Thus ends November and starts December. November was a pretty rough month. Let’s see what December brings. Lots of random stuff:

The plumber has gotten the part and is here to fixing the furnace.

Molly Lindsey, the new deputy press secretary at the DeStefano campaign is going to start blogging. I’m very excited about this. The blog has suffered because not enough different people were writing. There was a long discussion about rumors about my role on Connecticut Local Politics. She has put her first blog post up on the DeStefano campaign. Please stop by and make her feel welcome.

In that same discussion, Genghis comments, “I'd personally like to see a Lieberman/Weicker rematch, but that isn't happening.” I’m not sure that ‘it isn’t happening’. I’ve heard that Weicker has told friends that if Lieberman says one more stupid thing, Weicker will run. As one pundit commented, that is about as solid a declaration of candidacy as you are ever going to get.

Colin McEnroe wrote a little bit about Joe’s latest comments in his blog for the Hartford Courant.

Colin is also teaching a class on blogging, and I’ve commented on his class blog and several of the student blogs.

John write about people writing with different voices on a single blog and about the ephemeral nature of online communications. I added a long comment there. Nile has an interesting post on writing and Christopher has an interesting blog entry about blogs shaping our intelligence. When I get some time, I should post comments there.

In the political realm, Kelly Kennedy has a very interesting commentary on Contract Reform in Connecticut. It was also discussed on Connecticut Local Politics.

Campaign Finance Reform has passed. I want to compliment Bill Finch for having a discussion about it on his blog. We need to see more of this from our political leaders.

Another interesting post is Michael Wilcox’s post about approval ratings. Check out the graph on his post. Two key highlights. President Bush’s approval rating has consistently been below President Nixon’s approval rating for the same point in their respective presidencies. The other is that in spite of that Democrats in Congress have an even worse approval rating.

On the Freedom of Speech front, there has been some interesting discussions about a school newspaper in Oak Ridge, Tennessee which had an article about birth control, and the school pulled the newspaper. Various blogs are suggesting contacting the school administration condemning the action and the Society of Professional Journalists had this to say about the subject:

“The Society of Professional Journalists condemns the decision of a Tennessee school principal who censored the school newspaper.

’This is an example – a bad example – of school officials censoring news content simply because they disagree with it,’ said SPJ President David Carlson, the Cox/Palm Beach Post professor of journalism at the University of Florida.”

I sent my letter to the school administration approaching things from a different tact:

“Today, I read the AP article, ‘Newspaper is off stands at a school in Tennessee’ and I wanted to congratulate you on the job you are doing. Dwight Teeter, a University of Tennessee journalism professor is quoted as saying, ''This is a terrible lesson in civics”.

I must disagree. I believe this is a great civics lesson and I hope all of your students learn about the importance of standing up for freedom of speech and learn more about using alternative media.”

In the P.R. world, there has been some great discussions about how large P.R. companies just don’t get the blogosphere. In particular, Steve Rubel has been writing about this with BL Ochman presenting another view.

In the arts world, the Wadsworth Atheneum up in Hartford is making great news with its Get Surreal project where people are invited to create their own art. It looks like a great tool to play with. If only it can be tweaked so that we can import images and create some interesting political art.

As a final thing, I’ve spent some time helping, See the Dawn get their website up. Essentially, it is a simple catalog of health and beauty products. It is based on CivicSpace so that we have the ability of blog about the products. Stop by and take a look.

So, November has been crazy. I briefly caught up with my emails. I’ve used this post to try and hit some of the big topics I’ve been thinking about. But now, I’m about 150 emails behind and 950 blog posts behind. The bolder has slipped again. More later...