Call a spade a spade

This is one that has sat, nearly finished, in my posts for a while, and it says things I think need to be said, so I'm polishing it off and sending it out the door.  How long I've sat on it, you can determine by the age of the links at the bottom.

One of my pet peeves about conservatives in general and the tea party in particular is the inconsistency with which they fuss about the national deficit.  President Bush inherited a government budget that was actually recording surpluses and proceeded to drive it straight into the ground, not only by cutting taxes on all and sundry but by starting two wars and making expensive changes to Medicare.  Did conservatives utter a peep about deficit spending and passing our debt on to our children and all that jazz?  Not so much.  They may not have liked it all that much, but so long as their guy was in charge, they sucked it up and pretended not to notice, or that a little fiscal irresponsibility was a worthy price for all the other good stuff he was doing.  It was only when President Obama took office, and started spending money on things that they weren't happy about, that the federal deficit became a big issue to conservatives.

The unfortunate thing, if we're operating under Keynsian economics here, is that right now - during and immediately after a crippling recession, when the economy is depressed and taxable revenues are low - is exactly when we should be using deficit spending to keep our heads above water.  The flip side, of course, is that during times of prosperity - like, I don't know, the early 2000's - is when you're supposed to pay off your debts, balance your books and establish a position of strength so that you can go into debt during times of need.  We, of course, bombed that, so now instead of spending the surpluses of plenty in our time of want, we're piling debt upon debt.  And I definitely agree that this is bad.  But the proper time to raise a ruckus about this was during the Bush years.  And yet, because the people who worry about deficit spending tended to agree with him on most other things, they held their peace.

All of this is very sad and cranky-making, of course, but this isn't a blog post to rant about the failings of conservative punditry.  That was just background and context.  What I need to say is that I think I, and the rest of the confirmed liberals who make up Obama's base, are guilty of the same double standard when it comes to the handling of civil liberties in the war on terror.

Blogger being a pain

As much as I like my tasteful black background with white text, it makes things a pain when Blogger decides to make the background for half of my text white and doesn't give me an option to set the background to transparent. This has happened on the last two posts I have worked on. C'mon, Google.  Stop wallowing in freakishly large piles of money and make the UI make sense.

Political blogging and the proper scrutiny of police

I think my problem with blogging is the same as my problem with writing in general: it's not that I don't have great ideas (or at least, ideas that I think are great), but that I have difficulty making the transition from 'diversion' to 'habit' that is necessary to produce writing on a consistent basis. Weeks will go by in which I either don't think of blogging, or think, 'oh yeah, I should do that sometime' and then do something else. And yet I want to stick with it. I finally figured out how to delete an old blog, and removed the class blog I had to produce sophomore year, and might yet delete this one, but only after backing up my posts, and only if I am confident that I will be more successful at sticking to my next one. In the meantime, I have posts from April and May in various states of completion (and that's another problem; starting ideas and then trailing off and leaving them in stasis for months), so hopefully I'll get to those shortly; I'm also mulling over a future post on the gradual dehipsterization of my taste in music.

In the meantime, more and more often when I think about political topics, I find myself framing it in terms of what I would say were I an elected official dealing with such a thing. Which is an interesting train of thought my mind has been following these last few months, I think. I'm not sure it's a realistic ambition, or even an actual ambition; while I might be ok at the actual law-making part of the job, I'm not sure how someone as introverted as I would fare on the campaign trail, especial when just starting out, when meet-n-greet takes precedence over out-of-state attack ads. But it's a fun thought experiment, and who knows? Maybe if teaching jobs continue not to be found, I can start over with a law or poli-sci degree? In any case, I've already written one such post, and I rather expect I'll be writing more, and leaving them up here for future political foes to dig up and use against me. Good times.

So.

As a diligent reader of the internets, I was of course aware of the recent and hilarious legal kerfluffle involving The Oatmeal, in which a scrubby joke-compiler website hired a scrubby lawyer to make scrubby and unsubstantiated threats to extort money from the writer of the Oatmeal.  Who promptly and amusingly retaliated with massive and public scorn, backed by the full force of his large and loyal fanbase and the not-inconsiderable legions among the wider internet community who enjoy making fun of scrubs.  Things got much, much funnier when the scrubby lawyer in question, one Charles Carreon, got his undies in a wad and decided to take on Oatmeal, IndieGoGo, The National Wildlife Federation, The American Cancer Society, and pretty much everyone who made fun of him. He later backed down, although not without finding a few new ways to wallow in fail on the way out the door; the matter might or might not rest at that.

But this isn't the topic of this post; this is just background.