Dilemma Continued

Mohamed touched upon some of the fine points in the priorities dilemma in his comment. You're right in that often to place family first in the priority list, we need to put career first for a while, but then how long is a while? I don't know. Is it the time away when you are doing your phd? is it the career itself?
If you want to go to academia, you have limited choices and once you make that choice it is very much of a long term choice (long term referring to 7-10 years since you can't move away before you get your tenure). It is worst when you have two career people to consider.

I know what it is like when you are away and things happen in your life that you can never get back. By being away you take a risk that things don't change during that time and that when you return it will be to the same faces. But when this doesn't happen, then you really re-evaluate everything and you see the risks more clearly with passing months.

Anyhoo.

Here's an interesting Washingtonpost editorial on how Bush is possibly the worst president ever. It says that the problem with the worst ever presidents in US history has been that they are "Stubborn, narrow-minded, unwilling to listen to criticism or to consider alternatives to disastrous mistakes, they surrounded themselves with sycophants and shaped their policies to appeal to retrogressive political forces (in that era, pro-slavery and racist ideologues)." Now compare this with what we know of Bush.

I wonder if the public reaction to presidents such as Johnson, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Richard M. Nixon, who claim the worst ever US presidents title, was anything similar to that of Bush. Was the public so divided?