Author: Jonathan Blundell

I'm a husband, father of three, blogger, podcaster, author and media geek who is hoping to live a simple life and follow The Way.

Who is Mike Huckabee?

CBS This Morning asked the same question… see what you think.

Heard different stories on his tax record as governor?

Here’s what he said on CBS This Morning…
“In the 10.5 years I was governor, the state and local tax burden… went up all of 1.1 percent.
Income tax was the same as it was.
There was a 1 penny difference in the sales tax.
But we also improved education which is a good thing…
They forget to tell you that we cut taxes 94 times.
We eliminated the marriage penalty.
We cut the taxes for the lowest income earners.
The taxes policies we did helped the people on the bottom reach the next rung on the ladder
And that’s the kind of real tax policies the country’s looking for.”

Jessica interviewed on ATC

A friend, Jess Davis was interviewed on NPR’s All Things Considered over the weekend about the 2008 presidential campaign.
She worked as an intern at the WDL while I was there and I worked with both her parents while at Ellis County. Now she’s News Editor at the student paper for the University of South Carolina.
Congrats to Jess. Keep up the good work.

Tracking Santa then and now

From the Google blog:
It was more than half a century ago, on Christmas Eve in 1955, that a Sears Roebuck & Co. store in Colorado Springs advertised a special hotline number for kids to call Santa. What the company didn’t know at the time was that they had inadvertently misprinted the telephone number. Instead of Santa’s workshop, the phone number put kids through to the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the bi-national U.S.-Canadian military organization responsible for the aerospace defense of the U. S. and Canada. Worse, it wasn’t just any number at NORAD: it was the commander-in-chief’s operations hotline. In the spirit of the season, Colonel Harry Shoup, the director of operations at the time, had his staff check radar data for any indication of a sleigh making its way south from the North Pole. They found that indeed there were signs of Santa, and merrily gave the children who called an update on his location. Thus, a tradition was born, and NORAD has continued to help children track Santa on Christmas Eve ever since.

Google is joining the effort. This holiday season, NORAD has partnered with Google to use technology including Google Maps, Google Earth, iGoogle and YouTube to track Santa. I can remember tracking Santa with my grandfather as a child, and I’m so proud to see my company carry on his vision of doing something this special for kids around the world.

The countdown begins December 1st on NORAD’s website, where families can find a new kid-friendly game or activity every day until December 24th. And starting at 1:00 am PST on December 24th, you’ll be able to track Santa’s trip in real time. You can download Google Earth and add the NORAD Tracks Santa iGoogle gadget to your iGoogle page anytime, but make sure to come back to noradsanta.org on December 24th to download the special Santa Tracking file for an enhanced 3D Santa-tracking experience.

Advice to Obama

Karl Rove offers this advice to Barack Obama:

If she (Hillary) wins the nomination it will be because her rivals – namely you – were weak when you confronted her and could not look her in the eye when you did. She is beatable but you have to raise your game. Iowa is your great chance for a breakthrough. Win it convincingly and you can build on it in the contests that follow. Lose it and victory becomes much more difficult.