Open letter to our commenters

Ken Avidor has announced that he’s not going to write regular articles for this blog anymore. I respect his reasons, but his departure leaves us with a problem.

Ken’s contributions to this blog have been so valuable over the years that losing him is like losing both legs on the battlefield. So we’re asking commenters to help us out.

Eva and I can continue to contribute regularly, even daily to the blog. I estimate that about eighty per cent of what we post here on DB consists of links to reliable information about Bachmann—late breaking news, video and audio of Bachmann collected by others, citations to editorials and opinion pieces about Bachmann written by reputable news people, etc. We also include material from the comments, and will continue to do that.

We’re asking commenters to keep on sending those links (whether the links they send relate to the thread topic or not.) We'd like you to keep sending quality information and tips to the DB blog, posting these in the comment thread. What we’re asking for are the web links, to important items or audio/video mentioning or featuring Bachmann. We are also interested in items that relate to the candidates hoping to defeat Michele Bachmann. Your opinions, as always, are highly valued. But what we’re asking for here are the links to stories we may miss because we’re short-handed right now.

The links you send may not always end up as stories--because we’re short of contributors willing to write them up as such, and because we’ll have to pick and choose among items we find and items you send in. We can’t possibly write up every link that’s sent in--because Bachmann now makes national news on a daily basis and because Eva and Bill both have daily schedules that make writing up every item impossible. And because we also have to spend time moderating the comment threads (to make your comments appear, to keep the dialogue moving, and keep the character assassination and obscenities out.)

But if you want to use the comment thread to explain why the link you sent in is particularly important—so much the better, that will draw the attention of hundreds of DB readers to your item.

Some regular commenters aren’t official contributors to the blog but continue to send in comments that are particularly valuable because they contain links to sourced information. We want to particularly thank Lady, Anna, Aubrey Immelman, and jonerik. There are others, too. We’d like to encourage commenters to keep doing that—sending in “hard” information from the Web, as well as opinion.

And thank you all very much—we value your contributions and opinions, very much.