Political Forum » My Last Blog Posting

link no longer active: thecourier.typepad.com/rightonthemark/2009/04/my-last-blog-posting.html

Regretfully I must conclude my blogging days with this last posting. I was alerted via Email...

YOU NEED TO REMOVE THIS LINE FROM YOUR BLOG IMMEDIATELY. You need to remove the comments regarding it as well, and you must leave a comment to the effect: "This blog post has been edited and some comments have been removed."
This Email was in reference to my use of "douche bag" to describe pirates who had attacked a commercial ship with U.S. citizens aboard & had taken the captain hostage. While some folks might disagree with the use of such words I don't believe it was vulgar & certainly not any worse than other uses of language on this blog & others.

Just a week later I had the words "dumb bitch" in the title. Then I thought maybe it's not because the words were vulgar but because they attacked a person or a group of people. However, in October of 2007 I called Senator Craig a moron with no demand to remove that attack.

Other uses of harsh language passed without any fanfare. In some of these cases the language wasn't printed in its entirety. Instead, curse words were simulated to show anger over a situation. Simulated cursing also came in another blog as well with #*&% YOU! to show anger & frustration. Some simulated cursing simply replaced certain letters with *** leaving the curse word to your imagination. However, those simulations didn't fool anyone to thinking of a nicer sounding word. Some cursing wasn't even simulated in the case of talking about an "ass-kicking."

I have come to the conclusion that my use of "douche bag" might have been accepted if I had written it "d**che b**." Or, had I used it to describe a disgraced republican politician. Either way, censorship for the slang use of the word in question seems a bit ridiculous considering what has been allowed up to this point.

It truly has been a pleasure sharing my thoughts with you as well as reading yours. However, rather than be unnecessarily censored (in my opinion) I'll have to discontinue my blog.

Let me know if you need any technical assistance with starting a blog of your own. You can start a free one at places like blogger.com and wordpress.com and perhaps others. Even the typepad system you have been using is available but there is a monthly fee with them. Also, if possible, I think you should try to save all the content you wrote for your old blog and add it to your new blog. You wrote a lot of great content and it is a shame to see it all vanish. I noticed much of what you wrote is still available on Google's cache and there are ways to get a lot of what you wrote back. Please let me know if I can help. I am pretty good at technical things. It am seriously bummed to see all of your good writings just disappear. I can only imagine how you feel about it.

Being in control of your own blog is the way to go so nobody can tell you what you can and can't write about. This incident could be a blessing in disguise for you.

If you need any hosting or anything or want to setup another blog let me know. I got plenty of room on one of my hosts to allow you to put your blog up at no cost to you.

Can even use my domain if you do not wish to buy one something like yourname.crazyamerica.org or crazyamerica.org/yourname however you like.

Thanks...

I think I'm going to focus on the youth baseball program in my hometown for right now.
I'm heavily involved with it.
I'll still be around here & other places like this to toss my opinion around.
I don't need a blog to do that.

Although, at some point I may go at it again.

Grant --- if you know how to recover my blog postings it would be most appreciated.
The editor deleted it & I can't open anything.
I wasn't even going to ask her for the files because she noted that it wasn't MY blog but rather it belonged to The Courier (my hometown newspaper).

Thanks again for the support...

One way to get old content you have lost is to search for the following in a search engine like Google and click on the "cache" of each article you want to save:

site:http://thecourier.typepad.com/rightonthemark/

For example, if you search for "site:http://thecourier.typepad.com/rightonthemark/" and then click on the "cache" link for "Right on the Mark: Easter SEALs" then you can scroll down and see the content of that article you wrote.

Note: I am not sure how many days/weeks the cache stays there.

Note: Other search engines like MSN and Yahoo have the cache feature as well so between them all you should get pretty good coverage.

Note: There may also be some Internet time machines that archive information as well. There may also be paid services that makes your job easier. However, if your goal is to just save 50 or so gems then the cache system mentioned above might be easiest.