SOMETHING NEW HAS BEEN ADDED

As you well know, Ballots have been mailed out, and now we are voting on several state issues, but mostly on city and county races. This is where elections are still cute and cuddly events where friends and neighbors get out and have a good time supporting everything from their favorite fire commissioner to who the abacus operator for the county will be. It is an odd year and that means small year with no outside or big money influences.

Something has changed, as this sure doesn't describe my community.

• Local campaigns learned about mudslingin' in past elections; they're learnin' how to do it, now. Just wait 'till the campaigns get good at it next time around!
• Candidates are pretending to scold their operators for leaking out lies about their opponents.
• Local PACs are contributing big money to candidates. and spoken about as if they are the ugly kid at the high school prom.
• Out of State Law Firms and other entities are contributing bigger money to candidates.
• Gambling influences are contributing big money to candidates.
• National Organizations have discovered local elections across our state and other states as well and are pushing their agendas through local candidates. The majority of these have a "progressive" agenda.
• Elected positions with annual part time wages of $16k to $19k a year are now finding candidates raising between $35 and $50k to be an effective candidate. the bar has been set, that is what it will take if you want to be a viable candidate, like it or not.
• And the newest feature, is the unrestrained freemarket of ideas, anonymous ideas, flaming ideas, and trolling ideas. Go online to any newsblog and newspaper website across the state and read how nasty the online political game is being played. further if you really have too much time on your hands

Yes, go online and read the comments to the articles and to opinion letters and posts. User names are ficticious, scandalous, frivolous and are nothing compared to the comments that are left by these users under creatively anonymous names.
However, I suspect that there are really very few people who are using these features and that by observing writing styles you can surmise that each author has several pen-names. I may be wrong, but I presume that some news reporters and opinion writers of Newspapers moving to the internet are flaming themselves under ficticous names just to encourage readership. With the Papers, Radio, TV News, if it's bleeding, it's leading. but I digress...

This year there is probably no significant effect on votes being decided by readers of these online smashmouth forums. There is a very small group of people who want to have serious, civil political discussions and debates, and they are not yet adapting to the youth who make a conscious effort to bring the dialogue down to below locker room humor and take it to the 4th grade to ninth grade level of political debate. While this may be the most entertaining for many readers, it leaves much to be desired by those who snivel for civil dialogue.

In the next local election cycles coming in the future, we will see more use of these unregistered comments and get more out of hand, scandalous, libelous, etc; it is and will be protected political free speech. Like it or not, it may begin to have an effect on local voters.
Eight Points to ponder and I only covered one.

See ya next post.