RightOn Texas

Thursday, October 30, 2008

Freedom Ain't Free: Michelle Ma Belle - Obama's Greatest Liability

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Right Online Austin Newsletter: Election Edition

Right in Austin Blogger Newsletter

November Election Edition

Endorsements in Travis County Races

I Support Congressman McCaul

I first met Michael McCaul during the 2004 Republican Party Primary election cycle. This was right after redistricting created an oblong-shaped district that ran from Pflugerville to Katy. After interviewing all of the candidates in January and February of 2004, I came to the conclusion that Michael McCaul was the best choice for representation in Congress and recommended Young Conservatives of Texas to endorse him then. I have the same conclusions now as I did in 2004.

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Find your Travis County Voting Location

The Troops Choice for Commander-in-Chief

Words never spoken - “Lincoln is up over McClellan by 6 points. It looks like the swing state of New Jersey could be leaning McClellan’s way. This election of ’64 is all over the map” or “The latest tracking poll shows that McKinley is ahead in the swing states and is now up 54-46 amongst late deciding voters.” Or how about, “New polls indicate that Thomas Jefferson could face trouble in the election.” What? Never read about the media and pollster wars of the 1860s? Haven’t come across how the daily tracking polls gauged whether or not Washington could beat the British? Are you sure you haven’t seen a documentary somewhere that showed how Americans were asked whether or not we could win World War II? For as much fun as everyone has looking at polls, they seem in general to have degraded our society. The media is now only focused on making every election into a horse race. If the campaigns can’t be covered as a sporting event then the mainstream press heads home and leaves the C-SPAN cameras to a lonely audience of informed, but vastly outnumbered smart voters.

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Reasons I Support Jerry Mikus

I have had the privilege of getting to know Jerry Mikus over the past couple of months during this year’s campaign. Jerry is a candidate for State Representative in District 50, which covers north and northwest Travis County. When Jerry talks to people, he speaks from his heart, which is the main reason that I support him. Jerry is not the mouth-piece for a consultant or for a special interest group. Jerry’s special interest is the people of north Austin in the Texas Legislature.

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Down Ballot Spotlight: Constable Bob Vann

Constable Bob Vann has served Travis County Precinct 2 with honor and dignity for twelve years now. Every person that I have met who knows Bob Vann recognizes him as a man of integrity, respect, and determination. He has served the residents of Travis County very well over the last decade.

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General Election Information

Karl Thomas-Musselman: Noreiga’s and Strama’s Campaign want to “Destroy Republican Party”

Noriega’s official Online Campaign Director, Karl Thomas Musselman, left an interesting comment at the angry and unhinged Liberal blog site Daily Kos:
“This election is our chance to destroy the Republican Party and its leadership. On the campaign trail, Mr. Noriega has stated that he wants to represent all Texans. However wanting to destroy the party that represents the majority of our state’s citizens, doesn’t exactly sound like ALL Texans to me.”

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Joe is a Plumber and has a Six Pack?

Some guy named "Joe" tonight is infamous for something that doesn't really involve him but instead resembles every American. He's an average person that works an average job with a six pack!

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Nothing New Under the Sun

As frightening as Barack Obama's socialism is to many of us, we need to remember that it's not like he's the first American to ever think about these things. Jonah Goldberg has a fantastic column up this morning discussing that very thing, and I highly recommend it.

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Austin Area Political Forums

No Faith in Austin Interfaith

I attended the Austin Interfaith forum tonight. As a St Thomas More parishioner, I got the notice, and originally confused this with a parish event. I found out later this was an event that included other churches (St Albert), a synagogue (Kol Halev), and members of other groups (teachers unions). The 'forum' was not really a forum, but rather was an endorsement rally put on by the Austin Interfaith 'faithful' for their issues. (This was said directly by one of the leaders: "Our Issues are our candidate" and they endorse an agenda.) This was a highly scripted event, where almost all the talking was done by the Austin Interfaith leaders and questioners, and only a little time by candidates to answer, and no free-range audience participation.

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Local Issues on the Ballot

Round Rock ISD Seeks to Raise Taxes

The Round Rock ISD Board of Trustees voted over the summer to put nearly $300,000,000 in bond proposals on the November ballot. These bonds, if passed, will raise the total amount of public debt on Round Rock ISD citizens to nearly $1 billion since 1993.

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Get the facts about how the Domain Subsidies are affecting Austin, and why you should vote FOR Prop 2 on Nov. 4.

http://www.stopdomainsubsidies.com/

Spotlight of the Week: YCT Hosts Governor George Allen

George Allen: Start Your Creative Engines!

Young Conservatives of Texas at the University of Texas hosted George Allen on Tuesday evening. George Allen, the former Governor and Senator from the Commonwealth of Virginia, spoke on how to use our common sense, conservative, Jeffersonian principles to address one of the biggest problems facing our generation: energy policy. George Allen's wit and outlook gave a very clear picture into what our country must do to achieve energy independence while growing our business infrastructure simultaneously.

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If you have blog posts that focus on Travis County politics, candidates, and issues, please forward me the links so they can be included in future updates. If you would like to be unsubscribed, please email me and let me know.

Friday, August 8, 2008

Bloggers For Cornyn

Here is the Bloggers for Cornyn blogroll:

Friday, July 25, 2008

Google Reader for RightOnTexas blogs

I've started to build up a subscription list on Google Reader. Freedom's Truth google reader public items.

Subscribing is easy enough, just add the blog name. the other nice thing about Google reader is that you can put your subscriptions into different categories.

The main problem is that you have to mark the items 'shared' to get it visible in the public page. So it's a nice private reader but less of a public-shared one. I'd like a more automatic way to do public aggreggation. Maybe I should use Feedburner or something else instead. Comments?

UPDATE: I was able to get the RightOnAustin tag to be public, so now all I have to do is set up the correct set of blogs for it.

Monday, July 21, 2008

Austin Bloggers - A good template

Austin Bloggers is an aggregation site. We could / should be able to do something similar with the Texas conservative bloggers.

A note about their mechanisms:

The original Austin Bloggers site supported posting only by trackback: a capability found in most blog packages and made popular by Movable Type. Later, a portal login was added so that people could compose and submit entries through a form. Even later, the submission form was enhanced so you could pull the RSS feed from your blog and easily post an entry from that.

The trackback mechanism is subject to abuse, and nearly all of the metablog trackback submissions are spam. The spam entries are suppressed from the main page, but they are causing problems in the RSS feed. The spam posts appear as "has been removed" entries in RSS.

The trackback spam has grown to be a major annoyance and action was required. I could do some computer science heroics to prevent it, but, I don't think many people are using trackback anymore. Trackback submissions to the metablog have been disabled. If you don't know what "trackback" means then don't worry, this probably doesn't apply to you.

If you wish to continue to post metablog entries via trackback then contact me and I will set up a private URL that you may use. As of this moment, trackback posting should be considered deprecated, and may be removed completely depending on feedback from the community.

RPT Blogs etc.

Seeing JohnMcCain blogs, my estimation of the John McCain online effort went up considerably. This site is a lot more newsy and worthwhile than the McCain site. Had discussion at AFP conference with (name elided to protect my feeble memory) of the RPT (Republican Party of Texas), and I proposed a few things.
- "Tina's blog" and maybe have her twitter (Can't believe I proposed it, but the virus is spreading; I don't use twitter and likely won't anytime soon, btw)
- Cornyn has a good blogroll (good source for our blogroll). But it would be nice if RPT could put a RPT Blogs, like the McCainblogs.com site.
- Support for campaigns and candidates in terms of setting up meetings online, "meetup" style.
- An RSS feed that combines the RSS feeds from all the campaigns (and teach campaigns how to make Press Releases and use the RSS feed to distribute it).
- Calendar items, that can include campaign events. Why not mash up with geographical info so you can tell what campaigns will be having events in your area?

In other words, my suggestion was for the RPT to be an umbrella of support for all state and local campaigns, providing online apps, tools and other things, and be a clearinghouse for campaign releases to the news media.

Friday, July 18, 2008

WP on RightOnline Summit

Washington Post on the RightOnline Summit.