NOVATOWNHALL

Erica Garman spent the day wheeling around Sterling yesterday, read about it here.

Keep an eye on her blog and you will see what I mean.

More to come.

Another blogger passed on this weekend, as reported by Eric, longtime blog friend, virtual drinking buddy and Tom Waits brother in arms. This blogger, Winston Rand, I did not know, but if he was a friend of Eric’s I am sure he would have been a friend of mine.

It highlights the fact the blogosphere opens a new element of history and memorialization, that a public diary or collection of essays can stand as one’s monument, one’s epitaph or eulogy.

When the Acidman died a couple years ago, this fact really hit home with me. I read Rob Smith’s blog regularly, but not carefully enough to know he had any serious health issues, so his sudden death (in the midst of blogging, if I recall correctly) was a shock. Right up until the end he was writing cogent, biting, personal essays. He had done this for a long time, and, per his wishes, his blog has remained online as family members have been recycling his posts (because there are so many gosh darn good ones), so that his son will have a place to go to learn about his dad. Click here to follow his last week.

Acidman’s traffic is on average still higher than ours at NVTH, which says something, since we are roughly seven guys who are still generally alive and writing.

It evokes the question of what sort of legacy each of us is leaving on our respective blogs. If I fall dead on the keyboard tonight I would not be overly concerned with the NVTH sitemeter stats two years on, but I wonder if all this written material I’ve left would tell the accurate story for my kids and potential grandkids. They’d definitely be able to glean the fact that “Grampa was angry,” but what else?

As I approach 50, as the years pile up, dropping dead on the keyboard is no longer a distant possibility but a growing likelihood. I hope not soon, but certainly more likely with each passing year. Taking the long view I have to wonder if the legacy here is all I would want to leave.

Holy Hot Columnists, Batman, Michelle has done it for us again!

As a lower tier, C-grade blogger, I can tell you the one thing that makes it all worthwhile are those unexpected moments when you get a “spike” in traffic for absolutely no reason, and a whole bunch of people visit your site more or less accidentally. Ninety-nine percent of blog “marketing” consists of trying to pull various tricks that cause visitors to click on a link to your site. Whether through clever identification of popular google searches, or just trying to convince Glenn Reynolds you’ve written something worthwhile (tried many times and like the cycles of the planets it has ALWAYS proved beyond my control - if it ever works, I will know death is at hand), the basic idea is “Ha! Made you look!”

Once again, the driving force is my NRI photo of Michelle, because MSN has seen fit to make her their featured “popular search” of the day (click her photo then “See also: Images”). There she is, beginning of the second row.

(More form NRI, here and here.)

I know the vast majority of these folks will never visit here again, but occasional flood of gawkers is nice.

Thanks, Michelle! If you ever want me to return the favor, I’ll be happy to provide a head shot which you can publish with abandon.

UPDATE: Approaching 2500 visits. That’s a couple grand at least from Michelle, and counting.

Y’know what? When the Malkinator brings that kind of traffic, the lithesome one goes back on the front page again.

Hope you are ok, dude. It is always scary in this realm of obscured identities that someone could fall off the grid for one reason or another and no one would ever know.

I can think of a million reasons you would no longer be participating on this blog, and that is fine. But I am worried. You have my e-mail address; please let me know if you are still kicking butt in Ann Arbor, biatch (The General’s first post here - oh my how time flies).

Valuable service provided by RWN.

…Obama’s embracement of appeasement.
Obama has a huge anti-gun record.
Obama may not be a Muslim, but every association with religion he has made seems to be outrageously radical!

It’s a long list, go read it all.

The wife is in Baltimore where there is much cooler stuff going on than we typically get in the suburbs here. Hopefully some of the coolness will rub off on her and then by extension on me.

Looking through our referral logs last night I learned that approximately 33% of our traffic at NVTH Blog is because of people googling this photo I took of Michelle Malkin last year. (Here is a larger version for those of you with poor eyesight.) Now, is that really “googling” or should it be termed “g-ogling?”

Anyway, special thanks to Michelle for wearing that skirt and those boots at the NRI Summit. We’ll take the traffic any way we can get it.

UPDATE: On second thought it looks like there’s just something weird going on right now. That photo is a year and a half old and in the past 24 hours there has been a huge increase in the number of requests from images.google.com. Michelle’s birthday maybe? I’m stumped.

Priceless commentary from Mark Krikorian:

When will the long national nightmare of mechanized harvesting come to an end?

Blog Fu, aka the president of Help Save Manassas, and some of his team spent the morning at a local 7-11 photographing and filming the ad hoc hiring taking place.

Half the enjoyment is in the telling, so go read the whole thing.

It appears they gathered some good information on people hiring under the table. Maybe some of it will be actionable by local law enforcement. There is this one particular section of the U.S. Code which just might be actionable for a police force participating with ICE.

Kudos and thanks to Greg and the others for taking the time to go out and help make a difference.

If you have not been following it, there seems to be a lively time going on in Denver right now:

One of the sponsors of the convention is Shotgun Willie’s, a local strip joint. Each delegate’s credentials packet includes a coupon for half-price admission. Shotgun Willie’s also has a booth in the exhibition hall, next to the Mike Gravel booth.

No wonder Libertarians always seem slightly bemused by Republican political events …

More R.S. McCain coverage is at the American Spectator blog and at R.S.’ own little slice of the blogosphere, The Other McCain. Just scroll on down the screen for the full chronology on each.

Also, scroll down at Donny Ferguson’s blog, Third Party Watch, Reason Magazine

Blog Fu has the key results of today’s 10th District Republican Convention:

Congratulations to Jo-Ann Chase, Kay Gunter and Howie Lind for being elected to the Republican State Central Committee for the 10th District of Virginia! This represents a pretty substantial victory for conservatives over the slate endorsed by 10th District Chairman Jim Rich, who was re-elected without opposition.

Go read all of that because Greg has some good commentary.

This was touted in a flyer widely distributed onsite as “the Conservative Slate that Jim Rich Does NOT Endorse!” I don’t know enough about the opponents to know who is really more conservative than anyone else, but I do know these three stated a commitment to keeping the issue of immigration enforcement a live one in the state party. Jo-Ann, I can tell you, is definitely a major voice on this issue in Northern Virginia and it is gratifying to see that she, Kay and Howie swept into the State Central Committee.

First Herndon re-elects its pro-enforcement town council, and now the 10th District follows suit. Not bad for an overall discouraging political year.

The Loudoun County delegation played a key role in sweeping these three into office. Loudoun had 170 representatives at the Convention, Fairfax County 230 - but our votes count for more because of the weighting. (Maybe someone will explain this in more detail, that’s all I know).

Back when the call for delegates was announced, I know that we had some extremely active people working the phones and various social networks, including the Help Save Loudoun crowd, Eugene Delgaudio’s list of supporters, and many who worked on the Greg Ahlemann campaign.

It showed. There was a huge contingent from Sterling and nearby areas of eastern Loudoun - a crowd of people, most of whom I have not seen since approximately the first week of November last year. And none of whom, I believe, has returned to the Loudoun County Republican Committee. I think the delegation to the 10th District Convention is actually about the same size as the entire current LCRC. Food for thought there.

I attended the community hearing Wednesday for residents of the Sterling area to give feedback to the Board of Supervisors, and overwhelmingly the issues local residents are most concerned about center on the illegal alien problem here. A prominent sentiment was that the county government has abandoned this community. I suggest we could extrapolate that sentiment to the fact that many, many of those who were previously involved in county politics feel betrayed by the LCRC. If the committee decides it will now be “issue-neutral” a lot of people who saw it as a vehicle for solving their neighborhood problems will not be motivated to participate.

When the call came out, I know a big message being circulated was “Ok, you are let down by the results of last November, and let down by the presidential campaign, but here is something you and everyone you know can do to help further the cause of immigration enforcement: Sign up as a delegate for these two Conventions.”

Not that everyone was motivated principally by the illegal migration issue, nor that the three elected all see that is their number one topic, but that’s the message we were circulating and I imagine those with other “conservative” causes were framing the Conventions the same way.

Oh, yes, I did say “Conventions, plural.

I think today’s result bodes well for Bob Marshall in his bid for the GOP nomination for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by John Warner. At least among the Help Save Loudoun PAC network, these two delegate assignments were being promoted as a package: Bob Marshall has been an exemplary legislator for immigration enforcement at the state and local levels in Virginia. He sought and obtained an opinion from Attorney General Bob McDonnell on HSL’s Honest Business initiative proposed to the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors last year. He is not the typical politician, and I think the general feeling is “politics as usual” contributed to Sheriff Candidate Greg Ahlemann’s defeat last year. We and a slew of other local activists got a bunch of people to file as delegates.

Folks around here are willing to go to the mat to see Bob Marshall get a shot at the U.S. Senate. Although Jim Gilmore is heavily favored to get the Republican nomination, if this eastern Loudoun contingent shows up in Richmond it could get interesting.

Click here to contribute to Bob Marshall’s campaign.

Regardless of what happens in two weeks at the state Convention, the Republican Party of Virginia just got three solid advocates for the rule of law.

From past experience I have the impression our readership is not by and large a “techie” audience, unless the technology happens to go bang - in which case I think we have the top experts in the world this side of Janes.

But maybe the occasional Web or marketing person will drop by, so I am going to share a great blog I discovered in the course of researching my day-job Web overhaul project (which remains highly diffuse at this point). It’s honestly one of the best blogs I’ve ever read in any subject field, and I have read a whole lot of them.

Jeremiah Owyang is clearly the rare individual who has found an occupation which matches his personal enthusiasms, so that his online diary bears the depth and quantity of content of someone who pours 100% of himself into the subject matter. This is a pure blessing for anyone interested in learning about the information-intensive, jargon-rich, and opaque - for those who have fallen a bit behind on tech innovations - field that Owyang specializes in: Web strategy. Every minute spent on his blog is worth that minute of your life. His posts on User Experience could serve as a certificate program.

For instance, this post and comment thread on Content Management Systems arrived at a perfect time - when I am engaged precisely in researching CMS and social media solutions for our company. If you are behind the times on Internet trends, terms like Twitter and Technographics are greek to you, if you are responsible for making a strategic Web decision, and you want to get caught up, read this guy’s blog.

Our friend LI at Too Conservative has a great discussion going about George W. Bush’s legacy. Here is my take:

Toppling Saddam was the right thing to do, in my view, but handling the occupation with military-lite was a really bad idea. We started “rebuilding” before our soldiers had put the hammer down on all the bad guys. “Rules of engagement” … whatever happened to WINNING. The war should have been fought less like Vietnam and more like “Devil’s Guard” by Elford. Don’t get me started …

On the other hand, we have not been attacked on American soil in roughly 6.5 years. Our men and women are fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them here. Bush has delivered on homeland security.

On the OTHER hand, as a relative who is pretty non-political but leans conservative said to me, “I don’t know why we have our young men and women over there dying for those people.”

There is a strong sense among many Americans the money and blood America has contributed to securing Iraq is looking like a questionable investment considering what the Iraqis themselves are contributing. Let’s be blunt: They don’t seem worth it. This may be unfair, but the perception is they don’t care enough to fix their own country so how can we fix it for them.

The resolution of this whole war with the religious fanatics we no longer are supposed to identify by name will be years in the future, and I agree Bush’s legacy on this issue will be determined by how it ends.

But right here and now, why the hell are we spending billions of dollars a month to rebuild and secure Iraq when they are sitting on an ocean of oil? If the Democrats had managed to nominate someone without the crushing negatives of Barack Obama, I would say they win in November in a walk just by repeating the above sentence over and over.

On the OTHER hand, Bush did well with his Supreme Court appointments. In fact, he did phenomenally well. He did much better than his dad. The only way W could have done better would have been if he’d been able to make another appointment. Platinum legacy on this issue.

But on the ultimate, final, this-is-it-and-no-tag-backs hand, Bush was a disaster on illegal immigration. Previous recent presidents were no great shakes on immigration enforcement, but the Bush administration turned a blind eye, opened the floodgates, and cut our enforcement agencies off at the knees for years.

As an example, the illegal invasion of Herndon began under Clinton, but hastened greatly under Bush. The invasion of Sterling, as with so many American communities, was 100% on George W. Bush’s watch, after word got around in the business community that Title 8 of the U.S. code was now officially classified under: fuhgetaboudit.

People say, well GW Bush has ALWAYS said he’s in favor of free flow of people and goods across our border with Mexico, so anyone who is disappointed with how his executive branch managed immigration enforcement simply was not listening when Bush was working his way up the ranks. Fair enough. So we can’t nail him for being duplicitous, and shame on us for not calling him out on it before he became, er, president of the United States. But his policy of allowing a massive increase of illegal immigration was a bad one and the results have been bad, and his legacy will reflect this terrible public policy mistake.

It may not be all that life is about, but it definitely is a part of what life is all about:

Tomorrow, Dan, ACTivist, Jacob and I will be at the range for a good number of hours and an exponentially larger number of rounds, plinking, blasting and challenging each other’s mettle.

Targets and clay pigeons will be obliterated, skills will be honed, glorious machines will be brought to bear, manhoods will be questioned, and epithets will fly amidst the cordite. God willing, it is going to be a VERY politically incorrect afternoon.

I promise a semi-comprehensive range report.