The Water Ballet
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 05/09/2012 - 08:34The NPR correspondent drones on about some Afghani undersecretary and I turn off the car radio. I've heard enough of war and international politics. Besides, it is raining and I want to watch the water ballet.
The rain taps insistently on the windshield, varying its amplitude and frequency as I accelerate or slow down, and as the skies above darken or lighten with rain. The creaking windshield wipers provide a more steady beat.
The wheels hiss as they push aside the water on the road, in search of some asphalt to grab and the pitch of the hiss of the neighboring car wheels shifts as they doppler by.
One car, a prima ballerina, leaps to the front as a chorus of cars dance in tight formation behind and we all head off to our daily work. There will be more broadcasts about wars and undersecretaries, that I can listen to later. For now, I will quietly drive, watching the water ballet.
Social Media and Local Politics: 2012 Amity Budget Referendum Results
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 05/08/2012 - 21:37Another year, another budget referendum. Last year, the referendum passed, 870 to 542. This year, it passed 917 to 597. There was also a bonding issue, which passed 952 to 558. I tweeted the results and they were cross posted to Facebook. Instead of putting the results into tables on the blog, I also created a Google Doc with the results for the past three years, together with some enrollment information.
As is usually the case around the polling location, it was congenial and there were interesting discussions. Some of which was about election day registration. With the voting systems in place, if a person is registered to vote in a different municipality, they will be able to get their registration changed to the new municipality on election day. Of course this is only for Connecticut. It would be great to see voting systems between different states connect, if even just on one by one basis, like Connecticut and Massachusetts.
Already, there is some information that gets shared back and forth between states, such as when a person changes their driver's license or registration. This can be used for updating voting information. However, it does present interesting problems for people who split their time equally between two states, or even worse, between multiple states. Besides the issues of voting, there are car registration, insurance, and tax issues.
With that, as I mentioned last year, for municipal finance issues, people who are property holders can vote in elections in Woodbridge, even if they are registered to vote elsewhere. It makes sense. If you are paying property taxes somewhere, you should have some say in how they get spent. Yet this does not mean you can register to vote in multiple places. That remains a felony.
Meanwhile, up at the capitol, the legislature was arguing about revisions to the campaign finance laws, particularly around changing the disclosure rules for independent expenditures. It passed the House and is waiting to be heard in the Senate. The discussion got into some interesting points that perhaps should be considered in separate bills.
When is Facebook activity a campaign contribution or an in kind third party expenditure? This is something that has been argued in the past. Is it the value of what is given, or the cost to give it? If I make positive comments about a candidate, and I have thousands of followers, is that worth more than a comment by someone with hundreds of followers? If I'm a paid social media personality, is the value of my comments greater than someone who is on Facebook just for fun? Does it matter if I'm posting on my own page or some specific Facebook Fan page? When is, or should a disclosure statement be issued in social media? Do you need one on each tweet in Twitter? Can all of this be dismissed as 'de minimis'?
Then there are the issues of public access television, and for that matter newsletters or other forms of publications.
With that, it's getting late, and I'll save these questions for later, perhaps while I'm covering a congressional or state convention. These conventions are coming up starting this weekend.
Social Media and Event Planning: @CHCConnecticut, @SolomonEvents, @NoRACupcakeCo, @JordanCaterers, @ImagineThatCake
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 05/07/2012 - 05:45While my focus on social media really started with a political and literary bent, I cannot avoid the role of social media marketing and this week, I ran into a some good examples of how this should really be done.
@CHCConnecticut, where I work as social media manager, was celebrating its fortieth anniversary and opening a state of the art new health care facility in Middletown, CT. Throughout the process, we worked with many organizations, from architects and building contractors, through caterers and event planners.
@SolomonEvents handled key parts of the event planning. In addition, they tweeted throughout the week about the event. I was sharing tweets with Heather Solomon before I met her, and she end off the tweeting with:
The pleasure of connecting on Twitter then actually meeting in-person (@ahynes1). #WhyIEnjoySocialMedia
She talked about the cupcakes we had one evening from @NoRACupcakeCo and @WhalePack retweeted a picture she had taken. Also, joining in the discussion was the caterers, @JordanCaterers, and the bakers, @ImagineThatCake
Of course, the event was about more than just food, and there were notable dignitaries at the event. @chrisdodd, @govmalloyoffice, Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, whom the Denver Post retweets messages about via @hickenTweets, and State Representative @mattlesser.
Social media helped cement relationships established during the event and allowed many people to get their messages out in a conversation about the event. It was a good example of using social media together with event planning.
Judicial Good Behavior
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 05/06/2012 - 14:54Today, I read the latest court order in Planned Parenthood of Hidalgo County Texas v. Suehs about whether the State of Texas can cut off funding to the organization that provides basic preventive health care to nearly half of the participants in the states Women’s Health Program.
This is just the latest in the ongoing court battles about health care in America. Opponents of the Affordable Care Act, and especially, opponents of abortion are seeking to block health care reform through State Legislatures and the judicial system. In the Planned Parenthood case in Texas, a District Judge order a stay of implementation of a new Texas law that would defund Planned Parenthood. A judge on the Fifth Circuit, overrode that stay, allowing the law to go into effect. Then, a three judge panel, including that judge, overrode the judge's override.
So, who is this judge? Fifth Circuit Judge Jerry Smith. Does the name sound familiar? Perhaps it should. Judge Smith was appointed to the Fifth Circuit in 1987 by President Ronald Reagan. He attended Yale for both his undergraduate and his law degrees. In 1996, he wrote the majority opinion in a case in which the Fifth Circuit struck down the use of affirmative action in admissions to the University of Texas Law School. This decision was later overturned by the Supreme Court.
Yet recently, he has been making more news. Last month, he was the judge that ordered the Obama Administration to explain its position on judicial activism. It appears as if Judge Smith is in favor of judicial activism when it comes to overturning liberal laws, but in favor of judicial restraint when it comes to defending conservative laws. That is, he does not seem to possess a fair and even handed judicial temperament.
There is a long tradition of not criticizing judges, but with the Citizens' United decision by the Supreme Court, that has all changed. The Pew Research Center recently issued a report, Supreme Court Favorability Reaches New Low. The report notes that:
The court receives relatively low favorable ratings from Republicans, Democrats and independents alike.
While there have always been bad apples wherever you look, the U.S. Supreme Court has usually stayed above reproach. Yes, there was the Dred Scott decision a century and a half ago, but that is often viewed as an exception.
After the Citizens' United decision, Keith Olbermann compared Dred Scott to Citizens' United, and by extension, Chief Justice John Roberts to Chief Justice Roger Taney. We shall yet see if Citizens' United will be a greater threat to the United States as we know it than the Civil War was, or if Chief Justice Roberts shall suffer a similar fate as Chief Justice Taney. However, the current trends do not look good for Citizens' United or the esteem that our courts are held in.
Judges like Fifth Circuit Judge Jerry Smith only compound the problem of Americans' faith in the judicial system and endanger their own legacy. Wikipedia, as well as NNDB do not list Judge Smith as having been a judge, either at the district level, nor on a state court prior to becoming an Appellate Judge. No, Judge Smith's qualifications appear to come from having served on executive committee of the Texas Republican Party for over a decade.
NNDB lists his wife as Mary Jane Blackburn and Fundrace lists Mary Jane B. Smith of Houston Texas as having contributed $866 to Ted Cruz's U.S. Senate campaign back in 2009. Cruz has been endorsed by the Club for Growth, the Tea Party Express and lists repealing 'Obamacare' as one of his top priorities.
The Constitution says that judges "shall hold their Offices during good Behavior". Traditionally, "good behavior" has been determined by Congress for Federal Judges. However, given the low esteem that both Congress and the Supreme Court are held in, is it time to reconsider what "good behavior" is?
Proles, Nietzsche and the Desperate Slacktivists Passive Interactivity
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 05/05/2012 - 15:12Recently, I stumbled across the article, What if Interactivity is the New Passivity? by Jonathan Sterne at McGill University. It is the sort of media theory stuff that I suspect many of my friends looking at how to monetize their social media activity tend not to read. It builds on the criticism of people passively consuming broadcast media, and asks if the interactions that we have now, liking pages, following friends, maybe even retweeting, or playing a game in Facebook, is really all that different than people watching television a generation ago.
It is an interesting question, and my thoughts quickly drifted to 1984, “If there was hope, it must lie in the proles”, or at least with those who are engaged in social media. Yes, I feel the ghost of Marshall McLuhan standing over my shoulder, whispering in my ear, “the medium is the message”.
Yet, perhaps, McLuhan isn’t all that far off. Perhaps what Sterne is saying is that interactivity, at least in terms of Slacktivists signing online petitions, isn’t really that much warmer of a medium than people a generation ago cursing at the news on the television.
Perhaps, the new, passive interactivity, reflects an even older idea; Henry David Thoreau’s “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”. That paragraph, goes on to say, “A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind.”
So, how do we transcend this desperate slacktivists passive interactivity? Sterne’s article starts off by talking about Malcolm Bull’s essay, “Where Is the Anti-Nietzsche?” Perhaps there is more of a relationship between these questions than the analogy that Sterne suggests. However, that should probably stand as a blog post on its own.
