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April 01, 2008

Publish JDM!

Our old friend Jonathan David Morris has completed a book. He sent out this message today:

Dear Everyone In My Address Book,

As you may or may not know, I recently finished
writing a book. That's the good news, but here's the
bad news. Now comes the hard part: Getting it
published!

Luckily, there's something you can do to help me. A
petition has been established to make sure my novel
hits store shelves. It takes only two minutes to sign
this petition, and it only hurts a little tiny bit (I
promise). Please take a moment to add your name to the
list:

http://www.petitiononline.com/readjdm/

Thank you all in advance.

-JDM-


Posted by KevinRollins at 01:01 PM | Comments (0)

February 19, 2007

Stumbling on Buddha

Wow! This quote from Buddha that we posted over two years ago picked up 7,662 views over the weekend. All these vists were thanks to StumbleUpon and its user ratings system. As the name suggests, SU is about running into something you wouldn't have known about and therefore you may not have sought out. Is SU the next great tool of the Internet?

-- KDR

Posted by KevinRollins at 11:37 AM | Comments (0)

March 20, 2006

The Free Liberal -- Expanding its Presence Nationwide

The people behind the Free Liberal are on the move. I have recently moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico to run a state think tank known as the Rio Grande Foundation. Our primary mission is to create an economically prosperous New Mexico. More about the Foundation and what we are trying to do can be found here.

Also, Liz Moser, another Free Liberal Board of Directors member, recently moved to Arizona to work for the Alliance for School Choice. The Alliance is based in Phoenix, Arizona and is dedicated to improving the lives of children by giving their parents greater educational options.

Although I will certainly miss seeing my friends at the Free Liberal on a regular basis in Washington, the opportunities to improve the world are often far greater outside the Beltway.

-- Paul J. Gessing

Posted by PaulGessing at 02:29 PM | Comments (0)

March 19, 2006

Featured on the Free Liberal

Regular Free Liberal readers may have noticed that on the top of each article page on the Free Liberal there is now a bar that says, "Featured on The Free Liberal" followed by links to two Free Liberal stories. We just added this feature two weeks ago to point out to our readers what we think are some of the best and most important articles we've run during the previous week.

This week we feature Michael Strong's "Getting Serious About Helping the Poor in the U.S." and Jonathan David Morris's It's Time to Forget About September 11th."

Michael Strong's piece does something very important -- it casts a public policy problem in truly human terms. Instead of reading about dry housing policy, we see it in terms of one woman's struggle for survival. It is important to remember that we are involved in the public sphere not to merely move cold statistics in the direction we favor, or to realize some abstract ideal for the abstraction's sake, but instead to help real people who are suffering.

The style reminds me of a speech that my friend Clarence Young made to the Buncombe County Commission when they were trying to ban RV's from trailer parks. Clarence happened to own a trailer park, and he told the commissioners a story which put the bureaucratic rule in human terms. A man had come to him and asked if he could park his RV in Clarence's lot. The man said he only had a few months to live, as he was dying of cancer, and wanted to be close to his ex-wife and daughter. Clarence had a policy of not allowing RVs and he thought that the man was lying, he was sure that he had AIDS, not cancer. But, he decided to let the man stay. Sure enough, later that year, he died. The newspaper obituary reported that he had died of AIDS. Clarence pointed out to the Commission, "This rule would have robbed me of one more chance to do a good thing for a fellow human being." Needless to say, the commissioners were pretty shaken up.

JDM's piece does something rather different. He takes what would seem to be an unsympathetic position of "forgetting September 11th" and shows how in one sense, it is the most American way of dealing with the horror. JDM doesn't argue that September 11th isn't tragic, but that we cannot continue to live in fear. He tells readers:

You can hoot and holler all you want about this concept. You can say I’m anti-American. You can even accuse me of spitting on the memories of all those who died. But you would miss the point of what I’m about to say here, because this has nothing to do with the heroes or victims, and nothing to do with politics.

But, some readers miss his point nonetheless. One need only to click over to the Free Republic to see how controversial such an idea can be in some circles. The responses become more and more ludicrous with people equating JDM with all sorts of nasty ideologies. They even post pictures of people jumping out of windows at the World Trade Center. When one Freeper points out to them that they are misreading his piece, "Actually the title is misleading. Read the whole article," another responds, "The title is his first sentence. They're his own words. Yeah, he's doing it for shock value. He asked for it, he's getting it."

JMC1969 writes, "I'll forget when all the scum sucking, America hating, terrorist loving assholes like this guy, are dead, rotting in their self made Hell. FU! and may God forgive your ignorance."

-- Kevin D. Rollins

Posted by KevinRollins at 01:26 PM | Comments (0)

Free-for-all (frfr-ôl) -- n. A disorderly fight, argument, or competition in which everyone present participates.

from Dictionary.com



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About the Free Liberal
The Free Liberal is an independent journal of transpartisan thought.

The views expressed herein are those of the writers individually and not necessarily those of the Free Liberal, the Center for Liberty and Community, or its board of directors.