The Experts

Zoe mainly drinks from sippy cups or her thermos (when she isn't drinking from me). The sippy cups are hard to spill; the thermos is easy to spill. So she spends a lot of time upending her thermos and deliberately spilling all over the place. The general consensus among the parenting experts I read is that, at Zoe's age, it's no good telling her not to spill or putting her in time-out for spilling or something, but it is important to teach her that her actions have consequences and that she should bear at least some of the responsibility for those consequences - i.e., have her help clean up. So I get out a rag and show her (while doing most of it my self) how to wipe up the spill. Zoe is very enthused about helping and takes up the cloth and swipes it all over the place. She likes this activity so much that she immediately spills more milk so that she can clean it up again.

I wonder if the experts have children.

I'm Back

I've decided to start blogging again, and hopefully I'll have the time to do so regularly.

Most of the time I will be blogging about Zoe things, since that comprises 99% of my time and energy, but today, just for fun, I will blog about something else.

I turned on the Rachel Maddow show last night, which I Tivo and try to watch every day, although I am not frequently successful at it. The first thing I heard was that Senate Democrats have decided not to extend Medicare to people under 55 after all. The tiny, miniscule nothing of a move they were going to make toward a public option, they've decided not push through. And folks, I think I have fucking had it.

Democrats have a supermajority in the Senate, right? Barack Obama got elected with elevendy trillion percent of the vote? He brought in huge Democrat majorities to federal and state governments? This all happened, right? Then why the fuck can the Democrats not get shit done? The extreme right wing of the Republican party held the government for eight years, and even without the enormous popularity and huge majorities, even with the fact that nobody even liked them, they managed to get shit done all the time!

So I'm done. I'm starting a new party. It will be called the Get Shit Done Party. Okay, maybe not. Maybe it will be called the Backbone Party. And we will support things that are actually quite popular in Real America, as opposed to the America that exists in the heads of politicians and television news outlets, like single-payer government health care, pouring money into schools, public spaces and infrastructure projects, and opting not to go to war whenever such an option is available.

And when we SWEEP the 2012 election, it will because we will promise this: to GET SHIT DONE. Here's how it will work. We will announce three policy initiatives a month. Congress then has that month to get all three things DONE. At the end of the month, if Congress is still quibbling about corporations want this and abortion that and for godsakes look out for the scary scary socialism, then we will issue an Executive Order and that's all.

Who's with me?