by Bob Weeks on February 25, 2010
in Politics
If online political activity has any value, Kansas Republicans aren’t providing much. Many Kansas Republican websites and online outreach efforts are stale and lagging behind in providing timely and quality information.
As of today, the most recent post on The Kansas Trunkline (promoted as “The Official Blog of the Kansas Republican Party”) is dated November 30, 2009. That’s coming up on three months old. If blogs have any defining characteristics, one is frequent updates with timely material. That’s not happening here.
This blog is promoted on the front page of the Kansas Republican Party website. That site doesn’t fare much better with regard to timely updates. The most recent news item is from January 25. The Twitter feed displayed there has four posts for all of 2010. The site doesn’t have accurate information about who is — and how to contact — the executive director of the party.
On the Kansas Republican Party’s Facebook page, the most recent post is from December 1, 2009. The Kansas Young Republicans Facebook page, however, does better.
Even efforts using cutting-edge technology from campaigns aren’t doing better. SamForGov — that’s Sam Brownback’s campaign application for the iPhone — has an event from November 2, 2009 as the latest campaign event. Under “Campaign Updates,” the only item is a news release from September 3, 2009. The front page of the app still displays an invitation to Kansas Days. That event took place nearly four weeks ago.
Some local Kansas Republican Party organizations do better. The Johnson County Republican Party seems to be up-to-date with useful information. The Sedgwick County counterpoint doesn’t fare as well.
The Kansas Democratic Party has a revamped blog that allows for “community bloggers,” although so far only one has signed up. The blog has 10 posts so far for February. Not exactly a fount of information, but better than the stale Republican blog and websites.
There’s a saying: “You are who Google says you are.” Google, of course, finds relevant websites based on what people say they’re looking for. But when Google (and other search engines) returns these websites with their stale news and out-of-date events, people lose confidence in the organizations that created the sites. Having visited once and finding little of value, people are not likely to return again.
This is the case if Google even returns these sites in response to searches, as freshness and frequency of updates is thought to be a major factor Google uses in deciding which sites to display to users.
As a Republican activist, I urge those in charge of these sites to make a commitment to providing fresh, timely, and relevant content. Part of how to accomplish this is to avoid delegating responsibility for the websites and blogs to “tech guys.” That’s because when it takes communication with technical support — and the possibility of receiving an invoice — to update a website or blog, the hassle factor means it doesn’t get done.
Instead, party leaders, staff, volunteers, and activists need to know themselves how to update websites and blogs. This requires that these sites be built upon technology platforms — like WordPress blogs, for example — that allow for and encourage end-user updates and maintenance. It also takes a commitment by leadership and staff to be trained, and then ongoing disciplined effort to keep the sites updated.
Tagged as:
Computing,
Kansas blogs,
Kansas Republicans,
Politics
In Kansas, alternative media outlets like this blog can’t get the same level of access that traditional media has in the Kansas statehouse. My post Kansas alternative media shut out of legislative access gives details.
This week I in was in Anaheim, California on a fact-finding trip. As part of this, I asked to meet with a planner for the City of Anaheim. Shortly after we started our meeting, he asked to leave the room for a moment. When he came back, a media relations person for the city was with him, and stayed with us during our meeting.
This is not unusual, as many companies and governmental bodies have policies about their employees talking to the media.
But that’s it … in California — Anaheim, anyway — bloggers are treated as press. Not so in Kansas, though.
Tagged as:
Kansas blogs,
Kansas legislature,
Kansas news media,
Kansas state government
by Bob Weeks on June 21, 2009
in Politics
by Bob Weeks on March 17, 2009
in Politics
Jason Croucher, writing in the Kansas Jackass blog, says that we’re spending trillions on the Iraq war and little domestically. Is this really the case?
A running tally of the cost of the war from CostOfWar.com is at about $605 billion. That’s in line with other estimates. It’s true the war is going to continue to cost a lot for some time, and the cost may well exceed $1 trillion at some time in the future, but that’s a lot different from saying “all those trillions spent in Iraq.”
Then there’s this from Croucher: “Ah, but then, suddenly, the federal government did something they haven’t done in years — they actually spend [sic] some money domestically!”
I realize that Croucher is exaggerating a bit — okay, a lot — in order to be sensational and amuse his readers. But to say that federal domestic spending hasn’t been increasing is far from factual.
Croucher may have been relying on material such as that presented by the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. (This might be the case if he’s doing any actual research when forming his opinions instead of parroting leftist talking points.) Their analysis shows that federal domestic spending is growing less rapidly than defense and security spending for the period 2001 through 2008. Relative to this spending, domestic spending is shrinking, they say.
This analysis, however, ignores the fact that spending has been increasing, and rapidly, too. Numbers will illustrate this.
The Heritage Foundation has a series of charts prepared from the historical tables of the U.S. budget. One chart, titled Since 9/11, Federal Spending Has Increased Much Faster Than Inflation, contains this analysis: “Total nominal spending has increased 97.6 percent since 1992, while the Consumer Price Index has increased a relatively modest 47 percent, which means that government spending is growing much faster than inflation. Less than half of the increase in federal spending came from defense and homeland security spending.”
So federal spending is growing, and it’s not all on the war and homeland security.
While the Iraq was is expensive, it’s nowhere near the budget-buster that Croucher might have you believe. The chart titled Despite War Costs, Defense Spending Falls Below Historical Average tells the story that even though defense spending is rising, it is still below — way below — spending in recent periods (as a percent of GDP) .
The spending whose absence Croucher laments has, in fact, been increasing rapidly — even during the recent Bush presidency. The chart Mandatory Spending Has Increased Almost Five Times Faster Than Discretionary Spending illustrates. The mandatory spending shown in this charts is mostly social security, Medicare, and Medicaid spending. That’s all domestic.
Remember too that it was George W. Bush who started the prescription drug benefit program for seniors. That’s an expensive program.
Tagged as:
Government spending,
Kansas blogs
Today’s edition of the Kansas Jackass blog has a post written by Jason Croucher that criticizes Americans For Prosperity because the group doesn’t like taxes.
That’s not quite accurate, as Croucher himself says he doesn’t like paying taxes. Instead, the post seems to argue that we have to pay taxes because they’re there, and we don’t know whether they’re too high, and anyway, we can’t identify and agree on what is waste, so let’s just pay. Something like this, anyway. But there are a few problems with this post that deserve discussion.
He likens paying his cable television bill to paying taxes. This analogy is false on several levels.
First, subscribing to cable television is a voluntary act. A company offers a service, a person decides to buy, and therefore becomes a customer. The customer — and the company, too — can decide to sever the relationship whenever and for whatever reason the parties have agreed to.
That’s not the way taxes work. There’s nothing voluntary about the relationship between state and taxpayer.
Then he says that he doesn’t know whether his cable bill and taxes are too high — his emotions make him feel like they are — and how there’s no rational reason for thinking they should or could cost less.
As it turns out, there is a rational reason why a cable bill is what it is: competition provided through markets. It hasn’t been this way until recently, but now you can get television service in several ways besides free over-the-air broadcasts: cable TV, satellite TV, and in many areas, TV provided by the telephone company. These three service providers compete with each other on the basis of price and service. (This doesn’t include services like hulu that show television programs over the Internet.)
For most of the things that government does and taxes us to pay for, government is the sole source. Even for areas where there are alternatives, such as private schools, many people can’t afford to pay their taxes and private school tuition at the same time, so government is almost like the sole source. And even if a family decides not to use the government schools, they still have to pay the same taxes just as through they used them. Companies operating in markets can’t compel their customers to do that.
Furthermore, competition provides a built-in incentive to control waste, something that Croucher seems to think is desirable to control in government, if we could come to agreement as to the definition of waste.
In private industry, the profit and loss system provides a powerful incentive to control waste. At the minimum, being efficient while satisfying customer needs leads to greater profits. Its strongest incentive, however, is survival: those firms that are wasteful die.
What happens to wasteful government programs? President Obama campaigned on ending wasteful earmarks, but signed a bill containing 8,500 such earmarks. He did say this is the “end to the old way of doing business,” but I don’t think anyone believes him. Or ask George Will about the mohair subsidy.
The automatic pruning of inefficient or wasteful companies through markets and the profit and loss system saves consumers from having to do with a grocery store what Croucher wants us to do with Kansas government: come up with a list of “waste.”
So government, as we see, is largely immune from the pressures of a marketplace. So Croucher is correct on one respect: we don’t know what our taxes should be.
But we can be positive that they’re too high.
Tagged as:
Free markets,
Kansas blogs,
Kansas state government,
Taxation
Recently a Kansas blog covered a political event and wrote this in a post titled Defending America Summit Brought out the Wingnuts:
Stephen Ware, Professor at the University of Kansas Law School:
“What’s unusual about Kansas is about how little the people’s wishes matter. There are no checks and balances in the judicial selection process.”
********. It’s called a retention voted [sic]. Don’t like Justice Dan Biles? Vote him out in a year. And, hey, aren’t all professors supposed to be crazy liberals?
I asked Mr. Ware about the value of retention votes in giving a voice to the people. As it turns out, he said, no Kansas Supreme Court justice has ever lost a retention vote, and only one lower court judge has. “This is consistent with the pattern around the country, in which judges hardly ever lose retention votes. That’s mostly because there’s no rival candidate to spark a real debate.”
So it appears that in Kansas, retention votes have not been a meaningful way for voters to engage in the process of choosing their judges. However, I will trust this blogger to educate us about crazy liberals.
This blogger also mentions (A few notes on the Governor’s budget) that the Kansas Senate’s President is Derek Schmidt. Call your office, Stephen Morris.
Tagged as:
Kansas blogs,
Kansas judges,
Kansas state government,
Kansas Supreme Court
by Bob Weeks on November 11, 2008
in Liberty
My page of coverage of the general election for Wichita and the surrounding area is available. Click here to view it.
I don’t think I have all the candidate websites listed yet, so if I’m missing any, please send it to me though the contact page. I’d prefer an email message rather than a comment.
Tagged as:
Kansas blogs
