We have a blogroll of favorite blogs and sites to visit. It is deliberately not long because if I put in 100 sites I could not honestly tell you I read every one of them every day, so I’ve chosen my favorites.

If you have any suggestions of some I’ve missed please let me know and if they are daily reads for me I’ll certainly put them on. If they are not daily reads I will check them out and see if they interest me enough to make them a daily read for me.

This blog is new and it’s up to you to tell us what you want on it. You are our customers and our customers come first.

You will also notice I have added at the bottom of the sidebar a Breitbart news headline service for news and for politics. Click the appropriate box and you will see the headlines.

I have asked Tonto to give me a list of the liberal newspapers he would like to have listed but so far he hasn’t come up with a list, but I must say most of the newspapers and news services listed are already pretty liberal even if he disagrees with me.

I won’t link to the far left blogs and I won’t link to the extreme right blogs. That includes my former blog. We want a blog where we are not preaching to the choir but are showing our open-mindedness and diversity to a variety of readers.

We also want a blog that encourages our readers to discuss among themselves rather than having every post a comment by one of the bloggers. I will respond with a welcome or a comment as I see the need to do so, but don’t get hurt feelings if we don’t always comment on your comment. I have seen that too much on my former blog and have heard people say it is nothing but the bloggers talking to each other. Lesson learned, but I can’t stay quiet so I’ll be on the threads talking with you too, at least until we get more people commenting.

Let us know what you think. Feel free to email me by using the contact link on the sidebar to give us your ideas. I will forward any of Tonto’s email to him, and I must say he has a good following.

If you use Internet Explorer you will notice things that should be on the sidebar are now on the bottom of the page.

My web designer has been working on it and we have the best minds in the business trying to figure out why the template isn’t doing as it should with just the addition of a couple of words that shouldn’t have changed the sidebar.

Please check the bottom of the page for links until this problem is fixed.

Thank you.

The saying is that when life gives you lemons you make lemonade.

How applicable it is to the birth of this site.

I will not be specific enough for you to guess what I’m actually talking about, but I believe purging one’s mind of thoughts and words that have hurt that person is one part of the path to healing.

I do not claim to be perfect—in fact, I am very imperfect in the eyes of the world and in the Eyes of God.

In the past two weeks I have endured a hurt that was almost unbearable. At the same time I’m sure my words from that hurt also hurt others. For that I am sorry.

For reasons I will not discuss here I have been separated from my former blog.

I was subsequently banned from posting comments or even allowing trackbacks from this blog to it.

So I began making lemonade. I thought about what I wanted in a new blog and one of the things I definitely did not want was name-calling of anyone, whether it be a commenter, fellow blogger, or political or public figure.

I’ve been around blogs enough in the past few years to see too much of that, and I want to try to bring us together as a people instead of keep us on opposite sides of the street as enemies.

We can have differing views without being difficult. Tonto and I do not share the same political beliefs but we have gone into this together knowing that and also have a basis of family love that will never go away, so we can argue without fighting. It’s called debate, and I won’t question his intelligence (higher than mine) and he won’t question mine. We are like brother and sister and that bond will never be broken by a simple opinion on a blog.

He has always been that big brother to me. We were raised in the same house by the same people at the same time, although I take great joy in telling you Tonto is almost a year older than I.

I asked him to blog with me and told him exactly what it was I hoped we could accomplish. He has brought me closer to my Indian roots than I have been in many moons, and I am ever so greatful to him for that.

We have determined that if anyone disagrees with us in the comments section we will be so nice to them they won’t want to be spiteful to us ever again, because we have both seen the destruction of fighting and name-calling on blogs.

This is our pledge to you and also from JD if he can find the time to blog as he is a busy man.

I’m probably more of the hot head than Tonto and certainly JD, so they may have to rein me in a few times, but I’m not too old to learn.

We will never question your intelligence or call you crazy just because you don’t happen to agree with us on politics, and we ask that you treat us the same way.

This is one reason I love the Anchoress so much. She doesn’t talk down to any of her readers and treats them all with respect even if they don’t show it to her.

Although we have never met and probably never will in our lifetimes I consider her and Kimsch from Musing Minds to be two of my best friends, along with DJ Drummond from Stolen Thunder, and Sister from Sister Toldjah and Oak Leaf who writes for Polipundit. I must also remember my good friends and former blogging partners Big Mo and Republicanpundit in my list of friends.

I guess all in all I wasn’t given lemons after all with such good friends as these.

What is past is past. With prayers from many of the above-mentioned friends and myself I have begun to heal to the point of not feeling the pain each time I think of it and I don’t think of it very often the way I did.

We welcome you to J’s Cafenette and ask you to keep coming back. Tell us what you like and tell us what you don’t like and we’ll see what we can do to fix it for you.