I went and let WordPress update not only itself but every plugin I have installed as well as my theme. So, now the layout here is buggered up and I lost my spiffy green color.

I’ll have to fix that someday.

I’m bored, so here goes. Some of this is money saving advice so it might be useful.

- I don’t “get” the lady that shipped her adopted son back to Russia. For one Russia sounds like a shitty place to grow up. Second, that flight had to have been expensive. Why didn’t she just tan the kid up and send him to Angelia Jolie?

- Sometimes I forget Amazon.com started out as a bookstore. I signed up for their ‘Prime’ service almost a year ago which, for $80/year, gets me free 2 day shipping on anything they sell. I buy almost everything from them now. Just the other day I got a pull-behind spreader for my lawn tractor from them. Hell, we get our laundry detergent from Amazon now.

- Speaking of which, because we’re doing the cloth diapering thing we switched the laundry soap to ‘Country Save.’ It’s cheap, I think. I never really priced laundry soap all that much. We get 40lbs of the stuff (in 10lb boxes) shipped to our door for about $52. Based on our current burn rate it’ll take a full year to work our way through that 40lbs. And that’s with doing a load of diapers every night.

- A couple of months ago I went to unplug the night-light in our bedroom used to keep us my wife from stubbing toes when getting up to tend to the baby in the dark of the night. Sucker was HOT. Duh, incandescent bulb, inefficient as heck, gives off heat. Ordered up an 8 pack of LED night lights from Amazon for something like $17. Now I have photo-sensitive night lights all over the house. No more dark hallways. Yay! And they all run on less power than that single old night-light probably drew. Double yay!

- I need to update my blogroll. There’s probably 8 sites on there that don’t exist or that I don’t read anymore. Plus I’m sure I added some new ones to my RSS reader since I last published it.

- I’m a big fan of NiMH batteries in frequently used or high-drain devices like video game controllers and digital cameras. Problem is they’re like $3 for a single stinking battery AA at the store. Recently ran across BatterySpace.com and you can buy them for $1 each. Haven’t ordered any from them yet but I will in the future.

- Speaking NiMH batteries I’m a huge fan of the Engergizer 15 minute charger that we got about a year ago. I can no recharge dead batteries faster than running to the local Meijer and buying new ones. Super cool.

- Another bit on NiMH batteries: The “D” cell NiMH batteries I see in stores are just an AA battery stuck in a D case. Seriously, they’re a rip-off. They’re only rated for 2500mAh which is what the AA batteries are. You can get 10,000mAh “D” cell batteries over at BatterySpace.com I’ll probably be buying some soon because so much of our baby gear (like the swing) requires a “D” cell.

Breda Wants Baby Pictures

Alrighty then.

Here’s me at about 3 months:

Truncated RSS feeds that strip HTML formatting. This landed in my RSS reader today:

W <!– /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:”"; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:”Times New Roman”; mso-fareast-font-family:”Times New Roman”;} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source

I really wish all bloggers would subscribe to their own RSS feed just to see how they look. It’s the only way I read blogs these days and it’s really frustrating to run across one in my reader that leaves me totally baffled as to what the author was trying to get at.

It’s not off to a good start.

In related news Sebastian is hip to their “New Media Asasult”:

Just to let you all in on what the Brady’s are likely hoping for here, is that we all link to these outrages, and that it boosts their Google mojo. That way when people search on certain things, their message gets out there, and maybe they get some followers. I wonder where they got that idea from?

But seriously folks, the Brady’s are a lot of things, but they aren’t stupid. They are clearly starting to understand new media, and we have to be ready. Be so baited as you might be, the best thing is to ignore them.

Just read them, laugh, and move on. There’s no point in trying to fisk any of their nonsense.

Yep, I’m now a card carrying member of the ACLU and the NRA.

Is that the proper contraction for “It aint’” up there? I hope so.

Anyway, Rachel Lucas has some thoughts on Obama v. McCain in ’08:

We’re done with Bush now and we’re getting a new president. And it’s probably going to be Obama because so many people who otherwise could prevent that outcome simply won’t do it because McCain doesn’t say what they want him to say about whatever their pet cause is. It doesn’t matter to these people that there is no “Reagan” waiting in the wings to take over after Obama pulls a Jimmy Carter on the country.

I generally avoid saying much on this blog that I think would piss off or otherwise displease the bulk of my readers, but this is one case where I truly don’t give a shit because I genuinely believe that anyone who disagrees with me on this is flat-out wrong. I believe it with all of my heart and soul and I believe that history backs me up on it, and that emotion should have no place in a decision like this. I don’t give a flying fuck that McCain is more liberal than we would like and that he’s basically an asshole, because I’m operating with the awareness that he’s still better than Obama by about a hundred orders of magnitude.

Reading the whole thing is a good idea, but this is what got my gears turning.

LawDog’s already pointed out what little the POTUS is actually responsible for. It isn’t all that much. They’re not a god. They’re not a dictator. They do not control our government.

Maybe Obama will drop the ‘War on Terror’ if he’s elected. Honestly, what’s going to happen if he does that? Iraq and Afghanistan will continue to remain unstable. Big whoop. Terrorists don’t frighten me all that much. I stand a better chance of dieing in a car accident than I do meeting my demise at the hands of a suicide bomber.

Of course, given that I support Ron Paul that shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. I think the ‘War on Terror’ is a pointless endeavor, and good ‘ole police work is what’s needed there.

There is the whole matter of Supreme Court appointments though. I’ve given that some thought and you know what? Of the 9 sitting Justices 7 (seven!) of them are Republican appointees. None of the staunch conservative Justices are due to retire any time soon so I don’t see how we’d actually lose anything there.

Here’s what I want out of this election cycle: Gridlock.

We’ve seen what single-party domination of the federal government gives us: rampant spending. I hold no illusion that a Republican controlled government is going to be measurably better than a Democrat controlled one.

If the Republican party obtains a majority in either the House or the Senate, but not both, I couldn’t care less who gets the position of POTUS. If they obtain both then I hope that POTUS goes to Obama. If the Republicans don’t obtain a majority in either level of Congress and we get McCain that’s fine by me, but I’d actually prefer Republican control of one house in the legislature than relying on McCain to “gridlock” the Democrat controlled legislature.

If the Democrats retain control of the legislature and capture POTUS, well, we’re fucked, but that’d only last for 2 years. I suspect the Republican party would snap-back to their “small government” mantra if that happened and the Democrats would be kicked out of the legislature like they were in ’94.

Thanks, JR, for leaving the link in comments.

Texas seizure of polygamist-sect kids thrown out

SAN ANGELO, Texas — In a ruling that could torpedo the case against the West Texas polygamist sect, a state appeals court Thursday said authorities had no right to seize more than 440 children in a raid on the splinter group’s compound last month.

The Third Court of Appeals in Austin said the state failed to show the youngsters were in any immediate danger, the only grounds in Texas law for taking children from their parents without court action.

An anonymous phone call isn’t enough evidence to seize 400 odd children? No shit? Go figure.

I haven’t mentioned the FLDS situation for a couple of reasons.

1) Anytime you mix church compounds, law enforcement raids, and accusations of child molestation together I start thinking “Waco” and then I say stuff I probably shouldn’t.

2) The former church leader has been convicted of crimes against children, so there’s probably some validity to the government’s claims.

So, I held off until now.

Let’s recap real quick: Texas officials get an anonymous tip that there’s some child molestation going on in that there compound. Raid ensues, eventually upwards of 460 children are taken out on buses. Mothers have a hard time getting in touch with their children and the men are just shit out of luck.

Then we find out the anonymous phone call wasn’t from a 16 year old girl in the compound. It’s more likely from a woman in her 40′s off in Colorado that tried the same stunt in Arizona when the FLDS folks setup camp there. Arizona didn’t act on it because apparently that’s really not a good reason to seize children. Ya think?

Today I see this:

On Tuesday, six “girls” were deemed adults, including 27-year-old Leona Allred, whose lawyer insisted CPS knew from the beginning that her client was an adult.

“My client showed them the same documents they showed them from the beginning: a valid Arizona driver’s license and a birth certificate,” Andrea Sloan said.

That’s now 10 of the “children” that have been found to actually be adults. Fine police work there, folks.

Now, from the same article we find this:

One of those girls, now 19, was ruled an adult by the courts but not before she said in a conference call to the court that she could have been no older than 16 when her daughter was born on Aug. 19, 2005.

And in another courtroom, information gleaned from the records of a 17-year-old indicated she had to have been 15 when her first child was born.

OK, that sounds like a pretty awful thing. We’ve got a bunch of girls rounded up because they might be being sexually used by church elders and that right there shows something fishy is going on, right?

Maybe not. Let’s think about this. Check out the US teen pregnancy rates. The latest data from 2002 says that 75 out of 1000 teen girls (15-19) have been pregnant. That’s 7.5%. When you look at the FLDS compound they’ve now got 2 out of 450 children — that’s 4.4% and I’m totally ignoring any teen girls that might have once lived in the compound but later moved on when the became adults. Granted, there might be more teenage pregnancies being discovered in the near future.

I’m just saying, it’s possible that there’s a chance these young pregnancies might be the fruits of a little teenage hanky-panky in barn when nobody was looking. If abstinence only sex-education is a total failure (which I’d bet is the education those kids got) we should be seeing some rather alarming teen pregnancy rates, not half the national average; but that’s not my point. My point is that if there’s systematic sexual abuse of teenage girls going on in that compound we ought to be seeing a higher teen pregnancy rate than the “noise” that exists outside the system where things like birth control and condoms are available.

I think the Texas CPS has managed to blow any credibility they’ve got with the public on this one. I predict a massive failure in their ability to actually prosecute anybody. Maybe they’ll snag a guy or two but that’s about it. To achieve that they’ve rounded up every child from what amounts to a small town and disrupted the lives of everybody in it. I do not find that acceptable and I can’t imagine many Texans are to keen on their antics either.