The Free View - weblog of a presidential candidate

I've been trying to think of a smooth way to get back into the groove on the blog. I haven't come up with one. I've got a lot of catching up to do, and one of the options that has been hanging out there is to try and squish all the catch-up items into one big return entry-- but there's too much to do that properly.

So instead I'll post a preview of items that I plan to post about in the coming days and the rest of this month:

--A fuller explanation of the context behind my dismissal from the Russo campaign, and a number of my thoughts on the choices facing the delegates at the upcoming Libertarian Party convention.

--The very sad story behind the loss of one of my pets about 10 days ago, and the difficulties that unfolded from that event.

--My thoughts on this ridiculously tragic war.

--My thoughts on this ridiculously tragic upcoming presidential election.

--(Probably) a request for donations to help cover the cost of getting me to the upcoming LP convention.

--Some links and commentary about some of the articles I've come upon in recent weeks.

On that last note-- while this past month has been one of reduced output for me on almost every project I'm involved with, I've been trying to keep things flowing on The Little Brown Reader. I've posted 1081 entries to that part of the site since I started it in June of last year. At some point I moved to a very trimmed-down format for most entries-- which is to say, most entries these days are just a link, or a link and an excerpt. Very few comments, and I haven't done the rating system in months. It was just too time-consuming. So the 'LBR' functions mostly as a sort of an eclectic news ticker nowadays. It's not all of the articles I've read online, but it's a lot of them.

So far, the top three categories in terms of entries are:

Presidential Campaigns: 179 entries

War: 168 entries

Libertarians: 110 entries

It makes sense that those would be the three dominant categories, I guess. (And they are dominant-- the next largest is California Recall with 85, and then Civil Liberties with 59). The first two links above serve as pretty good compendiums of news articles on Election 2004 and the war in Iraq respectively-- not complete pictures in either case, but probably a lot of stuff you may not have seen in your e-travels.

If you want to get a sense of what I read in any given month, you can flip through the archive pages for March, April, or May here:
http://freedom2008.com/reader/archives/2004_03.html(March)
http://freedom2008.com/reader/archives/2004_04.html (April)
http://freedom2008.com/reader/archives/2004_05.html (I'll give you three guesses...)

You can of course find many other ways to sift through the 1081 entries at the main Little Brown Reader page: http://freedom2008.com/reader

I apologize for letting such a big lull develop in my updates. The plain truth is that the past month or so has been filled with a lot of deep reflection, and not a small amount of internal (and external) struggle. It's not really an excuse for falling behind, but it's the primary reason why I did. There are other, related reasons that are more substantive, and I'll touch upon those in the course of addressing some of the things I listed above.

All things considered, it feels good to be back. :-) I wish I hadn't stayed away so long.