RIP Bill Shipp
Just a quick note to say that emails like this (or blogs before it) covering politics wouldn't be able to exist without the steps that visionaries like Bill Shipp took decades ago. Way back in 2002, when I was 21 and just starting to work in the legislature, before I became an "insider" myself, the gold standard of information was reading Shipp's columns (or watching him on the Georgia Gang), Tom Crawford's Georgia Report (if you could afford it), and the old Baxter/Galloway Insider column. A great political columnist is like a great sportswriter, making you feel like you were really there and understood all the players.
Those sources were a great introduction and education and when I started my old blog my aim was to take the kind of knowledge that someone could glean on their own from these sources as a foundation and add additional details or technical analysis on top of it. Although my blog ended up being a great source of opposition research for Jill Chambers in 2008, it also opened a lot of doors that ultimately led to the writing of this very email.
So thanks to Bill Shipp for starting it all back in the day. We will all miss him.