If It's Not For Profit, It's Just Not

Don't you just love this Republican Congress? It's working diligently to destroy just about every public service it can, clearing the way for the health and welfare of private enterprise. For example, the federal government printed its last postage stamps last Friday. This will supposedly save the Postal Service lots of money; it went mostly private long ago, so it's all good.

But that's just stamps. What about public broadcasting? Some in Congress want to cut its already meager funding. Cool. Public broadcasting is just a bunch of liberal propaganda, anyway. If it's not fair and balanced like Fox News, we don't need it.

And cross-country train service? We don't need that, either. Obviously the airlines are healthy and a totally efficient way to travel. Greyhound is always fun, too.

Seriously, the postage and Amtrak cuts may make sense. If the privately-printed postage is going to be so much cheaper, um, ok. But what makes it cheaper? Is it the fact that the private printers pay their workers $6/hour and dump their printing chemicals into the local watershed while the gov't printers had to pay a living wage and dispose of their waste in a more responsible fashion? And Amtrak, well, it's been too expensive for most people to use for a long time—probably since the last huge cuts in federal funding. Personally I think we're going to wish we had a healthy, efficient, and robust national passenger rail system as fuel prices continue to rise, but hey, what do I know?

The public broadcasting thing is pretty indefensible, though. MoveOn.org thinks so, too.

Posted 07:19 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack | general politics

I'm Just, um, Catching Up

So what happens when you post to your blog nearly every day for a while and then suddenly stop for a few days with no good explanation? Apparently you get amusing email like this:

Listen here [expletive of endearment],

The only joy I get all week is to read your blog and natalie dee every morning and Gene Weingarten and Tom Sietsema's chats once a week. The rest of my time is spent giving birth—trying to learn things I didn't learn the first 1 billion times I tried, like con law. Don't give me excuses like that you are busy “helping people” and trying to make this world “better” by protecting people's “rights.” Just write thoughtful, insightful and clever shit every day. OK? And post it nice and early so I can read it during barbri.

Don't you just love it? I need more friends like this. Now that it's summer and I find myself living in a steam table.... oh, and since my days are a little longer than they are during the school year, well.... it's not that I don't want to post so much as there's just not always time. But hey, for you? I'll see what I can do. Thoughtful, insightful, and clever I'm not so sure about, but if all you're looking for is something more interesting than BarBri, that's a much smaller order and one I think I can fill. I'll try, anyway.

Ten things:

1. Blawg Wisdom has a new request for advice and a new Books category, both waiting for your generous and inspired commentary and input.
2. Dave! has picked up and run with the weekly law student blog roundup ball with a short but sweet snapshot of what's happening recently. Thanks to Dave!, this feature should be moving to Blawg Wisdom soon.
3. Energy Spatula is back in D.C. and she's already causing trouble. Welcome to town, ES!
4. Feeding my Mac obsession: Are Apple and Intel really going for broke against Microsoft?
5. And my political obsession: People love to bash Howard Dean but how can you not love stuff like this: “My view is that Fox News is a propaganda outlet of the Republican Party and that I don't comment on Fox News.”
6. “Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody else is spouting, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune.” --Noam Chomsky
7. PledgeBank: Raise money for something you care about.
8. ConnectviaBooks: Make friends with people who like the same books you like? Hmm.
9. Chicago Crime: A freely browsable database of crimes reported in Chicago. What a cool use of Google maps.
10. My thumb hurts.

Posted 06:42 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack | lists meta-blogging