KRA is hanging out in St. Louis, getting our batteries recharged at the Conservative Heartland Leadership Conference. Last night we heard about transparency in government (more coverage here) from some folks who have made it happen their state, similar to how it’s happening in Kansas (check out KanView to see the Kansas version of state government transparency in action).
Michael Quinn Sullivan, president of Empower Texans, began the discussion by quoting Thomas Jefferson:
I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and, if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education.
We heard a lot of good things, but one of the best comments of the night was from Grover Norquist, President of Americans for Tax Reform
Norquist ended the panel discussion by noting there are 513,000 elected officials in the United States and that transparency offers each would be challenger $300,000 in opposition research. “This is better than term limits,” he said.
With that in mind, KRA is going to launch a fun project, designed to get us all using this great opposition research tool in Kansas. Drop into our blog on Friday for the debut of Where’s Wampum*.
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on Jun 6th, 2009 at 12:10 am
One thing you can always depend on in politics: if you make plans to do something and tell the world it will happen at a certain time before you have it 100% ready to go, something will come up that will prevent you from meeting your goal. Such is the case with “Where’s Wampum”. We thought we’d be back in Kansas (we are) and have plenty of time to kick it off on Friday – but something unexpected came up and filled the day before we had a chance to finalize today’s planned “Where’s Wampum” post. And since we really want to post it on a Friday, we are going to wait and kick it off next week, on June 12. Well, that’s the plan anyway!