Anniversary: Ten Years Gone

It kept slipping my mind until just now:

I have officially been blogging like a madmen for ten straight years.

I started a blog - back when this was Blogspot - on May 4, 2006 for several reasons:

• As a librarian I need to learn the blogging methods to teach instructional classes to the public about it.
• I had a background in journalism and a hobby/interest in creative writing.
• I was curious.
• I had political issues to discuss.

Originally this blog was going to be a serious, academic focus on the need for Constitutional reforms: our system of checks and balances were inadequate to the demands of the 21st Century, and our government had become unresponsive to the real needs of the citizenry.

So I started Amendments We Need, and figured I could spend an entry a week or a month to write long-winded essays of reformer ideas.

It stayed that way - with long gaps of inactivity - until December 2007, when the upcoming 2008 Presidential election grabbed my interest, and I found myself blogging too often about the general craziness - the economic downturns, the rise of Obama, the horrors of Palin, the anxiety of the age - of that election cycle

I kept the title - and old website addy - until May 2013 when I changed it to this more exotic and suspenseful Notice a Trend title. Muy sexy, no?

Man, ten years of this stuff.

I've had some crazy posts: Sharing voter turnout information to Andrew Sullivan's Dish blog back in 2008 when it meant something... Blogging about the Iranian Green uprising that turned bloody (but hopefully a sign of future freedom to that nation)... sharing work with the Lost Battalion/Horde following Ta-Nehisi Coates... the constant wait for confirming my Obama Shoelace Theory (that a Republican will go as far as to accuse Obama of unpatriotic shoelace tying)... the four years of job-hunting during the dark days of the Great Recession... getting into fights with anonymous comment posters... Having Crooks & Liars pick up the occasional entry for their Blog Round-Up, and Vagabond Scholar and Infidel753 and Tengrain and Monkeyfister and Pinku-Sensei and Clarissa and... oh man I lost track of the others sharing my links, kick me I am so sorry I forgot...

Ten years of all this.

A lot of it angry, some of it depressing, but enough of it hopeful and grateful for the future ahead for all of us.

Ten years gone, but more years ahead. And this one's not over yet. There's a lot of work to do (DON'T VOTE REPUBLICAN FOR THE LOVE OF GOD) and there never seems to be enough time, but we get by...

Did you ever really need somebody, and really need em bad
Did you ever really want somebody, the best something you ever had
Do you ever remember me, baby, did it feel so good
Cause it was just the first time, and you knew you would... - Led Zeppelin "Ten Years Gone"

And I'm 9 posts away from reaching 1000 articles.

I should break out Yes' "Tempus Fugit" next.

Introductions are in order

Welcome to my political blog of ranting and snarkery. Insert smirk here.
My intent with this blog is to insert some positive and constructive suggestions to all the yelling taunting and screaming going on in the current political scene. Oh, I'll add my own yelling and taunting, but I will endeavor to add items of merit to the 'discussions.'
My primary outrage is directed at the current shabby lack of ethics: the corruption as highlighted by Congress Quid Pro Quo-ing with K Street and the Lobbyists, the open lying with BushCheneyCo.'s push into Iraq and methodical destruction of the Constitution's checks and balances, the bullying of media talking heads declaring 'evil' and 'treason' toward anyone showing a modicum of independent and logical thought... Yeah, fun times.
Just today, for example, the House passed a reform bill that essentially had no teeth to it. The New York Times article gives better detail on what is and isn't in the package:

After Mr. Abramoff's plea, Mr. Dreier and (Speaker Hastert) endorsed the idea of barring members of Congress and their aides from accepting trips paid with private money. But the bill the House passed Wednesday would not ban the trips. Rather, it calls for the House ethics committee to draft trip rules by June 15. Before then, privately financed trips will require advance approval from two-thirds of the ethics panel.

Unlike the measure approved by the Senate, the bill does not address the "revolving door," the Capitol Hill term for lawmakers and aides who leave Congress to become lobbyists. The Senate bill aims to rein in that practice by requiring lawmakers and senior aides to refrain from lobbying former colleagues for two years, instead of the current one year.

And there could be so much more added to create genuine reform and end the cycle of greed and mismanaged spending that have turned the last 5 years of Congressional budgeting into one of the biggest deficits this nation has ever seen, one that is threatening the fiscal stability of the United States well into the 21st Century. But noone's pursuing any of that.

Finding genuine reformers in elected office is viciously rare these days: the only way to get elected anymore is with stockpiles of money, and the only way to get those stockpiles is to suck up to whatever special interests and their lobbyists can cough up that dough for you. And those special interests/lobbyists are going to expect their money's worth once you get in. Expecting Congress to reform itself is like expecting Paris Hilton to become a nun (wait, is she Catholic btw...?).

No, in this regard, the American people - the middle class (what's left of it), the poor, the average American that doesn't have $2 million to donate to the Congressman's wife-run charity - are going to have to make the reforms themselves.

And the only way to do that is to get a Constitutional Convention going.

more to follow...