An Interesting Morning

So I started this morning laying bare my soul on my FB page with the tragedy that really began my war with legalists within the Christian church (they were called Pharissees during the time of Christ, “legalists” now), and honestly that put me into a funk. There are reasons I don’t talk about that very much, with the primary one being that it is one of the deepest, darkest areas of my life. So I’m not going to dwell on it here.

But that incident, which was the beginning of both my outright war with legalists as well as one of the key turning points in my life thus far, got me started thinking about beginnings. I saw that this post will be the 800th post on this site – in under 10 months.

This site started as http://swgapolitics.wordpress.com on January 25, 2009. As is typical with me, I didn’t introduce myself, I just started talking. I had been writing on my Myspace site for a few months before that, and I imported all of those writings to this site.

The very first “SWGA Politics” post was a very brief one by my current writing standards where I linked out to Jason – whom I had never met and rarely, if ever, spoken to at that point – when he claimed that President Obama had “allowed” missile strikes into Pakistan. I pointed out that Senators “allow” the military to do things – Presidents ORDER the military to do things. Thus, 2 days into office, Barack Obama was continuing the failed policies of George W Bush in regards to the “War on Terror”.

For nearly two months, the vast majority of posts on this site were bill commentary and voting records – something I need to get back to. I really started branching out of that around March 18, though there had been sporadic non-General Assembly posts in the prior few weeks – including one on a WI teacher suspended over her Facebook page.

11 days after I really started branching away from the General Assembly exclusively, Tom introduced himself as the new contributing author to this site. A month later, the wordpress site moved to its own hosting, and Tom and I officially became business partners.

We’ve since branched out in a variety of ways, with Tom concentrating more on Albany-specific stuff and me concentrating on 2010 Campaign and General Assembly-related matters. Eventually, I also came to write more about Lee County and Leesburg. We’ve also added Bill Waller as a writer who mostly looks at Congressional issues, and we’re always open to the possibility of adding more writers.

We’ve gone through a few site redesigns, and I’m thinking about possibly doing another one in the near-mid future. Our newest addition to the functionality of the site is the MobilePress theme, which allows easy reading on mobile web-enabled phones.

Tom and I, along with Bill, are going to sit down at some point in the next few weeks and discuss where this site is and where we want it to go. I have some ideas, and I’m sure Tom and Bill do as well, hence the face to face. (For those that aren’t aware, while Tom and I in particular talk nearly every day, we don’t actually see each other face to face that often.)

But I also want your input. I want to know what we’ve done right and what we’ve done wrong. I want to know about where YOU would like this site to move towards. So please, let us know. You can comment here or you can email us using the comment form at the top of the page.