About

Update December 7, 2018:

A lot has changed in four-plus years! Since I finally put the long-standing “Black Lucas” theme to bed as I updated to WordPress 5.0, I was going through pages and figured I would update this one.

This theme is called “Twenty Sixteen” and it’s rather appropriate since that was the year two significant changes came into my life. One was finally marrying my wife on the seventh anniversary of our meeting, and that was important in and of itself. So should I mention in the interim I was led to church and to my Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ? (That came a little before 2016, but not much.)

The other significant change was leaving active politics behind as I resigned from our Central Committee. Because I could not support the Republican nominee, I decided I wasn’t going to fake it for their sake. So with all that free time on my hands, I also decided to slow down my posting tempo here significantly and put a lot of that energy into a new project: my second book, called The Rise and Fall of the TEA Party. I expect to put it out in early 2019.

As for the rest, I originally wrote this at the very beginning and before I went live with the site, back in November of 2005. It’s been edited and appended a few times since but the base is still intact. Enjoy!

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Welcome to monoblogue.us!

This is my homepage and has been since December 1, 2005. It’s the successor to the “ttown’s right wing conspiracy” page found on Blogspot. While I enjoyed the opportunity to have my work published on the Internet, I had two main objections to being on Blogspot. One is that the website name as a matter of rule had “blogspot” in it. Thus, it lumped me in with everyone else’s blog, some of which were very good (so I link to them) and some were absolute rubbish, or written in foreign languages, etc., etc. Nothing against those bloggers, but I felt I needed to grow some and actually invest in something I can call my own.

The second objection I had to Blogspot was that it’s owned by Google, and Google is notorious for being a liberal haven. I did a post back over the summer which sort of put me on the map, and as an added benefit, the research introduced me to some other very nice bloggers of the conservative stripe. It was a post that encouraged conservative bloggers to rethink featuring Google ads because of their liberal leanings. As it turned out, a couple did, and I felt like I’d finally arrived in the blogging world to some small extent. My reader count went way up during that time.

After that, I decided that the way to gain full control of my content was to establish my own website. Also, it would free me up to accept competing ads, not having to worry about Google suddenly mandating that only their ads could be shown on the Blogspot websites. It took a couple months of research into finding a proper vehicle for replicating as much as possible the look and feel of my old website, but I decided on WordPress because it suited my needs and was a readily available platform that many other bloggers in my research used. So a shout goes out to them. In turn, they introduced me to midPhase, who is my hosting service. Kudos to them, they already had WordPress set up to install so I could go right to work. It’s still a work in progress, but getting better every day.

During this time, I debated on a name for the site. I really didn’t want to maintain the “right-wing conspiracy” angle, because I started to feel early on that it was maybe a little too constraining, and there’s 50 others out there with that rwc name. I have a deep passion for politics, I’ll admit; and I also cheerfully own up to being “just left of militia.” But there’s a hundred other subjects that I wanted to touch on, everything from baseball (the king of sport, there is none higher) to music (an enigma, since I’m a conservative metalhead) to current events, some of which are on the lighter side. Also, this could be more about me as just an average Joe (like my dad), not an “angry white male Republican.”

The inspiration for “monoblogue” struck me one day as I was listening to “a daily relentless pursuit of the truth,” my daily dose of Rush Limbaugh. My favorite parts of the show are right after the top-of-the-hour breaks, where Rush goes in depth on a subject that interests him. No real script, no callers, just a passionate “shoot from the hip” where sometimes you’ll hear a near-shouting rant when he’s interested in a subject and it inflames his passion. One hour, he cited what he’d continue discussing in his next hour’s monologue and it hit me. This slight play on words was the perfect name for my website, just add the “b.”

For monoblogue.us has only one person who contributes the posts, and that’s me. I do my own take on Rush’s monologues. But since I have a voice only the print industry could love and my talents run toward the written word, it turns out that this little corner of the Internet was the best place to make a difference as only I can. I don’t want to come off as conceited, but sometimes I think of angles no one else does. It’s a reason I decided on .us instead of .com – it’s a bit less common, a road less taken but hopefully worth the trip when you arrive.

As things progress down the road, I want to encourage you to check out the archives and the links. Most certainly, buy the stuff I advertise! I want this to be as inexpensive of a hobby for me as I can get it. Since I have a paying job, it’s not going to be a news website like Drudge or Michelle Malkin’s. But the plan is to try and spend at least a little time on it daily. Nothing frustrates me more than going to a favorite blog for days on end and finding no updates. Heaven knows I like to write and make my opinions known! That’s the easy part, the hard part will be finding time to do it. But it’s incentive aplenty when I know people read it and react to it.

So that’s a little bit about this website I call my home (page.) I suppose I should also tell you a little about me as well, a thumbnail bio.

I’m Michael, and I live on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. (Well, I used to until we bought a home in Delaware in 2019.) It’s not where I was born in 1964, but I call it home now. Until literally a month after I turned 40, I was a resident of the Buckeye State – the Toledo region to live and work, and Miami University to go to college. But my “real” job as an architectural designer was downsized at my last Ohio employer, so I went onto monster.com and ended up accepting a job here on the Shore. Great area, very much like northwest Ohio – flat, rural, near a large body of water, and conservative.

As life has turned out for me, I’m a single again guy. I have a great stepdaughter who’s 23 and lives in the Cleveland area. I helped raise her since she was 4 so she calls me “dad.” I have another wicked stepdaughter who I don’t claim since I was only married to mom for 2 years and couldn’t unspoil her in that brief time, she’s 13. It was her mom and I splitting that made me single again.

As a child, I played baseball, with not much to show for it. I still love it, though. As an adult, my sport became politics. I did a little better at that. My involvement was working on GOP campaigns in Toledo for a number of years in the late 1990’s as a field volunteer. I also was in the Toledo Metro Area Young Republican Club for about 6 years, and served as president for one. Also, I served for 4 years in the Lucas County GOP as a precinct chair. My election record is 2-1, although if you press me, my loss was the only contested one. My opponent had lots of cousins in the area, and his name came first on the ballot. (Yeah, I can spin too.)

Here you have it. A little about the blog and its evolution, and a little about the blogger. Again, I welcome you here and hope you find it worth bookmarking and returning often!

My e-mail address is: ttownjotes@yahoo.com.

Michael

Update on March 3, 2007:

A couple other political things have occurred since I wrote this in December of 2005. In September of 2006 I was elected to the Wicomico County Republican Central Committee and later this month I’ll assume a leadership post in the Wicomico County Republican Club. Also, on a non-political note, in 2006 I became a member of the Maryland Bloggers Alliance, a group of now 20 bloggers that cross-link to each other and as of February, share hosting of the Carnival of Maryland.

My original blog was lucky to get 50 readers a week. On January 15 of this year, I finally cracked the 1,000 reader mark (actual readers, not simple hits) according to my SiteMeter and thus far in 8 weeks of 2007 I’m averaging 1,017 readers a week – including my top two weeks alltime in the last two (1,304 readers 2 weeks ago.) So I’m surging again, the history of this site seems to be a big jump in readers every month or two. (I’m on a record pace for this, the first week of March.)

All I try to do with monoblogue is write well about things I find interesting, and it seems to be catching on. THANK YOU to all my readers of whatever political stripe.

Update on October 9, 2007:

I had a Rushalance over the weekend (almost 4,000 readers on October 5th) and got to welcome a whole lot of new visitors. Hopefully a number of them continue to read the site and enjoy what I write. But truly the reason I edited this was because of an e-mail I received. In that, I conceded I wasn’t conceited, just a lousy proofreader at the time.

Update on January 26, 2012:

I neglected this page for 4 1/2 years? Shame on me!  Actually, it wasn’t that long (my last save on this page was July of 2010) but that was only a minor change. So, yeah, a few things have happened since then.

For one thing, I lost the job I came down here for but found a few writing jobs which help take up the slack, along with a career change in my “outside” job. Since I last updated I became a paid contributor to the Patriot Post and PJ Media, as well as a stint as a Baltimore Political Buzz Examiner. I also worked on an unpaid basis with Liberty Features Syndicate for about a year, supplying op-eds to small local newspapers around the country.

In rereading the personal paragraph, I have a “significant other” now so I’m in the limbo between single and married. Yes, I plan on allowing her to make me an honest man but it has to be done in accordance with a couple standards, like being able to afford the ring! (I didn’t say my outside job was a really well-paying one.) The great stepdaughter is now 27 and getting married later this year, while the other one is presumably graduating high school. I’ve heard her and her mom have done some growing up in the interceding time, but we still don’t get along.

Sadly, I also lost my older brother on June 22, 2010. LJ is still missed.

Perhaps the most important thing for the sake of this life project, though, is that I’ve maintained my political seat on the Wicomico County Republican Central Committee. I barely squeaked through the 2010 election, finishing 9th out of the 13 candidates – luckily we needed nine so I made it, by 30 votes.

That’s given me a front-row seat to the political process and a reputation as a muckraker. They can deal with it.

So there you have the thumbnail sketch of the last few years. As I have always done, I want to thank my readers for making all of my success possible in this endeavor. There are probably 50 million blogs out there which withered and died because no one cared about them. Hopefully it’s obvious that I care a great deal about mine, but a large part of the reason I do is because I know there are people out there who read it and take what I say to heart.

Update on May 19, 2014:

I really did the change to reflect the new e-mail address: after many years on Yahoo I’m switching over to Gmail for the most part.

But I can add a few things: the great stepdaughter was married on September 23, 2012, a day after my 48th birthday. I’ve also added and subtracted a couple writing clients: I’m now basically inactive on Watchdog Wire because I have other, paying clients like Patriot Post, American Certified, and Independent Music Promotions, which sponsors my album reviews.

Aside from that, things roll on and change your address books accordingly.

Update May 19, 2014:

Since I don’t actually say this on my main page anywhere, you can contact me at monoblogue.us@gmail.com. As for the rest, I originally wrote this at the very beginning and before I went live with the site, back in November of 2005. It’s been edited and appended a few times since but the base is still intact. Enjoy!