I have gone through and linked to the financial information available at the Accountability and Disclosure Commission. This was done for the Legislature, Governor and Regent races.
Find the line that says Campaign Statements and then click on that. Find the latest report for the candiate and be sure to click on each tab to see who is financing the various campaigns and how they are spending their money.
The Legislative Candidate Profiles have been updated to the software that permits the candidates to fill out their information directly online. About a third of the candidates have filled out at least some of their information. We appreciate their participation and believe it will help the voters make an informed decision.
Next, I make sure all of the other races are up to date.
On March 6, we are sending letters to all legislative candidates. They have until March 21 to complete the form before we begin to complete the form on their behalf from the research we do. We don't really care what their answer is but we do want each candidate to provide whatever answer they are most comforatble with.
You can see the questions that we are asking by going to Races and then Legislature.
For now, other races will be done manually. I am working on getting software set up that wll allow us to do the other races online but that may not happen before the primary.
We are in the process of writing software that will allow us to send a set of questions to each Legislative candidate. The candidate will be able to complete their profile information online and answer the questions. The results will then be posted directly to the site. We hope to have the software written by the candidate filing deadline. So check back frequently to see what is happening.
I have been very busy with water related issues. Hopefully will know in a few days what the Legislature will do this year, or at least try to do.
I have been updating a few of the candidate profiles. But haven't posted notes on those yet. Trying to get basic information on everyone. I interview Pete Ricketts here in Imperial on Thursday.
I got my new phone today. It is a Vonage phone that allows me to pay a flat fee per month and then make unlimited calls anywhere in the nation. I plugged it in and expected that I would have to make some modifications to my network to get it to work. I didn't. It worked almost immediately. Take unit out of box, plug network cable in one jack, plug cordless phone base in other jack. Restart unit. I have a live phone that works without using the phone line. I call 15 candidates and 2 called back. It works. No one noticed that I was on a voice over internet phone. I noticed a couple of small skips and dropped syllables. I would say it is about 95% of the quality of the regular phone line. So for $25 month I get unlimited national calls, voicemail, caller ID, call forwarding, a near instant log of all incoming and outgoing calls, etc. I now need to do some more tests before I recommend it to my customers but so far I am impressed.
I took a break this last week and went in search of snow. I had been sitting in front of the computer too long and needed to see something different. I had to go over 10,000 feet to find it but found a foot of snow there in the shade of some trees. Now if I could just find a way of moving some of that moisture back to where I live I could make a lot of people happy.
Now that I am back I will start working on collecting more information on candidates. While most are cooperative, there are a few that don't seem to want to provide even their biographical information. Makes you wonder how responsive they will be once they get elected.
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
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.
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.
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.