Who cares about FISA?

The US Senate passed H.R. 6304 today, the FISA Amendment Act of 2008. President Bush is expected to sign it right away, because it's exactly what he always wanted in a FISA Amendment Act. It allows the government to spy on Americans in "emergencies" as long as they file the required paperwork within a week, and we know how good the US Government has been about correctly judging emergencies and keeping track of their paperwork in the past.

Oh, and the Act also gives immunity to telecom companies that helped the Bush administration spy on Americans, even though they knew it was illegal. Nicely, this doesn't just protect the telecom companies, but it also protects the Bush administration. The civil suits of private citizens against the telecom companies was the best way in which to expose the crimes of the administration.

Looking into the way that my elected officials voted, I was happy to see that two of my three congress critters voted against the bill, but one of them still had to break my heart. Here's my message to Ms. Patty Murray, one of my senators to the US Congress from the state of Washington:

Ms. Murray,

While I was pleased to see that you voted for the amendment removing telecom immunity from the FISA Amendment Act of 2008, I was extremely disappointed to see that you voted to pass the bill anyway. Not only does your vote let giant corporations that callously disregarded US law get away unscathed, it also prevents the main legal recourse that the people of the United States have of unmasking the perfidy of the current administration. Not only are you helping a corrupt administration cover their tracks, but you are making it easier for them to commit the same outrages again, legally! You are helping to strip from me and the rest of your constituents our Fourth Amendment rights.

I know that you're not the only Democrat to vote this way, but you are alone in the elected officials that represent me to do so, and I am thoroughly disappointed. I'm not sure if you voted that way because of a lack of political courage, because you have a misguided vision of what the security of our nation means, or if there something worse behind it, but I can assure you I will not be voting for you again in the future, and I will encourage my friends and associates not to do so.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised. You don't even have "Civil Liberties" as a possible topic in your email form.

I guess I shouldn't be too surprised. Political courage is something that's in short supply these days. I guess if the rest of the country's representatives were as cool as Washington's, we still would have handily beaten the bill. Maybe Washington should secede.

Just kidding.

But not really.

Born into debt

I didn't get started on this line of thought because of Wikipedia; it actually started because of a link that Corky sent me about an Indian woman who gave birth to twins at the age of 70. "When do women go into menopause in India?!" I thought. Apparently, whenever they run out of oocytes, which aside from being my new favorite word, and aside from not being present in my spell checker's dictionary, is the term for an egg cell that hasn't dropped from the ovary yet. Guess she had a lot of egg cells! Maybe she just started late or something.

Reading into the article, however, it turns out that she didn't get pregnant naturally. Because she had in vitro fertilization (IVF), she didn't necessarily have to have her own egg, and the article didn't specify that was the case. It's possible that she was impregnated with an egg from someone else, which would permit her to be pregnant even after going through menopause.

The real reason that I'm interested enough in this article to blog about it, however, is not anything I read about it on Wikipedia. The couple, a 77 year old man and a 70 year old woman, decided that they needed her to get pregnant in order to have a male heir for their family farm. Never mind that they already have two adult daughters and 5 grandchildren, they need a male child of their own to pass on their belongings to. From the article:

“We kept no stone unturned and God has rewarded us. The treatment cost me a fortune but the birth of a son makes it all worthwhile. I can die a happy man and a proud father.”

Nice. Because those daughters that you've had are just females. How much of a fortune did he spend in order to become blessed? He

"mortgaged his land, sold his buffaloes, spent his life savings and took out a credit card loan to finance the treatment."

So now you have a male son and heir. You'll leave him your mortgaged land. He won't be able to farm that land because he doesn't have a buffalo, he won't be able to buy one because he doesn't have any savings, and he won't be able to get a loan because his credit's already maxxed out paying off your IVF treatment. Lucky him!

Even that isn't why I'm blogging about. That's just one extremely poor choice for one unlucky kid. What really struck me about that article is that we're doing that to an entire generation with our deficit spending.