This blog's name

After writing articles for The Huffington Post blog for a year, I decided to launch my own blog, under my own name.

I considered other names for this blog. Since my initials are "CW," it would have been easy to go with some form of "Conventional Wisdom" -- the most popular usage of the juxtaposition of the letters "C" and "W" to date (outside of country/western music, or the "CW" television network).

I rejected this (ahem) conventional wisdom strongly, since one of the purposes of my blog is to offer un-conventional wisdom whenever I am able. I do not intend to have this blog be an echo chamber for whatever shouting match is currently banging around the internet.

I then considered "Congress Watch," since a large percentage of my articles deal with Congress and the mischief they tend to get up to when unobserved, but I felt that this was too limiting.

In the end, I reluctantly registered my own name as a domain name. Reluctantly, not so much due to modesty... as due to the fact that nobody can spell it. I will try to register common misspellings and have them point to the site, but I know that I won't catch everyone who can't spell it (from long experience), for which I apologize in advance. Keep trying, you'll get it. Hint: "I before E" does not apply.

This blog's purpose

This blog's purpose is to present to the public one man's view of politics.

My main focus will be on the hypocrisy and foibles which emanate so regularly from Washington, D.C., but which are largely ignored by the mainstream media.

But unlike some bloggers, I do not discount the value of the media. This blog will never be able to match resources with the giants of the journalism profession, and I therefore utilize them as resources for much of what I write about.

I do have problems with media bias in general, but my main problem with the mainstream media is what they ignore. The stories that surface for a day, and then sink like a stone in an unobserved pond in the middle of a forest are the ones which interest me most. Stories of import, stories which should demand attention but are quietly buried on some editor's "who cares" spike, in other words.

I try to avoid commenting on hot "flash-in-the-pan" topics for two reasons:

(1) everyone else is commenting on them, therefore someone else is bound to say what I'm feeling about them; and (2) I'd rather devote my time to shining a spotlight on the issues which I feel people are ignoring, rather than add to an overcrowded field of light being shined on the "scandal-du-jour."

Of course, nobody's perfect, and occasionally I will get sucked in to issues which the public (with a big help from the media) have determined are "the big story." But commenters to my stories (both here and on The Huffington Post) usually drag me back from such folly quickly, so I promise to keep them to a minimum.

One other sinkhole I promise to avoid is engaging in gratuitous flamewars (blogwars?) with other bloggers, or other media types. Much of what I read on popular blogs is merely "gotcha-ism" personally directed against other bloggers, or mainstream media types. I find these tempests-in-a-teapot boring, myself, and hope never to get dragged into such a contest.

My promises to you:

• I promise to always make the attempt to both entertain you and inform you about current events.
• I promise to bring to you, the reader, as wide and varied a sampling of the opinions of the day as I can possibly manage.
• I promise to respect your viewpoint -- whatever it may be -- in your comments, and to take your viewpoint seriously.
• And lastly, I promise to reserve my wrath and scorn for those politicians (of whatever party) truly deserve it....

-- Chris Weigant