The Free View-- weblog of a presidential candidate

Excuses, excuses

I've been not so much with the posting lately, but I come armed with a reason again. My internet connection, which is DirecWay satellite, has had major outages over the past few days. All in all, I lost about 15 hours of prime uptime, and I've been doing a lot of catchup once I've gotten back on. I know I could write while not online, but I find it hard to be productive on my computer without an internet connection. It seems like every other thing I do on my computer involves connecting to the 'net somehow. So most of my offline time was spent cleaning and organizing.

I've also spent a bunch of hours in the past few days working on the Nevada County Libertarian Party Newsletter for December with the party's Secretary, Janet Miller. She's the one who puts most of it together into a first draft, then we spend lots of time polishing it up. I'm pretty picky, and she's pretty open to suggestion, so the polishing can get pretty involved. Also, it's basically a one-page newsletter (the other side has the mailing info and a half-page we usually use to promote upcoming meetings). That might mak it sound easier, but it's actually really hard to make a good one-page newsletter. It would be a lot easier if it were two or four pages really. We try and put a lot in them, and we end up being quite surgical in our effort to do so. By which I mean we end up really cutting away all unnecessary chaff so we can get as much wheat in as possible. Basically every sentence gets checked out word-by-word to see if it's as tight as can be. It's been really good editing experience actually, even though it's just a page a month. It's a hard-earned page.

We'll be posting all the past newsletters over there soon for people who want to do some catching up. It's part of a major revitalizing effort at that web site. I have concluded that the web site is the most efficient way for our (very, very small) organization to gain an intellectual and political foothold here. We just don't have the resources for good on-the-ground politics. I think if we focus a lot of energy on the site, and use it as a freedom news and opinion clearinghouse for the county, we could gather a wide base of local (and loyal) readers. And if we do so we'll earn a lot of trust and goodwill from people who might never come to one of our meetings or events, and we'll educate and inform in the process. Good stuff.

There aren't a lot of news and opinion sources in my tiny county, and if we can become a decent one, I think we'll find a market of folks willing to tune in.

As far as regular posting of messages here goes, I'm really going to try hard to post at least a message a day all December. Hopefully a lot more than that, 'cuz I'm bubbling over with thoughts.