My Daily Domestic Diigolet 03/06/2008

I have always dreaded unloading the dishwasher. One day, I timed myself and it takes only three minutes. Keeping that in mind, it doesn’t seem so bad.
Mike wanted to change the door knob on our front door. It didn’t work correctly and we kept getting locked out. He bought a new door knob, but he was in the middle of another project and didn’t change it right away. One day, after sidestepping it for a while, he decided to stop everything else and change it. It took five minutes. He said if he had known that’s all the time it would take, he never would have waited so long to do it.
Most of the time we spend more time thinking about these things than just taking the time to do it and get it over with! Now walk away from the computer and take care of that thing that is bothering you! 😉

Gaskin largely blames the nation’s rising maternal death rate on the increase in Caesarean section births and the drugs sometimes used to induce labor. The National Center for Health Statistics reported last month that the maternal death rate for 2005 has risen to about 15 women per 100,000 live births, more than double the 1998 rate of 7. At least part of that increase is due to better reporting, but researchers say Caesareans also may be a factor.

Part of Gaskin’s success has been that she combines an analytical mind with an instinctual understanding of birth. She promoted the idea that a woman’s state of mind will influence how easy her birth is and encouraged unorthodox ways to improve the woman’s experience, like encouraging her to make out with her husband during labor. At the same time, she kept detailed records of each birth, providing her commune, The Farm, with statistics that would prove important in the debate over the safety of out-of-hospital birth

This presidential campaign has seen more than its share of oddities, from a Chuck Norris endorsement to a Stephen Colbert candidacy, but the nexus of Rush Limbaugh, Hillary Clinton, and Markos Moulitsas of DailyKos takes the proverbial Angel’s Food. From CNN:

The idea is that Republican voters abandon their candidate, John McCain, to vote for Hillary Clinton, in a sort of “subtraction-by-addition,” since McCain already has the Republican nomination sewn up. The strategy was first thought up earlier this year by liberal blogger Markos Moulitsas, when he urged Michigan Democrats to play havoc with that state’s GOP primary by voting for John McCain

“We need Barack Obama bloodied up politically. It’s obvious that the Republicans are not going to do it, they don’t have the stomach for it,” Limbaugh continued. “As you probably know we’re getting all kinds of memos from the RNC saying we’re not going to be critical. Mark McKinnon of McCain’s campaign said he’ll quit if they get critical over Obama. This is the presidency of the United States we’re talking about. I want our party to win I want the Democrats to lose.”

Recently, Rush Limbaugh put out a call to Republican Texas voters to cross over and vote in the Democratic primary for Hillary Clinton. His reasoning behind this was to “rig” the election so as to have the weakest candidate run against the Republican machine in the general election this fall

Barack Obama’s fate will probably be decided today in the Texas primary by Republicans like me. It is my intention to vote for Hillary Clinton, hoping she will win Texas and Ohio.

Tuesday night was a good night for Rush Limbaugh. “I want Hillary to stay in this,” he said on Fox News, because “I want the Democrats to lose. They’re in the midst of tearing themselves apart right now. It is fascinating to watch, and it’s all going to stop if Hillary loses.”

“If Obama is the nominee, we are doomed, ” Limbaugh said on Feb. 6 to a Republican caller to his radio program.

On Fox News, Limbaugh listed “another reason why we need Hillary to stay in:” the Clinton campaign can attack Obama in ways the Republicans cannot. “Who was it that first used Obama’s middle name of Hussein? It was not us. It was [Clinton supporter] Bob Kerrey, over and over again, former Democrat Senator of Nebraska.”

“Who was it that talked about Obama not just using drugs, as he admitted in his book, but maybe even selling them and dealing them? It was [Bill] Shaheen, Clinton’s co-chair in New Hampshire.”

“We want the Clinton campaign to keep pumping out these pictures of Obama dressed up as Bin Laden,” he said on Feb. 26. “If Hillary loses this thing, all of that’s going to come to a screeching halt. We want all the disruption in that party as possible. . . . We need to keep chaos alive.”

No one’s ever told me that hospitals are a rather late addition to the birthing process, that many of the procedures mothers go through are for the hospital’s convenience, not the mother’s, and that, despite spending more per birth than any other country in the world, the U.S. has the second-worst infant-mortality rate among developed nations. Why aren’t the presidential candidates talking about this? And where is the Ralph Nader of the baby-delivery biz, a whistle-blower who’ll just keep on blowing until people get tired of covering their ears? Well, we may now have one in the somewhat unlikely form of actress/talk-show host Ricki Lake.

The film made me reflect a lot about how sanitized life here in the US is. Both birth and death are completely removed from polite society. How many American women have witnessed a birth before their own? How could they possibly be prepared to stand up for what they want, put their experience in perspective, fight the fear-mongering