Martin Kramara

• 5/13/2011: Newspaper Story - Religious institutions voice their positions and influence lawmaking process in the Missouri's Capitol.
• 5/ 3/2011: Newspaper Story - Youth athletes suspected of having sustained concussion or brain injury must be removed from the competition and may not return until evaluated by a licensed health-care provider.
• 4/26/2011: Newspaper Story - Restrictions on the payday loan industry comes before a Senate committee.
• 4/19/2011: Newspaper Story - Umbilical cord blood donations wins a boost from a Senate committee.
• 4/12/2011: Newspaper Story - Three hundred activists gather in Missouri State Capitol to participate in the Prolife Action Day.
• 4/12/2011: Newspaper Story - A Missouri Senate committee is urged to require drug testing of welfare recipients.
• 2/16/2011: Newspaper Story - House committee votes to stop administering driving tests in foreign languages.
• 2/ 8/2011: Newspaper Story - Lawmakers vote to restrict government's role over livestock..

Posted 05/03/2011:  Sunday evening at 9:30 Fr. Germán rushed into my room and told me the news. "Somebody just tweeted me: they got him!" Goodness… Where to go and see what's happening when you get an information like that? I clicked CNN live stream, but it would not work, so (for the first time in many weeks) I turned on the TV. Everyone was saying the same thing: "it looks like they killed OBL, and POTUS is going to announce it officially", but the message kept being postponed. First for 15 minutes, then 30, then one hour.
What was amazing for me to see was the ability of CNN guys to fill the time: other than the tweet, they had practically nothing, but still, they were able to talk about it for 60 minutes. First, I thought it was going nowhere and they'd be forced to put something else on. But no: they went on all hour and actually did a pretty good job, sharing all kinds of interesting information. It was the time when one could see what these guys are capable of - because of their previous work and rich experience. It's a very well-known frustration for every journalist or blogger: the one when you have to file something though nothing's really happening.
That's the time when your previous work, readings, researches, contacts and all sorts of dead-looking preparation show their fruits. And that's actually my hope, too, for what I am doing these weeks: sometimes I feel like I am writing, recording, editing and filing "for the drawer" or "against the wall". But I do appreciate the experience I've gained this way and I sincerely hope to be able to use it once - maybe in the most unpredictable situation.

I don't have a precise day anymore but at least once a week I do my ten miles. From that comes my judging places based on their availability of trails. And that's one of the reasons why I dislike Rome - especially the part where I have been living for last four years. Not only there's no trail around. It's difficult to run even on the streets! Signs as "proprieta privata" (private property road) are so frequent that you have to pay a very good attention when you plan your run - if don't want to end up with a dog hanging from your boxers (which would be the better case, anyway). Forget about taking your car and going somewhere else: you're gonna spend more time freaking out in the traffic jam than actually running.

Knowing the fountains never worked, I approached one of them just out of desperation. I pushed the button - only to give myself a reason to stop. And there, something that I perceive as my small Easter miracle happened: the water came out! Someone had turned the fountains on and inadvertently saved my life… Let me tell you, the first gulps of water tasted thousand times better than the Wednesday suds which used to reward my seminary running. I hope the plumber could feel the power of my sincere, thankful prayers. The season of Lent was thus officially and bubbly terminated.

One of the most unexpected things for me to find in the Jeff City Capitol was the Missouri Catholic Conference – the official lobbying force for local Catholic Church. Now, I am aware this might sound a little strange, so please let me explain. Well, if you’d said to me a year ago that Catholic Church had a group of paid lobbyists who were pushing for its interests in the Missouri House and Senate, I would have asked you to say it again, doubting you really meant it, and had you repeated it one more time, I would have certainly considered it an outrageous piece of information.

You see, the word “lobbying” sounds to me and to my home country fellow citizens almost like a synonym of bribery, corruption or fraudulence. Honestly, for me, learning that Catholic Church in the United States has slipped even into THIS, was a little nauseating. Slovakia has a very young democracy (22 years in age) and lobbying is definitely not something people contemplate as a healthy part of it. In fact, it’s quite the opposite: many associate this vocable with dirty nudging some groups do to get the state “orders” – i.e. to make the government pick them for jobs paid by state money.

Interestingly enough, so far, there have been no lawful regulations approved concerning lobbyists and their activities in my country. So even if you actually find a couple people who call themselves with the name of lobbyists, they are perceived as a breed that prefers to hide in shadows. Some of them won’t even disclose to you who they’re actually lobbying for or how they’re financed. In a word, Church officials try to stay out of this: they prefer keeping directly in touch with some of the Parliament representatives, rather than relying on any mediators. This, as you can imagine, results in suspicions, troubles, disputes and variety of pitfalls.

To make a long story short, having seen how lobbying works in this country, I have completely changed my mind on it. After talking to various lobbyists in the Capitol and at the MCC headquarters, I have come to like their openness and (for me) unfeigned transparency. They would sit back and answer any of my questions with stoic tranquility. They explained to me how everything works, where the money comes from, what the rules are… and showed me how they were just one of many voices present “on the market” – so they felt free to speak for the Catholic Church and its positions - proposing, however, not imposing the values of Catholicism - in the habitat of democracy - where everyone’s ok with that.

I understand I’ll sound somewhat naive, but I sincerely like this model much better than the one we are sticking to in my country. I wish to see my homeland shifting to this design of democracy and alternating the present way of thinking on lobbying to its reasonable opposite I have come across here.

I have to say it. Technology is threatening my life. Trying to do some reporter’s work, it’s getting worse. To record floor sessions, committee hearings and interviews with representatives, you get and carry this big black bulky thing. First I thought it was a tape recorder. Well, not really. The thing actually seems to have some kind of a hard drive. However, when it comes to copying stuff to your computer, it doesn’t work as you’d expect: instead of just dragging the file as from an external drive, you have to play the whole timeline and record it minute after minute to your audio editing software. Let’s face it. Patience was one of the top-priority virtues they insisted we’d develop in Catholic seminary. Well, I guess I sneaked through somehow, not really learning it.

So, I decided I had to find a quicker way to deal with my recordings. I searched the web and before long, I found my solution! An adapter that will change my phone into a powerful recording device. Basically, a piece of wire with 3,5 mm jack you plug into your cellphone headset connector, with a xlr port on the other end, which you can insert directly to an audio wall plate and, consequently, avoid any backround noise in your recording. Then you simply copy the entire file to you computer. Perfect!

The delivery arrived just on time and I could use the adapter the very next day when House was in session. There, my enthusiasm died. My new cool thing just wouldn’t work! The recording was way too faint to be used for any purpose. Instead of making my life easier, the thing screwed me up. I ended up with nothing. Please don’t ask me how much time I killed trying to figure out what went wrong. It caused the very opposite effect of what I purchased it for.

Getting home, I tried it on three different devices. With four different microphones. Five different softwares. Later on, exhausted and upset I wrote an email to the manufacturer, describing my agonizing experience. To my astonishment, the reply arrived within a few minutes! It said: Hi Martin, You ordered the adapter for line-level input which is for recording from mixers and other audio outputs but not microphones. The adapter you have has a built in attenuator that reduces the signal strength. Then it directed me to a link where I could get the appropriate one. Instantly, I realized the IDtenT syndrome I lately read about, was not just a joke. I badly suffer from it myself!

Patience can sometimes really save more time than restlessness, hurry and flurry. After all these years, I guess my educators did have some point there.