A handful of new and old blogs that I’m going to be reading over the next few months.
Rep. Kirk Person is blogging at “Session Notes.” No comments enabled (crap-oh), but he seems to know what he’s doing.
Paul Shinn’s legislative assistant, Jim Freeburg, is blogging at “Forever Flippant.” Mostly looks like a personal blog, but he’s writing a bit about his job in a general sense. Should be good reading.
Jim does give a pretty good peak into an LAs life:
In 2 days, nearly a dozen lobbyists met with my boss. Not all were from big business: some represented “special interest” groups such as the environmental community, municipalities and education groups. Time is scarce however, 15 minutes max for meetings, scheduled back to back to back to back. We also got some big news, my boss will be the chair of the new Senator Higher Education Committee. Democrats, as the majority party, have the power to choose committee structure so they decided to split the Early Learning, K-12, and Higher Education committee into two. This is done by Democrat leadership in the form of a Committee on Committees. This is a group of powerful Senators who decide who will head up each committee, rewarding loyal friends, and leaving independent Democrats out of positions of power.
With the new committee assignment, I’ll be having a whole new challenge: trying to figure out how to properly fund our institutions of higher learning while also coming up with funding to get a new 4-year college in Snohomish County.
And, of course, there is the great Uptheblog by Rep. Dave Upthegrove. I’ll let Noemie at Washblog tell you about this one. Its pretty sweet. You have to like a guy who can make fun of his own pretty silly sounding name.
Upthegrove is Chair of the House Select Committee on Puget Sound, and here he is quoted in a recent Seattle Times article on the legislative agenda for the environment. Here’s his My Space page. I subscribe to it and occasionally follow the links to the blog entries, which tend to detail days packed with meetings with teachers, environmentalists, journalists, lobbyists, business people, other legislators and government officials, etc. He notes meeting blogger, Andrew Villeneuve, founder of Northwest Progressive Institute at a recent event. One of the entries not too long ago recounted a triathlon he completed: running, biking, swimming. Then he dried off and went to a meeting or panel or something. How cool is that!
Here’s an old post of mine where I reflect on how important it is that he posts at MySpace.
