John Brummett skewers the Arkansas Republican Party today for its supposed fiscal interest in going after Matt Campbell, creator of the Blue Hog Report, for the so-far unsupported belief that he might have posted some blog items during state time as an employee of the Arkansas Supreme Court.
If the Republicans REALLY cared about money, they’d talk about Secretary of State Mark Martin’s shoddy bookkeeping, his expensive staff retreat, his misuse of Board of Apportionment money, his own employees’ political activities on state time.
No, Brummett concludes, this was a plan — successful given that Campbell shut BHR down — to silence an effective critical voice, one whose biggest contribution to good government was a bright light on unconstitutional expense reimbursements to legislators, a bipartisan scandal. He writes:
What needs to happen is that, first, any conceivably justifiable concerns that either of these bloggers abused state time or equipment — not that any evidence exists at this point — needs to be addressed by their employers as personnel matters, and, second, Campbell must get his bluehogreport.com back online so that he can give the Republicans more of the hell they now deserve more than ever.
He tells me he is using this down-time to “retool” and design a long-term blogging strategy.
Perhaps he is over-thinking. After all, he seems to have been doing fine. And now the Blue Hog can officially tout himself as the blog the state Republican Party doesn’t want you to see.
Campbell has said he was also concerned about the Republican grief brought down on a friend, Jeff Woodmansee, who’s contributed a few times to Blue Hog and who works in the law library at UALR, now trying to comply with a massive FOI request for their librarian’s records.
Woodmansee sent me a note the other day that he now says I may use relative to his involvement. CORRECTION: I made a mistake and used an earlier draft not intended for publication rather than a subsequent note that was intended for publication. It is essentially the same, that he doesn’t fear the document request, but regrets the trouble it has caused others: