Gamecock and his alter ego Mike DeVine have traveled a winding writing road since penning his first professional newspaper column some seven years ago.
That road is about to straighten out on The Minority Report road.
That column, published soon after September 11, 2001 for The (Decatur, GA) Champion, was the first in the nation to advise that captured terrorists would not be entitled to POW status under the laws of war, whether defined in Geneva or Washington, D.C.
The column was written less than six months after my conservative epiphany (after 18 years as a Democratic Party activist and official) when Republicans were in the seventh year as the majority in the House of Representatives; one year from also holding the majority in the U.S. Senate; in year one of eight in the White House; and just three years away from the seating of the Roberts-Alito U.S. Supreme Court.
Then came the 2006 Election and the launching of The Minority Report. I was honored to be among the first invited to contribute.
Prior to the TMR Era, the rooster served as Legal Editor for The Champion (legal organ of DeKalb County, GA) where he engaged in dueling editorials with then Rep. Cynthia McKinney just before her first ever defeat for re-election. DeVine discovered Redstate.com and “gamecock” was born.
We were invited to join Race 4 2008.com, won a Blogoli contest sponsored by Hugh Hewitt and Townhall.com, and helped put R408 on the map with mentions by Instapundit, C-Span, Crosswalk, CNS News (link expired) and Real Clear Politics (link expired).
Upon our housing bubble pursuing move from the City too Busy to Hate in the Peach State to the Queen City of the Tar Heel State, we were hired for a stint as the conservative op-ed page voice of the Charlotte Observer, which columns are archived here at our personal Gamecock Townhall blog.
Along the way we were featured in the New York Times and on PBS
We are now the Charlotte Law and Civil Rights Examiner for
Well, the housing bubble burst in our face and after seven years of corporate law, we don’t want to go back into private practice and full-time litigation. So, we look around for a silver lining in this black cloud and what do we see but a diamond in the rough as bright as a rising sun and just as worthy of a rooster crowing:
TMR
The Minority Report and The HinzSight Report
And we, Mike DeVine have been and are the legal editor for same.
We intend to hew this diamond now with vigor. TMR will be the repository for all our writing (save for the book I am writing about my years in the bowels of the Democratic Party and what led to my conversion, copyright laws being what they are!) from this day forward.
My Examiner.com site has TMR as the exclusive RSS feed and all my columns there will also be posted here.
TMR was formed (and you can visit my TMR blog and see my first column on the subject) as alluded to above, to show the way back for the center-right majority to a political majority after our fall from power in 2006. Most of my writing is animated by this goal and all of my writing on this subject will be posted in The Minority Report.
On my blog here at TMR, among other posts, I will begin a feature called “Coming Attractions” which will preview all columns I am working on for all media outlets.
On Live Wire, in addition to the posting of miscellaneous short stories, I will regularly post “DeVining the Drive-bys” or “Parking the Drive-bys” (we may let Lord Vegas decide which), in which we will highlight misleading headlines and content of so-called “news” stories appearing in the dead tree and other media.
The above, and our stories destined for The HinzSight Report, will be intended to fulfill one of the main purposes that animated Dave Hinz to lend his sight to this site, and that is his “Citizen Journalism” vision.
We have been ill-served by the so-called main stream media since at least Walter Cronkite’s false announcement of U.S. defeat in the Tet Offensive and Vietnam and probably since the lie called the “McCarthy Era.” (A whole era named for some hearings? The cover-up of the discrediting of the egg heads I think.)
We can’t trust the beltway elites out to save or change the world through their advocacy “journalism.” So we will have to be the ones that stand on the corner so we can tell those that are at their jobs what happened while they toiled and to correct the incompetence and failings of those selling a thing called “news” in non-TMR venues.
And when we figure out how to post faces of Obama, we will do that too!
DeVine is clocked in full-time at TMR.
Mike DeVine’s Charlotte Observer, Examiner.com and Minority Report columns
“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” – The Chief Justice of the United States, John Roberts
“One man with courage makes a majority.” - Andrew Jackson
mikedevinelaw@yahoo.com
I have been especially proud of TMR lately. I really like the venture into Blog Talk Radio. I like the Morning Coffee that Hinz has started producing. I like the opportunities that TMR has provided to chat with Kevin Farley and Michelle Bachman recently.
I am not nearly the excellent and prolific writer as gamecock, but just like you I am, from now on, posting all of my writings to TMR and only to TMR.
John Wayne: "You're a persistent cuss, pilgrim."