Who are we?

When we started this blog in April 2008, campaign season was in full swing. Two of us -- the Commissioner and Gilbert -- had just voted in the Republican primary for John McCain. The other one -- the Chairman -- voted in the Democratic primary for Hillary Clinton. When November rolled around, all three of us voted for McCain over Barack Obama. It was to our great dismay that the liberal Democratic senator from Illinois, who wrote more autobiographies in his Senate career than serious pieces of legislation, would become the 44th president of the United States.

While we gave him a chance, we've had no choice but to be very critical of Obama from the outset. It took less than a month for us to conclude that he was unfit for the presidency. We've criticized him on virtually everything -- the stimulus package, the health care bill, the oil spill response, civil liberties abuses so many times that we can't link just one, his rank partisanship and his absurd, unpresidential demagoguery on Social Security. We've criticized the stupid battles the White House has picked, in particular against Politico and Rush Limbaugh. Although at times we've been accused of being Obama sympathizers because we think he's neither foreign-born nor Muslim, we point out that because of our civil libertarian bent, we actually disagree with Obama's entire agenda, as opposed to conservatives, who -- if they stopped calling the president a Muslim -- might find they agree with his policies that are abusive of civil liberties.

While we've hammered the president time and again, we've been equally harsh to the other side of the aisle. We've hit Sarah Palin here, here and here. Rush Limbaugh here and here. Glenn Beck here. John Boehner here. The congressional Republican leadership here. We've explained why it's un-American to give Israel unconditional support. We've criticized Republicans' obsession with torture. We've harshly criticized what we believe to be a dumbing-down of what was once a great political party here . And as much as we disapprove of his job as president, we genuinely don't understand the mass hysteria on the right concerning Obama.

We've taken on a lot of other issues. Our views on smoking bans are here. The wonderful old filibuster here. Political nepotism here. Tort reform here.

The bottom line is that this site is a political tour de force with no regard for party or clique. The American political landscape has provided us almost daily fodder to shoot at, from Sarah Palin's claims about "death panels" to Barack Obama's broken promises about lobbyists. We were one of the few sites to lobby for a McCain-Lieberman ticket.

We try to make arguments based solely on fact and sound logic, and regularly point readers to the invaluable FactCheck.org. If a claim doesn't have factual support, we're willing to change our minds. We want the government out of our pocketbook and out of our private lives, but that doesn't mean we want no government at all. It still has a responsibility to defend the homeland, build roads, responsibly and reasonably regulate markets and deal with things -- like the economic meltdown of September 2008 and the BP oil spill -- that the private sector simply can't handle.

In short, we're reasonable, and we expect the same from our leaders.