Connecticut
Post posts about what is happening in the State of Connecticut.
Google Maps and Drupal Location
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 04/26/2010 - 10:18One of the things I’ve enjoyed working on recently, has been using Drupal modules for location and Google Maps to present information in a new ways. As an illustration, I’ve set up a page on the Adopt CT First website, to show where there are various shelters and adoption events in Connecticut.
Before I get into the geekiness of how I set this up, let me tell you a little bit about Adopt CT First. The goal of this new group is simple. It is to get people who live in Connecticut and are looking for a new pet to check their local shelters first. By getting more people aware of local shelters, we can hopefully get more dogs adopted, and less killed. We can get more people to make sure their pets are spayed or neutered so the population of the shelters doesn’t continue to grow, and we can encourage others to become more involved with helping at local shelters.
The Crazy Aunt in the Attic
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 04/24/2010 - 19:33Coming up in a few days, there will be there will be a special celebration highlighting Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro’s twenty years in Congress. She was there in 1993, the last time the congress attempted to pass health care reform. She was there for twelve years of Republican control of the house. This year, she was there as Congress passed health care reform. “This is why you go,” she told bloggers this afternoon, “these opportunities are once in a lifetime”.
Yet throughout the whole process there has been a lot of misinformation spread. Rep. DeLauro is addressing this in different ways. This morning, she held office hours at the Woodbridge Library where she spoke one on one with constituents about their concerns. Still, even after health care reform has been signed, some people are more concerned with the process than the substance of the reforms and many people do not yet know what is in the law that affects them.
The office hours in Woodbridge are just a beginning of the effort to get people to understand what has actually been passed. After the office hours, Rep. DeLauro spent time talking with bloggers about health care reform. On Monday, she will be visiting the Quinnipiac University’s School of Health Sciences campus in North Haven from noon until 1 pm to discuss its benefits with young adults. She will also be speaking with small business owners, doctors, senior citizens and others that need to know what the changes really mean for them.
As the health care legislation was being crafted and debated in congress, much of the media failed the American people by only focusing on the process and a lot of the important issues never made it into the papers. Yet some bloggers did focus on the failures of the current health care system such as insurance companies calling domestic violence a pre-existing condition.
So what has made it into the health care legislation? Rep. DeLauro has always had a keen interest in food and nutrition issues. Part of health care reform includes a requirement that fast food restaurants with more than twenty-five stores list the calories in their food. Rep. DeLauro worked closely with industry groups to come up with acceptable legislation. It is an issue that Rep. DeLauro has worked long and hard on saying that she “was the crazy aunt in the attic” on the issue. Yet by simply making a little more information available, customers can make healthier choices about the food they purchase.
Yet there is so much more that needs to be done on food safety. Currently, only 1% of food imported into our country is inspected, and we are importing more and more food. Currently, there are fifteen agencies that deal with food safety at the Federal level. Rep. DeLauro believes we need one agency with that oversight.
Yet what about possible loopholes in the current health care reform? Rep. DeLauro spoke about the insurance companies immediately trying to find loopholes instead of trying to find what is best for the people of our country. Through vigilantly watching the insurance companies, this search for loopholes was exposed, the companies were shamed into backing off, and additional legislation is being pursued to better regulate the health insurance industry.
Much of this, as well as problems in the financial industry illustrates why self-regulation does not work, Rep. DeLauro maintains. Congress needs to take its responsibility for oversight much more seriously.
Unfortunately, it used to be that we had media that took oversight seriously as well; media that understood its role in making sure that we have the informed public that Jefferson said was necessary for democracy. Rep. DeLauro noted that when she started in Washington, the New York Times had a Connecticut stringer in Washington and the Connecticut Post, the Hartford Courant, and the New Haven Register all had people in DC. Now, there is no one left in Washington covering the Connecticut delegation.
Where are people getting their news today? Current media outlets tend to focus on the professional wrestling theatrics of politics and not on informing the public or serving the public good. To a certain extent, bloggers and online journalists can fill some of the gaps that have been left, taking advantage of the Internet as a means of reaching people. Yet this illustrates why Net Neutrality is so important, and Rep. DeLauro is a strong supporter of Net Neutrality.
Yet even if we manage to have informatory news instead of cheap entertainment masquerading as news, other problems remain. One of the biggest is the role of money in politics and Rep. DeLauro supports efforts to bring about meaningful campaign finance reforms.
Perhaps, with a rise of citizen driven informatory news and meaningful campaign finance reform, people can learn more about what is really in the health care reform act and other legislation. More importantly, it might be able to bring a little bit of civility back to our public discourse. If it takes a crazy aunt in the attic to lead the way, so be it.
Does Your Town Kill Dogs?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 04/22/2010 - 08:40The odds are that you live in a town that kills dogs. Here in the United States, estimates run from 2.7 to 10 million dogs that are killed each year. There are many reasons dogs get killed in shelters. Some dogs are just too sick to save. Others may be too aggressive. Unfortunately, many are killed because no one wants them.
Many states do not track the number of dogs killed by animal control officers, but the Connecticut Department of Agriculture does track some of this information. Here in Connecticut, around 2,500 dogs picked up by animal control officers are killed each year, or about 13% of the dogs that get picked up. This appears to be less than many other states, but is still a problem.
Perhaps the most important thing to be done is to make sure that your dog is spayed or neutered. Beyond that, getting your next dog from a municipal shelter or a rescue group that works closely with local shelters can help reduce the number of dogs killed because of overcrowding in shelters.
Also, knowing how your town is doing, and encouraging animal control officers to work closely with volunteer rescue organizations can be a big help. According to Department of Agriculture numbers, over half of the dogs euthanized in Connecticut come from the state’s largest five cities. Yet looking more closely, there are some interesting numbers to note. The largest city in Connecticut is Bridgeport, which euthanized seven hundred dogs in the 2008-2009 reporting period. Yet Bridgeport, which is only ten percent larger in population than Hartford, killed nearly seven times as many dogs as Hartford.
There are many things that could contribute to this. Bridgeport does impound three times as many dogs as Hartford does. However, some of this may be because Hartford animal control officers work closely with volunteer rescuers to find homes for the impounded dogs. Dogs impounded in Hartford are much more likely to be adopted than dogs in Bridgeport.
To make the point even more strongly, Stamford, the fourth largest city in Connecticut, which is 15% smaller than Bridgeport only euthanized ten dogs during the same reporting period, or less than 2% of the dogs they impounded. Stamford makes a strong effort to be a no-kill pound, and it is reasonable to assume that these dogs were either too sick or too dangerous to be adopted out.
Stamford adopts out over thirty times as many dogs as they kill. Wallingford has a similar success rate as does North Branford and East Hartford, and several smaller towns. On the other hand, there are several small towns that euthanize dogs and during the reporting period did not adopt out any. Though you cannot tell if the one dog euthanized in a town was because of illness, or lack of adoption.
For the large cities, Waterbury, New Britain and Manchester are the cities where dogs are more likely to be euthanized than to be adopted. A good group of volunteers has emerged in New Britain to help address the problem there and the numbers appear to be changing. It appears as if Waterbury and Manchester are two of the municipalities that could really take advantage of better coordination with volunteer rescue organizations.
Yet it isn’t just the large cities that people need to be concerned about. Derby, with a population of only twelve thousand euthanized twice as many dogs as they adopted out. It may be that there is a good reason for this, but it illustrates the need for people to ask questions of their local animal control officers and to look at their own communities first.
So, before you buy a dog at the local pet shop or from some breeder, or before you visit some large expo spending thousands of dollars to ship shelter dogs in from out of state, make sure you check out the local shelters and rescue societies. You just may find the dog of your dreams. You might even feel called to help other dogs at these shelters find their forever homes.
These are the stakes!
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 04/20/2010 - 10:03"These are the stakes! To make a world in which all of God's children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die."
I was five years old when this advertisement first aired. We did not have a television at the time and so it was many years before I saw this ad. However, it remains one of the most noted advertisements in the history of political ads.
It came to mind today, as I received word about TrueMajority’s new advertisement asking Sen. Lieberman to stop dragging his feet and commit to supporting President Obama’s arms reduction treaty, soon to be ratified in the Senate.
Continuing Coverage of CRMGate
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 04/19/2010 - 09:00On February 2, 2009, Jason Doucette, treasurer of “Friends of Susan 2010, Inc” submitted a Freedom of Information Request for a copy of the “Secretary of State’s current ACT database”. Eight months later, Geoffrey Griswold Fisher of Litchfield, CT, complained to the State Election and Enforcement Commission, apparently about receiving an email from the Bysiewicz campaign. Joan Andrews, Director of Legal Affairs and Enforcement responded that the matter will not be docketed, because if the facts were proven true, they would not “constitute a violation of any law within the Commission’s jurisdiction”. However, she referred the matter to the “Commissioner of the Department of Administrative Services and the Auditor of Public Accounts”.
In order to get a clearer understanding of the issue, I obtained a copy of the database also via a Freedom of Information request. Mr. Fisher has no party registration listed in the database, but does have a special note saying that in 2008 he had contacted the Secretary of State’s office about “Elegibility [sic] of Barack Obama to run for President of the USA”.
I have made my copy of this database available to people who have asked for it, including Republicans arguing against Ms. Bysiewicz eligibility to run for Attorney General. One person who received a copy of the database wrote, “I was actually surprised by how little new or spicy information was in there – shows what I get for buying into the Courant’s hype”.
Yet the Courant has not stopped their hype. Jon Lender of the Hartford Courant has written several articles and blog posts about CRMGate, with his latest coming out Sunday entitled Bysiewicz May Be Interviewed Under Oath In Office Probe; Questions Arise On 'Holiday Card' Listings In Her Database. I’ve added comments to his blog posts criticizing his coverage but they have never appeared on the blog.
His latest concern is that the database has a field entitled ‘CONTACT Holiday Card’, which Fox-61, also part of the Courant Media conglomerate describes as an unusual database field. Lender reports,
Bysiewicz says that this wasn't used to send holiday cards, and that the 5,400 people had sent cards to her office. But about 170 of those people told The Courant they never sent her a card -- and, moreover, got a card or cards from her.
I will be interested to see if any of these people can produce cards like this and whether or not such cards are in fact some sort of inappropriate personal contact or if they are really examples of permissible contact by a state agency to inform constituents about what is happening in the agency. One would think that if it were the former, there would have been other complaints that would have shown up without having to dig around into a constituent relationship database.
In fact, it is very common for personal information management programs, like the one that Secretary of State Bysiewicz was using to contain a field tracking the sending and receipt of holiday cards. While such information might not be as valuable to the agencies operation as information about whether or not the constituent is an elected official or has received copies of the ‘Blue Book’ in the past, to a person that works with databases for tracking customer or constituent relations, there appears nothing irregular about tracking this information.
With that, I would like to provide a slightly more complete view of the database. The database has 140 fields. Twenty four are about the Blue Book that the agency produces. Other fields include information about the electoral process, such as whether or not the contact is a current or former elected official, if they are on the Citizenship Fund Board, and so on. Thirty-six of the fields are never used. The party affiliation field lists 11,588 Democrats, 8,400 Republicans, 399 Other, and 45 unaffiliated. 7,172 contacts have special notes, including 2,771 special notes about Democrats and 982 Republicans. 24,600 contacts are listed as elected officials, including 9,629 Democrats and 7,100 Republicans.
With nearly 37,000 contacts in the database a “birther” or an unscrupulous journalist can easily go on a witchhunt to try and concoct controversy. Personally, as a blogger, I was offended to find that the database only included one reference to a blogger, and it wasn’t myself, or any of the political bloggers I regularly read. Even worse, while the database has 456 entries in the website category, the one blogger listed did not have an entry in the website category.
With that, I am wondering would it be like if we subjected Jon Lender to the same sort of scrutiny that he is giving Secretary of State Bysiewicz. First, it is worth noting that the Secretary of State’s Office’s database has fifteen entries with “Courant” in the Company field, yet Jon Lender is not even in the database. Even Colin McEnroe is in the database, although he is listed as being with WTIC, and not the Courant or Connecticut Public Radio. Perhaps Mr. Lender’s obsession with Ms. Bysiewicz is that he feels slighted and is suffering a narcissistic injury. Perhaps the Secretary of State’s office doesn’t consider Mr. Lender a credible journalist.
I was tempted to entitle this blog post, “No Word on Society of Professional Journalism Ethics Investigation into Jon Lender“. It would be a completely true statement. I have received no word from the Society of Professional Journalism about a possible ethics investigation into Jon Lender. However, such a headline, in my opinion, would be unethical. The Society’s Code of Ethics states, among other things,
Make certain that headlines, news teases and promotional material, photos, video, audio, graphics, sound bites and quotations do not misrepresent. They should not oversimplify or highlight incidents out of context.
Yet it does seem that Mr. Lender’s latest article, along with several others he has written, is, at best skirting ethical guidelines.
As the person who commented about the database also said to me, “The sad truth is, for all I know about Bysiewicz’s foibles, I don’t know what any of the other candidates think about anything at all… There’s certainly nothing to be gained waiting around for the Courant or related outlets to enlighten us on policy matters.”
Perhaps that’s the most important part of the story. We can question whether or not the Bysiewicz campaign’s use of the database is legal or ethical. We can question whether or not Jon Lender’s reporting is ethical. Yet there seems to be no question that the traditional media has failed in addressing substantive issues in the electoral process.
(Cross-posted at MyLeftNutmeg.)
