Well, not now. Not really. You see, I’ve been up since around 4:30, started the coffee around 4:45 and tried to go back to sleep but ended up awake around 5:00. I guess my “Take Some of This So You Can Sleep (For About Four Hours)” cold medicine wore off. The good news is that those four hours were awesome. The bad news is, it is a rainy, dreary, gray morning – perfect for sleeping in – and I’m wide awake.

So, I guess I’ll talk to all of you.

You may have noticed a little retro style postings on Friday. I have decided to bring back two regular posts I used to do, First Cup and the Overnight News Open Post.

First Cup is a few links to interesting posts from around the right side of the blogosphere. That post will be up some time before 8am. The difference from before is that I will just be posting that on Monday – Friday. I’m also going to do away with the coffee quote. If you have a post that you would like me to consider including drop a link in an email to lakelandjim at gmail dot com.

I’m also bringing back the Overnight News Open Post. This is a chance for you lazy bums to help out around here, in other words share interesting posts, pimp your own sites, and generally sound off on whatever strikes you. Just keep it reasonably civil and clean.

That’s about it for the retro stuff, but while I’m still up let me mention a few other things.

Don’t forget to vote in the latest bRight & Early 2012 Presidential Primary Poll #13. It’s in the right sidebar. See it? No, further down. There, just below the book ads and PJM link. There, that’s it. Vote. And speaking of the book ads, did you notice that I added a section of books by our GOP candidates? It displays three books randomly. You can refresh the page to see (and hopefully click on) selections from the other candidates.

I wonder if I could fall back to sleep now. The sun is coming up, but that’s only an assumption. The rain is keeping things dark and quiet. I guess the only thing to do is give it a try.

UPDATE: I guess it was too early, since the original title said “to”. Corrected the title, but left the link alone.

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The site has been up and down this morning, starting around 11am eastern. It appears to be up at the moment, and the hosting company is well aware (their support site is down). One thing I like is that they also have a twitter presence, so I can still talk to them. Well let me post this update while things are working. We are getting close!

If you can…

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If you look down at the very bottom of the page, sitmeter says that I’ve passed 500,000 visitors. However, if you go to the sitemeter statistic page that number stands at just over 493,000. The truth is probably somewhat different from either number.

In any case, I’m going to celebrate my first half million visitors!

There were two earlier iterations of bRight & Early blog before I landed here – one on blogspot, and one on another site I used to own. The earliest post I brought over was this one talking about the “Gang of 14″ on May 24th, 2005. A few things stuck out when I was reading over that post.

Still, my biggest issue with this compromise is that the right did all the compromising. Why stop there? Should we even up sides? “We’ll give you four Senators now and moderate to be named later if you’ll just be nice to us and say nice things about us in the press.”

“The right did all the compromising.” Hmmmm, why does that sound familiar?

here is a list of the signers:

Republicans: John McCain (AR), John Warner (VA), Mike DeWine (OH), Susan Collins (ME), Olympia Snowe (ME), Lindsey Graham (SC), Lincoln Chafee (RI).

Democrats: Ken Salazar (CO), Ben Nelson (NE), Mary Landrieu (LA), Joseph Lieberman (CT), Mark Pryor (AR), Robert Byrd (WV) and Daniel Inouye (HI).

Gee, do any of those names stick out to you? So, in six and a half years have we made any progress? Well, I’ve had a half million folks drop by.

Or not.

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If you are visiting the site, and not just reading this in a feed reader, you can see that I’ve been changing things around here. I am working with a new theme (it’s been a while since I changed things up) and off course there is quite a bit of construction dust. For one thing, I forgot just which widgets, and what order, resided in the sidebar. Other than that, I do like this theme. How do you like it?

UPDATE: Things are pretty much back to normal, but please let me know if you find anything that isn’t normal (excluding my usual ramblings, of course) or seems to be broken. Of course I’ll continue to play around with things. Please let me know what you think by leaving a comment and voting in the poll in the sidebar.

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I am thinking about a new look for bRight & Early. One theme under consideration is up on my sandbox site. Please take a look and let me know what you think. Add your comments here and/or vote in the poll in the sidebar.

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Good morning. Let’s continue our look back at 2010 as it was here at bRight&Early by seeing what I posted about in April, May, and June.

As we got into April it was clear to see that the 2010 political season was well under way. By the end of the month we would find out that Governor OoompaLoompa, Charlie Crist, had decided to run with no party affiliation. He also decided to run with no conservative support, no back bone, and no moral compass, but that wasn’t part of the official announcement. Earlier that month I had also taken notice of the Florida district 22 house race, eventually won by the impressive Lt. Col. Allen West. In the middle of the month I was able to attend the Lakeland TEA party. Here is my favorite picture from the event.

I started May with a post that gets to the heart of what I really like about Marco Rubio and his message of conservatism. It is embodied in this quote from his FNS appearance:

Conservative thought is the mainstream position in America. What is not mainstream in America is the belief that we should spend money that we don’t have. What’s not mainstream in America is the belief that we should take this crazy complicated tax code and make it crazier and more complicated. What is not mainstream in America is this belief that somehow if America weakens its position in the world, the world will become a safer place. These are the positions that quite frankly the policies coming out of Washington would create. That’s well outside the mainstream of American political thought. So I believe that what political pundits describe as conservatism and I embrace as conservatism is mainstream thought in America.

That short paragraph says a lot.

We also found out that the 2012 Republican Convention will be held in Tampa. I suggested a big blogger get together, and the idea is still there. Thoughts?

I was a real slacker in June, but I did take time to note the SC primary victories of Nikki Haley and Tim Scott.

That takes us through the first half of the year. You can read about January, February and March in Part 1.

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Just a quick note to say thank you to Dominique Garrel for purchasing the Blogad you see on the right. Running bRight & Early doesn’t require a lot of money, but it does take some.

If you would like to advertise on bRight & Early, take a look.

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WordPress version 2.9 has been released, which means I’ve been busy getting my publishing empire upgraded.

• bRight & Early — Done
• FloridImagine.com — Done
• Floridimagine.com/blog — Done
• Blog News Coop — Done
• Reclaim Conservatism — Done
• Blogs4Bauer — Done

That should do it for now. I’m going to bed.

And I’m up again. Meant to add the links last night. I’ve done so now.

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I’m testing a new plugin, TweetMeme Button, here on the blog. The plugin I have been using, Tweetable, is great, but the new one also places the button on the RSS Feed. That is if it works like I think it should. This post is a test of that feature.

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If you tried to tune in to last night’s bRight @ Night show you would have heard, well, nothing. The problem was not with Blog Talk Radio, but was caused by some technical difficulties here. Every 5-15 minutes the computer would restart, which really had me worried. Turned out that their was a loose connection with the power cord. Of course I didn’t discover that until after midnight. By then I was too tired to even right a paragraph like this one.

The next show will air tomorrow night. Don’t worry, I’m sure there will still be plenty to talk about.

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