Steve Lopez writes in today’s Los Angeles Times about Supervisor Mike Antonovich’s “screwball mailings:”

Antonovich is fond of putting staffers and clerks to work sending phonebook-size collections of his favorite “news” items to a few hundred friends and colleagues. Each time Uncle Mike gets the urge to regale pals with his ding-a-ling discoveries, it costs us several thousand dollars in printing and mailing costs, not to mention the much larger manpower tab.

Today’s piece was a follow up to this column:

One of the packets, dated April 2005, was a phone book-size monster of 283 pages. The packet weighed 2 pounds and contained dozens of clippings, including Wall Street Journal editorials, religious articles and an American Spectator story comparing President Bush favorably to FDR and Lincoln.

The bundle included a work order filled out by Antonovich’s staff, requesting that the printer roll off 265 copies and return them “to Room 869 ASAP,” Antonovich’s office.

Lopez rightly sees this as reflecting the supervisor’s lack of accountability. But we also see it as indicating technological cluelessness. This is 2006; who sends massive documents in the mail? Is Antonovich not up to speed on email … websites … blogging?

When we want to share our thoughts about Melissa Theuriau with several thousand of our closest friends, we don’t need to head out to Kinko’s. You see, there’s this thing called the internet … but since you’re reading this, you probably know about that. Antonovich? Possibly a different story.

Here’s our advice to Antonovich on how he can get ahead of this story.

1) Buy this book.

Blogging For Dummies
(there may be a special easy-to-read county supervisor edition!)

2) Buy this blogger.com address from Independent Sources:

http://antonovich.blogspot.com

3) Share your fascinating insights

4) Sit back and watch the traffic jump and tens of ad dollars roll in!

Total cost to taxpayers: free! (except for the book … maybe you can steal it from the library … it would be kinda like reprinting copyrighted material for your friends).

Yours in frugality,

- The Independent Sources Team

Technorati Tags: Los Angeles County, Los Angeles Times, Mike Antonovich, steve lopez

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 5th, 2006 at 3:07 pm by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under Los Angeles Times, California Schemin'. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.