Nebraska Citizen

10/28/05 Interview with Robert Howard by Steve Smith, © Nebraska Citizen.

I called Robert Howard to confirm that he was running for the Nebraska Legislature - District 2, and that the information that I had was correct. Robert wanted to give me a bit more information than the biographical information that I was asking for. We started out talking about the economy. Robert believes the best way to help the economy is to take entitlement revenue off the tax roles. To Robert, this means eliminating the State's tax on Social Security revenue, military retirement income and civil service income. He believes that this would encourage people who have worked for Offutt to return when they retire. He also feels that fewer people would leave the State if their retirement income was not taxed.

Robert is cynical about LB775. He feels that the bill is a failure. "Tax cuts should go to people who bring money into the State, not take it out of the State." This doesn't mean that Robert opposes all economic incentives. He believes that such incentives should go to people or companies that are headquartered in the State.

Robert worked as a blue collar worker doing quality control inspections. He spent much of his life doing repair work. He is a Democrat because he feels the Democratic party does a better job of representing the employee. However, he doesn't agree with the party on everything. For example, he believes the Democrats are wrong on the gun issue. Robert is a gun owner himself.

On the subject of abortion, Robert says that "nobody is in favor of abortion, but correcting it by making it illegal may end up with the same results as prohibition.” He feels that making it easier for the mother to choose life may be more effective.

Robert believes individual rights are important. It is one of his key beliefs. People who don't want to be annexed shouldn't be forced. A person shouldn't have to live with a feedlot that might affect their health.

In his eyes, there are a couple of ways to deal with industries that are detrimental to the quality of life in a community. One way is to place the facility in a remote area so that there is a large buffer between it and the community. The other way is to enclose such facilities to control air and water quality.

Robert knows that groundwater is a major issue for Nebraska but doesn't feel he is knowledgeable enough to be able to form an opinion as to how it should be handled. Robert believes he would be one of forty-nine Legislators and the best way to accomplish things is to work as a group to find what is best for the State.

He believes his greatest power is to be able to bring things to the table.

Our conversation moved over to schools. Robert believes the schools are doing pretty well. However, he believes that private schools with a history of providing a good education shouldn't have to bear all of the financial burden alone. Robert could support vouchers where a community has a proven need. For example, if there is a large Hispanic population, then perhaps there would be enough children to justify teaching some of the primary classes in Spanish as the children learn English.

Robert wants to be on the Judicial Committee because he wants to be able to protect individual rights. He also wants to be on the Ways and Means Committee so that he can help guide the direction of Economic Development.
Robert would like to emphasize that he is in favor of tax cuts, especially State taxes on Federal entitlements.

Posted by steve at 08:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (104)

The plan is to keep this blog neutral. There is no intent to favor one candidate over another. The only time I will give a candidate a hard time is if the candidate chooses to ignore questions about their positions on issues. Right now most of the work is in verifying the candidates contact and biographical information. Some people are easy to find because they have set up a web site and are prepared. Other candidates put their name in and then figure out what they need to do. There are a couple that I can't find much information on at all. There are also rumors about some people running that are not. For example, Politics1 lists several candidates as running that when I called them to verify said they are not running.

I hope to keep the site accurate. If you find anything incorrect please drop me an email and let me know.

Eventually I will Google all of the candidates and link to all of the various stories that I can find. For some there is simply too much information to list and in their case I will simply link to Google. A word of warning to people. Be careful what you say. Google has a very long memory. Even if you put something on your page and delete it later, Google will store the old material in their cache which you cannot touch.

While I love Google, they recently knocked down all of the Google ads that I had on this site. It was for a reason unrelated to anything done here but it caused a lot of page cannot be found errors. Unfortunately, it isn't easy to talk to Google as they severely limit communication with them. Took all of the Google stuff off for now.

Apparently trackbacks are not working on this site. Not sure why so will try to figure that out.

So far all of the candidates that I have managed to make contact with have been extremely cooperative in providing information. That has gone better than I anticipated when I started. It is proving harder to find some candidates than it should be but nothing serious.

Posted by steve at 02:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (6)

I am new to blogging so the only way to learn how things work is to try them and see what happens. According to Abe at http://dontletmestopyou.blogspot.com trackbacks on this site are not working. I am not even sure how to test that but this post is step one.

According to Technorati there are 3 sites that have linked to this site. I think by my referencing them that they will be notified of this post automatically. At least that is what the MT3 documentation seems to say.

So a thank you for the links to:

Abe at Don't Let Me Stop You/
Ryne McClaren at Ryne McClaren: A Weblog
Nebraska Politics at Nebraska Politics

Posted by steve at 05:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (14)

Douglas Polk, candidate for the 3rd Congressional District, has provided a statement via email to Nebraska Citizen.

Click here to read his comments.

Doug Polk Statement.htm

Posted by steve at 04:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (6)

Don Walton reports that

Philip Erdman forgoes bid for 3rd District race and supports Adrian Smith

Posted by steve at 09:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (4)

Bob Kerry Joins Scott Kleeb's campaign

Posted by steve at 08:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (5)

I emailed notice to each of the Senate and Congressional candidates today notifying them of the sites existence and asking them for biographical information along with any corrections they might see that I need to make. It takes a bit of time to find all of their addresses. So far I have contact information for everyone except David Harris and Mike Meister. If anyone knows how to contact these two, please let me know.

I will work on the other races as I have time.

Posted by steve at 05:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (9)

This is the first entry about a candidate instead of about setting up the blog. I signed up for email updates from each of the Senate candidates with the exception of the Nelson campaign. I didn't find any email notices available from the Nelson campaign. Shortly after signing for his updates I received an email providing notice of this story.

Lincoln Journal Star article on David Kramer

Anyone is welcome to provide notice of any story or information. We will be happy to link to it.

Posted by steve at 05:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (17)

About have the blog setup. I spent yesterday tweaking the site and learned how to get some of the key parts of the site to work with the blog software. Next step is to get the biographical questions finished up and sent out to the candidates. Also need to find some more people that want to help keep track of what candidates are doing. So we are looking for Nebraska political junkies. Contact us if you would like to participate. Oh, yeah, we need to let people know this site exists.

Posted by steve at 11:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (6)

I operate several businesses and work on this when time permits. Right now I am getting the layout to be along the lines of what I want. I am also working on getting all of the questions to the candidates ready to go. If you have any suggested questsions, please send them in. The site is divied into two sections. This makes it feel a bit disjointed but permits me to layout out all of the candidate profiles with more control than I can get with blogging software. The method has its pros and cons but lets me accomplish what I want.

Posted by steve at 04:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (2)

Nebraska Citizen is a team effort. The goal is to collect information about as many of Nebraska's political races as possible. Right now most people in Nebraska vote about candidates without knowing what the candidate believes. There are a variety of reasons for this but we hope this blog and web site will help make information available in a format that is easy to read and to quickly discover what each candidate is about.

Not all politicians will voluntarily participate. The well organized campaigns with a lot of money will choose one or two issues and talk about those issues only, ignoring all other questions. These candidates believe they can run a name recognition campaign and be successful. These candidates believe it is important to restrict the amount of information the public has about them because every time they take a position they fear they will lose votes. At candidate school they are taught how to avoid and to turn all questions to the issues they have chosen to talk about.

As a result, voters typically elect the candidate that is packaged well even if that candidate holds many positions that the voter disagrees with. In races where there are too many voters for the candidate to be known on a personal basis, we usually elect the candidate that has the ability to raise the most money.

This is especially true for the Congressional, Statewide seats such as Treasure or Attorney General, Legislative, Regent, or Public Service Commission. Even NRD races and community collage races are have too large of a district for the candidate to be well known. The race for governor is one of the few races that the Main Stream Media actually finds out the position of each candidate and reports it. The voter rarely has good information to base their decision on for most of the other races

Nebraska Citizen believes the public is better served and that our government will work best when the people know who it is that they are voting for. Getting candidates to answers questions issues has always been difficult. Many simply will not answer any questions.

Therefore for Nebraska Citizen to be successful in finding out the positions of each candidate we will use the following approach.

First we will ask each candidate to fill out a questionnaire. If they fill it out, we will accept their answer and post their positions. We will permit the candidate to take as much room as they need to explain any position. The internet, as compared to other forms of the media, makes it very easy to permit someone to expand on a yes/no question.

Second, if the candidate will not answer the questionnaire, then we will send out our team of investigators to find the likely position of the candidate. We will use a variety of methods to do this. We will attend meetings, make phone calls, ask the candidates staff, friends, associates and look at any records that might exist. We will also accept reports from people that live in the area. Based on what we find and what is reported to us, we will fill in the candidate's position as accurately as we can. We will let the site visitor know if the position is one given voluntarily by the candidate or one that we had to work to find.

Third, if the candidate feels that our report of their position is incorrect, then we will always accept the candidate's clarification. We will always accept the candidate’s direct statement over any other source.

We believe this policy will result in information on many races that cannot be found anywhere. It will also require a group of people that care about politics. If you would like to join the team, please contact us.

Posted by steve at 08:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)