Howdy, Folks!

I've never had my very own blog before.  At least not since they've been called blogs, anyway.  I used to have a couple of different sites on GeoCities, though.  Remember GeoCities?  I had a site for my travel photos, and one for kinky porn pics.  Those were the days, eh?

Never started any sort of political site, but I've always contributed to newsgroups/discussion boards/blogs as the internet has evolved.  For years, I always just commented on articles, and responded to the comments of others.  I guess I'm reactive by nature.  Which doesn't make me a reactionary.  At least I hope not.

My name is Dave, but I've been commenting on various sites as JMadison since about 1996 or so.  I chose James Madison as an avatar of sorts because, to me, he has always represented the best qualities of both liberal pragmatism and fierce civil libertarianism.  He believed in strong government, but also believed that a powerful government needed to have equally powerful limitations.


JMadison came about as a screen name because someone else had already chosen JamesMadison as a username for some board that I wanted to register to comment on.  Remember when usernames couldn't have spaces in them, and were usually case-sensitive as well?  Well I do.  I've stuck with it ever since.  There have apparently been others out there to use the same screen name, but accept no substitutes, folks--I'm the original and the best!

Sometime in 2003, I followed a link from a discussion on Overgrow (a wonderful, but long lost, cannabis activist/grower website) to a political article on a blog called The Smirking Chimp.  The name referred to a certain President...

I was instantly hooked.  While I had participated in many other web communities over the years, this one was different.  A place where many intelligent and articulate people, most of whom were perhaps even left of liberal, gathered to discuss many things, including, of course, what a bastard GW Bush was.

So it continues to this day.  The Smirking Chimp is one of the web's most unique liberal communities.

www.thesmirkingchimp.com

A few years ago, I decided to start writing short articles on occasion, which I would post to The Chimp.  A few days ago, I decided that it would be nice to have another place to archive my little rants just in case Chairman Jeff Tiedrich's laptop caught on fire or something

So here we are.  Welcome to The JMadison Files!  All comments, and all points of view are always appreciated here.  Even if you're wrong.