I found this picture of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip standing with the Obamas last week at Buckingham Palace rather startling.

(AP Photo/John Stillwell, pool)

The aging royals, grayer and more stooped than I remembered, were huddled awkwardly beneath of the towering shadow of our shimmering, still-under-warranty, kinetically energetic new President and First Lady. Were the British couple really so tiny or are the Obama’s so large that they dwarfed the royals almost entirely?

From A. Fine Blog.

There was a great post on the Chronicle’s website today about the use of Twitter by nonprofit organizations.

Great quotes from my Social Citizens blog pal Kari Dunnn Saratovsky at the Case Foundation and Beth (of course!) on the various ways that foundations and nonprofits are using Twitter to share news, raise money, organize events and generally connect with their supporters.

But one of the tips at the end of the article left me pondering. It said: Be professional. While for an animal-rights group blogging about vegan recipes may make sense, posting about how disappointed you were in last night’s episode of Lost probably doesn’t.

Alaskans are choosing to give a percentage of their refund to charities of their choice. Why can't we create a Tax Choice Program whereby we all get to determine where, say, 10% of our state and federal taxes will go. It would be our own personal tax discretionary fund.

Enormous efforts have been made by campaigns and public interest groups to register people to vote on November 4th. According to the Election Assistance Commission more than 2 million poll workers will be working at over 200,000 polling places this election. Unfortunately, what these new voters don’t know is that just registering to vote may not ensure that they are able to vote on Election Day or that their vote will be counted.

There will be a lot going on in Pennsylvania today with the death match between Obama and Clinton coming down to the wire. A huge turnout and lots of new voters are expected which is always worrisome in large states like PA with lots of different municipalities (the Pittsburgh area has the largest number of unique municipalities in one county, Alleghany, in the country) all with their own machinery and rules. There will be a lot of commentary on who voted for whom, but there is another, smaller story worth watching, and that is what happens to the machinery tomorrow.

Voting, in some form or another, is on the minds and screens of Americans everywhere during this election year. As everyone knows it’s American Idol season and millions of Americans are voting by phone and text messaging for their favorites. However, in spite of the great interest in and high turnout for the presidential primaries on the Democratic side, the voting system -- the mechanics that should allow for an easy and secure one-person-one-vote process, a system that the government has invested $4 billion since the debacle in 2000 -- continues to be broken.

Al Gore just announced a new campaign to $300 million climate change campaign. It’s a very slick website called We Can Solve the Climate Crisis, or We for Short.

At the risk of being totally un-PC for We, I have some problems here (and I’m not talking about the shock of seeing the phrase, “Nobel laureate former Vice President Al Gore” — didn’t I just know him as boring Al?).

It’s like the premise of a science fiction novel; what would happen if all of your friends disappeared in an instant? It would be like a neutron bomb that killed everyone around you, except you, and there you were standing all alone. Derek Blackadder had an experience like this on Facebook several weeks ago

Do you know which sector is the tenth largest biggest business sector in the country as measured by its revenue and number of employees? It’s the nonprofit sector, a sprawling, incongruous group of causes, agencies, universities and hospitals linked together mainly by the tax code that gives them all exempt status. And until now, it would have seemed implausible that nonprofits and presidential politics would go hand-in hand.

Just as people, particularly young voters, are beginning to pay attention to the presidential race, 14 states have already closed their voter registration with another 5 set to do so within the next week!