We are being released from the hospital. This is fantastic because I’ve been growing desperate with people who want to poke me, talk to me, take my blood pressure, ask me questions, and palpate me literally every hour 24/7. I haven’t even looked at any election – related news in a whole day! I haven’t read a book in days! I forgot to play my farm game! I’m very ready to go home and feel like myself again.
This was a very medically observed pregnancy for obvious reasons, and I did so much research during the pregnancy / sabbatical, to a large extent, because I wanted to preserve my sense of self. My identity is that of a competent person who knows the answers, who’s in control. I come into a classroom, and everybody falls silent and starts recording every word I say. I’m not used to being treated like just a body, and a problematic one at that, even when it’s done for the best of reasons.
This is not a complaint against doctors. Everybody has been amazing throughout the process. This is more about the difficulty that excessively cerebral people encounter when life reminds them that their bodies don’t consist just of an overworked brain.
Do let me know what interesting news and events I missed.
Clarissa's Blog 
It’s not news per se, but where I am it’s snowing at around two inches an hour. The ride into school this morning was awful (a twenty-five minute drive took over an hour), but fortunately for the commuters classes got cancelled midway through the day. When I was dropped off at home I found I had to wade through knee-deep snow just to get into my driveway. It was beautiful.
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Wow, that sounds amazing. 🙂
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Welcome back!!!! 🙂
You have missed events of great importance in Ukraine: Procurator General gas resigned at last! And the Government is very close to resignation.
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Finally, this freak has resigned.
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The poking and the prodding is the worst. With my last baby, I didn’t get a wink of sleep at the hospital, because whenever I’d finally settle for 1 min, someone would come in to introduce themselves (in the middle of the night, seriously?) or take temperature/pressure/give me Ibuprofen etc. And it was a totally uncomplicated pregnancy and birth.
The baby had nothing to do with my exhaustion, it was the ridiculously intrusive procedures. I totally understand the desire to be left alone and go home.
And you are totally right about pregnancy stripping you of identity — it’s such a carnal, earthy thing, and you do get treated like a piece of meat ’cause that’s what our bodies are… It is very surreal, especially for people who live inside their minds.
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Exactly! ! The baby was causing no trouble at all but I almost started to lose my mind out of exhaustion. There doesn’t seem to be any time assigned for one to sleep. It’s impossible to live this way! I began to understand how people get postpartum depression.
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Ghana is in the middle of a drought that has left many people without water for days. One river, the Densu, has almost completely dried up. Estimates are that these shortages will be long term and lead to food shortages as well.
http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/Ghana-s-water-crisis-will-worsen-Geographer-415703
http://pulse.com.gh/agriculture/climate-change-effects-ghanaians-brace-yourselves-massive-food-shortage-looms-id4688385.html
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Sounds absolutely horrible. What a tragedy. 😦
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Interesting comments on President Obama’s latest press conference:
https://www.balloon-juice.com/2016/02/16/president-obamas-presser-open-thread/
“PBO is giving a press conference now on a wide range of topics, including congressional Republicans’ refusal to do their jobs, whether Putin “bested” him in Syria, the 2016 race and his golf score (classified). His remarks on the SCOTUS seat were what you’d expect — he reviewed the history, etc., and basically called on the GOP congresscritters to do their goddamned jobs.
His take on whether Putin “outfoxed” him in Syria was interesting. He said Putin has assumed responsibility for a failed state and is spending billions, so he’s not sure that’s such a great prize.
On the Democratic race, he was mostly non-committal. He said he knows Hillary better and suspects her policies are closer to his own but admitted he hadn’t studied their positions all that closely. He said he thinks their values are similar and that it mostly comes down to tactics, but either candidate would be 100 times better than any of the Republicans. Yep.
On the GOP side, he said Trump gets most of the attention but that all of the candidates’ positions are anti-science, anti-immigration, etc. Shorter: they all suck. And Trump will never be president (PBO says he has faith in the American people).
I’m going to miss PBO.”
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It’s definitely true that Putin is paying dearly for what he’s doing in Syria. But he’s also getting his money’s worth with all the refugees that are ending up in Europe as a result.
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After Scalia died, the Republicans immediately announced that it would be improper for Obama to nominate anyone: it is only right that the people get a chance to name who they want to do the nominating next November. Never mind that the people did make it known who they want to do this sort of thing, and did it twice, by electing Obama.
Never mind that Obama will be President for almost a full year, Never mind that previous presidents have nominated Justices in their last year of office, Never mind that we could in effect be without a Supreme Court for over a year. The Republicans in the Senate have vowed not to consider a single nominee.
I don’t see how they can get away with this. So ironic that all the same people who go out of their way to profess their love of the C0nstitution are gleefully ready to ignore it.
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This post (“Going Home”) is the wrong place to debate the Supreme Court issue, but since it’s been brought up here:
There’s nothing in the Constitution that says the court has to have nine justices; the actual number has varied over the years. The court can (and has) functioned quite satisfactorily with a missing justice (Google the situation with Justice William O. Douglas, who had a severe stroke in the 1970s and refused to retire for a year, so no replacement could be nominated.) Few cases are decided 5-4, so most pending cases can still be concluded with Scalia’s chair vacant.
Few Presidents have ignored the Constitution more than Obama, who has had a record number of illegal “executive orders” overturned by the Supreme Court in 9-0 (NINE-ZERO) rulings against him. You can Google that info, too.
There’s a considerable amount of hypocrisy going on now on both sides of the political aisle. If the situation were reversed, the Democrats would be taking exactly the same position that the Republicans are, and everybody knows that.
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No, I actually want people to debate politics, make me feel more normal.
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I don’t have a crystal ball, I can’t say if the Democrats would announce that they are not going to follow the rules and refuse to consider any nominee, and you can’t either. It’s not something you can “know.”
As for the rest of your claims, I don’t have the time nor inclination to research how well- or ill-informed they are. You don’t address the main point which is simply that Obama is our President and as President, it is his duty to nominate someone.
As Clarissa says below, it’s a ridiculous claim that he should step aside eleven months before his term is up, everybody’s term is up eventually. Although I do like the idea of all the Republican Senators who are up for reelection going home RIGHT NOW, since who knows if they will all be reelected and I would much rather have next set of Senators act on the nomination (that was sarcasm).
Enjoy the quiet of being home, Clarissa.
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I don’t have a crystal ball either, but I do have a long memory, and I remember when the Democrats held the Senate and DID EXACTLY THAT when a Republican was President. You can Google that, too, if you don’t have the time or inclination (no sarcasm there at all).
Sure, let Obama do his duty. It’ll give him a break from breaking the law with all his unconstitutional executive orders — and save the current Supreme Court justices from overruling those orders EIGHT-ZERO.
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Do you mean when Schumer said the Senate should not consider any more nominees? That was always theoretical because no more nominees came before the Senate during that term, it was only a reaction to Alito and Roberts’ nominations. He was saying, “I don’t want to be fooled again.” That is the only instance I know of or can find. Anyway, that was the past and again, nobody knows the future.
It is somewhat of an odd comparison, Obama’s executive orders, which were acts of commission (and not put into place through the results of a legal process), and what most all Republican Senators are threatening to do (I hear one Senator has said he would consider a nominee) which is an act of omission — as such, there is very little recourse against it. There is no check on this behavior, as there was on the executive orders, and in that way, they are very different instances. More finger-pointing than anything else.
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As for keeping the balance in the Supreme Court, does anybody seriously believe that if Ruth Bader Ginsburg retired during a Republican president’s term, he wouldn’t try to substitute her with a very conservative justice?
Let’s not be coy here. Everybody plays their own game and not somebody else’s. Anything else is foolishness.
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Of course he’d try, but if the Senate didn’t have a filibuster-proof Republican majority, that very conservative nominee wouldn’t get through. Remember what happened with two of Reagan’s Supreme Court nominees in 1987, before he finally got a much-less conservative nominee approved during his last year in office?
Over the years, the Dems have done a much better job of nominating true-believer lefty justices than the Republicans have with their “conservative” picks:
Eisenhower called Chief Justice Earl Warren “the worst mistake of my Presidency.” George H.W. Bush got a real conservative with Sutter, didn’t he? Reagan appointee Sandra Day O’Connor found affirmative action — which is clearly discrimination based on race, ethnicity, and gender — constitutional because of the fantasy requirement for “diversity.” And of course, ultra-conservative Chief Justice Roberts literally jumped through hoops finding Obamacare constitutional because it wasn’t really a “tax.”
At least, the radical Democrats do a better job of recognizing one of their own when it comes to picking ideological nominees.
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Yes, that is why Justice Ginsburg has been so reluctant to retire, she would like there to be both a Democratic President and Senate before she does so. It is quite the gamble she is taking.
If the tables were turned, do we really think the Democratic Senators would refuse to consider any nominee? It is one thing to consider a nominee and then turn him/her down, and another thing to refuse to consider anyone at all.
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There are several examples of Democrats trying to filibuster Republican Supreme Court nominations (Alito was the latest one — a filibuster that Obama supported.) The Dems failed to keep that nomination from being considered, but they definitely tried.
Now it’s the Republicans’ turn to try. Hopefully they’ll be more successful at turning Obama’s game back on him.
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I never heard a weirder idea than that Obama shouldn’t nominate because eventually he will be reelected. Eventually everybody will be reelected, so what? Let’s suspend the presidency and the Congress on that basis? Ridiculous.
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The idea that Obama will be reelected to a third term (the Constitution only allows two) is weird indeed! Which Republican said that? 🙂
Welcome home!
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No news here. I’m just wondering if parenting is going to take a toll on your self-proclaimed control freakishness. I would say the one thing that is really, really worth controlling as a parent is sleep schedules. When the baby naps, you can get some work done. But it takes a little while, usually, for sleep to regularize. Good luck. I wrote a novel when my first son was an infant, so it’s not impossible.
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I’ve started having really bad sleep issues. And it’s not the baby’s fault. It’s my own anxiety. I’ll need to deal with this or I’ll be a wreck.
So it’s my sleep schedules I’ll be controlling, it seems. 🙂
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Yeah, my anxiety level when the kids were infants was very high, especially the second one after he had medical issues. I am pretty sure I didn’t sleep well for six months, minimum, from the PTSD. It wasn’t pretty.
It does get better. It just takes a while. Meanwhile, I’m sitting here shitting myself about my Eldest having his 10th birthday Wednesday. It’s so cliché, but it’s true: “The days are long; the years are short.”
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My little nephew is going to be 2 months old in a week and I’m thinking, “Ah, he’s such a big fellow now.” :-)))))
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I’ve been more than a bit busy — I’ve had a nearly six month diversion that’s kept me from writing, or in fact from doing much of what I wanted to do …
At least some things are settled or soon will be: the matters surrounding the small library I bought, my old belongings that have been languishing in America, where I’ll set up a new residence in order to avoid some of the surprises of the past six months, and so forth. I don’t expect things to relent anytime soon — if anything, the intensity might actually increase.
Otherwise, I’m looking forward to a Trump presidency in the United States because I won’t want to try to buy him off — it’ll be much more entertaining if there’s a wriggling gadfly in the soup. After all, he’s the populist President that Americans today probably deserve. 🙂
BTW, best of luck with the little one, and hopefully things transition to some semblance of a new and less chaotic normal once you’re done with hospitals for a while …
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