Machan supports voting third party Libertarian — even though said candidate is not likely to win — because it would “prepare the culture for some kind of serious reforms, maybe even a revolution.” That’s an argument I think really only matters if either the Democrats or Republicans ever showed any concern about the folks who voted third party beyond how likely they would spoil their candidates’ chances. I don’t really see candidates make any outreach to third-party voters except during the actual campaigns.

Flanders, though, came out in favor of Barack Obama, despite his tax-and-spend platform, because of his stance on other libertarian reforms such as ending the war in Iraq, restoring the separation of church and state, and other issues.

I’ve already explained why I voted for Obama in the primary — my explanation is very similar to Flanders’. As it stands, I can’t vote for McCain. There’s no way I would cast my vote for an authoritarian with possibly even less respect for the limitations of the government than George W. Bush. So my choice as well is either third party formal Libertarian candidate or whomever wins the the Democratic nomination.

Balko’s own blog is here, if you’re interested in following these issues. I got more interesting responses from my SWAT editorial than I expected. I’m just horrible at predicting people’s responses to the things I write about.

Oh, and I’m not promoting Balko’s blog simply because he recently complimented my SWAT editorial in it. I had totally planned to mention him a week ago here in my blog. Totally. Really.

The Desert Dispatch got hit pretty hard in the communications outage today. Our phones went out, our Internet went out, and our company cell phones went out. We couldn’t access our customer service database to deal with problems. We couldn’t even post about the telecommunications problems on our Web site (not that most Barstow residents would have been able to read it anyway). We were as cut off as everybody else.

I thought I’d be able to work around the issue because I have a cable modem and phone service at home, but when I ran home to post a quick news story about the communications outage, I discovered cable phone/Internet service was out as well.

So for four hours I simply sent Aaron Aupperlee and Jason Smith loose on the city to get all information that they could and then … just kind of sat here. I couldn’t call the two of them, so I trusted them to come back with good information. I couldn’t do anything. We were supposed to have a teleconference regarding a redesign of our Web site, but I couldn’t call in. Everything on my to-do list was shot. There is hardly anything I do as the editor of the newspaper that doesn’t incorporate telecommunications of some sort. Fortunately, some people on our staff had personal cell phones that still worked so we were able to contact a few folks outside Barstow to plan.

If you care at all, if we’re in a situation where we can’t design the Desert Dispatch here (and with communications down, we can’t — all our work is saved on a collective server and we can’t access it or print it), we send our page designers and sometimes even reporters to our sister paper the Daily Press in Victorville to make sure a newspaper comes out as usual. We’ve had to do so once before a couple of years ago due to a power outage. Fortunately our services came back around 2 p.m. and (knock on wood) don’t have to do so today.

Arritt writes: “I don’t think there’s been this much excitement in Barstow since McDonald’s starting selling Angus burgers.”

I don’t know, there might have been more excitement in Barstow when our boys cross-country team won the state championship a couple of months ago for the third year in a row, but I suppose it’s too much to expect Mr. Arritt to keep track of a bunch of provincial hicks like us. Nobody tell him about the citywide riots we had when McDonald’s ran out of McRibs that one time or we’ll never hear the end of it.

My family isn’t directly involved in city politics, so I was fairly confident they wouldn’t have been there. However, my dad is involved with the Lion’s Club there and knows many of the community leaders. He is acquainted with some of these people who were shot, and even knew more about the shooter than the AP report indicated at the time. He filled me in on the man’s history when I called him at home to make sure they were all okay.

Fortunately, my family is safe. For that moment, and for the first time in my life, I felt what it must be like for anybody out there who hears a report of a tragedy on the news and not know whether or not it has affected their loved ones.

Every presidential cycle there’s a great rending of garments over how much participation journalists should be “allowed” in our country’s own political process.

The editor of the Denver Post sent out a memo listing who would and would not be allowed to participate in Colorado’s caucuses. The Rocky Mountain News has apparently prohibited journalists from participating in the caucuses entirely.

Caucuses are different from typical primaries because the votes are public tallies, so I understand the visual image of, say, your local news anchor standing around raising his hand for Barack Obama or Mitt Romney.

But on the other hand, so what? Here’s part of what Kelly McBride, an ethics expert for journalism think tank The Poynter Institute has to say about the matter:

“It’s a tough spot for the head of a newsroom to be in. You can’t prevent an employee from exercising a constitutional right. But you can minimize staffers’ involvement in political coverage if they have created a perception of bias or a conflict of interest. And if a significant portion of your staff can’t cover politics, can’t edit politics and can’t write headlines over political stories, that’s a problem too.

This might be a problem that’s peculiar to newsrooms in the United States, where news content (as opposed to opinion and editorial) remains free from political affiliation. It could be that someday we will move to something more like the European model, where many newsrooms reflect a political position.

I still think there’s value in a newsroom with a neutral point of view when it comes to politics. As long as neutrality is a value, it seems that caucuses and restrictive primaries will pose a difficult choice for journalists.”

My response to this is that it’s only a tough spot to be in if you think your readers or viewers are absolutely, utterly stupid. I blogged a bit about this before on the issue of journalists’ contributions to political campaigns.

The gigantic logic flaw in the middle of this debate remains the same: The absence of proof of bias is not the same as the actual absence of bias. It absolutely slays me that a significant number of leaders in this industry think that if readers don’t know or have documentation of a journalists’ political affiliation or beliefs, then the reader will just assume the journalist doesn’t have any.

We know this is not true. We know readers already make assumptions about the political leanings of journalists. We are not fooling anybody. This attitude is completely self-absorbed and insulting to our customers. Does not voting in the Colorado caucuses mean that John Doe Journalist wouldn’t prefer Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama? Or vice-versa? Of course not. It just means that we don’t have proof, which means that people will guess or speculate about journalists’ personal views and may or may not be correct. And it doesn’t mean that John Doe Journalist’s reporting won’t be influenced by his feelings toward Clinton or Obama.

There is a solution, and we don’t have to convert to the European model of partisan newspapers (though we’re a lot closer to them than most U.S. media leaders would care to admit). It’s simply being honest and having faith in your readers to discern the truth of what they’re reading or watching. It’s getting over that narcissistic attitude that journalists are some sort of holy paragons of truth as opposed to the reality that we’re a bunch average joes with a curiosity addiction who like to write and talk.

In fact, I’ll start. I voted in the California Primary this morning. Because I’m a “decline to state” voter, I wasn’t able to vote for Ron Paul, whose libertarian anti-war views most match my own. The Republican Party doesn’t allow “decline to state” voters to participate in their primary in California. The Democrats do. Ultimately I voted for Barack Obama (I’m just talking about myself — this isn’t a newspaper endorsement). He seems at first to be a long ways away from Ron Paul in his extremely expensive government funding plans, but there are definitely hints of libertarian mindsets back there with somebody who is interested in moving us past the Boomer-fueled culture wars that I’ve simply grown tired of. The election of Hillary Clinton, I feel, would actually fuel the war further in both parties, and I think Obama’s election would prompt the GOP to adapt eventually to a more libertarian standing or risk irrelevancy.

So what happens now? Now you know a little more about what makes me tick. Of course, I’m not just a typical editor here anyway; I write opinion pieces as well, so I never even had the luxury of acting like I’m above biases. Does this make me more or less trustworthy as a source of information? Granted, as the Desert Dispatch is a community newspaper, I won’t exactly be responsible for putting together a lot of national political coverage. But regardless, I have faith in your ability to look at what we do as a newspaper and come to intelligent conclusions about what we’re reporting. And I don’t believe trust is built between a media outlet and its customers by withholding information about ourselves.

We have been tracking visits to the Desert Dispatch on days when we have our live primary results, and we are noticing significant increases in both the number of page views and the number of distinct visitors. The state is reporting a recent jump in voter registration to the tune of 700,000 people over the 2004 presidential election. It’ll be very interesting to see how Tuesday turns out.

Also, because of the change in the voting system yet again, we’re being warned about slow result tallies. We may not be able to declare winners for Wednesday’s Desert Dispatch, but we will have our live vote counter online as we’ve been doing throughout the primaries so visitors can keep track.