Be ready for a brain cramp by the time you make your way to the end of the densest news articles you’re likely to read for a long time.

I am so pleased to see that someone else has noticed that it is impossible to find contact information for party officers on the utgop.org web site.

As you may or may not know, these deficiencies are part of a longstanding and creeping dismantling of that web site.

Whereas, it was once possible to get a complete listing of all of the party officers of all of Utah’s County Republican Parties, that information has been systematically stripped from the site in recent years.

It was also possible, at one point, to get a complete listing of the members of the state central committee, by county, with phone numbers and addresses, so that we could lobby our representatives on what is, by the Bylaws, the governing body of the Utah Republican Party.

That listing, too, has been gone for years, now.

You get the drift.

The party wants your money. If you give enough of it, they will see to it that it gets transferred to Senator Curt Bramble’s PAC. (Kip, your county party illicitly transferred $54,000 dollars to exactly that PAC in the last election cycle, all to be given out like candy to the Republican incumbents who, too often, eat out of the hand of Utah’s own “Blago from Chicago,” Senator Bramble.)

What they don’t want is for you to pester them with phone calls asking hard questions about why the ethical slide in the Utah Republican Party continues with their smiling acquiescence.

If I were you, and I wanted a more vibrant, grassroots-friendly party, with better accountability, and a better flow of information, I would think long and hard before giving any public support — or my vote — to the man who thinks he has the state party chair in the bag at this point, current GOP Vice Chair, Todd Weiler.

Stan Lockhart has groomed him well.

And I can tell you from personal experience–that’s not a good thing.

Or you can try to get lucky and see if Stan Lockhart will take your call on his cell phone (801-368-2166) when he sees whose name is on the Caller ID. Most times, he lets those go to voice mail, though.

In a pinch, my understanding, from one of the victim candidates of the Fabulous Five, is that, sometimes, when Stan can’t get someone to pick up the phone, he’ll have his very good friend, Senator Curt Bramble (remember the Bramble-Lockhart float scandal and the Bramble-Lockhart lobbyist trip to Italy?) make the outbound call on Curt’s cell phone (801-361-5802), then hand the phone back to Stan who will then personally take over the ransom negotiations.

Let me know how that works out for you.

Mike Ridgway
801-438-4139
http://stalkingbramble.blogspot.com

Anyone who can nudge the Salt Lake Tribune to cover this kind of story as hard news (as opposed to the slimy, gooey, dark, smelly, useless [and did I say inaccurate, unfair, poorly researched, and libelous] kind of non-news attention that gossip columnist Paul Rolly would usually give in such a setting) is okay with me.

Trib writer, Dan Harrie, sometimes called the “Dyspeptic Dean” of political reporting, has for years laughed at those who would bring these kinds of “inside baseball” stories to his doorstep in the mistaken belief that he or one of his would give such concerns a single drop of ink in coverage.

I guess we should thank the Trib for weighing in. But given the fact that they are consistently about a week behind in telling these stories, I wouldn’t hold out any hopes that this trend of muckraking journalism will continue.

You know the proverb about broken clocks.

Mike Ridgway
Candidate for Utah’s National Committeeman
http://stalkingbramble.blogspot.com
801-438-4139

Kip