Excellent diary, Rach! -Elisa

Caesar’s wife should be above suspicion

I’ve been mulling over that line for nearly a month now and wondering if we’ve advanced our view of politicians’ wives since the origin of that quote in pre-Empire Rome. On the evidence of the past few weeks, probably not.

In America, Michelle Obama has drastically “scaled back” (as in, doing only about 20% of her original workload) her role as vice president of community and external affairs at the University of Chicago Hospitals. In Australia, Therese Rein, the wife of opposition leader (and putative future prime minister, if the polls are accurate) Kevin Rudd, has sold the Australian arm of her self-built A$170m job placement corporation after accusations of conflict of interest. Both women made their decisions because of their husbands' political aspirations.

I'm NO Roseanne Barr fan. Never have been. I find her pretty funny, but also  pretty grating. She's just too brash and her voice is too nasal for me, generally.

But I got this article, from the LA Times, off of a list-serve I subscribe to at work - for fundraising researchers. I probably wouldn't have read it, but the sender copied it into the email, and it looked short enough. Someone had emailed a different article on philanthropy earlier in the day, and this was something of a follow up/continuation.

Strangely enough, I kind of agree with what Roseanne says (save that draft thing). It's a bit reactionary for me, but I figured I'd throw it out there to you MTers. It's definitely relevant to our philosophy and mentions stuff that's been discussed here in the last week. So read and enjoy and discuss away. I'm looking forward to your comments.

Here's the link, to cover our copyrighted butt.