I usually do a “Music Monday” post at the start of the week.
But since the SK NDP Leadership has just started, I thought it might be fun (and alliterative!) to give over a few of my Mondays in the coming weeks and months to some thoughts on the race, Ryan Meili’s campaign and other related topics.
I also need to start out with a similar disclaimer to the one I posted during the last leadership race in 2009.
Although I am clearly identifiable as a Meili supporter (and now, much moreso than last time), I have to be clear that all blog posts, opinions and comments are my own and are not being “fed” to me or otherwise directed by the Meili campaign.
During the last race, there was not one occasion where Ryan or any of his team said to me “Hey, Jason, you need to post this!” or anything like that.
Of course, I would pick up things while attending events or phone banking or simply visiting with members of Team Meili. But what I chose to write or not write about was completely up to me (and I tried to respect people’s privacy and confidentiality. I still remember being at a restaurant with some members of Team Meili when someone made a wisecrack about Dwain Lingenfelter then looked turned to me and said “Don’t you dare blog that I said that!”).
I’m sure there were multiple times Ryan and his team were as frustrated with what I wrote as pleased by it (I alternated between calling Ryan “the next Tommy Douglas” and “Saskatchewan’s Obama” for much of the race before settling on “a 21st Century Tommy Douglas” right before the Leadership Convention which was probably seen as a bit of both, a nice compliment but a bit hyperbolic.)
But the only time Ryan approached me directly with concerns about something I’d already written was when I was writing a lot about the “Waterhen-gate” membership scandal that happened in Dwain Lingenfelter’s campaign. And his concern had nothing to do how my writing might affect his campaign’s prospects – positive or negative – but that, by writing about it, I was only extending the embarrassment of the people of the Waterhen and Flying Dust First Nations.
Which is all a long way to say that, in my mind, this blog is mine and mine alone – not a mouthpiece for anyone or any campaign, and that the opinions expressed are also mine and mine alone.
While I’m doing disclaimers, I doubt everyone will read the note I put on the top left of my blog so just so you know – I had to combine my old blog (blog.jason.hammond.net) with my new one (headtale.com) a month or two ago. Although it’s nice to have all my blogging from the past six years in one place, many of the internal links from the original blog are now broken and need updated.
So you will occasionally see a link to something like: headtale.com/blog_archives/2009-01-01/123456.html. You should be able to easily hack the URL to the correct address by changing the wrong URL to something like: headtale.com/2009-01-01. Apologies for this inconvenience. When time allows (ha!) I hope to try to figure out how to fix this little glitch!
One I’ll never fix is that all old comments lost the names of who posted. So it’s often hard to follow who replied or who’s saying what.
And with that out of the way, let the race begin!
