I was amused yesterday to see a comment about a post concerning Carl Baugh's fake footprint that was posted SIX YEARS AGO. It got me to thinking that, as of March, 2015, this site will have been around for 10 years. As a philosophy, this site believes that the answer to bad speech is more speech, that there is room for many, many voices to talk about issues and the more the better, that we all don't have to agree, but in America, we get to voice our opinions. From Justice Brandeis

"If there be time to expose through discussion the 0hood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence."

I also believe in participatory citizen journalism, and that the internet has changed the way, forever, that people can get information, directly, for themselves. From 2010.

The very first post on Somervell County Salon was in March of 2005. 

Back in 2011, my plans were to scale back going to meetings and recording them for posting on the internet. There are plenty of sources for news and opinion in Somervell County, 2 newspapers and other blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, you name it. What seemed more important to me was that people could go directly to a government entity and look at the agendas, minutes, see associated documents, listen to audio, see video (if someone did it as Paul Harper is doing for the Somervell County Hospital District), in other words, be able to get information for themselves DIRECTLY from the source. And, for a lot of the government entities, that's absolutely 1. I've been able to listen, for example, to Somervell County commissioners meetings when I had an interest (such as about the SR20 debacle). I firmly believe that unless a citizen is willing to spend a little time looking at, reading, analyzing information FOR HIM OR HER SELF, he or she is at the mercy of an incomplete presentation of what actually happened.

It's also been kind of great to have a full archive  for when I or others have wanted to dip back in the past to see issues that still resonate at the present time. 

So here's to more years of Somervell County Salon, as a venue with an opinion.