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Oklahoma Election 2020: Judges
The 2020 Oklahoma general election ballot has retention votes for three State Supreme Court justices, two judges on the Court of Criminal Appeals, and three judges on the Court of Civil Appeals. These are yes-no votes, unlike the district judge elections that occur in gubernatorial election years. If "no" prevails...
2019 OKGOP convention thoughts
UPDATE: Generally a good outcome. David McLain was elected chairman. Former State Rep. Mike Turner was elected vice chairman. All of the rule changes were thrown out because outgoing state chairman Pam Pollard failed to provide the proposals to delegates by the 10-day deadline. Platform was on the agenda and...
Can the blogosphere be reconnected?
Some recent articles have had me thinking about blogs, what we had, what we lost, and how we might be able to get it back. As massive social media sites have brought the global conversation under centralized control, concentrating the power to exclude people and opinions in the hands of...
Oklahoma 2016 judicial retention
Two State Supreme Court justices, two judges on the Court of Criminal Appeals, and three judges on the Court of Civil Appeals are before the voters for retention. If any of the judges get more no votes than yes votes, he or she will be out of office, and a...
Oklahoma SQ 780: Decriminalization of drug possession
UPDATED 2016/11/02: Having completed my analysis of all 23 sections of the SQ 780 legislation, I have revised the introductory text below to provide a better summary of the effect of passing the state question. Oklahoma State Question 780 began life as an initiative petition. Unlike most state questions, its...
Oklahoma SQ 779: Boren sales tax for schools and colleges
Oklahoma State Question 779, an initiative petition promoted by University of Oklahoma President (and former Oklahoma governor and senator) David Boren, would amend the Oklahoma Constitution, establishing a permanent 1 cent on the dollar sales tax (a permanent increase in the state sales tax rate from 4.5 cents per dollar...
Vision Tulsa and Tulsa County, April 5, 2016, election in a nutshell
Tomorrow, April 5, 2016, voters across Tulsa County have a special election for sheriff and will also vote on the county's sales tax proposal (1/20th of a cent for 15 years) for capital projects. Here's what the white countywide ballot will look like. Voters in several Tulsa County municipalities will...
Oklahoma Election 2014: judicial retention ballot
Three justices of the State Supreme Court (Reif, Colbert, Watt), one justice of the Court of Criminal Appeals (Lumpkin), and five justices of the Court of Civil Appeals (Goodman, Wiseman, Barnes, Rapp, Goree) will be on Tuesday's ballot. Oklahoma has a two-path appellate system: Criminal cases are appealed to the...
BatesLine's blogrolls
A request from a fellow blogger for reciprocal blogrolling (adding each other to our respective lists of recommended blogs) reminded me that I got away from the traditional blogroll (long lists of links to blog home pages) some time ago in favor of aggregation. The old system provided a prominent...
Bad bureaucrats: Pension logrolling, hidden funds, expenses fiddling
A few news items of interest, while you wait for me to publish some sort of analysis of last Tuesday's results: Reuters: Special Report: How a vicious circle of self-interest sank a California city -- long, but a must-read: Yet on close examination, the city's decades-long journey from prosperous, middle-class...
Francis McGrath, the definition of a city manager
If you look in the AP Stylebook to find out whether to capitalize city manager*, you find his name as the example, the paradigm: "City Manager Francis McGrath." When people ask me what I think about Tulsa changing to a council-manager form of government, I think of Francis McGrath. For...
City fires back on county jail negotiations
The jail sharing contract between the City of Tulsa and Tulsa County is due to expire in less than two weeks, and negotiations are stalled. Mayor Kathy Taylor issued a memo to the City Council last Friday reviewing the origins of the current contract, created in 1995, and the county...
Judicious voting
An edited version of this column was published in the November 2-8, 2006, issue of Urban Tulsa Weekly. The published version is available on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Here's my blog entry linking to the article. Posted October 25, 2022. Judicious voting By Michael D. Bates Ye shall not...
The anti-pork scorecard: 4 of 5 Oklahoma reps get failing grades
Logrolling is a time-honored technique for funding projects that couldn't stand up to focused scrutiny. You lump a project of questionable importance in with essential appropriations, so that no one dare vote against it. That setup makes it very hard for a voter to hold his own legislator accountable for...
Quick round-up
I have been busy today with work and with staving off a barrage of comment spam. The spammers were smart enough to see through my latest strategem, but to its programmers' credit, Movable Type seems to keep up with the most current list of open proxies and holds comments from...
BlogRolling recently updated now fixed?
It appears that the problems with BlogRolling's recently-updated feature have been corrected, as about half of my blogroll is now showing a reasonable last-updated time. UPDATE: Here's what BlogRolling has to say: We had a temporary issue with the blogrolling database. It seems the table had been abused and resulted...
Episcopal church tells Episcopal church to stop calling itself Episcopal
The rector of St. Gabriel's United Episcopal Church in Springdale, Arkansas, which is running a widely-supported and effective relief effort for those in southern India affected by last fall's tsunami, has been asked by the rector of St. Paul's, the largest Episcopal Church USA parish in nearby Fayetteville, to stop...
More on BlogRolling "recently updated" problems
I've done some more investigation into why most blogs on my blogroll don't ever show up as recently updated. BlogRolling.com's FAQ on how it determines which blogs have recently updated mentions that it relies on two RSS feeds in addition to direct pings. The two feeds are: http://www.weblogs.com/changes.xml http://www.blogger.com/changes.xml When...
Recently updated?
I probably shouldn't write about this, as it will remove a competitive advantage I currently enjoy. I have my blogroll sorted in most recently updated order, and I use it for my own reference to see who has new material posted. Other bloggers use italics, an asterisk, or some other...
Judge mandates recall for July 12
At about 3 p.m. today, District Judge Ronald L. Shaffer ruled against Tulsans for Election Integrity and Tulsa City Councilors Jim Mautino and Chris Medlock and for the Coalition for Responsible Government 2004 and ordered the Tulsa City Council to call recall elections for the two targeted councilors. I have...
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