It was 10 years ago today when I launched this website with a simple announcement on Facebook. When I started, I was very unclear about what I was going to do with it. If I had never had lunch with an old friend, it never would have happened.
Tom Briscoe had been the editorial cartoonist for a newspaper I had owned and he and I got together for lunch one day in the spring of 2011. He told me I had to start publishing a blog. I gave him all sorts of excuses about why it was a bad idea, but he somehow talked me into doing it anyway.
For the first couple of months, the content was all over the chart. It was mostly bad. By summer, I had settled into writing something that was heavily political and I gained a nice little following that amounted to a couple thousand readers a day.
My big break came when something I wrote — some original reporting from an event I happened to cover — was shared on a popular national political blog called Instapundit. From there, the piece was picked up by conservative and libertarian radio shows around the country, including that of the late Rush Limbaugh. I had 30,000 readers that day — and many of them stayed with me.

The gifts we give children shape them and reveal what we expect of them
Conservatives betray their own values when they mimic enemies
Life is too short to hide the love you would regret hiding at death
Grief keeps reopening the door my loving mother walked out of
For an American church, the Fourth of July should be just another day
Lens of narcissism is only way to understand Donald Trump’s crime
The pounding rain from the storm brought me warmth, light and love
Sad husband: ‘My beautiful wife is dying; I’m so sad I can’t sleep’