Jack Johnson Web Site Header

Currently, the Tennessee legislature is in session, and Senator Johnson is using the site to keep his constituents informed on the news from the session, his schedule and committee meetings, as well as, solicite feedback from them.  Senator Johnson has also started to Twitter and you can reach his account from the site.

Senator Johnson is up for election in November , 2010 and will continue to use the site as a valuable communications venue to speak directly to the voters in his district.

We have some amazingly talented designers and the site looks incredible. On the back-end it has a custom content management system to easily allow the Senator and his staff to add events, news release and any other information; manage volunteers and send email to his email list.

I look forward to working with candidates around the nation to help them improve their web presence so they can communicate directly with voters.

Feel free to use my contact form if you are interested in getting more info on me or Majority Strategies.

On a personal note, I went to Sunday school with the Senator’s daughter, I even have photos from 1978 to prove it, LOL.

Article: Earmark for Lexington

In a similar vein is this blog post on Fred Thompson’s site about how “temporary” taxes are anything but. I love this quote:

As we all know, there are few things more permanent than a temporary tax. Just ask the folks who footed the cost of the Spanish-American War for the past 108 years via a federal excise tax on our phone bills.

Anyway, currently I am playing with tools in the Yahoo User Interface, some little JavaScript widgets that help give your sites a little more Web 2.0 interactive flair.  I am not doing anything complicated, but wish I knew JavaScript better, but with learning C#/ASP and the MS-SQL, MySQL and PHP work, I don’t know that my brain could take in anymore.

Of course, if the wonderful people at WordPress would put out a Rich Text Editor like the one embedded in this blog editor my life would be simpler. One of the reasons I am working with the YUI is that version 2.3 has a rich text editor. I have tested out quite a few and can’t seem to, at least easily, get the right set of options configured in any of them. So far, YUI’s Editor has been the easiest to configure, but still missing an image upload option (at least that I have found yet).

Lastly, while I took a break from coding, I was looking at the Iowa Straw Poll results. I find these to be great money makers for the party that holds it, but of limited real value. However, because the media places value on them, so do the candidates, or is that the other way around? Anyhow, after watching a video the other day from Mike Huckabee, I was very impressed to see his  second place win.

I went over to his site and thought it looked pretty cool and they already had a YouTube video up of post-Straw Poll spin, in about an hour, that is pretty good. What surprised me was that it was running ColdFusion. I have never done any Coldfusion, but what I have seen of Scorpio, ColdFusion 8 (which maybe out of beta now), Adobe hasn’t abandoned it, and with the help of BlueDragon, it might actually hold some developer mindshare.

On a personal note, I thought Huckabee to be a very articulate speaker and well-reasoned thinker. Plus, he has a good personal story with the weight loss and the Baptist preacher background. I will say the most ironic thing about him is that his sons, one of whom got arrested last year, are all still relatively large, and here the Governor lost all this weight and wrote a book on it. I am not really surprised about one son, as I met him back in my College Republican days and I think we all knew the only way he was involved with the CR’s was because of his dad, kinda reminded me of Tommy Boy.

So guess there are my random thoughts for Saturday…have a good rest of your weekend.

Anyway, I should say don’t use me as a judge of the presidential campaign web sites, frankly I have only spent like 10 minutes on the other GOP ones, and not much longer on the Dem ones. (Although, doing a quick tour just now, I love the fact that McCain’s is begging for money and not much else on the front page…I’ll leave it at that.)

I read an article today about the changes to the congressional ethics laws and they have this strongly worded section over candidate’s spouses and other family members being paid by the candidate’s committee or the family member’s employer being paid by the committee. I come to most of these articles different than most Americans. Having worked with and met many candidates and their families, I have found most to be honest and the family members often extremely talented and smart in their own right. Often they have skills that, while not alone, are very valuable to a candidate and for which they would otherwise be well-paid in the open market. All committees meet pretty stringent and frequent reporting requirements, so they employees and vendors for a candidate are well known (the only exception would be in the case the vendor currently doesn’t have to disclose that they employ a family member, then okay make that a reporting requirement, in the interest of full disclosure).

If the candidate’s donor are okay with the arrangement, why should the House Ethics Comm. care. This isn’t taxpayer money, but donor’s money. If it is an appearance thing, like Caesar’s wife, then okay. But for these “government watchdogs” to get all concerned over how this private money is spent and in the process lambaste these private citizens who are, for the most part, only trying to help their family member do a good job and get elected is a travesty.

Moreover, I don’t think this will alleviate the past lobbyists scandals, or the current Alaskan scandal, but I hope it gives everyone warm fuzzies that a law was passed that made no practical difference (isn’t that most laws these days???).

I will now get off my soap box and go back to my servers.

Read the full article at The Fix.

(Please contact me if want to pay me$21,000/mo. for your web presence, LOL.)

At he end of June, former US Senator Fred Thompson appeared to be on the verge of officially announcing that his flirtation with running was more than that, that he would be a candidate for the GOP nomination.

Personally, I was pleased. I found him to be an intriguing figure (I met him in 1998 at the Biloxi SRLC) and certainly as truly conservative, at least for the things I want, as any of the other candidates. (I won’t go on about my predilections, but suffice it to say if you want to see flip-flopping as high art, search for Mitt Romney on Youtube; and I was never a fan of McCain, since he appears to be totally opposed to our Senator McConnell on one of the more important issues – free speech; but I digress.)

But from the tech side what I found interesting is how he was able to build his team up and get a web site that was pretty nice looking in only a week. I realize he probably was laying the ground work for a bit longer. However, only 4 years ago, the web site would have been an afterthought and certainly wouldn’t have been so high on the agenda. Moreover, I was impressed with the quality of the site in the time frame it appeared from germination to execution of his nascent campaign.

I hope, at least from the techy side, he continues to use this forethought to his advantage. The GOP seemed to have been the first movers on the Internet, as a way to gain an advantage over the mainstream leftist media, but since Dean in 2004, we seem to have lost our way and our current presidential candidates and the national committee may be throwing money at it, but certainly aren’t making all the right moves that the Dem candidates are (see Clinton ad, Obama MySpace).

Anyway, I was reading a recent e-mail from the Nixon Library about the controversy that still swirls around his presidency and legacy. In the letter, they are discussing the attempt to ensure all the records from the presidency are preserved and archived, and a big part of this is that the library is now a part of the National Archives. Up until now it had been an all private foundation supporting and running it, lest that evil Nixon use the US Treasury anymore by spewing his propaganda, so his opponents said. As the letter rightly points out, most two-term presidents since Eisenhower have some ignominious distinction in their eight-years and they haven’t exactly been totally neutral in their presentation even though they are taxpayer funded libraries.

Honestly, I haven’t been to any library but Nixon’s, although I would love to go to LBJ’s, Clinton’s and Reagan’s; but, it is a fascinating insight into the continuing academic consternation over what to do with our only president who ever resigned.

While I worked at the Ky. Republican Party, Steve Robertson was the political director. Steve taught me a lot, but mostly it wasn’t about politics, and a lot of it I didn’t realized till I aged a bit more.

This weekend, after serving as the director of the Governor’s Office for Local Development (GOLD), Steve was elected chairman of the Republican Party. This is awing considering he isn’t much older than me, but certainly deserving, and I think he can contribute a lot to the party, and maybe even to the Governor’s re-election.

Hopefully, Steve will use his position to improve blogging and web usage by Republicans in this state, as the Dems and specifically Mark Nickolas, have become the de facto news source for politics, sad though it is (in fact, the Herald Leader didn’t even post a full article about yesterday’s election, guess it wasn’t rancorous enough to be “newsworthy”).