After a while, it is necessary to reflect on why one keeps batting out these missives, especially since so few seem to care. Honestly, if a couple dozen people stop by here, then it’s a busy day. While it hasn’t hurt my career at all, it surely hasn’t helped it, either. So why keep doing it?

I don’t have an answer to that. It isn’t that I think the world has changed to a point where there’s no need for me to speak up. It’s that I don’t see any effects from speaking up in this particular place.

But, as long as I’m being honest, let me say that I never really tried to sell this place. I never really cared if I got fifty readers or only five. But I’ve just been too busy with everything else to give much effort here. And it shows.

Here’s the thing – I’m too much of a maverick to fit in with either side, either politically or religiously. In politics, I see the Democrats to be every bit the bumbling fools that Republicans were. The major difference is that Democrats have not been able to purge moderates from their ranks, so there are more of them. For now. In religion, I simply don’t see any way to make someone believe in a God who loves if they prefer hatred and strife.

If anyone reading this has any thoughts, feel free to let me know. I’m not sure there’s any benefit to continuing this website. What do you think?

Marvel Comics used to publish a comic called “What if…” that I loved. The basic premise was that they took a well-known Marvel story line and twisted it in some manner. Or they took a hero from one part/time of their fantasy multiverse and paired them with someone from another part/time. So I’m going to blatantly adapt that and make it “What does it mean when…”

• What does it mean when…

a blogger doesn’t update his/her blog regularly? Any number of things. They could be busy with this thing we all call life. They could have tired of blogging. Or they could simply have a bit of writer’s block. I’m not exactly sure of why I haven’t been updating as regularly as I once did. Part of it is that keeping up with two-year-old twins doesn’t give me long blocks of uninterrupted time. Part of it is that I get tired of rehashing the same old arguments. Part of it is that I’ve had a lifelong battle with depression and, lately, it’s been winning on too many fronts. Time to get that taken care of.

• What does it mean when…

you get fitness equipment as a present? In my case, it was a Wii Fit. In my case, we talked about the puchase beforehand and I think it means two things: 1) “I love you enough to help you take care of yourself,” and 2) “Here’s the gift you said you really wanted.” Both of them are nice messages to get. I hooked it up for the first time today and tried not to be insulted by the brutal truth of the Wii Fit. “You are obese.” Man, that’s hard to hear, even when you know it’s true. “Your balance is poor – do you often trip when you walk?” Uppity thing! But, I do, unfortunately. I don’t fall, mind you. That’s a few years down the line, I suppose. Oh yeah, my Wii Fit age is 63. Does that mean I can get some Wii Social Security? (There have already been fun moments on Wii Fitness – such as it telling me “You have perfect balance!” exactly as I was falling over.)

• What does it mean when…

the President says that “Anger isn’t a governing strategy?” It means he has his eye on the important stuff. We are looking at a deficit that will add more than a trillion dollars of debt per year for the next decade. Believe me, a hundred and fifty million isn’t even enough to blink an eye at. Think of it this way: If I handed you a dollar per second, eleven and a half days would pass before you were a millionaire. If I gave you a thousand dollars a second for eleven and a half days, you would only be a billionaire. If I gave a thousand people a thousand dollars per second for eleven and a half days, then I would have given away a trillion dollars. Another illustration would be how much this represents per person – the AIG bonuses were enough to give each person in the United States just under fifty cents. The deficit is the equivalent of giving each person just over three hundred and thirty-three dollars. See what I mean? Big difference.

It also means that we need to let our system of government work as intended – by letting it strain out the destructive forces of group emotion. It might be satisfying to tax bonuses at a special rate, but when it comes to your bonus, I’m willing to bet that you won’t want it taxed so much. On the other hand, I’m of the mind that people making millions of dollars every year can afford to pay a bit more in tax. I just won’t feel sorry if someone can’t jet their daughter to Paris to shop for a dress for her sweet sixteen party. I won’t even feel bad if she can only shop at the Goodwill store.

• What does it mean when…

the same Republicans who voted for President Bush’s tax cuts and deficits are worried about the current level of taxes and deficits? It means that they don’t know what else to say. Georges Santayana said (roughly) “Fanaticism is redoubling your efforts when you’ve lost track of your goal.” What, exactly is the goal of the Republican Party now? I’m willing to bet that there aren’t three national Republicans who could answer that without resorting to sound bites. Unfortunately for the GOP, two of them are Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, and the rest of the GOP would really like for them to go away. As I used to tell my Democratic friends, “When you are the minority is not a time to have an ideological purge. It’s time to build a big tent and convince moderates that you like them.” It works for the other side, too.

My wife wants you to see this video:

No, not that one. George Orwell.

I’ll let him have the microphone:

What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, “I am going to produce a work of art.” I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience. Anyone who cares to examine my work will see that even when it is downright propaganda it contains much that a full-time politician would consider irrelevant. I am not able, and do not want, completely to abandon the world view that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself. The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us.

I’ve not yet written a book, but a collection of blog posts would be more than book-length. A friend asked earlier today how long I’d been doing this. It was the February of 2005 when I started my blogspot blog. I started contributing to Blue Jersey in October of that year. I’ve been writing at the Star-Ledger since July of 2007. Now I’ve launched a Jersey-centric blog of my own. In between, I’ve written about Texas politics in several places, New Mexico politics at a couple of blogs, and was invited to blog for The American Prospect during the 2006 mid-term election cycle. I also blogged for Congressman Steve Rothman for a year, but that was a bear of a different color.

I began blogging by stating that I felt as unwelcomed in some Democratic circles for being a faithful Christian as I did in some conservative churches for being a Democrat. That has changed, and Barack Obama is a large reason why. But I still feel too much an outsider in many partisan and ideological circles. Because, I believe, I am not pure enough.

I have written many times that I am a Democrat because I’m a liberal, and I’m a liberal because I’m a Christian. To the extent that party and ideology agree with my beliefs, I defend them. But when they don’t, I have no problem stomping on their toes. I won’t pretend to be a mover and shaker, but I’ve pushed a few changes here and there. Enough to know that I can be heard if I beat a drum long enough.

My two main problems with the Bush Administration has always been: 1) That they view reality through an ideological prism, skewing their view; and 2) They make victory their ultimate value, putting themselves above the law. I already see the seeds of these faults in the Progressives that are revelling in their victory. Of course, I stand by my statement from a year ago that Barack Obama is more closely a legacy conservative than a true Progressive, and that Progressives will be disappointed in his Presidency while the majority of the country will be happy with his leadership.

I know there is no context given for any of this, so it might be hard to follow what I mean. In short: I mean that I intend to be as hard on the changing power structure as I have been for the last four years. I will continue to insist on reality-based government and continue to insist that my beliefs will influence my politics until the day I die – and anyone who says otherwise about their politics is being less than honest with themselves, if not with others.

Basically, I don’t like being lied to, no matter who does the lying. From that place, I think I’ll have a lot to write about in the next four years.

I have a longer response to Rabbi Michael Lerner’s Op-Ed. The meat of the matter:

We have to understand that America, as a whole, remains more conservative than Progressive. Yes, Barack Obama was elected President, in large part, because he promised to fix our healthcare system and right the economic injustices of our current economy. But at the same time, Prop 8 was passed in California, denying the basic right of marriage to the gay members of our family. Similar measures were adopted in Florida and Arizona. In Arkansas, the ability of children to enjoy protective rights of unmarried parents through fostering or adoption was stripped from them.

These are truly unjust actions. But if we allow the Progressive movement to be broadly reactive without first building the shared values and beliefs that make such actions sustainable; then our house will turn out to have been built upon the sand. And when the electoral rains come, we will be washed away as thoroughly as it now appears our opponents have been.

Your result for The Perception Personality Image Test…

NBPC – The Daydreamer

Nature, Background, Big Picture, and Color

Take The Perception Personality Image Test at HelloQuizzy

I’ve received some reports of people being unable to leave comments. So I’ve installed the Disqus comment system. That means you are going to have to register with Disqus to leave a comment, but once you’ve done that, I hope it will move along smoothly.

I don’t generally have a problem with conservatives. It’s when they start talking about public policy that I have a problem. Like this example:

Obama laughs off the charge of socialist behavior — and to be fair, socialism isn’t the precise term to affix to his ideas. It’s more like Robin Hood economics. On a recent campaign stop, Obama joked that, by the end of the week, McCain would be accusing him “of being a secret communist because I shared my toys in kindergarten.”

A funny line. But, of course, Obama’s lofty intellect must comprehend the fundamental difference between sharing your G.I. Joe with a friend and having a bully snatch your G.I. Joe for the collective, prepubescent good. It’s the difference between coercion and free association and trade. In practical terms, it’s the difference between government cheese and a meal at Ruth’s Chris.

Wha-a-a-a-a-a-at?

So in this comparison, teaching a child to share his or her toy is teaching them to accept free cheese from the government? That’s a pretty big stretch.

And it isn’t about taking a toy from a child – bully or not. The comparison would be taking a couple of toys from a child who has millions and giving them to children who have none. If there was only a single dollar in the economy, the comparison might hold up. Obama’s line isn’t about economics, it’s about the dirty under-handed nature of John McCain’s campaign who will tie any action to the worst possible scenario – a gimmick apparently embraced by the conservative author.

By the way, there is no such a thing as “free trade”. Try and force the local megamart to change just about anything based on your buying power. Force your employer to change any policy based on your productivity. Then come back and tell me how effective your bargaining power is.

Now, I’m not suggesting Obama intends to transform this nation into 1950s-era Soviet tyranny or that he will possess the power to do so. I’m suggesting Obama is praising and mainstreaming an economic philosophy that has failed to produce a scintilla of fairness or prosperity anywhere on Earth. Ever.

Um – Barack Obama is talking about rolling back the Bush tax cuts on the highest income earners and allowing the folks at the bottom of the income scale to cash in on the tax code by making tax credits refundable. We had prosperity and a bit of fairness before Bush, right? Well, I think you hardly need look any further to find an example of why this author is simply being dishonest.

As far as redistributionist policies bringing prosperity – well, the tax code was even more progressive – translated, redistributionist – from the time of the Depression through the 1980s. Some of the fastest growth of widespread prosperity happened in those years – when the wealthy were taxed heavily to provide schools, bridges, highways, and even welfare programs for the poor.

“Fairness” is much more ambiguous a term. Are we to measure fairness only by income paid back in tax? Or shall we look at total wealth accumulated? Perhaps we might remember the widow’s mite. If you aren’t familiar – rich people giving lots of money doesn’t equate to poor people giving all they have because rich people still have tons of money left over. Don’t like that? Talk to Jesus. It’s his example.

You know, once upon a time, the stated purpose of taxation was to fund public needs like schools and roads, assist those who could not help themselves, defend our security and freedom, and, yes, occasionally offer a bailout to sleazy fat cats.

Obama is the first major presidential candidate in memory to assert that taxation’s principal purpose should be redistribution.

Well, yeah – like I said. What part of “assist those who could not help themselves” does not contain a redistributive aspect? The question appears to be more about who deserves help through redistribution of income rather than whether redistribution should take place.

But perhaps the problem is one of memory. Can’t remember Ronald Reagan?

Gergen also noted that the Reagan administration was responsible for enacting the Earned Income Tax Credit, an extremely successful redistribution program which returns money to the working poor.

Yes, the EITC – the same kind of refundable tax credit that Republicans are now vilifying.

The proposition that government should take one group’s lawfully earned profits and hand them to another group — not a collection of destitute or impaired Americans, mind you, but a still-vibrant middle class — is the foundational premise of Obama’s fiscal poli

This is simply an outright lie. If he said “working class”, he would have been closer to the truth. The refundable tax credits only redistribute income if a person has not paid enough tax to cover them – otherwise it is simply reclaiming the tax one has already paid. I know it’s common to refer to the working class as the middle class, but they are not the same. Even if Joe Biden said it.

And who knew we needed such a drastic renovation of an economic philosophy we’ve adhered to these past 25 years (even counting Bill Clinton’s comparatively fiscal conservative record)? Despite a recent downturn, and with all the serious tribulations we face, Americans have just lived through perhaps the most prosperous and peaceful era human beings have ever enjoyed.

Yeah – it’s so drastic it is basically the same as what we had in 1999 – with a few more targeted tax breaks for working people. So drastic!

Then again, it is doubtful that Obama is on his way to the presidency because of any revolutionary idea. It’s about performance. And by performance, I mean the performance of President Bush.

Bush’s failure, however, should not be counted as a failure of markets or capitalism. Even if it were, history shows us that the failures of capitalism are a lot more fun than the absence of capitalism.

Wha-a-a-a-a-at?

How can anyone look at our credit and banking institutions and not realize that a massive market failure occurred? Did not Alan Greenspan say that there was a basic flaw in the idea that markets will govern themselves? Is this not basically the same lesson we supposedly learned in 1929?

Capitalism is far from failed. But it sure does work a hell of a lot better for people at the top – and not nearly well enough for people at the bottom. It is not an abandonment of capitalism to spread a safety net so that people are not crashed and crushed when the greedy and irresponsible take us all to hell in a handbasket.

Conservatives have been accusing liberals of being socialists since, I don’t know, since liberals have been accusing conservatives of being fascists.

But when a candidate explicitly endorses a collectivist policy . . . well, words still have meaning, don’t they?

Well, “everyone does it” so that makes it right, right? Yes, words still have meaning. Especially words like “Liar!”

Wired says I’m dead. I just checked my pulse, though, and I seem to be okay.

Writing a weblog today isn’t the bright idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It’s almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.

I’m available on Twitter, and I have a facebook page – though I find it increasingly useless – and I keep a bunch of photos on Flickr. None of it is the equivalent of what I do here. It couldn’t possibly be.

In the last two weeks, I’ve had days where I got as many as 900 hits on this blog, and have been over 300 hits for the past couple of days. On Twitter? 68 followers.

But it’s about more than just numbers. I was blogging steady when I barely broke into double-digits on page-views. And I don’t just post here – I also blog regularly at Blue Jersey and at the Star-Ledger. I’ve blogged, in the past, at Drum Major Institute and The American Prospect, Op-Ed News, Burnt Orange Report, and NMFBIHOP, just to name a few. I’m not a household name from coast-to-coast by any means – not even in spots – but I really haven’t had that much trouble getting some amount of attention.

Yeah, people learned how to game Technorati. It’s practically useless. So is Daily Kos. But that problem is simply the problem of the internet – there are so many voices that it’s difficult to find individual voices that are worth listening to. How does Twitter – which doesn’t really have an effective search function – change that? Answer: it doesn’t. But, as it turns out, that isn’t the problem that Wired is looking at:

That said, your blog will still draw the Net’s lowest form of life: The insult commenter. Pour your heart out in a post, and some anonymous troll named r0rschach or foohack is sure to scribble beneath it, “Lame. Why don’t you just suck McCain’s ass.” That’s why Calacanis has retreated to a private mailing list. He can talk to his fans directly, without having to suffer idiotic retorts from anonymous Jason-haters.

Hateful people can be a problem. I have a solution here at my blog – I delete them. Over at the Star-Ledger, where I don’t run the show, I just ignore them. People are entitled to their opinions and they are free to share them appropriately in the proper forum. In that forum, I prefer to give wide latitude – the only comments that have been removed were a death-threat against me and a commenter that wanted to redirect attention to an unrelated article I’d written elsewhere. Here, it’s much more intimate, and I’m less willing to suffer fools lightly. Want to be an ass? Cool. Do it somewhere else.

Now, maybe if I had fifty jillion people stomping through here, it would reach a point of diminishing returns. I should be so lucky.

What we have here is the equivalent argument that texting will lead people to read books less. It’s idiotic. Twitter and other social networking sites can work as a tandem to blogging, but don’t confuse the two as synonymous. And if a few bloggers want to preach to their choir, then that’s fine, too.

From my Twitter homepage, I’m going jumping around to see what I can see. Here goes:

Jump 1: Sistertalk was the last tweet – she’s getting ready to live-blog the debate (brave girl – I can’t stand to watch). Earlier, she found a desire to tattoo health warnings on gay people and the Wisconsin absentee ballot has the wrong return address. Yeowwww.

Jump 2: The first person she’s following is Kathy Johnson, who is in London. I’m jealous.

Jump 3: The second person in Kathy’s list is Noah, who has a pic of something that looks interesting.

Jump 4: The next jump is to Crystal, who has no blog.

Jump 5: Next jump is to Stubbleblog. He’s talking about social networking.

Jump 6: Trazzler wants to know needless stuff about you.

No Bacon.