Welcome to the new home of The Political Vine, the country’s…edgiest Republican news publication.

We started in a 10’ x 11’ home office with 155 subscribers in July 2000, and we’ve now grown to a viewing list of 3500+ consisting of readers primarily from Georgia, but we also have readers in 16 other states, as well as the District of Columbia (but, we are still in that 10’ x 11’ home office…which gets pretty cramped for our editorial staff meetings).

We believe you will find our new home a bit richer in content than our newsletters have been. To us, it’s a whole new environment and it will take us a little while to work out the bugs on production, but we think we’ve made the correct choice and many more of you will come if we “build it.”

A Few Thank You's First...

A huge thanks to the good folks at 1871Media.com who displayed initiative in seeking us out and then showing what they could do for us to improve our newsletter. Customer-service wise, President Rick Stratton and CTO Paul Rapnikas have been top-notch in their response to our requests and questions.

For point of reference, the Website we are working towards having for ourselves will be a community as extensive in content as the one 1871 Media built for the Illinois GOP, The Illinois Leader.

1871 Media can build Websites for newsletters like ours, for media outlets, and for political candidates as well. Politically, their management leans toward the Libertarian/Republican side of politics which is just fine with us.

A big thanks, as well, to Bob Griggs of Snellville.com. Back in May 2002, when we were first looking at the idea of taking our newsletter to the Web into a full-blown site, he spent some time for us working on our logo. We were not able to launch a Website back then, but we held onto the logo, and as you can see at the top of every page, it is a very good-looking logo.

New Format

To give you a bit of an introduction to the site, we used to have one lonnnnng newsletter with articles on top and letters-to-the-editor on the bottom that forced you to read things usually in one sitting. This older format also caused the file to sometimes become so large that it would get rejected by some e-mail servers. And, for some of our really long issues, this was a bit of a bother to some readers because it would take a lot of time out from their busy days (our stuff is that addicting that people drop everything to read the latest gossip and analysis).

Now, our presentation will consist of seven major sections on the new Website, with room to add more as we grow.

The really slick part of our new format (among a whole slew of other slick features) is that our articles will automatically be archived as new articles are added.

As you read this right now, there are rectangular boxes on either side of this text. Except for the Discussion Board, these "Content Boxes" appear on every Web page so that you can easily navigate to any article or section you wish.

On the left side of this page, starting at the top, is:

A) A box to enter your e-mail address to Subscribe, Unsubscribe, or Maintain your Subscription and Demographic Information
B) Rumors & News
C) Opinions
D) Columnists
E) Frivolous Free Association
F) Letters To The Editor.

On the right-side of the Web page, starting at the top is a place for advertisements, a place to Search for subjects written about on the Website, our Online Poll, and links to About Us and the Discussion Boards. All of these sections will be explained shortly.

We will still issue “Rumors have it” newsletters and “Special Alerts” (though that may be renamed as “Breaking News”). All newsletters will contain “teasers” of new content that has been added to the Website so that as you read the headlines and teaser bits in the newsletter, you will be able to quickly decide which ones you want to read first and which ones will take more time to chew through that you may want to read later. A mouse-click on the links will bring you to the Website where you can read the full stories. Or, just set your

At the very top-left of every page, there is a "HOME" link so that wherever article you start reading, you can click HOME to bring you back to the "Top Story" section of the Website.

Though you can visit the Website at-will, and read the stuff on there, not all of the information sent out in a newsletter will necessarily appear on the Website. Besides, “Breaking News” is the best way to catch the hottest bits, and the only way to know about them is to directly subscribe. (Hint: We really want you to sign-up for the newsletters!)

Website Sections

A section titled Rumors & News will contain the bulk of our news stories; Letters-To-The-Editor will be contained in it’s own section, Letters.

We are introducing two new sections for other folks to contribute articles and opinions, Columnists and Guest Opinions. Randy Evans, Legal Counsel to both Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert and the Georgia Republican Party will be a regular contributor as will others, including members of the editorial staff of the Political Vine.

A section we term Frivolous Free Association has been added. For those of you who had any psychology courses in high school or college, you should be familiar with what “free association” is. We put the “frivolous” in there because we gets tons-o-stuff e-mailed to us that is either humorous or poignant, and either politically-based or not, that we’d like to share with folks, but they just didn’t fit inside of a regular newsletter. And, we didn’t want to jam-up people’s in-boxes with “Hey, this is funny…you’ll like it” all day.

But, Frivolous Free Association will be the presentation area for all of these things that are spread around the Internet that folks might be interested in reading at their leisure. The “free association” part also means these things will be posted in no particular order and you could be reading one thread of humor and jump elsewhere to a different line and then jump back to your original thread of humor. And, it’s also possible to put picture files, GIFs, Flash presentations (if you’ve got a hankering to make fun of a Dimocrat or whomever else in an editorially acceptable manner) and similar stuff.

A new thing that we are just pleased as punch about is the ability to take an Online Poll. Every week we hope to have new questions thrown out there, from the really fun to the really serious.

One curious thing about our new polling software is 1) that it must have 10 votes registered before any counts are shown, and 2) that it’s darned difficult to “stuff” the ballot. Unlike other online polls we’ve seen, it’s going to be difficult to cheat with ours (yes, we’ve tried that “Close Window”-“Open New Window”-“Refresh” technique…it doesn’t work), so once you vote, you cannot change your vote.

In Political Vine Has Landed-Part 2, we discuss the Discussion Forums and a few of the little...surprise toys in store for you.