E-Tickets, post-election analysis

Catching up with links -- I had two pieces in last week's Urban Tulsa Weekly.

My Cityscope column dealt with E-Tickets -- why the Tulsa Police Department needs the electronic citation system advocated by Councilor John Eagleton, and what's the hold up to getting it funded.

Here are some earlier stories about E-Tickets:

• August 1, 2007: Councilor Crusade by Brian Ervin
• September 26, 2007: Safer Streets with E-Tickets? by Brian Ervin
• January 16, 2008: Somebody Should Be Cited by Brian Ervin (on the mysterious cancellation of the bid request for the system
• November 5, 2008: News Updates, which mentions the Council's October 30 decision not to fund E-Tickets from the 2006 Third Penny fund.

Also in last week's issue was a feature story with my post-election analysis, covering the Tulsa County Commission District 2 race, the Republican successes in the State Legislature and Corporation Commission, and the re-election of Sen. Jim Inhofe (while noting the strange undervote in the U. S. Senate race) and Congressman John Sullivan. I took a look at the swath of counties, stretching from Pennsylvania to Oklahoma, that gave more votes to the Republican presidential nominee this year than in 2004, and noted the connection to the lands of Ulster-Americans, aka the Scotch-Irish. I closed by suggesting that Republicans may want to adapt the British Conservative Party's Campaign North, their successful effort to rebuild their party in the north of England, where they had been nearly wiped out by the Labour Party.

A few links related to that last point:

• January 2007 memo from Francis Maude to Conservative MPs describing the creation of Campaign North


• Guardian story on the formation of Campaign North


• Videos about the campaign centers in the North East, the North West, and Yorkshire.