I started this blog in the early days of the Bush administration when Bush was enjoying the highest approval ratings in history. I was worried about where he would lead the country and, by the end of his first week in office, I was terrified. I suppose only the long view of history will bear out which one of us was right, but so far I would say that The Ranter leads at least 6-0 at the half (environment, economy, Iraq, torture, rendition and appeasement, with Afghanistan and a few others undecided).

I tried a number of things to get the word out, to get people to join the ACLU and to buy my tshirts. For a while the site did rank #1 for "bush is evil" in Google. But I eventually lost interest for several reasons:

• Realistically, as soon as Bush’s approval ratings started to really drop once the Iraq war started going poorly, I felt less need to keep writing. Everyone could see that the emperor had no clothes and I just didn’t see the value any more in being one more voice repeating it. I did on a couple of occasions write posts in favor of Bush, or at least critical of his critics, but it seemed like the right had plenty of people writing those types of articles, so there wasn’t much point there either.
• The site never really got traction. I had no illusions that I would develop hundreds, let alone thousands, of loyal readers — there are just too many writers on politics and current events, most of them much better than me, but other things I did drew in more people in comments and more interaction, and this site never rose to the level of engaging readers. Perhaps if I had found some others to write and built more of a community, it might have stayed interesting longer to both visitors and me.
• The fundamental vibe of most of the articles is negative, and I’m not a negative person. In fact, I’m a strong optimist. And I think most of the tshirts I designed were positive and at least a little humorous (“Proud member of the vast liberal conspiracy” which seemed even funnier in 2003). So I felt more and more out of step with my persona on Taken For Ranted. I could have tried to turn that around, but I felt constrained by the existing content here. I always imagined that what I wrote here would be free, fun, ironic. The truth is, with a couple of exceptions, it was plodding and boring. That wasn’t the point.
• I have been enjoying thinking about other things and decided I wanted a new space to do it, so I started writing on an old domain I had, RaisedByTurtles.org. My original idea for that site was to get people, especially young people, to write fictional biographies, perhaps several, where they would be unfettered by the boring details of their actual lives and write the life they planned to live or just something offbeat. My official biography is, uh, unfettered by facts. I never did figure out how to spread that idea among young people, but I had positive associations with the domain and, given my slow pace at getting things done, it seemed a more appropriate name for a place for my thoughts. It is not political. It’s a place to put down things I don’t want to forget, without feeling constrained by the topic. Some are straightforward solutions to computer problems that I know I’ll need to solve again (forcing Firefox to open resizable popups). Some are just my reactions to doing business at this place or that (as my thoughts on how restaurant managers should count vegetarians). I don’t know as these topics will interest any other human being, but they interest me more than opposition screeds to an administration that is no longer in office, and I felt like they would go better somewhere else. Like buying a new notebook to keep your journal in I guess.

Maybe this all begs the question of whether I suddenly think everything in America and the world is great and Saint Barak has saved democracy. Sadly, no. But unlike with Bush, I’m just not sure where Obama is taking us and I’m not sure he’s making the right or the wrong decisions. And in any case, I suppose the answer to that really is in what happens a year or two from now (in other words, do we get our wars, health care, spending and tax system under control or not).

I might have something to write from time to time, but for now, that’s why I don’t. The closest thing I have to what I used to write here is my Twitter stream except it’s lighter and more whimsical and more like what I imagined the feel of this blog would be.

Popularity: 13% [?]

I haven’t gotten around to writing anything or checking comments or responding since October 22, when my wife got crushed by a boulder and was taken by helicopter to the Modesto hospital, and when it was too much for them to handle, on to Stanford. She didn’t die or become paralyzed, but it was very close on both counts. She’s already walking a bit and should have a pretty good recovery and lots of titanium in her spine. I haven’t had the time or, more exactly, the inclination to write anything for a while. Also, I haven’t been really reading the news so I my mind just hasn’t been working that way.

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I’ve been having some fun with my breaking news stories that nobody else makes up reports, but I’ll be getting back to some more serious stuff soon, including a couple of book reviews (or at least one). That said, I feel like fake news stories that mirror real news are sometimes more telling than the actual news.

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I’ve been keeping this blog with a simple default “Occadia” template, pretty much unchanged, though I never really cared for it. Now I’ve got a design all of my own confection, including the Ranter logo which represents what I sort of intended (getting up on a soapbox and yelling because things are so f… up).

I also had never really intended quite such a serious journal and lately I’ve been having more fun making up fake news stories and I have a small back log of those to publish in coming days and weeks. Hardly anyone ever visits this site, though, so it hardly seems pressing!

Popularity: 8% [?]

I just installed a countdown timer to keep track of how long I have to wait until Bush becomes my favorite ex-president. I have taken a script freely available on the net and created a Bush-specific version for you to download. Check out the install page to grab your own. Also, in the process, I stumbled across the site of a guy selling an actual physical desktop Bush presidency countdown timer. I have a picture of that on the timer install page.

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Rant! Rant! Rant! What good does it do? I couldn’t say, but given the current state of politics in the United States it can’t hurt to have one more person out there ranting. Maybe an army of ranters. Got a good rant? I’ll post it if I like it. Got a thousand good rants? I’ll host ‘em if I like ‘em. Now I’m just ruminating about intelligent design, CIA secret prisons and torture, political cronyism in the Bush and administration and that other party we used to see around, but which seems to have nothing to say anymore. What were they called? The Democrats I think. Like Phil Ochs said about liberals: “Ten degrees to the left of center in good times. Ten degrees to the right of center when it affects them personally.”

Popularity: 6% [?]