{"id":1548,"date":"2005-07-08T15:12:21","date_gmt":"2005-07-08T19:12:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.test.bradblog.com\/?p=1548"},"modified":"2006-07-09T22:09:40","modified_gmt":"2006-07-10T05:09:40","slug":"when-did-you-start-and-why-did-you-continue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bbnewdb.webbyspice.com\/?p=1548","title":{"rendered":"When Did You Start Reading BRADBLOG? And Why Did You Continue?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

I have a couple of questions for everyone: When did you start reading the Brad Blog?<\/strong> and Why did you keep coming back?<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I may as well go first:<\/p>\n

I don’t know. Really. I honestly don’t remember when or how I first landed at the Brad Blog, but I do remember that it looked a bit strange. OK, very strange. I hadn’t seen a green-and-yellow blog before. Still haven’t seen any others, now that I mention it.<\/p>\n

But I spent quite a while reading, and I remember thinking “this Brad fellow is pretty good; I wonder why he hardly gets any comments”. I didn’t make any comments myself, though. Ahem. And I made a mental note to myself saying “come back soon”. Which I promptly forgot…<\/p>\n

I do remember my second visit. I got here on a link from BuzzFlash. The story was about the White House removing embarrassing material from their website. And it was a good one.<\/p>\n

The White House Scrubs Historical Documents: Removes Pages of Historic Record from the White House Website<\/a><\/p>\n

And there was more, including this:<\/p>\n

More Scrubbing of White House Website!!! Audio & Video Removed!<\/a><\/p>\n

Within a period of just a few weeks, Brad posted a whole series of articles about the same topic, as summarized here:<\/p>\n

Highlights of our ‘White House Website Scrub’ reporting…: (Shrub Scrub? HTML-File-Gate?)<\/a><\/p>\n

All this was before the election, before Clint Curtis came along, before the phony voters rights group ACVR. This was [to my knowledge] Brad’s first investigative series, and it was fascinating to watch it all develop.<\/p>\n

I watched from the sidelines, still thinking: “Why doesn’t this blog get many comments?”<\/p>\n

Eventually I made a comment myself, here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Then things started to happen. I made a few more comments. One of them<\/a> even drew a response from Brad. Pretty soon I was drawn into a discussion or two. And there was no looking back.<\/p>\n

Before long I was reading old posts in the archives. And eventually I got a fairly clear picture of Brad and his Blog. Maybe it’s not an accurate picture but at least it’s fairly clear.<\/p>\n

I see him as a fine researcher and a determined digger, a really nice guy who is very concerned about the state of the country and its direction and who is working hard to do something about it, a good creative journalistic writer and a very funny one too.<\/p>\n

No, it’s not all rose-colored glasses because I see the flaws as well. Sometimes he gets apostrophes in the wrong places. Sometimes he spells words wrong. Once in a while he even chooses the wrong word.<\/p>\n

I started sending Brad e-mail saying things like “it’s democratic not demmocratic” or “you should be saying its not it’s” … and “you’re too good to be making these kinds of mistakes” … and Brad would make the changes in his posts. Eventually he realized that it would be a lot easier for both of us if he gave me the keys to the blog. So now if he misspells a word, it’s still his fault. But if that mistake remains on the blog for very long, it’s my fault too.<\/p>\n

One thing led to another … having made a few short comments I then started making the occasional long one, and eventually I could see that I needed my own blog. So I started one, but I kept returning to The Brad Blog, kept making dumb comments here, kept fixing the typos, even deleted some spam once in a while … after a while there came a time when Brad needed to hit the road and he offered me a chance to do some guest blogging … scary stuff, that, at first! … and the rest, as they say, is a mystery!<\/p>\n

They do<\/em> say that, don’t they?<\/p>\n

OK, enough about me. Let’s talk about Brad. Let’s talk about you.<\/p>\n

When did you start reading the Brad Blog?<\/strong><\/p>\n

and Why did you keep coming back?<\/strong><\/p>\n

This item is part of the First Annual BRAD BLOGATHON<\/a>, conceived and implemented by readers of The BRAD BLOG! Please help keep Brad blogging. You can click HERE to donate<\/a> using PayPal or your credit card, or click HERE to donate<\/a> using snail mail. Many thanks on behalf of Brad and the Bloggers behind the Blogathon!<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot I have a couple of questions for everyone: When did you start reading the Brad Blog? and Why did you keep coming back?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":155,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bbnewdb.webbyspice.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1548","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bbnewdb.webbyspice.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bbnewdb.webbyspice.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bbnewdb.webbyspice.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/155"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bbnewdb.webbyspice.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1548"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bbnewdb.webbyspice.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1548\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bbnewdb.webbyspice.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bbnewdb.webbyspice.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bbnewdb.webbyspice.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}