Burnt Orange Report

Feeling Blue and just a bit Kinky

By Karl-Thomas Musselman

I'd like to clear up some conceptions that seem to have been created with my recent series of posts about the Texas Governor's race. I have been told, from various sources, that my commentary is direct, confrontational, and seemingly Anti-Bell in nature. Well, two out of three ain't bad.

I don't pretend to think, not do I believe most bloggers think, that they or I are the definitive voice on the state of affairs in Texas politics. It'd be nice to think so, but honestly we are just a team of players with some technology and an audience with an interest to broaden the discussion of party politics, scandal, and highlighting news and commentary that in any other case would be left to the backrooms and dustbins of day to day Texas happenings.

That said, and as I have said before in some of my posts before, my interest first and foremost is to be a Burnt Orange Reporter. That means I'm going to cover the campaigns, all campaigns, from the high level Perry v. Strayhorn battle, to the Invisible Democratic Primary, to our Independent friends Kinky and Jennifer Gale. Why? For one it's damn entertaining for me as well as you the readers (I hope) even if it does cause campaigns a bit of a headache at times. But that's the nature of campaigns, you put yourself out there, try to do the best job you can controlling how people perceive you, and sometimes hope for the best.

I do not envision Burnt Orange Report to ever be a puppet or promoter of any campaign just because that is conventional wisdom or they happen to be the Democratic nominee (or at least I will not strictly enforce a requirement on any of the writers here to blindly accept a candidate at my or the Party's bequest). I see little interest, for example, in being forced to promote Marty Akins against Carol Keeton McClellan Rylander Strayhorn in 2002 say, when I and many Democrats that did end up voting for Marty had to find some of the biggest damn clothespins to hold our noses while doing so.

I'm a supporter of the Democratic Party, have been, and plan to be on into the wild Blue yonder. I have every interest in supporting our candidates, building our party, and devising new ways to grow the Texas Blogosphere- allowing our thousands of readers to become the newest insiders to the party. That's why I'll promote Step Up Texas as much as I can, because it's inventive technology that enables the grassroots to help build the Party. It's why I spent 4 hours at a technology meeting last night that brought people together to envision the integration of the state party's voter data with new campaign tools that are being built by the Strama Tech Guru for the coordination of at least 4 campaigns. It's why in an upcoming post I'll have to ask what the hell is going on with our state party and how can we help fix it, before I blindly encourage people (like was done at the SDEC meeting) to shovel money into the hole that was created this last reporting period.

As a blogger I dissect and discern, promote and dismiss, and sort and investigate to the best of my abilities within the boundaries of the time and money I have as a third year student at The University of Texas at Austin. It's not because I know best- hardly. It's because I believe in the concept of Texas political blogs being the open source media for an open source Democratic Party where news, ideas, and activism are born, bred, and bringing us to Victory on E-Day.