Connecticut
Post posts about what is happening in the State of Connecticut.
Teen Task Forces
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 12/03/2007 - 21:23It’s been over three decades since I attended one of those high school parties where I was more concerned about what people were thinking of me and whether or not I would finally find a high school sweetheart than I was about how I would get home safely. It has been over three decades since I listened to announcements on the schools public address system about the death of a classmate in a drunken driving accident. My memories of such events are cloudy, but they still linger with me. Still, issues of teen driving remain with us today, and the solutions seem not to have changed substantially.
Last week, The Hartford Courant had an article about Gov. Rell appointing a task force on teen driving.
The governor, following the accident-related deaths of seven teens over the past four months, today announced formation of a task force that will look for more effective ways to convince teens to drive safer.
Named to co-chair the task force are: Robert M. Ward, commissioner of the state Department of Motor Vehicles, and Dr. J. Robert Galvin, commissioner of the state Department of Public Health.
The comments in forums and mailing lists were not particularly favorable. As I think back to my high school years, I can just imagine how much credibility such a task force would have had with my peers and how dubious I would have been of any of their suggestions. Why don’t they listen to the kids?
I have no beef with Mr. Ward or Dr. Galvin, yet somehow, it seems like they might as well have appointed Paula Schwartz, the infamous superintendent of the Region 10 schools who seems so threatened by teenagers expressing real feelings.
No, if you want to find solutions to problems with teen driving, maybe you should listen to teens. Maybe you need a person like Avery Doninger on the task force, inelegantly pointing out how out of touch too many of us adults are. Perhaps you need more teens pouring out their hearts online about how sad they are, and groups like the ‘RIP myles gosselin we miss you’ group of Facebook.
Perhaps if we adults spent a little more time listening to teenagers, they wouldn’t need to spend as much time doing stupid things like drinking and driving or driving to fast. I guess it seemed that way to me thirty years ago, and it still seems that way to me today.
Postscript: While it seems that some things never change, things do get better. When I was in high school it was only the hardcore nerds that ever touched a computer, which for me consisted of using a Teletype to connect to a computer at a community college a couple towns away. When I was in high school, some of us nerds hung out in the photography clubs dark room trying to make our artistic photographs. Now, with a few clicks of on the cellphone anyone can store their photographs online. I even ended up meeting my high school sweetheart. For me, it only took twenty five years.
Who Won Last Night’s Debate?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 11/30/2007 - 13:19As with any debate, each campaign likes to claim victory, independent of what actually happened, and I like to take a different viewpoint. So, I am going to declare two winners of last night’s debate in Ridgefield.
The first winner was Howard Dean. Yes, he isn’t running for President this time around and none of the proxies were there to speak on his behalf. However, three of the five proxies had been very involved in Gov. Dean’s 2004 Presidential bid. I don’t know about the other two, although one of the other two did benefit from a fundraiser that Gov. Dean did on the proxy’s behalf.
At the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Gov. Dean spoke at various venues, and one of the key lines I remember from those speeches is, “If all you do is vote, you get a D.” He was pointing out that being involved in our democracy is so much more than just making it to the voting booth. The proxies on the stage, in addition to having worked hard for Gov. Dean in 2004, in addition to being proxies for candidates in this debate, have each run for elected office. They are the A students.
On top of that, every person who showed up for the debate, and those that listened to the stream on MyLeftNutmeg, somewhere between 70 and 100 people, are also honors students. Instead of simply catching a soundbite here and there and going to the polls as low information voters, each one of them stopped and participated in a grassroots discussion about where our country should be going. They are the other winners of last night’s debate.
Major kudos should go to Susan Cocco and everyone who worked together to make this wonderful event happen. It should be a model that Democratic committees and clubs around the country should emulate.
Advancing the Dialog - Presidential Proxy Debate
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 11/29/2007 - 20:30This evenings debate is part of an ongoing series to discuss the major issues of our day at a grassroots level. These sort of grassroots discussions are key to promoting democracy. During the introductions, Rudy Marconi, First Selectman of Ridgefield, who was elected for a historic fifth term with over 70% of the vote was introduced as was Selectperson Di Masters as well as a member fo the Ridgefied Board of Education.
Several DTC chairs and former chairs were then introduced, including Karen Dolan of Redding, Martha Aasen, former DTC chair from Westport and State Central member, and Fran Besmer of Kent. Jim Himes, Democratic Candidate for the Fourth Congressional District was also introduced.
The proxies for the candidates where then introduced. Richard Brodsky, NYS Assemblyman from the 92nd district which is around Dobbs Ferry is speaking on behalf of Hillary Clinton. David Stevenson, a long time Democracy for America activist is speaking on behalf of Kucinch. Kim Hynes is speaking on behalf of Edwards. Susan Cocco who is running the debate noted Kim's patent in anti-fungal research, as well as her involvement in the Dean campaign and running as a State Rep candidate. Lex Paulson is representing Obama. Lex was also involved in the Dean campaign and ran for State Rep. Jim Sullivan is representing the Dodd campaign. Jim ran for Congress in the Second Congressional District in Connecticut in 2004.
Following this, Susan introduced the bloggers, Matt from MyLeftNutmeg, Jackie from YourCTBlog and myself.
Polling machine auditing and Presidential Debates
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 11/29/2007 - 10:43Spending time in Waterbury yesterday gave me a lot to think about, some of which may find its way into the debate in Ridgefield this evening. Kathy Dopp of the National Election Data Archive writes that “the major problem with CT's audits is that it takes place so long after the election that anyone wanting to rig the election has loads of time” to tamper with the results. She points to efforts in Utah to require a mandatory vote count audit. There will be discussions over the coming weeks about how the vote count audit can be improved, and the concern about the time between the end of voting and the auditing of counting needs to be considered.
Another topic that was discussed at the Registrars’ office during the vote counting was the great income disparity between the poorer parts of Connecticut and the gold coast. When I got home, I found an email from a friend pointing to a great website for analyzing the 2000 census figures, www.zipskinny.com. It provided a stark contrast between parts of Connecticut.
In Weston (06883) and Darien (06820) the median income is $146,000 and only 2% of the people live below the poverty level. An hour up the road in Waterbury (06702) the median income is $11,000 with 40% of the people living below the poverty level. Head up into Hartford (06120) and the poverty level goes up to 44%.
This evening at 7 PM, there will be a debate in the Dayton Room of the Ridgefield Public Library, Main St. Ridgefield, CT when the Democratic Town Committees of Ridgefield, Wilton, Weston and Westport present representatives of various Democratic Presidential campaigns. Hopefully, this event will inject a bit of retail Presidential politics into Connecticut and many of you will attend. I will be there wearing my blogger hat.
I’ve been toying with questions that I would like to ask. Being there as a blogger, my thoughts for my initial question were something like, “With the growth of use of the Internet, the media landscape is changing. Anyone can publish online, and this has great potential for our democracy. How will your candidate make sure that the Internet’s potential to facilitate our democracy is not impeded? It is a broad question providing candidates opportunities to talk about net neutrality, copyright issues, media consolidation, media education, and so on.
Yet as I look at the numbers from Zipskinny, I am considering asking how the candidates plans will affect the vast income disparity in our country, and in our state, where one community, less than an hours drive from its neighbor has 20 times the poverty level and the median income level is less than a tenth of its neighbor.
Perhaps these questions are linked. What role does the mainstream media have in its lack of coverage of issues of poverty in America? What role does the Internet have in providing tools to help people out of poverty?
Let me know what you think should be asked for questions, and check back this evening, where I hope to live blog the debate.
Observing Voting Machine Audits
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 11/28/2007 - 21:39As I mentioned in in a previous post, and even included as my Wordless Wednesday picture, I spend several hours today observing people in the Waterbury Registrar of Voter’s office audit the results of this month’s elections by hand counting the ballots and comparing the results with what the optical scanning machines produced.
It was a long and tedious process for the folks in Waterbury. They had six districts that had been selected for the audit. In each district, they needed to randomly select three races. Unfortunately for them, they ended up selecting several multi-candidate races, so the tallying and cross referencing took a particularly long time, and their audit report to the Secretary of States office will probably end up being between twenty and thirty pages long.
Waterbury, like some of the other large cities in Connecticut has a bad reputation in terms of voting, so I was particularly curious about how they would react to the observers and how well the audit would go.
