Archive - 2010
October 30th
Waterbury Applies Community Policing to Animal Control
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 10/30/2010 - 10:46My regular readers know that I’m interested in many topics, from politics to animal rescue. At times these topics fit together nicely and I’ve written a bit about various municipalities as they address animal control issues. People often look at animal control issues in the south and are horrified to find that states like Georgia put to sleep more than 100,000 animals a year.
Connecticut does a much better job, but still they put to sleep between two and three thousand animals each year. Waterbury has it particularly bad, receiving between 200 and 300 calls a month and putting to sleep between 20 and 30 animals each month.
The traditional goal of animal control officers is to keep the public safe from vicious or infected animals and to punish people guilty of cruelty to animals. However, some believe that is cruel to animals to kill them just because no one comes forward and adopts them within some legally defined brief period.
There are fiscal arguments about this. What is the cost of killing an animal? What is the cost of keeping them in a shelter? What are things that can be done to reduce these costs?
Perhaps the best way to reduce costs is to take ideas of community policing and apply them to animal control officers. The U.S. Department of Justice describes community policing this way:
Community policing is a philosophy that promotes organizational strategies, which support the systematic use of partnerships and problem-solving techniques, to proactively address the immediate conditions that give rise to public safety issues such as crime, social disorder, and fear of crime.
Some municipalities seem to take the exact opposite view when it comes to the animal control aspects of their police departments. The animal control officers take an adversarial position with local rescue groups. As these problems become more and more apparent, other municipalities are adopting wiser approaches.
Hartford animal control officer Sherry DeGenova is a hero among many animal rescue activists and her application of the ideals of community policing to animal control is one that municipalities across the state should be adopting. She works closely with local media, rescue organizations and anyone else that will listen or lend a hand to help adopt out animals from Hartford.
Yesterday, I received an email from the newly appointed Officer in Charge of the Waterbury Police Animal Control Shelter, Sergeant Rennee’ Harvey. This email is another great example of a local municipality trying hard to find more humane and cost effective solutions to animal control. I applaud Waterbury for these efforts and hope that members of the media, rescue organizations and other groups join in this Waterbury’s great new effort of applying community policing to animal control. Likewise, I encourage other municipalities to look at how they can apply community policing to animal control.
October 29th
Connecticut State Senate Debate
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 10/29/2010 - 10:03Tuesday evening, candidates for Connecticut’s 17th State Senatorial District met for a final time before election day at a debate organized by the League of Women Voters in the Woodbridge Senior Center Cafeteria.
Around forty people attended the well run debate. The candidates were respectful of one another and spoke honestly and frankly about their positions and what made them different. In many ways it boiled down to traditional points from any debate. Democratic Senator Joe Crisco spoke about his years of public service and the good that he has done for the 17th District and the state as a whole. Challenger Tamath Rossi spoke how large the budget is, how high taxes are and how Senator Crisco and the Democratic Supermajority have failed to curtail spending. People who believe there is too much government and that our current financial problems have been caused by too much governmental interference in business will want to vote for Rossi. Those who believe that the government plays an important role in protecting citizens, that the financial crisis was caused by a decrease in regulation of Wall Street and other corporations and who believe that the government can play a role in creating a business friendly environment through means other than simply cutting taxes and getting out of the way will want to vote for Crisco.
Most of the attendees appeared to already clearly be supporters of one candidate the other and few minds were changed. However, the information from this debate and previous times that State Senator Crisco and Naugatuck Deputy Mayor Rossi have met is important for people still trying to make up their minds about whom to vote for on Tuesday.
October 28th
Connecticut Bloggers
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 10/28/2010 - 10:02Recently, I’ve been in several discussions about Connecticut blogs, so I thought it might be useful to explore various ways people can find Connecticut blogs and ways that Connecticut Bloggers can be found.
To put things into perspective, Blogspot lists 59,900 bloggers using their software in Connecticut. Over the years, I’ve been picking out various Connecticut blogs that I follow in Google Reader and you can see some of them in my Connecticut section of Google Reader.
One of the oldest and best established aggregator of Connecticut blogs is CTWebLogs. More recently, newspapers are getting into the blog aggregation business. The political section of my blog appears in the opinion section of the Journal Inquirer. The Record Journal has a Community Blogs section on there website and other newspapers are starting to follow suit.
Politics is an area where a lot of blog aggregation goes on. LeftyBlogs has been around for a long time, aggregating blogs that are about local politics. Unfortunately, they have not updated their list in ages and it is pretty incomplete.
Ballotpedia is a wiki trying to provide a better list of political blogs. It does not have an apparent political leaning. Anyone can set up an account and modify it. So far, the modifications appear to be dominated by conservative bloggers.
Moving away from politics, an interesting list is New England Bloggers. They haven’t updated their list since last December, but you can still find many interesting Connecticut Bloggers on the list and in the comments.
More recently, Connecticut Bloggers have been gathering at various events. Wendy and Cheryl both wrote about their experiences at PodCampCT where various bloggers, podcasters and others interested in social media gathered.
Then, there is an emerging group of Connecticut Bloggers that plan on meeting regularly to share their blogging experiences. Wendy wrote about the first meeting and Lisa wrote about an upcoming meeting and listed blogs of some of the participants. Another participant, Christopher, wrote about the upcoming gathering in his blog as well.
As a final note, I would like to mention a few other Connecticut Blogs that I’ve been visiting regularly recently. Grampy’s World, Small Town Mommy and Moomettes Magnificents are Connecticut blogs I’ve found through various blog advertising networks like Adgitize and EntreCard. I particularly like Adgitize in that it brings in both traffic and a little advertising revenue.
There are probably several other good lists of Connecticut blogs. If there are some that you especially like, let me know.
October 27th
Wordless Wednesday
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 10/27/2010 - 09:10
October 26th
The CT Election Boycott
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 10/26/2010 - 09:04I'm getting fed up with this political campaign. I'm wondering, who is with me if we try a boycott? Seems our future politicians have enuf money to spend bashing each other... what about us???
A friend had posted that on her Facebook page last night. It is a great illustration of the old adage that negative campaigning depresses turnout. The goal is to depress the turnout of a candidate’s opponent’s supporters, thereby making it so that the candidate running the negative ads needs fewer votes to win.
Yet perhaps it is time to challenge this adage. If you stay home, you are telling the campaign strategists they are right. You are rewarding them for their bad behavior. The problem is, many voters just aren’t aware that they have choices.
The most recent Quinnipiac poll asks this question:
If the election for United States Senator were being held today, and the candidates were Richard Blumenthal the Democrat and Linda McMahon the Republican, for whom would you vote? (If undecided) If you had to choose today, would you vote for Blumenthal or McMahon?
Blumenthal gets 54% of the vote. McMahon gets 42% of the vote, with 1% voting for someone else, no one listed as not voting and 3% listed as not knowing.
The problem is, the candidates are not just Blumenthal and McMahon. There are two other candidates who are on the ballot and several write-in candidates.
Suffock University conducted a poll a few days ago that listed all four of the candidates on the ballot:
In the race for U.S. Senate your ballot lists four candidates in the following order: Republican Linda McMahon {mick-MAN}, Democrat Richard Blumenthal {BLUE-men-thol}, Connecticut for Lieberman Candidate John Mertens {MER-tins}, Working Families Candidate Richard Blumenthal or Independent Warren Mosler {MOSE-ler}, for whom will you vote or toward whom would you LEAN at this time?
In this poll Warren Mosler gets 2% of the vote and John Mertens gets 1% of the vote; three times the number of people voting for other candidates that Quinnipiac finds.
An interesting question in that poll was
Linda McMahon has released an ad stating that Richard Blumenthal lied about serving in Vietnam. Does this make you more likely to vote for Linda McMahon, Richard Blumenthal or one of the other candidates for US Senate?
30% said they would be more likely to vote for Blumenthal, 25% said they would be more likely to vote for McMahon and 5% said they would be more likely to vote for one of the other candidates. In other words, 35% of the likely voters are more likely to vote for against McMahon and 25% are more likely to vote for her as a result of her ads. This doesn’t sound like a winning strategy.
Over in the Governor’s race, we see similar results based on the type of question asked. Quinnipiac asks
If the election for governor were being held today, and the candidates were Dan Malloy the Democrat and Tom Foley the Republican, for whom would you vote? (If undecided) If you had to choose today, would you vote for Malloy or Foley?
Malloy gets 48%, Foley gets 42% and 2% say they would vote for someone else. However, the Suffolk poll asks
In the race for Governor your ballot lists three candidates in the following order: Republican Tom Foley, Democrat Dan Malloy, Working Families candidate Dan Malloy, or Independent Thomas Marsh. For whom will you vote or toward whom would you LEAN at this time?
This poll has Malloy getting 49% of the vote, Foley only getting 38% and Tom March getting 4%.
All of these polls focus on ‘likely voters’, that is, those who have not been turned off and are thinking about boycotting the election. How would the results change if these unlikely voters, instead of staying home, came out and voted for a minor party candidate? Could the dynamic be changed so that candidates who run negative campaigns run the risk of causing their party to lose major party status?
Personally, I would like to see more candidates talking about their strengths in solving problems and their stances on issues and less time on negative advertisements. Even more important to me is that we increase voter participation in the coming election.
So please, if you don’t like any of the major candidates, don’t sit this election out. Get out and vote for whichever minor candidates you believe would be the best elected officials. If you do like some of the major party candidates, by all means, get out and vote for them, especially if a backlash against negative campaigning could hurt your favorite candidates’ changes.
