I'm sure you're all wondering why I've gathered you here today

I suppose that it's inevitable that these questions would come up: why us? Why now? All of us have individually cultivated little plots of the blogosphere to varying degrees of satisfaction. Why slough off the comforts of our own little blogs for the wild and wooly world of group blogging?

First and foremost, we're doing it because we're Good Americans, and Good Americans know how important it is to be productive. And trying to keep up a blog solo every week is a lot of work. But keeping up a blog among four or five people? Easy street, and we're able to split the time savings of our efficiency up so that each of us can catch up on Hogan's Heroes re-runs (and if I might further digress, why hasn't this little bit of television history received the Hollywood blockbuster treatment yet, eh?). So we're Good socialists secularists feminists leftists Americans! Yeah! Fuck yeah!

On top of that, we're all friends who have been reading each others' blogs for years, and so we finally got the good sense and realized it would be fun to start a group blog - plus, we could read all of our writings in one place, rather than having to refresh four different pages, thus circling us back around to point #1 and further establishing our credibility as Good Americans.

So what's in it for you, dear reader? A couple decades of fancy book learning; small insights on big events; scatological humor; rants, rants, rants!; sober analysis; a therapeutic laugh; 5 parts idealism, 3 parts pragmatism, 2 parts cynicism; culture vultures; mountains out of molehills; and copious Simpsons and Star Wars references.

At the very least, you can tell all of us to go fuck ourselves in one place (ref. point #1). And if that's not what's Good about America, I don't know what is.