1% of families.

    Copyright © 2010 – 2011 Economic Policy Institute