Traffic here has upticked lately so I thought I’d do a quick post describing the site. The primary blog is Archpundit. There, I cover national, international, and state politics, especially Illinois. Additionally, I hope to blog more frequently on welfare, the environment and education policy. I also have a weakness for wingnuts similar to Scoobie Davis’ enjoyment of Jack Chick. This interest has suffered with my wife’s growing concern that either I will fall prey to Trinity Broadcasting Network and Jack Van Impe or our children will.
I have a second blog that I write that concerns itself exclusively with the Saint Louis region and Missouri that I have named Blog Saint Louis (link to the opposite site at the top of the blogroll). Blog Saint Louis is heavy on local politics and I have separated the two. First, many of the people I know who read Blog Saint Louis aren’t terribly interested in my views on national politics, at least on a daily basis. Second, many intereted in this blog aren’t interested in the minutia of Sa
int Louis politics. From time to time I do double post to both sites.
What are my views? I’m a liberal, though not always a predictable one. I also hate cliches unless I write them. I believe government can have an important role in providing opportunities to all. This is certainly true of my life in which I have benefited from free public education and access to a small liberal arts college largely available to me because of federal assistance. I’m also a strong advocate of using markets to make government intervention as efficient as possible.
Now, who the hell am I? Well, I blog anonymously for a couple reasons. One, it allows me plausible deniability at work. Anyone who reads these blogs from Saint Louis can probably figure out who I am pretty quickly, so let’s not confirm my employer’s suspicions. Second, my work does involve working on some projects related to local St. Louis politics and by blogging anonymously I don’t have to concern myself with whether a project will be endangered by a snarky comment.
A bunch of people have requested specific topics and I’m hoping to oblige in the next couple weeks. For the next week I hope to spend some time discussing the 2004 Illinois Senate Race and go into some detail of the challengers. Work is heavy, so there will be some erratic posting, but keep checking in. In addition to that topic, I hope to return to some big picture issues the 2002 elections raise.
On a final note, those of you sick of Blogger and Blogspot, consider Blogstudio. For only $15/yr you receive more functions and far fewer down times. It is available free as well minus a couple features like comments and RSS feed (feel free to access mine for other sites if you so wish–Blog Saint Louis is on stlouist.com). Stats are apparently coming. After starting with Blogger I have found Blogstudio to be a huge improvement and quite easy to use if you want a simple web interface. It also works better with Mozilla and Netscape.
Oh, and feel free to correct my spelling. After getting Blagojevich correct most of my time blogging I was notified I was spelling Hynes incorrectly. I’m fully capable of being an idiot.