I hate surrendering to the inevitable, but the time has come to do so.

From within our team or without, I’m looking for someone to take over the running (and ownership) of this blog.

There’ll be some time to permit a smooth transition. I should be able to afford to stay online till the end of February.

Sometime in March, renewal of the host server will be required, or a new contract with another host. It’ll be up to the new owner to pay for that. They should also plan on moving the blog to a new domain (besides reachm.com) sometime in May.

Among the advantages one can have from assuming control:

a) As an established blog, you’re on hundreds of blogrolls already.

b) If you maintain the current viewership or increase it, you’ll stay aboard the Liberal Blog Advertising Network. Which is good for at least 10 ads per year (which can grow if your readership grows).

c) I’ll assist in any way I can during the transition, and will provide suggestions and options that can help if you’re new to blogging, based on my 4+ years as a blogger.

Whether or not the current roster of contributors continues is unknown at this time. If you choose to keep it running as a team blog, you may have to recruit more people (depending on what you have in mind.)

Simply, there’s an enormous number of positives that were gained via peers and teammates, through my participation in the blogging community over the years. They certainly outweigh the negatives. But one negative has recently come to overshadow the pluses: basic economics. Another negative is even more personal: the sense that my own blogging has faded to a point that fails my own standards of quality research and writing, and my ability to assist in changing the status quo or assist others in need has diminished to near irrelevance.

To justify continuance, I set the bar low: the site had to provide enough revenue to offset hosting, domain name and site administration costs, plus my monthly internet access expense. It’s fallen short of that after September.

As I’m anticipating a recession in the second half of 2007, and my current dayjob is working for a real estate broker - an industry that declined severely last year and faces worse this year - I feel fairly certain my employment will be jeopardized. Thus, my principal efforts need to be focused on finding new employment to meet basic sustenance needs. Drawing unemployment will be insufficient to meet my responsibilities.

As odd as it may seem, my exit will not be just from blogging but from being online at all. Despite the low cost of that, I have to pare back to barebones, at least till I can find that elusive sense of job security. And having been online for over nine years continuously through three job changes and several address changes, I know it’s going to be a rather cold turkey getting used to that.

It’s not a new world to me, nor have I ever misunderstood my place in it. There’s the netroots. And there’s the decomposing organic matter feeding it, till the nutrients are exhausted. I was only able to personally provide a monetary contribution to one Congressional campaign this year. That candidate not only lost, but their staff didn’t even acknowledge the receipt of that donation, which made me feel I’d wasted my effort on someone clueless. (In the relativity of campaign finance, I know a hundred bucks is a pittance, but relative to the real world of scraping by that us po’ folks endure, I don’t think it good form not to send out an automated form-email ‘thanks’.)

Discouraged? As a blogger, no. But as a helpful friend, yes. The serious illnesses of two teammates on this blog and my inability to provide them meaningful assistance through fundraising helped drive this decision. I know I can do better than that for my friends in the future by taking on a second halftime job at the minimum wage, instead of investing endless hours into blogging.

And I find it annoying that amid the declining brain cells, I hear a punchdrunk big mook’s voice muttering “I useta be a contendah.”

The support I received through several family tragedies will always be among the greatest gifts gained in my entire life. I’m eternally indebted to a couple dozen people for that generosity of spirit, a rarity to a poor man before Al Gore invented the tubes we correspond through. Thank you again; you know who you are and deserve a multiplied karmic return for that.

If you’re interested in owning this American Street, please leave a comment or email me.

Thank you, to all the brilliant lights who’ve contributed to this effort, as teammates (all those sidebar asterisks denote them, but fall well short of defining them) and as commenters. Keep giving the mighty ‘THEM’ hell. You’re an inspiration to many more than you might suspect.

Update: As appreciative as I am of compliments and support, I’m not going to reconsider and continue beyond February. I’m passionately nihilistic about US foreign policies, despite the changes in Congress, and spending more time with my family and friends offline is the best way to channel my heart while the capitalist killing asshole complex conspires to nuke the planet into submission.

I misspoke by saying it was all about economics. Sometimes the only defense against warmongers and the slow braking ‘pragmatism’ of the political opposition is just to go forth and love.