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.

Who was this attractive woman? Why did her story not ring true?
Hidden chains need to be broken, so I’ve become a reluctant rebel
Taxing ‘the rich’ more not only wouldn’t work, but it’s not fair
We often live in the tension between known and unknown
FRIDAY FUNNIES
Leave your dead past behind; that’s not where you’re going
Bachmann’s attack on Obama’s TelePrompTer was cynical hypocrisy
Need for love drives behaviors; for me, old needs make me eat