I’ve written about it in the past; blogging changed a big chunk of my life; when I started the blog, in 2002, I was a newly-divorced parent with a couple of young-ish kids. I hadn’t had a lot of time for a social life in quite a while. The blog, the NARN and finally the MOB opened up my social horizons in ways I’d never imagined.

I’ve also kept my day job and my radio and blogging lives pretty religiously separated.  There aren’t two people at my day job who know about the radio show or the blog; I don’t let on where I work to many outside my family and the NARN.

Indeed, in all my years of blogging, I’ve met very few who linked both worlds.

In the nineties, I was working as a technical writer – mostly writing instruction manuals for badly-designed software.  And one of the greats in the field was this guy, Matt Abe.  He was, for many years, the president of the local “Society for Technical Communication” chapter, the professional group where techwhirlies met, networked and looked for that next gig.  Matt had worked with a few friends of mine; everyone said he was a great guy and a great boss.

And then I left tech writing; the ideal tech writer is someone with a left-brained detail focus, and when it comes to details I’m the kind of look at that shiny object on the floor.

So I was pleasantly surprised when we held the first MOB party to find that not only was Matt Abe a blogger (not at all rare among tech writers) but a darned good conservative one; he runs Northstar Liberty, one of the essential conservative blogs in the Twin Cities, especially on (a subject obviously near and dear to my heart).

And he covers the waterfront, subject-wise; an excellent writer (doy, he does it for a living) and a much -better-than-average analyst:

After the passage of Obamacare, the debate on whether to allow video gaming machines to be installed at Canterbury Park and Running Aces may seem like just so much bread and circuses. Yet I spent some time recently researching this topic and exchanging some e-mails with the executive director of Racino Now. I learned a lot about Minnesota’s conflicted attitudes toward gambling, but the legislative debate all really boils down to money.

On the one hand, we have the “trouble in River City” crowd which opposes installing video gaming machines, ostensibly on moral and legal grounds, at two Twin Cities locations: the aforementioned racetracks where gambling is in progress as we speak. Yet these good folks are strangely silent on repealing the Minnesota State Lottery, or shutting down the Indian casinos or the racetracks, or office football and basketball pools. If gambling was such trouble (with a capital “T”), why not shut it all down?

The answer: money.

Read on, of course.

And make North Star Liberty a frequent stop on your rounds of the MOB.  But watch your comma splices when you do.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Wednesday, April 14th, 2010 at 7:20 am and is filed under Conservatism, M.O.B.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.