I developed this “back to basics” concept a few months ago for a different and perhaps surprising reason: I was considering running for City Council myself. A couple of local friends also encouraged me to consider the idea. I do a lot of analysis and discussion, of course, of City Council decisions and provide a different point of view.

Unfortunately, I can’t be the editor of the newspaper and serve on City Council. Well, in a purely technical sense I could, but my boss certainly wouldn’t keep employing me, and if I were a reader I wouldn’t trust any news stories about City Council if the main editor were a member.

So if I were to run for City Council, I would have to find another job. The problem, here, though, is that there really isn’t a whole lot in Barstow I’m qualified to do besides work at the newspaper. We journalists aren’t good for a whole lot once you get us out of our element.

The only other logical fit would be education, which would have been a problem. I have issues with the union-dominated, money-wasting operations of our public school systems. It would be hypocritical for me to promote smaller government and then turn around and live off the public dime as a school teacher. (This is assuming they’d have anything to do with me anyway)

So, being the market-loving libertarian I am, I realized that I’m pretty much where Barstow needs me to be. If I don’t have value as an employee in Barstow’s business market outside the newspaper, then obviously I should stay here. Whether the City Council would have been better or worse with me on board (assuming the idea I could have won) is a question that will remain unknown.

Though feel free to speculate in the comments.

Seriously though, I do want to add a little more insight to my attitude about the drug war. Libertarians are known for their attitude in favor of drug legalization. Also, and not entirely unrelated, many libertarians are perceived to be casual drug users.

I don’t touch drugs, at all. I rarely even drink alcohol. I want to make it clear that my attitude toward drug use is not based on some naive idea that drugs are not dangerous or a problem. My attitude is based on the belief that families and friends are better resources in helping deal with these problems than the government, and there’s a lot of information out there that backs up my view.

On a personal level, I’m a child of the drug war. I turn 37 on Monday, so it was interesting to me to notice that I’ve essentially lived my entire life in this fight. Drug use tore my family apart when I was a child. I don’t care to get into the details of it, but it was devastating. I know what drug abuse can do to people. Subconsciously, I’ve made many decisions about my life to make sure I never become one of those people.

But I also know what families can do. We put ourselves back together (well, really, it was my father’s hard work that did it). Government intervention did not play a role. If the government had gotten involved in this situation when it was at its worst, who knows what would have happened? I and my sister might have become wards of the state, and as difficult as things were, I can’t imagine such a turn of events working out better for me.

Strangely, this will be the first time I’ve actually gotten to see Barstow’s fireworks show. Something has always prevented me from going out there until this year.

The house at the center of the case has been moved. And the project that the city used to justify taking it under eminent domain practices … is pretty much dead.

You know, that’s another argument against eminent domain abuse that didn’t even occur to me. Private projects and developments change all the time. Sometimes they die entirely. Keeping eminent domain confined to an identifiable public need — like a courthouse or school — doesn’t guarantee a project’s completion, but it is certainly more likely than a huge complicated private development.

Imagine if the City of Barstow had used eminent domain to get the land for one of these proposed housing developments that haven’t and maybe won’t come to pass. People forced to move and buildings bulldozed. And then, the developers don’t have enough money or can’t actually complete the project.

That’s something to keep in mind when a municipality defends its eminent domain abuse for economic development projects. There’s absolutely no way of truly knowing whether the project will ever come to fruition.

You may or may not have noticed some slight changes to the way the current Desert Dispatch looks. As we’ve been putting together the various elements and features that we’ll be using in the redesigned newspaper, they’ve been quietly showing up in the current version. A couple of new items — a stat file display and a “Did you know?” box — were used in Saturday’s paper.

We’ve started practicing designing the new pages to see how much work it will be once the redesign launches in July.

Just to make things clear, though, the redesign is actually fairly modest. We’re not really changing our content that much. We hope to make it easier to find important information and details in the way we present the news so that busy readers can quickly get what they need.

I explained to the caller that actually, my intent with the opinion page is to promote libertarian political views, while at the same time, accommodating other views as well.

There was one particularly illuminating moment in the conversation. Because he was more progressive, he was concerned that too much conservative opinion on the page, unchecked by an equal amount of progressive commentary, might influence people to believe in conservative politics.

In other words, he was concerned that we were encouraging people to believe in things that he didn’t want people to believe.

It was a real learning moment for me, because in my mind, of course the commentaries are trying to influence people to believe in the writer’s views — that’s what they’re for. The entire point of an opinion page is to influence and challenge what people believe.

But that’s not how the caller felt, and I should have probably known better. The rise of our pundit-based opinion culture has created a country where people believe the purpose of commentary is to validate what they believe. To tell them that they’re right and those other people are wrong. The purpose of running commentary from the “other side” is not for “balance,” like they want to believe. It’s so that they have somebody to be indignant about and prove wrong. The idea that there might actually be a third side (let alone a fourth or fifth) seems alien to people these days. Because Freedom Communication editorial writers have a libertarian perspective, we’ve been accused of being part of the “liberal media” when we write about individual rights and then accused of being “right wing pawns” when we write about property rights and support capitalism. There are people who really cannot perceive that there’s anything else out there.

The larger result has been bland, toothless opinion pages in other newspapers across the country, where editorials read like they’re written by a focus group and are designed to appeal to the pre-existing beliefs of the majority of the readership, not to actually influence anybody at all.

But I’m hopeful for change over the next 10 years. The fragmentation of the political parties might help. The increasing number of voices encouraging the Republican to turn back to a small-government mentality adds a new side to the discussion. Blogs have changed the dynamic in many ways — some just add to the pundit echo chamber, but a lot of them add nuance to the discussion, dissecting and pushing at the foundations of what we believe.

I will continue to try to challenge what people believe on our editorial page, and I don’t apologize for my — or any of my writers’ — efforts to actually influence people’s beliefs.

The biggest problem with such a plan (assuming we had staff members who could take the time to go around checking gas prices, which we don’t) is that the information would be collected one afternoon and then published the next morning. By this point the information is obsolete and would likely be incorrect. It simply wouldn’t actually be as useful as some people think it would be.

The solution to this problem is the easily updateable Internet, but even there we found a problem. A couple of weeks ago we a briefly added a widget from gasbuddy.com that allows people to search gas prices by Zip code. But the problem turned out to be that only a very small number of local gas stations participated — four or five if I recall. We did not get a good enough cross-section of gas prices for the tool to be useful or reliable. Ultimately, we took it off our site.

However, Gas Buddy also allows users to essentially join the site and contribute by reporting gas prices. If Barstow residents were willing to do so, we could develop a more reliable price check system so folks can better choose where to fill up the gas.

I had my own experiences with this program last month. While I was driving down to Ontario to catch a flight, I was pulled over by a CHP officer for apparently no reason other than to see if I was wearing a seat belt. I was. Fortunately I always make sure to give plenty of padding time to get to the airport, given the potential bottleneck of the Cajon Pass, and it was just a slight nuisance.

Then, toward the end of May, I returned back from another trip on a Friday and of course got caught up in crawling traffic on Interstate 15 heading toward Cajon Pass. I wondered if this was just typical holiday traffic (Memorial Day weekend) or if there was an accident or problem up ahead. My car slowly crept along the highway, approaching one of those big signs they put in place to warn about traffic conditions or Amber Alerts. Maybe it would tell me what was going on?

Nope. Instead, it read: “Click it or Ticket.” That’s it. The sign’s intended use was subverted as well for some wasteful campaign.