Champaign-Urbana Liberal Blog

About the site:

Welcome to C-U Liberal.  I’m just getting started but here’s the basic idea behind starting this blog:

Locally in Champaign-Urbana there are a lot of bloggers.  A lot of liberal and Democrat bloggers.  But the most open blog forum is run by local conservatives at Illini Pundit.  It is open to dissent and you’ll find liberals on there too.  It’s a great blog but even some of the conservative posters have noted that there really isn’t a similar forum where liberals can post without always being the minority, which is just silly in such a purple county such as ours.

Some people might argue that the UC IMC forum provides this space but they are highly against running their site as an open blog style forum.  That’s their choice and as much as many disagree with it I’m going to stay out of it.

So in the interests of having an open dialogue among liberal bloggers especially on local issues and politics I’m hoping to grow this site and add lots of local contributors.  I also want there to be plenty of free room for dissent so the place doesn’t turn into an “ideological echo chamber” (sorry had to steal that phrase) and ideas don’t go totally unchallenged.  How boring would that get anyways?

Overwhelmingly I’d like to keep the whole thing extremely open and tolerant of even the most oddball dissent that might pop up.  I don’t have a definite set a rules in mind yet beyond obvious things like threats, malicious personal attacks on users, illegal stuff, pornography, etc.  Hopefully it’ll stay fairly civil.

The big task ahead will be recruiting contributors and seeing if there’s enough interest to keep the idea alive.  I think there is.

Feel free to offer comment, suggestions, etc. in the comments in the welcome post (which is pretty much a carbon copy of this part of the about section).

About Me:

I’m a liberal who’s been living in Champaign for many years now.  I started down my political and liberal path during the first Clinton Administration.  I’m more of a country boy than a city slicker so some of my views probably won’t exactly toe the party line but I’m hoping this place will eventually have a wide variety of liberal minded folks from the most ardent progressives to the more moderate middle-roaders.  I’d say I’m in there somewhere.

Other than that I am going to try to stay as anonymous as possible and try to respect the anonymity of others as well to help ensure as open a discourse as possible.  My own take on executive privilege!  For the really curious they might be able to figure it out from some of my old posts on Illini Pundit or UC IMC from the archives of the old sites.  I still like to check out both but it’s been a while since I commented so good luck.