Day: April 28, 2009

This move by Senator Specter does not surprise me.

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Veteran Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter said Tuesday that he switched from the Republican to the Democratic Party.

“I know I’m disappointing many of my colleagues,” he said at a news conference. “The disappointment runs in both directions.

“I’m putting principle at the top of the list,” he added.

When asked how and when he made the decision, Specter said, “the decision has been reached as I have traveled the state [Pennsylvania] in the last several months. Specifically, I got my home poll results last Friday … and consulted with my campaign managers and had a long discussion. … I came to a decision over this past weekend.”

Specter also said that President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid would campaign for him as he runs for re-election — now on the Democratic ticket — in the 2010 race.

The Specter party switch would give Democrats a filibuster-proof Senate majority of 60 seats if Al Franken holds his current lead in the disputed Minnesota Senate race.

“Since my election in 1980, as part of the Reagan Big Tent, the Republican Party has moved far to the right,” Specter said in a statement posted by his office on PoliticsPA.com.

“Last year, more than 200,000 Republicans in Pennsylvania changed their registration to become Democrats. I now find my political philosophy more in line with Democrats than Republicans.”

Specter, a five-term Senate veteran, was greeted by a loud, sustained round of applause by dozens of constituents outside his Washington office shortly after the news broke.

“I don’t have to say anything to them,” a smiling Specter said. “They’ve said it to me

Looking down the barrel of a world wide pandemic, comes the news that there are 135,000 unfilled nursing positions in the United States. By 2015, this number is expected to go to be 683,000 unfilled positions.

Two main reasons are given for these shortages:

1. Nursing hours are long, difficult and stressful
2. There is a huge shortage of nursing faculty.
    We are running out of nurses to teach prospective nurses.

Back in the day, there were 2 professional jobs for women—nursing and teaching. All fields of professional work are now open to women. Many choose other professions than nursing. Although men are now nurses, certainly not all that many join the nursing field.

There are probably some carry over stereotypes from an earlier time that we don’t even realize we say. How many of us say ‘male nurse’ without even thinking about it. Do we say ‘female nurse?’ No. Americans need to put nurses in a better light and to drop the gender stereotyping.

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1980 was the first year that equal numbers of men and women voted. Why were women reluctant to vote for 60 years? What took them so long to catch up with their male counterparts since they had finally won the franchise with the 19th amendment?

Because the census didn’t track voter turnout until the 1960’s the pace that women caught up isn’t known. A re-discovered study has been uncovered that gives further information, according to the Pew Institute:

The study …was published in 1924 by two researchers at the University of Chicago, Professor of Political Science Charles Edward Merriam, and Harold Foote Gosnell, then an instructor in the same department. Years before the fielding of the first statistically representative national opinion polls, the authors aimed through a carefully designed and deployed door-to-door survey to provide a “preliminary approach to the study of political motives.” Their target population was that one-half of the voting-age adults in Chicago who failed to cast a ballot in the mayoral election held on April 3, 1923.

2 of the major reasons women didn’t vote were:

1. Disbelief in women voting
2. Objections of the husband

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