WurfWhile

Like everyone I make mistakes, but my writing quality is usually better than it was this week. I have two sizable mistakes in mind (perhaps my readers have more).

The first mistake was in “DuPage Taxation - A Watershed Proposal” where I wrote about two main topics: the possibility that the DuPage County Board was going to sneak in new taxes by making space under the tax cap through new fees, and the increasing and regressive use of fees instead of taxes in DuPage. The complex topics are related - but they should have been two different posts. Instead the post was too long and may have lost people.

My second mistake, the next day and post, was the title “Congressman Biggert Why Aren’t You Proud To Be An American.” I often start out with a rough concept title and then create the body of the post only to work on the title again at the end. I did that in this post except that, after finishing the body to my satisfaction, I hit “publish” before remembering that I intended to rework the title. I’ve done this a few times before - but never with a title that ‘didn’t work’ for me like this one. I honestly don’t know what title I would have come up with (once I published it and it went through RSS I figured it was a lost cause), but I would have strived for clearer meaning. Bill Baar among others has rightly taken me to task for seeming to call Congressman Biggert “unAmerican” a phrase I didn’t use, but given my lack of clarity, an understandable mistake. What I intended was less crude, the suggestion that Congressman Biggert’s actions against child health care and SCHIP (see here and here) were not in the spirit of providing American opportunity and the best for our youth and future generations - what can be thought of as our proud American heritage. For more on this and my disagreement with Bill’s take see here.