Month: March 2008

N-C-double A! (again, with a different gender)

Last year, it was the men’s basketball team from my alma mater, Miami University, that went to the dance after winning the Mid-American Conference tournament in dramatic fashion as a number 4 seed. In the NCAA tourney they lost a heartbreaker to Oregon 58-56, showing the selection committee that they should have been seeded higher than 14th.

This year the men’s team was the 5th seed and lost to eventual MAC tournament champion Kent State 49-47 in the semifinals. So no trip to the dance this year, but they will do something never done before. More on that in a bit.

It will be the Miami ladies finally making their first trip to the NCAA tournament as they play Louisville on Sunday in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Again disrespecting the MAC, the tournament gave the 23-10 RedHawks a #13 seed although they finished as the second best team in the conference overall at 12-4 and won the tournament over archrival Ohio University. (Wonder if we’ve clinched the Battle of the Bricks yet?)

So on Sunday hopefully ESPN will cooperate and place the Miami-Louisville game on either ESPN or ESPN2 so I can watch it. Right after bowling would be ideal.

By the way, the women’s tournament should have plenty of local interest since Maryland will be a #1 seed in their region and oddly enough drew Coppin State in the first round. Those are the only two Maryland schools involved on the women’s side. Coppin State also managed to make it on the men’s side, and takes on fellow Maryland school Mount St. Mary’s in the play-in game tonight with the winner to face North Carolina Friday. UMBC also made the field and happened to draw Georgetown in the first round. Two state schools also were invited to the NIT as Morgan State will travel to Virginia Tech for a first-round game tomorrow night while Maryland travels to Minnesota this evening.

Finally, proving that March Madness is still ripe to be milked for all it’s worth, my RedHawks men will participate in the inaugural College Basketball Invitational tournament, meeting Tulsa tomorrow night in Oklahoma. This 16 team tournament means that 112 college basketball teams will participate in post-season play. While that seems like a lot, bear in mind that over 300 schools play in Division I college basketball, and over half of the BCS Division college football teams play in a postseason bowl (64 of 119). Unique in the CBI is a best-of-three championship series, but you have to wonder about a tournament which features a 13-18 Cincinnati team.

So hopefully I’ll have plenty of Miami basketball to watch as things progress while our hockey team also has a shot at an NCAA bid as well. I’ll find that out too sometime Sunday.

A leading linkee

This includes a *shameless plug alert*.

I got an e-mail from Elbert last night and it gave me a laugh, so I give him the hat tip and a fresh 180-day cycle. You’ll see what I mean in a moment.

But as he said:

Joe’s gonna be mad and have a tantrum when he sees this.

What he’s referring to is a post he came across on ShoreBlogs, one where Technorati rankings are discussed. According to them, monoblogue has the largest number of links among Delmarva bloggers, with 73 sites linking to mine. Salisbury News is second with just 54.

I’m sure some will argue that, yeah, it’s because you crosspost to Red Maryland all the time. Nope, sorry, that only counts as one link regardless of how many articles I crosspost. While it’s true that each time I do so restarts that 180 day clock, the same can be said for the multitude of sites linked up with Joe’s. I suspect I do pick up a little extra by being in the Maryland Bloggers Alliance, but not all of those blogs have our widget so it doesn’t always accrue to my benefit.

I just take this as a sign that I’m doing something right in all of this because people continue to find my site worth reading. It’s also why I’m trying to increase my operating tempo to 2 posts a day during the week so there’s more variety in what I write about and incentive to visit more than once a day. Sure, it will still be predominantly political but I’m trying to work in other issues and viewpoints that you may not have seen or heard before and commenting as appropriate.

By the way, have you noticed how Joe posts every few days a picture of what the price of gasoline was a year or so prior? Over the last 2 years, I’ve done the same with grocery prices in posts I call the market basket. When I do my shopping next month and see how the prices on the list compare to prior periods, I’ll begin to add the price of a gallon of gasoline as a seperate comparison item too. So I’ll give credit to Mr. Albero for that part of the idea; however, I’m really scared to see what inflation has done to the price of groceries when I do my shopping. I think it’ll be brutal.

Now for the shameless plug. Tomorrow morning I’ll again be on with Bill Reddish, doing the AM Salisbury program at 7:40 (WICO-AM 1320). Truth be told, I’m actually the spot starter for the slot as the originally scheduled person was a scratch. But I’ll do my best to make it interesting and I think I’m going to focus on local and state politics this time rather than the Congressional race. You know I have a lot to say, it’ll just be a matter of saying it well and keeping on point. Check it out and see how well I do.

Joe says it ain’t so

Late edit: Since there were some comments questioning my use of my editorial license to summarize Dr. Arminio’s letter, you can read the letter in full as the first comment and judge for yourself whether I maintained the flavor of his remarks in my post. My only edit of his letter reprinted as the first comment was to space out the paragraphs.

I got an e-mail over the weekend from defeated Congressional candidate Joe Arminio, who seems to have joined the crowd piling on Diebold and electronic voting machines in general. It’s a fairly long e-mail, so I’ll summarize a few of his points. Here’s the opening paragraph:

Were There Inaccurate Primary Votes In Congressional District One?
By Dr. Joe Arminio
March 14, 2008

A heavy fog of doubt envelops the so-called official results, released three days ago, of the 2008 Republican Primary in the First Congressional District. Similar fogs envelop vote counts across the country. A major cause of all this doubt is typically the same: electronic voting machines, not paper ballots, were used to record the votes. The First District, like almost all other places, foolishly and irresponsibly relies upon voting machines and does not rely upon paper ballots that are manually and publicly counted. Very significant inaccuracies may have resulted.

The key points he attributes the “heavy fog of doubt” to are many, but mainly relate to the vast disparity in campaign spending between himself and fellow also-ran Robert Joseph Banks as well as the difference between his vote and Ron Paul’s vote in the First District. Arminio also throws into question the results based on the number of straw polls Ron Paul has won vs. the number John McCain won. (For the record, McCain got zero votes in our September Wicomico County Straw Poll while Paul received 4 votes.)

Arminio spent $85,000 on the race, which works out to roughly $66 for each of his 1,277 votes. Most of it went to three editions of his newspaper The American Way and 1,000 small campaign signs, 999 of them I think I saw along Route 50 heading up to Chestertown to cover the Kent/Queen Anne’s campaign forum. Banks spent much less and gathered 1,186 votes. Meanwhile, Ron Paul had 4,695 votes in CD-1, and it’s this large difference that Arminio questions. It is for these reasons Arminio feels we need to go back to paper ballots. I can just see the ACORN types on that one, complaining how it would disenfranchise the poor and illiterate, along with the illegals they’re trying to register.

He also returns to the Ron Paul endorsing Wayne Gilchrest flap:

Someone else shall say that Ron Paul endorsed not me, but Wayne Gilchrest, several days before the primary. True. But news of this endorsement was not surely widely known. What is more, it was evidently greeted in disbelief in many quarters. For the record, Ron Paul sent me a thank you note soon after the primary in which he said he did not know I had been in the race and thanked me for my efforts on behalf of his cause and the Constitution.

Not quite a case of mistaken identity, but a mistake nonetheless by Paul. I chalked the endorsement up as courtesy to a fellow Congressman myself, like Newt Gingrich’s endorsement of Wayne Gilchrest. Regardless, Joe comes to his conclusion:

Are we in the throes of a crushing irony? Are we supposedly waging war in Iraq for the purpose of bringing them free elections but cannot ensure free elections in our own country?

In the First District, Andy Harris is the declared Republican Congressional nominee. I trust that he will press for the restoration of the proper, constitutional procedure–the use of paper ballots and the public counting of these ballots–in the interest of preserving the Republic.

I was just reading the copy of the Constitution I keep on my desk and I saw nothing on the type of ballots to be used. In Article I, Section 4 it only states that each state legislature prescribes the electoral laws – however, Congress can “make or alter such Regulations” by law. Joe is correct in thinking that Congress can make such a law dictating paper ballots and certainly is within his right in calling on Andy Harris to do so, but the Constitution is silent on the actual voting method.

So take it for what it’s worth, I just found it sort of amusing and decided to share this afternoon.

Ask but please don’t receive

If you’re a loyal monoblogue reader, you’re probably aware I belong to the American Institute of Architects since they’re an organization that purportedly represents the interests of those of us in that profession.

During the week of March 24-28 the AIA holds what it terms “Advocacy Week.” Formerly known as Grassroots, which was held each February, this would’ve been a week architects descended on Washington to pitch the items they’d like to receive from the federal government. With this revision of name and focus, they’ve changed tactics a little bit and look to have members buttonhole their home members of Congress back in the district while they’re on their Easter recess.

On Friday I got my normal e-mail from the AIA, which featured among other things the “asks” the organization thinks members need from Congress:

  • Enact incentives for energy-efficient buildings—Ask members of Congress to vote to extend tax incentives to promote energy efficiency and cosponsor legislation, soon to be introduced by Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D-Colo.), that will provide incentives for homebuilders and homeowners to design, construct, and renovate energy-efficient homes and neighborhoods
  • Eliminate retainage rules on architects and engineers—Urge members of Congress to pass legislation to eliminate the 10 percent retainage of fees on architects and engineers who contract with the federal government
  • Promote healthy and safe communities through transportation funding—Oppose proposals to raid the Mass Transit Trust Fund to shore up the Highway Trust Fund and support provisions in next year’s highway bill that provide incentives for projects that build safe and prosperous communities.

I’ll take these one at a time. Needless to say they’re generally not listening to me as a member.

Energy efficiency is great, and I’m all for it assuming the payback time for additional costs incurred during construction is relatively short. What I don’t favor is the federal government tinkering in the market or mandating the energy efficiency of buildings. Nor do I believe that there should be tax incentives for particular behavior. Not only does that tend to make taxes more progressive rather that more flat as I prefer, it places way too much power in the hands of those who aren’t elected but determine the actual regulations which dictate the method of compliance.

On the other hand, I do agree with the elimination of retainage for architects and engineers. We have a hard enough time getting problem clients to pay up let alone the federal government arbitrarily withholding 10 percent. Retainage is appropriate for contractors as incentive to finish the loose ends that always occur when they deem a project complete, but since our job as architects can come to an end once the permits are secured (it depends on the contract whether we administer construction, check shop drawings, etc.) there’s no real reason to hold our payments up.

The AIA only bats .333 with me though as they strike out on point number three. I say raid that Mass Transit Trust Fund until it’s zeroed out! The Highway Trust Fund is far more important although I’m a little dubious about how they distribute it to the states because of their mandates withholding funds if states do not pass particular laws, violating the Tenth Amendment.

I know the AIA has swallowed the global warming and sustainability Kool-Aid big time and they’re foes of suburban sprawl. Does building highways farther and farther out to the suburbs encourage sprawl? Of course. But they seem to have the same philosophy the O’Malley Administration has here in Maryland – force commuters onto mass transit that isn’t very convenient and not many who have a choice would normally ride. The market of $3-4 a gallon gas will do much more to fill up those mostly empty buses and trains that rely on the federal largesse for their subsidy than any amount of money the federal government throws at them ever will.

(Of course, had we been able to extract our own oil supplies and build more refineries we may not have had $3-4 gas in the first place! I suppose we have to assume it’s what the Democrats and Wayne Gilchrest wanted, but I digress.)

The second point of spending money on improving highways and not mass transit is the trucking aspect. Yes, trains are efficient but rarely can goods go directly from point A to point B exclusively by rail. Instead of a trucker sitting in traffic watching a subsidized half-empty train car go by on the Red Line while he’s burning $4 a gallon diesel fuel, maybe a wider highway would help the truck get where it’s headed more efficiently.

Furthermore, love it or hate it Ocean City depends on tourism and not many tourists want to make the trip for a week’s vacation in OC via bus. Since you can’t get there by train we need improved highways so tourists aren’t spending $50 on a tank of gas to be bogged down in a traffic jam.

Then again, I suppose I can’t expect much out of my group when its associated political action committee called ArchiPAC announced a list of recipents of their campaign cash for the last reporting period:

  • Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA, for re-election in 2010)
  • Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA)
  • Rep. Stephen Cohen (D-TN)
  • Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME)
  • Sen. Tim Johnson (D-SD)
  • Sen. Ken Salazar (D-CO, for re-election in 2010)
  • Rep. Mark Udall (D-CO, for 2008 U.S. Senate campaign)
  • Rep. Tom Udall (D-NM, for 2008 U.S. Senate campaign)
  • Rep. Nydia Velazquez (D-NY)

Fortunately, this isn’t like a union where I’m forced to give money that’s used for political purposes but with most of these recipients (save Rep. Cantor) having an ACU rating less than 55 and four of them in the single digits, these politicians may be AIA-friendly but they’re sure not working in my interest.

If the AIA truly wanted to advocate for the interests of architects, they would work to make the federal government and the tax man get off our backs, and allow the market to dictate what is built. We architects are a pretty creative bunch so let us sell the clients on the advantages of good and energy-efficient design instead of having the government dictate things to us!

Opinion on Obama

It’s not my opinion, though, this article was written by someone else. And after I give credit to my fellow Wicomico County Republican Dave Parker for passing this along to me, I’m going to post what this person wrote. At the end, I’ll tell you a little about the person who penned it – you might be surprised.

This is from the New York Sun:

It’s an amazing time to be alive in America. We’re in a year of firsts in this presidential election: the first viable woman candidate; the first viable African-American candidate; and, a candidate who is the first frontrunning freedom fighter over 70. The next president of America will be a first. We won’t truly be in an election of firsts, however, until we judge every candidate by where they stand. We won’t arrive where we should be until we no longer talk about skin color or gender. Now that Barack Obama steps to the front of the Democratic field, we need to stop talking about his race, and start talking about his policies and his politics.

The reality is this: Though the Democrats will not have a nominee until August, unless Hillary Clinton drops out, Mr. Obama is now the frontrunner, and its time America takes a closer and deeper look at him. Some pundits are calling him the next John F. Kennedy. He’s not. He’s the next George McGovern. And it’s time people learned the facts. Because the truth is that Mr. Obama is the single most liberal senator in the entire U.S. Senate. He is more liberal than Ted Kennedy, Bernie Sanders, or Mrs. Clinton. Never in my life have I seen a presidential frontrunner whose rhetoric is so far removed from his record. Walter Mondale promised to raise our taxes, and he lost. George McGovern promised military weakness, and he lost. Michael Dukakis promised a liberal domestic agenda, and he lost.

Yet Mr. Obama is promising all those things, and he’s not behind in the polls. Why? Because the press has dealt with him as if he were in a beauty pageant. Mr. Obama talks about getting past party, getting past red and blue, to lead the United States of America.

But let’s look at the more defined strokes of who he is underneath this superficial “beauty.” Start with national security, since the president’s most important duties are as commander-in-chief. Over the summer, Mr. Obama talked about invading Pakistan, a nation armed with nuclear weapons; meeting without preconditions with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who vows to destroy Israel and create another Holocaust; and Kim Jong II, who is murdering and starving his people, but emphasized that the nuclear option was off the table against terrorists – something no president has ever taken off the table since we created nuclear weapons in the 1940s. Even Democrats who have worked in national security condemned all of those remarks. Mr. Obama is a foreign-policy novice who would put our national security at risk.

Next, consider economic policy. For all its faults, our health care system is the strongest in the world. And free trade agreements, created by Bill Clinton as well as President Bush, have made more goods more affordable so that even people of modest means can live a life that no one imagined a generation ago. Yet Mr. Obama promises to raise taxes on “the rich.” How to fix Social Security? Raise taxes. How to fix Medicare? Raise taxes. Prescription drugs? Raise taxes. Free college? Raise taxes. Socialize medicine? Raise taxes. His solution to everything is to have government take it over.  Big Brother on steroids, funded by your paycheck.

Finally, look at the social issues. Mr. Obama had the audacity to open a stadium rally by saying, “All praise and glory to God!” but says that Christian leaders speaking for life and marriage have “hijacked” – hijacked – Christianity. He is pro-partial birth abortion, and promises to appoint Supreme Court justices who will rule any restriction on it unconstitutional. He espouses the abortion views of Margaret Sanger, one of the early advocates of racial cleansing. His spiritual leaders endorse homosexual marriage, and he is moving in that direction. In Illinois, he refused to vote against a statewide ban – ban – on all handguns in the state. These are radical left, Hollywood, and San Francis co values, not Middle America values.

The real Mr. Obama is an easy target for the general election. Mrs. Clinton is a far tougher opponent. But Mr. Obama could win if people don’t start looking behind his veneer and flowery speeches. His vision of “bringing America together” means saying that those who disagree with his agenda for America are hijackers or warmongers. Uniting the country means adopting his liberal agenda and abandoning any conflicting beliefs. But right now everyone is talking about how eloquent of a speaker he is and – yes – they’re talking about his race. Those should never be the factors on which we base our choice for president.

Mr. Obama’s radical agenda sets him far outside the American mainstream, to the left of Mrs. Clinton.  It’s time to talk about the real Barack Obama.  In an election of firsts, let’s first make sure we elect the person who is qualified to be our president in a nuclear age during a global civilizational war.

Any guesses as to who this is? The author is Ken Blackwell, who is now a columnist for the paper, and the piece is entitled “Beyond Obama’s Beauty”.

I may have tipped this off a little bit with the categories at the top, but Ken Blackwell ran and lost for the Governor’s seat in Ohio in 2006. However, had things been as I thought they should be in a perfect world, that would have been the point where Blackwell was wrapping up his second and final successful term as the chief executive of my home state. Unfortunately, the Ohio Republican Party leadership abhors contested primaries and their choice in 1998 was the moderate Bob Taft – a guy who allowed state government and taxation to grow and the one who pretty much ran the state party into the ground by 2006. It was at that point that Blackwell defied the state powers-that-be and contested the primary against establishment candidate Jim Petro. Sadly the damage was done and Blackwell lost handily that November to Democrat Ted Strickland. 

Ken was a figure in Ohio politics well before running for governor, though. He first won statewide office in 1990 as Ohio’s state treasurer, then became Secretary of State in 1998 after the Republican brass talked him out of the primary fight he just might have won. He certainly had my support because he was by far the more conservative candidate running. But perhaps the Ohio Republican party thought the state and nation weren’t quite ready for a black governor at that point.

You see, a half-decade before Michael Steele became a household name in this state, we in Ohio had the conservative black guy in Ken Blackwell. I don’t know if they ever threw Oreo cookies at Ken but I’m sure he took his share of abuse from those who share his skin color but not his political philosophy.

What this means is that the article you see above can’t be dismissed as racist. It’s sad that we still have to deal with this sort of name-calling over forty years removed from the advent of the civil rights era, but there is a class of people out there who depend on these divisions for their living, and even if Barack Obama should become President they’re not going to go away quietly.

Besides, I don’t recall those people and groups making much of a fuss when Blackwell and Steele both lost their bids for statewide office in 2006. It proves my point that sometimes the civil rights movement is about power more than about race. Luckily thoughtful criticism knows no skin color and Blackwell is right on point with his column.

Time for talkin’ baseball

If you’re like me and are jonesing to get out to Perdue Stadium and watch our hometown team play, I’m sorry but we’re still 20 days away from the opener on April 3rd. (Coincidentally, that date will also mark the return of my Shorebird of the Week.)

But you will get a chance to come out to the stadium and get a little more excited about our chances for the 2008 season on Saturday morning. That’s when the Shorebirds are hosting their 5th annual Family Fun Fest beginning at 9 a.m. Not only can you purchase your individual game tickets for the 2008 season, the kids will get a chance to hunt for Easter eggs while the parents can check out all of the summer camps and activities geared toward entertaining the little crumb-crunchers while they’re out of school. (Is anyone else like me and in favor of year-round school?)

They’ll also have an American Idol of sorts – well, it may sound like the first rounds of that program but the real idea is to solicit volunteers to come out prior to the games and sing the Star-Spangled Banner. Those tryouts will be held in between the Easter Egg hunts. We had some pretty good singers last season so hopefully they’ll come back and new talent will be found. (I’m still waiting for the reincarnation of Jimi Hendrix to show up and jam that out though. Maybe Saturday.)

And if that’s not enough, you’ll find me someplace working the event. Many of us in the Shorebirds Fan Club help out with the rides and games, and being that this will be the first time I go behind the scenes to help out, we’ll see what kind of experience it is for me. As I recall, one thing we’ll do is the Cake Walk – rest assured I did not bake a cake so you can be fairly confident the cakes will be really good. 

So no sleeping in Saturday for this guy. I would tend to believe we’ll have something in place to sign up new Fan Club members while we’re at it. A particular need is for those willing to be host families for the players, since most of them didn’t come into the Orioles organization with six- or seven-figure bonus checks and would really appreciate a place to live during the season.

Hopefully the rain that’s predicted for Saturday afternoon will hold off until after the close of festivities at 1 p.m. and all that will be left is to enjoy the predicted mild weather for that morning. I look forward to seeing a lot of folks there as we get ready for another summer of watching baseball!

Does the phrase “do without” ring a bell?

Apparently not to the Maryland General Assembly.

We’re all familiar with the computer services tax slated to go into effect on July 1st. Those of us who pay attention also know that this will be a job-killing levy that, like the cigarette tax increase, won’t come close to the promised revenue amount. If you believe Tim at Gunpowder Chronicle, we’re already seeing efforts by Pennsylvania to swoop in and take the computer business out of Maryland.

So there are a number of legislators on the other side of the aisle who are having second thoughts about this. (The ones on my side rejected it on first thought, but sadly we were outvoted – a situation which needs to be addressed two years hence.) This led me to an article in today’s Baltimore Sun by Gadi Dechter which brought up the idea of repealing the tech tax, but replacing it with an additional income tax levy on the rich. It got the backing of Senate Budget and Taxation chair Sen. Ulysses Currie:

“I support (the shift from tech tax to income tax). There’s a strong feeling that if we can find an alternative revenue source, we should repeal the computer services tax.” (Emphasis mine.)

You are exactly half right, that last half is perfect. It’s that alternative revenue source that bothers me.

When the rest of us come up short on our monthly expenses, we sit down and go through our budget and do some hard thinking about what cuts we can make. There’s a lot of folks out there who are facing the choice between paying their mortgages and paying on their credit cards and utility bills. I suppose that we average people do have opportunities to find alternate revenue sources, but taking a second job (assuming you can find one) can be detrimental to family life and robbing banks is illegal in all 50 states.

I realize that the state has a pretty significant budget shortfall, probably because they were stupid enough to honestly believe that people would gladly take it in the shorts to pay higher taxes on cigarettes, an increased sales tax, and other levies which shot upward. Regardless, what’s done is done and we’re already seeing the results. More evidence of the state’s shortsightedness will occur as the year progresses and companies vacate Maryland in an effort to avoid the computer services tax where they can.

Even the Maryland Republican Delegates who conceded that all the additional taxes that took effect in January were necessary to balance the FY2009 budget drew the line at balancing the budget on the backs of the computer services industry. What I haven’t seen yet from the Democrats is the justification for all of the programs, jobs, pay raises, and other items they felt necessary to increase in next year’s budget, which they spend OUR hard-earned tax money on, and somehow I doubt we’re going to see it either. They’ll just continue on their merry way until enough people get fed up with it.

Let me step off my soapbox to make another point. As always, the predictions on revenue from the income tax increase, which would raise rates from the current 5.5% on those who make over $750,000, are viewed with rose-colored glasses. The state expects $230 million from this “temporary” tax for FY2009, which replaces the $200 million presumed to come from the tech tax. My quick and dirty math based on the revenue expected makes it sound like there’s about 30,000 people who would pay this extra tax. Granted, an additional 1% tacked on for millionaires and 3/4% for those who fall just short isn’t something that a lot of folks reading this are going to have to deal with, but it’s the principle to me as well. Personally, I think we all should pay an equal rate regardless of income.

But if you’re making that much money, would it be that tough to pull up stakes and relocate to a more tax-friendly state like Virginia or Delaware? While this is, as written, a “temporary” tax slated to expire in 2012, I’m not going to be the one who bets the farm that it would be allowed to go away at that point. And once capital flees it’s pretty tough to bring back.

Instead, why not look for more cuts in programs like the rest of us have to with our budgets? In these fairly lean times, the time’s not right for the state to try and be all things to all people. Unfortunately, it’s dominated by a political party who wants to be that and more knowing that by doing so, or at least impressing on enough people that they’re making the effort, they can maintain their power almost perpetually.

Crossposted on Red Maryland.

Worrisome trends in blogging

Today you get the companion post I promised last night.

I had planned on just doing the first part, which shows a trend among blogs that I found fascinating. But then the tail end of this piece came about thanks to an article linked from Bill Duvall and Duvafiles, written by Jennifer Harper in Tuesday’s Washington Times.

First things first, though. As most of you have likely noticed (those of you not reading through an RSS feed), at the left hand side of monoblogue I have a box that shows my influence ranking in the state of Maryland, according to BlogNetNews. I point this out not necessarily to show my ranking (currently #5) but to use the peer group I’m in as an example for my theories. For the record, here is the top 20 list:

  1. Pocomoke Tattler
  2. Salisbury News
  3. PolitickerMD
  4. Charles County Cafe
  5. monoblogue
  6. Worcester Right
  7. Maryland Politics (better known as Red Maryland)
  8. Maryland Moment
  9. The Sun – The Session
  10. The Main Adversary
  11. Maryland Politics Today
  12. Baltimore Reporter
  13. The Dagger
  14. Free State Politics
  15. Inside Charm City
  16. The No BS Zone
  17. Lost On The Shore
  18. Brian Griffiths
  19. Maryland Politics Watch
  20. On The Record

In this case, I’ll skip the links; they’re easily enough checked out through BlogNetNews. There were three key items I looked at among this group of websites.

One recent trend that you may not be able to notice just by the names is that the mainstream publishing media has gotten into the blogging business in a big way. Newspaper-related blogs, which rarely had a ranking when the process started last spring, make up 20% of the list this time around. PolitickerMD is a localized web publication of the New York Observer, Maryland Moment comes from the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun is behind their blog on the General Assembly session at #9, and On The Record is part of the Daily Record newspaper. A segment that used to be alternative media is now beginning to be co-opted by those entities who bloggers originally fought against, and they have a whole army of people who are paid to contribute new content.

A second item is the number and complexity of crossposts among several of those listed. It’s argued that the crossposting process games the ratings, and that might be true to an extent. I counted ten of the twenty who feature crossposts to at least another member in the rankings, at least that I’m aware of. Of any top twenty blog, Red Maryland probably has the most benefit since they receive input from 7 other bloggers and/or their contributors who reside in the ranking: Salisbury News, monoblogue, The Main Adversary, Maryland Politics Today, Baltimore Reporter, The No BS Zone, and Brian Griffiths. That tangled web can work through several other sites as well – P.K. Burns of Maryland Politics Today also contributes to Salisbury News along with Red Maryland, so his posts could be on four different sites simultaneously, counting BlogNetNews. It’s a lot of exposure, but perhaps it cannibalizes his own site to some degree.

However, to me the largest trend is that of consolidation. Of the sixteen Top 20 sites which aren’t newspaper-affiliated, at least seven of them have multiple contributors. I already mentioned Red Maryland, made up by 18 writers, but other examples are Baltimore Reporter, which weighs in with 11 co-authors, Salisbury News with seven contributors, and Charles County Cafe with seven as well. Other multi-writer sites are The Dagger, Free State Politics, and Maryland Politics Watch. I believe Pocomoke Tattler is a husband-and-wife team but couldn’t verify that.

In other words, I’m now in a minority position as some sites have recently picked up additional writers. Locally, Salisbury News has followed this example over the last six months in going from a solo outfit to seven writers. Obviously it allows for more frequent posting of content, and that drives readership to see a site more often. Meanwhile, the solo practicioners on the list have put up anywhere from 4 to 55 posts this month. That 55 figure is from Worcester Right, which generally is a news digest site. Without that, the average for March so far among this group is about 11 posts, or roughly one per day.

It does tend to prove what John Hawkins noted last night on the 1500 word theory, but in this case the more successful blogs tend to be collaborative and manage to succeed because they can put up a lot more stuff in the course of a day. Meanwhile, a contributor doesn’t need to have the fuss of posting something daily, which is hard to do for many people unless you really want to devote a chunk of time to it.

While I’m going to keep trying to be the exception which proves the rule, it doesn’t mean I wouldn’t take the right offer that came along to be part of a larger group, perhaps as a guest blogger. Right Wing News is an example, as John uses guest bloggers on weekends. They get increased readership and he gets weekends off. Most likely I’d keep this site running regardless, but there’s times a setup such as that sounds appealing.

All this may not matter a hill of beans though if the Washington Times story is correct. According to a Harris poll just 4 percent of people read political blogs daily, and the number is fewest among the younger set. (That shocked me.) Meanwhile, there’s 100,000 new competitors a day for my readership if you believe Technorati. Could it be that political blogging isn’t the hot new trend anymore? I’m not sure where people would move on to, but I think some of this stems from the fact that most political bloggers simply regurgitate talking points and stretch the truth for their own purposes instead of making the attempt to analyze policies and educate readers. Whether it’s fair to say it or not, our craft comes across as the wild, wild west, and the entry of newspapers and television networks as internet sources probably has hurt our readership as well. They do their own blogs, as I noted above, but those come with the legitimacy of the news organization behind it.

A shakeout might not be such a bad thing though. Once we get rid of the bad apples who simply exist to trash a person or their philosophy, the political side of the blogging world may get its respect back. I may not have the greatest readership numbers, but I think I do have the greatest readers because they usually can comment in a reasonable manner whether they agree or disagree. Eventually this could change when monoblogue is discovered by a much larger number of people, but for now the forum seems to run pretty well.

Unfortunately, the bad reputation that some bloggers give to all of us is going to haunt the genre for awhile longer. All of us have to work harder at being factual and accurate while still maintaining an edge – only then can we bring a larger share than 4% to those websites we work hard to maintain.

A new category and a look at my success

Tonight I decided to add a new category for my posts, as you can see up top. I seem to write about other bloggers and their blogs quite a bit, plus I indulge in navel-gazing from time to time – so a new category made sense. And this edition will have its share of introspection because I ran across an excellent post from John Hawkins, who writes Right Wing News. The subject was The Top 10 Reasons Bloggers Don’t Succeed. It played off another recent post of his where he interviewed five of the most prominent female bloggers, who gave their opinions on success and other aspects of blogging while female.

Of course, when you consider that Hawkins is a full-time blogger who makes his living at the craft and that he has been blogging for over seven years, perhaps it’s no shock that his readership dwarfs mine by a factor of almost 100. I suppose he qualifies as an expert observer! To me, it was an opportunity to learn and see where I could improve.

With that, let’s look at his ten reasons that bloggers don’t succeed:

  • They’re just not very good.

With that one, I have to say I don’t qualify. It’s not to toot my own horn, but I have more fans than detractors and monoblogue is not my only writing outlet. Stylistically I’m sure I don’t appeal to everyone but I can write in complete sentences and paragraphs with words that 99% of the time are spelled correctly. One of my favorites is the Merriam-Webster website so I look up words on a daily basis.

If there were one criticism I have about myself, I really need to sit and ponder on a thesaurus. I notice I overuse phrases at times.

  • They don’t cover interesting material.

As Hawkins puts it, “Are you willing to spend the time it takes looking for stories or are you just going to write about whatever is on the Drudge Report today?”

I spend probably as much time reading as I do writing, and part of that is an effort to find things which appeal to me and that I think can become an interesting post. And I do look for unique angles, not taking things completely at face value – particularly on a news release from a politician or political group.

But the key to this is that I write about things which interest me. My task is to make that interesting to the reader and hopefully I succeed on a regular basis. This is also why I don’t just do politics because I get burned out on the topic after several days in a row. So you get my “Weekend of local rock” or Shorebird of the Week posts simply to change things up.

  • They’re not unique enough.

I touched on this point in my comments immediately above, and I think the two go hand-in-glove. I try not to make this like anyone else’s site because, quite frankly, there aren’t a while lot of people like me. (I can hear the chorus now, led by my two ex-wives: Thank God!)  So why should my site be like someone else’s?

  • They don’t network.

On this one I’m somewhat guilty as far as my fellow bloggers at Red Maryland or in the Maryland Bloggers Alliance go. Part of that is simply distance. But I know and have met many of my fellows locally who do political sites. Certainly I make them aware I read the sites because I leave my name and URL when I comment about 99% of the time. Once in a great while I’ll be anonymous when I feel I need to, but usually you’ll know it’s me.

I could do a better job in this respect I’m sure.

  • They don’t promote their work.

In my case this is true to an extent and it’s something I really should get back to.

While I do crosspost to Red Maryland and contribute a post or two to the Carnival of Maryland every two weeks, I got away from something I did for awhile and this particular point may be the impetus for me to begin again with a slightly different tactic.

For about 4 to 6 months, each weekend I sent out an e-mail called “This week on monoblogue.” On it would be a list of 3 to 5 bullet points about posts I was planning on writing for the upcoming week. But the issue I ran into was beginning to feel like I was placing myself in a box by promising posts about certain items while other, more interesting subjects would arise. I’d still feel obligated to write about those subjects I alluded to in my e-mail rather than the fresher items.

What I may do instead was something another blogger I link to has done, and it’s similar to that concept Hawkins illustrates. Bob McCarty would send out an occasional e-mail about posts he thought were interesting – more often than not I’d check them out. However, I haven’t seen one lately so maybe he’s marketing in a different manner. And in this business it is all about marketing.

  • They’re not consistent enough. They take days off.

If there’s any one of these I don’t do, this is the one. I pride myself on not missing a day, fortunately thanks to WordPress it’s easy for me to take days off but not have readers notice. In fact, yesterday was one of those days. I wrote two posts Monday night and posttimed one to run last night. Didn’t suspect a thing did you?

  • Doing their initial promos too early.

If anything, what I did wrong in December of 2005 was not promo myself. Then again, at that time I really didn’t know any other bloggers so I had no idea who to promote myself with!

At present though I do get promos on occasion. Sometimes the sites are good and once in awhile they really succeed. I think the first one who ever asked me was Philip Pidot, who does a website called Suitably Flip. He’s gone on to bigger and better things to be sure.

  • They don’t link out enough.

With one exception, if I find something worth writing about from another’s website I link to them and trackback if the opportunity is there. Of course, I also expect credit when people use my writing and a trackback if possible.

Actually, unless I slip up there aren’t exceptions. I just put the first part in to tweak Joe Albero since he ragged on me about not doing that. This site tweaks him better though. (By the way, that was two links, so I’m doing my part.)

  • They don’t post enough each day.

What John Hawkins claims in his post is that he averages 6 posts and 2500 words a day; of course he’s a full-time blogger. His yardstick for mere mortals like me is “at least 1500 words a day,” spread out over a number of posts.

So I got curious and checked out the length of my 15 most recent posts, which I placed over about 15 days. Surprisingly to me, the average post was 828 words. It seems like I write a lot more, but the numbers don’t lie and none of these individual posts added up to 1500 words.

But my ideal as far as length of post is to have it as long as a newspaper column, like something by Ann Coulter. In fact, I just did a quick count of last week’s Coulter column and it weighed in at 848 words, so I’m generally hitting the length about right.

Thus, it stands to reason that in order to have a better chance at success in this portion of the list I’d have to write 2 or 3 posts a day. It is an idea I’ll consider, at least on an occasional basis as time allows. Actually, I will write two tonight because there’s a related aspect to this point that I wanted to get into but it would work better as a separate post anyway. So look for another post to come up tomorrow after lunch.

And finally…

  • They don’t hang around long enough.

Even in doing monoblogue just since December of 2005, I’ve seen a bunch of blogs come and go. There’s some I really miss and some that I wondered what the point was. Can doing a blog be a grind? Of course. As I noted above, it’s fortunate I can write this in such a way that I can take days off, but most who start blogs do really well for a month, then slack off, then decide to heck with it.

But I’ve noticed a trend in blogging, one that I’m going to discuss in my next post. In the meantime, I think that I avoid most of the pitfalls John Hawkins discussed, and to be quite honest after checking the numbers of many of my peers I do succeed better than the majority of them. No, the numbers aren’t where I’d like them to be but when I look at my initial goal of being happy with a few hundred readers a week I’m well ahead of that.

As crazy as it may seem, I’m going to keep on doing what I do because the fun hasn’t gone out of it.

A sign of things to come?

It’s been an unusual election cycle thus far, and an upset victory in Illinois may give Republicans cause for concern. On Saturday Democrat Bill Foster won a special election to replace former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, who resigned late last year. He defeated perennial candidate Jim Oberweis by grabbing 53% of the vote in the district, which spans westward from Chicago’s suburbs.

So we’ve seen a Democrat victory in what was thought to be a pretty “safe” GOP district, in an election that even political expert Robert Novak predicted would keep the seat in Republican hands. (He did include a disclaimer about a low turnout possibly affecting results, and turnout was quite small.)

But as I sit here tonight in what’s supposed to be a “safe” GOP district, there are things that make me wonder about the upcoming Congressional election in November.

Blogger ShoreIndie correctly points out that Andy Harris did not win the counties on the Eastern Shore against Wayne Gilchrest, while the quite moderate Republican who posts the Mainstream Shore website talks about “thoughtful” Republicans who are supporting Frank Kratovil. (I don’t think ShoreIndie, who she includes in that number, is a Republican though.)

A further complication may come from an announcement yesterday about a Libertarian candidate entering the race. Dr. Richard J. Davis of Hurlock touted his candidacy in a Daily Times editorial. While it’s not likely he’ll gather a large percentage of the vote, it could affect a close race. (If and when Dr. Davis gets a website, I’ll link to it.)

And it’s obvious that Frank Kratovil’s strategy will be to run only slightly to the left of Andy Harris in an attempt to pick up the moderate Wayne Gilchrest voters, possibly even receiving the endorsement of the soon-to-be-former Congressman. This strategy paid off handsomely for Democrats in 2006, as several candidates won by running as centrists who occasionally would veer right-of-center on some issues. For Kratovil, running this way would sew up the conservative Democrats who inhabit our area moreso than most, while Democrats who are more liberal would be somewhat dissatisfied with Kratovil but would pull the lever anyway out of party loyalty. Moreover, where Gilchrest won with independents, assuming the philosophy of Wayne as much as possible would bring voters to the Kratovil side. This is the way Wayne won his seat so often, but in the reverse party scenario – conservative Republicans would hold their nose and vote for him lest the Democrats pick up the seat.

Kratovil has also gotten a lot of help from friendly press coverage, and I would expect that to continue. The brutal campaign on the GOP side further buttressed the effort as the three main candidates trashed one another for several months. And as long as Frank can run a stealth campaign and control his own message, he has a chance to succeed in this race.

The crux of this campaign will be whether Andy Harris can place Frank Kratovil on record as to how he would vote on certain issues. In this Harris has to be the aggressor, even though it could alienate a number of voters who didn’t care for his tactics in the primary. When there is no legislative record to speak of, a blank slate if you will, success will depend on how well that slate is filled and by whom. Here are some things we don’t know about Frank Kratovil:

  • Would he work to extend the Bush tax cuts, or vote with the rest of his party to increase our taxes drastically by allowing them to expire in 2-3 years?
  • Is he pro-life or pro-abortion?
  • While we know that Frank considers the conflict in Iraq a “civil war”, how would he continue the fight against Islamic terrorism?
  • Along the same lines, does he support our efforts in Afghanistan?
  • What sort of policies would he advocate to secure our energy independence, subsidies for unproven and expensive technology or creating jobs through further exploration and refining of the resources we have?
  • How about Second Amendment rights?

These are just a few of the questions where Frank Kratovil needs to be put on record regarding the solutions he supports. And something tells me that the right-of-center rhetoric he espouses will be shown as simply lip service to attract votes – the real Frank Kratovil will just be a “yes man” for those things Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton wish to do to us in Washington.

A new “culture of corruption”

This afternoon it was learned that the Governor of New York state, Eliot Spitzer, is expected to resign his post after he was named in a federal prostitution case as “Client Number 9.” Elected in 2006, Spitzer already had made waves late last year with a proposal to allow illegal immigrants to receive drivers’ licenses, a proposal that was later taken off the table.

These Spitzer allegations follow on the heels of recent news involving both main contenders for the Democratic Presidential nod. Barack Obama has been linked to the shady dealings of Chicago businessman Tony Rezko, who is accused of fraud, extortion, and money laundering in a federal indictment. The probe includes questions about the purchase of Obama’s own home and a vacant lot next door. Obama also made the mea culpa of donating over $150,000 of campaign contributions which had been traced to Rezko to various charities.

Nor is rival Hillary Clinton immune to shady campaign contributions, with donor Norman Hsu also indicted on federal charges, including theft and campaign finance violations. She was forced to return $850,000 of donations bundled by Hsu, although she encouraged affected donors to give a second time.

Although it’s fun for me to pick on the Democrat side of the aisle, in the interest of fairness there’s been a number of scofflaws from the GOP side of the aisle too. The original “culture of corruption” charges made by Democrats running against the GOP majority in 2006 involved disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff and led to the resignation of former Rep. Bob Ney of Ohio, who was convicted of accepting bribes. This was after a separate incident the year before, when Rep. Duke Cunningham resigned after he pled guilty to accepting bribes as well. Also a factor in the 2006 campaign were the personal escapades of former Rep. Mark Foley of Florida, who also resigned weeks before the election.

More recently we’ve also had the withdrawn resignation of Idaho Sen. Larry Craig, after he pled guilty to a disorderly conduct charge (or pled guilty to using an overly wide stance), along with an indictment of Rep. Rick Renzi of Arizona that accuses him of extortion, wire fraud, and money laudering. (Bear in mind the old saying that a good prosecutor could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich, too.) Even on a state level, Delegate Robert McKee left office after a FBI search of his home allegedly found child pornography in his home and on his personal computer.

Misdeeds even occur on a local level: witness the recent DWI arrest of Wicomico County State’s Attorney Davis Ruark. And you can’t always find honesty in public employees either, as Wicomico County employees are under suspicion for a scheme to steal up to $2 million in items belonging to the county. (I went over these charges a couple weeks ago.)

Getting back to my party’s standardbearer, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone out there has dirt on John McCain as well and they’re just waiting for the right moment to dish it out. All in all, it makes me wonder about where our nation is going.

I’ve met a lot of people who were involved with politics, probably moreso than 90% of those of you reading this. My interest in that field led me to get involved with it on the local level, and that’s the level at which I’m planning on staying. Asking people for money never much appealed to me because then I’d feel like I owed them something.

But if you look at those people I listed in my little hall of shame (with the caveat in some cases that they’re simply accused of their transgressions and not convicted), what brought them down generally fell into two categories: money and morality. One can argue that accepting bribes would also fall into the “morality” category, but for the purpose of my remaining post I’ll keep them separated.

While there are times the morality category can be described as a temporary lack of good judgment on the part of the accused (among my examples, Davis Ruark’s DWI charge comes closest to this description), there’s usually a pattern of behavior that only comes to the surface once a person is caught. For example, it’s likely that this wasn’t the only time Governor Spitzer solicited a prostitute and I’d venture to say that Delegate McKee didn’t acquire his alleged collection overnight. Even though both had to know what they were doing wasn’t kosher with the public trust placed in them, they apparently felt that they were above the law and could do what they wished.

But while these examples in the morality category are bad enough, we have people who steal from the public till for personal gain. In just over a month, most of us face the deadline to send in our tax returns and while most of us get some amount of money back from the federal government, it’s not everything we sent in after you count Social Security, Medicare, and the dozens of other levies placed upon us by government of all levels. Yet more and more people seem to get into public office or the political arena with the apparent intention of enriching themselves as much as possible with dollars sent in by other people. Indeed, absolute power does seem to corrupt some absolutely, and what really scares me is how many haven’t been caught yet. The shame of it all is that I used to think 99% of the politicians I knew were trustworthy, and while maybe that’s never been true I’ve become more and more cynical about that number over time.

While I can’t say I’m naive enough to ever think we’ll have a perfect system again, I’m led to believe that the only way we could get back to sanity is to elect a group of people who are dedicated to making government smaller and allowing the people to keep more of their own money. With less money to redistribute, the temptation to take some off the top may be tempered too. It’s a long shot, but that may be our only hope.

Crossposted on Red Maryland.

Legislative checkup, 2008 session day 60 (part 2)

Today’s excursion into the Maryland General Assembly will be shorter because I’ve found in my research that most GOP bills don’t get very far in our Democrat-dominated legislative body. I can pretty much set up four groups of bills: those that got a hearing but went no farther, those still awaiting a scheduled hearing, those that actually got the courtesy of a committee vote before being rejected, and rare victories. If you go back to the original Checkup post you can read what these bills are about with their sponsors.

Bills that were heard but proceeded no farther:

Still waiting on their day of debate:

Several GOP proposals were already defeated in committee:

Of all the bills I went through from the GOP side, only one survived and it was the one I thought was the most ridiculous. Senate Bill 111 added the homeless to the list of people who could be construed as victims of hate crimes. It passed third reading 40-4, with Senators Stoltzfus and Colburn in favor, as was Senator Andy Harris. The House has yet to act on the legislation.

I asked Harris about why he voted in favor of the bill last week, and his explanation was that there’s a strategy to water down the whole idea of hate crimes by continually adding groups to the equation to a point where most people could conceivably be covered. I can understand the logic of the argument, but I still disagree that any such legislation should be on the books.

This will take care of another installment of my Legislative Checkup. I’ll probably make another pass at this around the end of the month as the hearing process will be complete and omit those bills which died in committee previously in order to streamline the reporting. So chances are most of what I look at will be the lunacy the Democrats want to enact.