Celebrating three years of Orange Juice, albeit belatedly

Well, I blew it. Apparently this blog has been up and running since July 10, of 2003, and I failed to celebrate our third anniversary. I should note that I took some time off after June of 2004, but we returned to action with a vengeance in December of last year. Since then it has been my good fortune to develop a great blog team that is all over the political map – and I want to take this opportunity to thank my co-bloggers for all of their hard work. Claudio Gallegos, in particular, has been perhaps the biggest reason that this blog took off. Gracias Claudio!

Two of our bloggers (Gila and Thomas) have been in the media quite a bit of late with their fine work on the developing stories involving the mess in the Capistrano Unified School District, and the alarming demolishment in Santa Ana by developer Mike Harrah that is paving the way for his One Broadway Plaza project while skirting state and federal environmental and safety laws. Well done both of you – keep up the good work! Tim Whitacre has also been in the paper a lot lately as well, as he continues to battle unethical behavior by our electeds. Keep it up Tim – you’ll have a lot to blog about! And our newest blogger, Quang Pham, is so good that our friends at the OC Blog recently borrowed him while Jubal was on vacation. And let’s not forget Luis – he is always there to smack me when I get too harsh on the undocumented.

Thanks also to our readers for sticking with us and helping the Orange Juice to grow from being the first political blog in Orange County to being one of the top political blogs in California. We certainly are not following in the footsteps of some of the more establishment blogs here in the OC and elsewhere. We have in fact been accused of allowing too many trashy posts – but while we reserve the right to cull the truly profane posts, we remain committed to free speech. I am truly proud of the fact that our blog team does not hide behind pen names – although we invite the public to post under whatever pseudonyms they wish to use.

We have big plans for the rest of this year and hope that you, our readers, will stick with the us! It has been a great three years, despite the hiatus, and I know that even better times lie ahead. The blogosphere is changing politics in this great nation, and I am very pleased, and humbled, to be a part of it.