Things aren’t as they used to be. The days of tax-and-spend liberals appear to be fading into history, paving the way for the modern conservative movement of borrow-and-spend. Ages past, conservatives used to lament the bloated influence of the federal government on state and local affairs, especially when it involved increases to the federal deficit. Those days are gone. In what I suspect to be a Bush Administration-sponsored news story (read: propaganda), Republican congressmen are crowing like crazy over their abilities to bring federal dollars to their districts for purely local projects. “Where’s the fire, MrKedder?” you may be asking. Well, assuredly, nothing is new about congresspersons of either party using earmarks to send government monies into local municipalities. But doesn’t anyone notice the difference? The change? Conservatives used to decry this method as a way for liberal representatives to waste more of the taxpayer’s hard-earned dollars. Now it’s business as usual? The only way to fly? The day that the inability of a President to veto any old piece of legislation that a Congress controlled by his party sends him becomes a boon to America is a sad day indeed. Clinton, if you recall, ran a surplus for the remaining years of his presidency, and passed that surplus off only to see it evaporate under the hands of a Republican president. Since then, our national debt has skyrocketed and the government has been forced to raise the debt ceiling of America’s credit limit repeatedly. All of this wouldn’t be such a big surprise if conservatives hadn’t been running on the smaller-government-controlled-spending platform for the past 20 years. I mean, come on! Who ever thought we’d miss the good old days when conservatives actually conserved things?