ABOUT ME (updated January 2010)
I live with my wife Cara and our four pets in Raleigh.
From January 2006 - February 2009, I was an editorial writer at the Rocky Mountain News in Denver. (Then the paper shut down.) Previously, I was on the editorial page of The Press-Enterprise in Riverside, Calif., the final seven months as deputy editor of the page. Before that, I spent four terrific years at the Las Vegas Review-Journal (Nevada's largest newspaper!) as an editorial writer and columnist. My first paying gig in journalism, 1989-1997, was a labor of love at Reason magazine, five of those years as the monthly's first full-time bureau chief in Washington, D.C.
I'm a North Carolina native, alum of UNC-Chapel Hill (class of '79), and an unshakable fan of Tar Heel sports.
Politically and philosophically, I'm a classical liberal/libertarian (join the crowd, right?). By beginning a blog in December 2002 I've clearly overlooked the entire "early adopter" strategy ... but perhaps something interesting remains to be said in this format.
ABOUT THE BLOG NAME: For all you history buffs, the Regulators of North Carolina were a ragtag band of yeoman farmers in colonial Piedmont N.C. who protested British taxation, in particular the practice of the royal governor of assessing arbitrary fees on small landowners and then seizing their property if they didn't pay. A couple thousand of them engaged the Crown's militia in the Battle of Alamance in 1771. The Crown won, but the skirmish is considered the first battle of the Revolution.
To the extent that the Regulators had any political philosophy, however, they were anarcho-socialists of a sort. They advocated the execution of public officials and lawyers and the redistribution of property.
I used the term Deregulator as the title of a little tabloid-style rag I self-published for about a year and a half in the mid-1980s while living in the backyard of the Regulators, Chapel Hill. Think of it as a nonvirtual me-zine.
My somewhat grandiose goal was to put out an advertiser-supported free weekly that would be easy to distinguish from the two, high-quality left-wing weeklies that existed at the time. The title was meant to let readers know they'd read things from a different perspective.
On one level, my plan didn't work out that well (meager advertiser support), so the zine ended up being a rather expensive hobby. But taking the larger view, the Deregulator was a smashing success. I used the experience to eventually land a career as a professional journalist. It's been a great ride, and I hope it continues for a long time.
Hence, the blog title, in tribute I suppose to what brung me here.