New Marin GOP blog

Hello. Welcome to the new Blog for the Marin County Republican Party. I'm Tom Montgomery, IT guy, webmaster and treasurer (and that's a whole 'nudda story in and of itself) for the Marin GOP.

Our new web site launched in mid-December, just in time for Christmas and the election season. This has been a lot of work. I gotta tell you. I'm sure I've driven the web developer nuts with change orders throughout the process. "Can it do this?" I ask. Or, "one more thing Jeff". Or my favorite: Whadda you mean it won't do that and there's an extra charge for programming? That's not what Sal (the boss) said." Ah yes, the trials and tribulations of bringing up a new site.

Gotta say thanks to a great guy before I go any further. Herb Drake. Herb got us launched in the cyber world. Picked the Marin GOP up hitchhiking on the Information Super Highway as I like to say. We didn't know a hyperlink from an HTML page when we decided to get a website. Herb designed and hosted the site for the last four years through his business CGI Foundry. We've moved on now with the new site for technical reasons, but I just want anyone who visits our site to know what a debt of gratitude we owe Herb for the foundation he helped us build. Thank you Herb!

I'm really excited about the new site though. Aside from the blogging, it does all sorts of cool stuff. Much more than the "other" political party site in town. We'll take your money online any way you want to give it to us as long as it's Visa or Mastercard. Sorry no Paypal. Ooohhh, cheap shot. Sorry. It's got a live news feed from the state GOP site. They certainly post some interesting stuff on a daily basis. A gazillion links to Republican clubs of all sorts: youth, log cabin, women's groups, ethnic groups. Hey you're all welcome in our house. My attitude is: if you've got the testicular fortitude to put an R next to your name in Marin, we want you. We need you. We've got to stop these crazies in the county from taking and spending all our money AND then spending the money we haven't even got yet.

There's links to support our troops. Try finding anything like that on a Democrat website. Not in this county I can tell you.

We've got pages for candidates and elected officials too. I sent out a "feeler" email to a handful of elected Republicans and have received back one reply that very politely asked not to be listed as their position was a non-partisan office. I respected their request and the posting won't go up. I got news for you though: If you think ANY office in Marin is non-partisan, think again. Not in this county. Remember back to 04 and the "non-partisan" judges' races? Faye D'Opal against Paul Haakenson? The IJ wasted no time in "outing" Paul as one of us. He lost by a mere three points. That little tidbit by the IJ probably cost him the election when you consider that more than twice the registered Republican base voted for him (translation: a whole lot of Democrats). Justice was served though. Arnold appointed him to a vacancy on the Marin bench this last year. We now have a very balanced bench in Marin! Let's keep it that way.

Almost done. There's links to all the Republican presidential candidate websites. There's news links of all sorts. And it's all organized very nicely. There are NO links to Keith Oberman though. Won't happen as long as I run this site. Don't even ask!

Last, there's biographies and information on all our committee members. Another "won't find elsewhere"..........

That's it. See you next time. Feel free to sign up and blog with us.

T