Titles: You Thought This One Had a Point, Didn't You?

So I read the White House Blog. It's an interesting read because of the fact it gets information out so promptly about what the Obama Administration is doing. Plus they post the Weekly Address, which I think is great because we should know what the President has to say. So recently I ran into a couple of interesting posts that mostly what I found a little odd were the titles and their relation to what was actually being said. The first was entitled "$100 million there, $100 million here". Now when I saw that I just kind of scratched my head, because with all of the spending that the government has participated in, it seemed like that was just a terrible endorsement of handing out even more cash. Really what it was about is President Obama's budget because he is seeking to slim it down by $100 million or so, which is a great thing and I hope they can accomplish such a task. Being more efficient with money is certainly praiseworthy and I applaud the administration for taking on such a task. However, this really didn't seem like a good title for this blog post. I'm all for clever, fun, witty titles but you have to make sure they convey proper messages and this particular one seemed to fail a bit with that.

The other post I found of interest was entitled "What Makes the United States Special". In this post they discuss President Obama's recent release of the "torture memos" and quote him in a speech he gave to the CIA. I found this title to be interesting; it drew my eye immediately when I saw it on the list of my RSS feed. However, I wasn't expecting it to be about the memos first of all and secondly, I didn't think their way of jumping into their post was necessarily wise. This post begins by acknowledging the release of this information, so my first thought was "So they're saying the U.S. is special because we release this kind of information," which is somewhat of a special thing so I was able to buy it. However, then it proceeds to talk about how the memos spoke of interrogation techniques, which really sent my head for a spin, because it almost seemed like they were saying "The U.S. is special because we torture people." The eventual outcome was speaking of how we're special because we don't resort to the same level as many of our enemies. However, yet again, it didn't seem like a wise use of title to text.