ANNOUNCEMENT: A new contributor to Small Precautions

As those of you who have been reading Small Precautions know, this blog was launched exactly four years ago, in the aftermath of Kerry's loss to Bush in the 2004 election. Part of the motivation for blogging was as a kind of political therapy, as a way to process my disbelief that the country could possibly have reelected someone as criminally incompetent as Bush, and in part as a way to offer some small token of dissent and resistence to the horror of having that guy at the helm for another four years. (Confession: it was also partly about relieving my boredom with the job I had then.)

However, now that we're entering a new political phase for the country, it seems reasonable that Small Precautions should also take a new form, and to that end, I am introducing a new contributor. The goal of this blog will no longer be simply to register the trends and politics that seem to matter most in a world politically dominated by feckless conservatives, but instead to pluralize the discussion to include a variety of interests and points of view, some of which may in fact by at odds with my own. The model here will be other group blogs, such as Crooked Timber, in which the unifying element for the writers is less a unified partisan orientation (as is the case for blogs like Daily Kos or the Corner), and more of a shared sensibility, which in our case, might well be termed an appreciation for the political sublime.

With that, let me introduce my friend Brad Peck, another disloyal clerk. Brad lives inside the Beltway and thus has a fake job, he actually gets paid to read, and respond, to blogs. In the process he often discovers an article or opinion which, though interesting, is NGW, not germane for work. Brad works at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, formerly did work for the NSA, and before that was in the Air Force. At a recent dinner this background led one politico to ask him "So how are you a Democrat?" His response, "We are a very big tent."