Yes, this soldier of political battles is back.

8:15 – has Scalia announced that he’s retiring? Is that something I missed?

8:23 – Kasich at least knows that Putin’s invasions are justified as a defense of Russian-speakers from imaginary evildoers who want to prevent them from speaking Russian. This shows he is, at least, trying to learn.

8:24 – it’s also great that Bush is pointing out that Russia is not fighting ISIS in Syria. It’s sad that this needs to be pointed out.

8:26 – all of Bush’s 5 supporters must be in the audience today, booing Trump.

8:34 – Bush is so pathetic defending his brother.

8:35 – Kasich is on a roll today.

8:37 – I’m glad Trump is stating the painfully obvious about the disastrous Dubya administration.

8:44 – how is Trump proposing to “bring back jobs”? Is he against freedom of markets?

9:08 – why is this audience so pro-Rubio? Are they getting paid to cheer and boo?

9:27 – wow, this is a very angry debate. Do they remember there will be a general election where all this will come back to bite them?

The baby is hilarious. I wasn’t getting her fed as soon as she wanted to, and she grew completely enraged. In her anger, she looked exactly like me. Such a tiny little creature is already capable of enormous emotions.

The second pregnancy was much easier than the first. I didn’t get PUPPPS (although there was a high probability), my blood pressure was perfect, and I never even had heartburn. 

But the gestational diabetes came back with a vengeance. I was on enormous doses of insulin, and it wasn’t helping much. I had to use disbetes-specific meditation to bring the blood sugar down. And I hate meditation. It goes against my nature.

What’s really weird, though, is that the moment I gave birth, this raging diabetes went away. I was on a very severe diet for 22 weeks, and then all of a sudden I’m back to normal.

I didn’t make any announcements about the pregnancy because even though most people are very normal and kind, there’s always a couple of aggressive fools who come out of nowhere and start freaking out all over you.

Because of my history, this was obviously a high-risk pregnancy, and I found this great clinic in St Louis that specializes in precisely this kind of cases. This is a team of great doctors and nurses who watch you very closely and support you throughout the pregnancy. For many weeks, they would call me on the phone once or twice a day, EVERY day, helping me handle things.

All of the doctors in this practice seem to have training in psychology, and this is what helps them work with patients like me. 

The bad news, however, is that I’m one of the clinic’s last full-time patients. The clinic is ditching the long-term, personalized care and will adopt a conveyor belt approach of seeing random patients on a situational, crisis – solving basis. I’m happy Klara and I managed to squeak by before this happened.

See under the fold!

Continue reading “Today Is the Happiest Day of My Life” →

So Bernie said that electing him would be as historic a milestone as electing the first woman president? Because he represents the 0,02% of the population that identifies as socialist?

I’m getting tired of giving the benefit of the doubt. If O’Malley – let alone Trump – said this, no benefit of the doubt would go their way.

What say you, people? How is the debate going? Don’t leave me hanging, give me your impressions! I can’t be there right now, but I need to know what’s happening.

People keep saying that Bernie has started courting the black vote. Is the following how he tries to do it?

Bernie Sanders questioned President Barack Obama’s leadership in a new interview, suggesting that he would be able to close a divide between Americans and government that the Obama administration has left open throughout his presidency. 

“There’s a huge gap right now between Congress and the American people,” Sanders said in an interview with MSNBC that will air Thursday on “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell.” “What presidential leadership is about [is] closing that gap.”

Sanders acknowledged that Obama has tried to bridge the divide but said he hasn’t succeeded. “But I think what we need, when I talk about a political revolution, is bringing millions and millions of people into the political process in a way that does not exist right now,” he said. 

A black fellow is incompetent, weak and divisive while a white fellow will magically achieve what that poor doofus couldn’t, eh? Good to know.

What do you think about this Bernie ad?

I don’t like it. The idea it transmits is “everybody is the same, everybody is interchangeable, everybody is easily manipulated and needs me to condescend to them and tell them not to be manipulated. I stand above the faceless, nameless, interchangeable masses.” 

And it’s not just the ad, it’s the whole philosophical basis for Bernie’s campaign that alienates me. I don’t need more money, I don’t need free healthcare (I already have it and it sucks dick), I don’t need free college, I don’t need any part of what he’s offering.

What I do need he dismisses as trivial and unimportant. He wants to chase me back into the American 1970s that were peachy for people like him but shitty for people like me. In order to lure me back there, he tries to convince me that our interests are the same and being an immigrant and a woman has no special meaning. And that’s exactly the lie people like me have been buying into for 150 years with the same bad results. 

I don’t mind paying more taxes even though I’m well-aware that I personally will gain absolutely nothing and lose a lot under Bernie’s system of wealth distribution. But I want to see, at least, the recognition that I have needs of my own and I’m being asked to be very charitable and magnanimous and sacrifice those needs for the benefit of others. Don’t shit on my head and tell me I should be grateful because the pile of shit is protecting my ears from freezing.

There is a huge amount of howling about the interview Meryl Streep – one of the two Hollywood actresses with any talent at all – gave at the Berlin Film Festival. I find, however, that Streep was uncommonly kind and gracious to people who seem incapable of conducting themselves with any degree of decency. Here is the part that I found absolutely shocking:

Asked by an Egyptian reporter whether she understood films from the Arab world and North Africa, Streep said while she didn’t know much about the region, “I’ve played a lot of different people from a lot of different cultures.”

When some dime a dozen quack journalist dares to take this tone with a world-class super star, the star in question needs to be an extremely charitable person to continue the conversation. I would like to see this creep of a journalist ask a male celebrity if he understands some crap movie or other. 

What’s especially obnoxious is that every feminist website in my blogroll is piling on Streep and not on this disrespectful, obnoxious jerkwad of a journalist. And then the same pseudo-feminists will whine how nobody takes them seriously in professional contexts, seeing zero connection between their readiness to support public putdowns of successful women and their own incapacity to be treated with respect in public spaces.