For more than 10 years now, Brad Friedman has been doing the difficult and thankless work of covering America’s horribly broken elections system.

Of course there’s more to the Brad Blog than that singular issue, but it’s an area in which Friedman excels, having made himself an expert and a crack reporter who covers even the most obscure stories.

Here’s how Brad began his post, looking back:

On January 24, 2004, the Mars rover named Opportunity landed on the red planet and began its mission. According to NASA, the mission “was to last only three months.” In the ten years since then, Opportunity has “has driven 24 miles” and has offered thousands of extraordinary close-up pictures of a never-before-seen world, all while having “contributed valuable information about the diverse watery environments of ancient Mars.”

On the very same day that Opportunity began its mission on Mars in 2004, The BRAD BLOG began its exploration of Planet Earth. Our mission, at the time, wasn’t even necessarily slated to last three months. But, like Opportunity, as of this week, we have also defied the odds by sending out extraordinary close-up pictures from our unlikely and continuing investigations ten years after we began.

Here’s to 10 more.

— Posted by Peter Z. Scheer