Tue 20 Dec 2005
The Political and the Personal
Posted by Liza under Current Affairs, Pregnancy, Opinion
I’ve actually been so outraged by the news that the President authorized the NSA to conduct warrantless wiretaps of Americans that I haven’t been able to blog about it at all.
Isn’t it bad enough that there’s a secret court that would normally be responsible for authorizing those warrants? Or that the standard for getting a warrant is that law enforcement says it’s related to a foreign intelligence investigation? They’ve turned down 5 of these requests — out of thousands — since 1978! And law enforcement don’t even need the warrant in advance — they can start the wiretap in "an emergency" as long as they ask for one within 3 days.
The President does not get to ignore the law. He’s the president of the GOVERNMENT for crying out loud! The legal structure!!! And it is insane and ridiculous and un-FSUKING-believable that he claims "Congress authorized me to use force in Afghanistan, therefore I could ignore the US CONSTITUTION and other legal civil liberties protections."
No.
Mr. President, Afghanistan and Al-Queda were how you convinced Congress to pass the Patriot Act. I may not think it’s a good law, but it IS a law. If you wanted warrantless wiretaps, you should have asked for them. At the time, you probably would have frigging gotten them!
But you didn’t. Now you’ve broken the law. And you’ve broken it in a massive and outrageous way.
In an IMPEACHABLE way.
</rant>
On the personal side, Smudge is bigger and so are most of his movements. They’re starting to feel extremely strange. And I’m working on a Top 10 Things I’m Looking Forward to Doing When I’m Not Pregnant list.
I’m also researching cool, high-tech cloth diapers. Fuzzi Bunz, Happy Heiny’s pocket diapers, Wonderalls, and StarBunz (for special occasions) seem to get the best reviews. Our intent is to use a mix of cloth & disposable, but the cloth will have to be pretty convenient and easy or we’ll wind up giving up on them.
Fruit & Veg Count, 12/18: 1 organic gala apple, 1 cup organic butternut squash. (Thinly sliced and sauteed so it caramelizes. YUM!!!)
12/19: 2/3 cup mixed veggies (beans, peas, summer squash, carrots).




December 20th, 2005 at 9:00 pm
Given that research is my profession, it’s odd but true that I let others do my cloth-diaper research for me. But I figured, why reinvent the wheel when so many others have sweated through this. I will send you a compilation of a couple of friends’ emails on the subject. You can also take a look at our cloth diaper registry at www.felicite.com to see what we decided to go with (basically a mix of Fuzzi Bunz for high tech simplicity and Chinese Pre-Folds with covers for economy. And we’ll use 7th Generation on the occasion we want disposables (e.g. when my mom is babysitting).
December 21st, 2005 at 12:03 am
As I understand it from various baby-having folks, the way to make sure you stay with cloth is to have a diaper service that takes away the dirty and replaces them with clean. I understand they even provide a container with an odor-trapping lid.
I’m not sure if there are such services that offer diapers with panda faces on them, however.
December 21st, 2005 at 7:11 am
Apparently diaper services are a business in severe decline.
My mom wanted to give us N months of one as a baby gift and was able to identify only one such business in the Atlanta metro area. And it wasn’t near our house.
That plays a big role in our “lets use a mix” and focus, within that mix, on the fancy high-tech cloth diapers.
December 21st, 2005 at 4:15 pm
That’s really unfortunate. Sheesh.
Hey, speaking of baby stuff, I need your postal address. I’m sure you’ve sent it to me before, but could you email it again?
Merci!
December 21st, 2005 at 8:45 pm
Yep, sounds like you are lving under a dictatorship not unlike Hitler’s regime. That’s how it all happened you know. He started his country on a pride bandwagon and then switched to a fear of Jews bandwagon meanwhile breaking all sorts of laws and being all secret like. Please let me know when Bush starts turning you all against Canada…
December 21st, 2005 at 10:02 pm
Most folks in the US don’t take Canada very seriously.
My high school global history teacher was of the semi-serious opinion that the US should invade and annex our neighbors to the north.
But few people even give it that much thought — which, honestly, probably works out better for you than if we were paying attention.