Connecticut

Post posts about what is happening in the State of Connecticut.

The Impact of the Internet on Institutions in the Future

A recent report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, The Impact of the Internet on Institutions in the Future suggests:

Most surveyed believe that innovative forms of online cooperation could result in more efficient and responsive for-profit firms, non-profit organizations, and government agencies by the year 2020.

Mostly, the people surveyed were ‘technology experts and stakeholders’ who would be expected to believe that technology is going to make things better.

Recall Congress Now reports that

A New Jersey Appellate Court, in a March 16th unanimous ruling, paved the way for the first ever recall effort of a U.S. Senator. After originally being denied their constitutional right last September by the New Jersey Secretary of State for the circulation of petitions to recall Senator Menendez, The Committee to Recall Robert Menendez sued, taking their case to the New Jersey court…and won. The American Civil Rights Union (ACRU) was the only outside organization that filed an amicus brief with the Court supporting The Committee to Recall Senator Robert Menendez, the group formed by NJ Tea Parties United and the
Sussex County Tea Party.

Is this the sort of more efficient and response government we are looking for? I know that a lot of people would have liked to recall Sen. Lieberman here in Connecticut, but I worry that this moves us even further into a world of constant campaigning, paid for by the most wealthy and creating more gridlock in Washington.

To support the Project Vote has announced “the first mobile canvassing tool for Apple's iPad. This will increase voter registration and drastically reduce canvassing costs”. As a Nokia N900 user, I’d love to see this tool available on other platforms as well. The press release notes that “Currently only four states, Arizona, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington, support online voter registration”. Slowly, we are seeing that more and more government services are going online, and hopefully, move governments will use technology to improve their voter registration process, and make it easier to register online as well as easier to verify the legitimacy of the registrations.

Meanwhile, here in Connecticut, the battle over the future of the Citizen’s Election Program continues. The current Governor, who was elected before the program went into effect, wants to take over a quarter of the remaining funds in the program as part of the deficit mitigation efforts. Many express concern that cut of funding will force the program into insolvency. Perhaps everyone in the Governor’s office and the Legislature should take a 25% pay cut before we make that large a cut to the Citizen’s Election Program, since it is people that were elected prior to the program that have gotten us into this mess.

This again, returns to the latest Pew survey, where people noted that institutions are a strong resistance to change. Barry Wellman, of University of Toronto noted “Institutions know how to protect themselves.”

Will government be more efficient and responsive as a result of innovative forms of online cooperation? It would be great if that turns out to be the case, but the efforts of institutions to protect themselves significantly cast doubt on this.

Connecticut Blogs

Five years ago, I worked as the ‘BlogMaster’ for John DeStefano’s Gubernatorial campaign. I left that position to become the technology coordinator for Ned Lamont’s U.S. Senate bid in 2006. One of the things that I tried to do in both positions was to reach out the bloggers across Connecticut. I sought to include not only the most obvious political bloggers, but bloggers of all types.

Things have changed a lot since then. I can’t find my old contact lists from back then, and I suspect even if I did, many of the email addresses have changed, people have moved, or perhaps given up blogging altogether. Meanwhile, lots of new bloggers have joined the Connecticut Blogosphere and in various areas niches have developed.

A couple weeks, I attended a bloggers meeting with Ned Lamont. It was a small group of political bloggers whom have all known one another for quite a while. Since writing about this, I’ve been in touch with various campaigns that are interested in reaching out to bloggers. With that, I started to review some of the different Connecticut blogs I pay attention to.

Here are links to some of them:

Political blogs

It can be tough to decide who to list. Different blogs have different frequency of updating. Some are attempting to be more like professional news organizations. Others are opinion pages.

Some of the blogs in the political realm, in no particular order, are:
MyLeftNutmeg
Connecticut Blog
HatCityBLOG
CTBob
Cool Justice
The 40 Year Plan
Only in Bridgeport
CT Voters Count
Drink Liberal
YourCT
Lon Seidman
CT Blue Blog
Connecticut Political Reporter
Saramerica
Spazeboy
CT Working Families
NBPolticus
The Pragmatic Progressive
CT At Work

Lists

Various sites aggregate other blogs. Some of my posts show up on the Journal Inquirer. Others show up at the Record Journal blog list. Some also show up on other technology and marketing blogs beyond Connecticut. One of the best lists of Connecticut blogs is CT Weblogs

New Haven

The New Haven Register has recently reached out to a group of bloggers with their Community Media Lab

Some of these blogs include:
CT MMA News
Lockets Meadow
Budget Babe
Sound Bounder
Tagan’s Kitchen
Tom Ficklin

Some other interesting New Haven blogs include
New Haven Kids
On the road to greenness
Tomatoes on the vine
tasing-threesixfive
Satorial Sidelines
TristanRobin
Yalieyoonjoo

Hartford

I haven’t explored the Hartford area blogs as much recently, but I thought I’d highlight a few:
Mira Hartford Urban Compass
Live In Hartford

Misc

Some random other Connecticut blogs worth checking include:
Harvesting CT
This Sphere
Nutmeggrater
CT Energy
CT Green Scene
CT Smart Growth
Greenwich Blog
CT Real Estate Unleashed
Kate Rothwell
Grampy’s World
Moomette’s Magnificents
Frugal New England Kitchen
The Savvy Seller
Sweeties Sweeps
Touchd Blog
Mama Rucci
Beverly Kaye Gallery.

So, are you another Connecticut blogger? Are you interested in connecting? Exchanging links etc? I’ve recently been tweaking my site so I have different links showing up on different pages depending on your interests, you can link to just my Connecticut pages or my Politics pages and I can reciprocate appropriately.

Update: I've had some good emails with various bloggers and have updated the list to add several new sites. In addition, I'm now thinking of adding Connecticut125, as a list of sites that participate in various 125x125 exchanges. If you're interested, let me know.

Memory and Desire

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

Monday morning, I drove down Fountain Street to a hearing in New Haven. At Ramsdell, the traffic got bad. A city bus had stopped to pick up passengers and a long line of cars trying to make the light blocked the box. When my turn came, I joined the procession and as we made our way down Fountain Street, I noticed cars in front of me and behind putting on their flashers. Managing to look further down the road, I saw two limousines in the lead. I had managed to join a cortege. At a convenient spot I pulled over to let the cars full of mourners regroup.

At Whalley Avenue, I glanced up Fitch Street. Police cars were arriving and a young woman in distress sat on the ground next to a car in the middle of the street. The windshield was shattered. A man sat with her providing comfort. The light changed and I was on my way again. If Caesar’s soothsayers had been with me, they might have pointed to these as warnings for the day to come. My friends with more cheery dispositions might have told me these were reminders that things could be much worse. Either way, I continued on the road destiny had set for me.

Wednesday came, and it seemed as if we were thrust unprepared into summer, surprising us with unexpected record heat. I went to Wesleyan to hear Larry Lessig talk about the wrongs of corporate speech. Memory and desire mixed as I traipsed across the college campus. Students sat on Foss Hill, enjoying the summerlike weather as they talked about their studies, their dreams, their loves, or just nothing at all.

Wesleyan has a beautiful campus and it reminded me of my Alma Mater, especially those spring days when it was just too hard to study. My thirtieth reunion is rapidly approaching.

I saw the young professors with their own desires, perhaps hoping for a student that would love their subject material as much as they do. “Someone had blundered”. Mr. Ramsey, in ‘To The Lighthouse’ cannot reach ‘R’. I had once dreamed of being a philosophy professor on a campus like this yet the design of my life did not turn out that way. “Memory and desire”.

Design. Have I ended up in a small rental house in Woodbridge, CT by design? By some sort of fate? By some set of decisions; some good, some bad? And what is around the next corner? I’m thinking much more about design as I read Frederick Brooks new book, The Design of Design. It is a great book which I will write a review of soon, and which is shaping some of my current thinking.

As I sit at my computer writing, Simon and Garfunkel’s “Kathy’s Song” comes on Pandora.

My mind's distracted and diffused
My thoughts are many miles away

I don't know why I spend my time
Writing songs I can't believe

All of this is a long path to Lessig’s talk. Larry is a great speaker. I had heard parts of what he has said before, just as during various campaigns, I could recite stump speeches of candidates that I was supporting. Other parts were new to me. A key thought emerged to me, what sort of country were our forefathers trying to design when they wrote our founding documents? What sort of country are our leaders today trying to design? Are they even thinking about the master design of our country?

Lessig spoke about the Constitution’s framers concern about Princes.

No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.

Yet Congress seems all too willing to accept presents from the Princes of Wall Street and the Kings of the Health Care Industry.

“mixing memory and desire” Lessig’s talk seemed well designed to mix memory and create a desire for a country where our leaders are not dependent on the lobbyists and the special interests they represent.

Will it make any difference? Can the path of our republic be changed? What might a change mean for our economy? For taxes? For Government Services? For you and for me? It is hard to tell.

“The answer my friend is blowin in the wind.”

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Dr. Larry Lessig Horrible v. Captain Foley Hammer and Penny Bysiewicz

“Destroying the status quo because the status is not quo. “

This evening, I will go hear Larry Lessig deliver “The 19th Annual Hugo L. Black Lecture on Freedom of Expression "Speech and Independence: The Wrongs of Corporate Speech”. I suspect I probably know much of what he’s going to say. I’ve heard him speak before and he has a recent speech up on his website.

Matt Singer heard Larry Lessig speak at Rebooting Democracy recently, and wrote up a response to Lawrence Lessig. In his speech, Lessig suggested that things in Washington are “much, much worse” than candidate Obama said on the campaign trail. Matt Singer goes even further. He suggests that Lessig’s call for public financing of campaigns is an “inadequate cure”, and I think Matt is partly right.

Based on the experiences of campaign finance reform here in Connecticut, I think Matt underestimates the impact that campaign finance reform can bring. He suggests a different path to change

The good news then is that there are other methods to win. The bad news is that they're really hard. For the most part, they mean working hard for a series of years, knocking a ton of doors, dialing for dollars, motivating volunteers, handling coalitions, etc., etc.

Actually, the campaign finance reform and hard campaign work are closely related. Candidates that decide to kick the big money addiction of the current special interest driven system find they need to work hard, be frugal and find creative new ways of getting their message out. They have more time to focus on this, because they don’t have to spend as much time dialing for dollars and can spend more time talking with volunteers and voters and finding new solutions to old problems. Of course, what we need in government right about now are creative and frugal hard working leaders.

Here in Connecticut, we are watching this unfold in what could be a very interesting Governor’s race. Ridgefield First Selectman Rudy Marconi, a Democratic Candidate for Governor, put up several creative advertisements on his YouTube channel, especially attacking the monied special interests, yet these videos didn’t go viral and Mr. Marconi is still a dark horse in the race.

Today, Former Stamford Mayor Dan Malloy sent out a press release announcing

The Dan Malloy for Governor Campaign today announced the launch of its first paid advertising effort. Beginning today, the campaign will be running ads on hundreds of Connecticut news and information websites including key political blogs.

Will these carefully targeted ads get enough extra bang for the buck to stand up to the advertising that other Gubernatorial candidates are buying on television? It will be interesting to watch and see.

Meanwhile, the Connecticut Attorney General’s race has gotten a new twist. I’ve written before about how the issue about Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz’s contacts database has seemed to me to be a red herring. I obtained the database, and showed it to anyone who wants it. Various people have read what I consider to be irresponsible articles about the database and have commented to me about how the database doesn’t have any Republicans in it, or that the ‘special notes’ are only about Democrats. It is a good example of concocted stories getting misrepresented and ultimately spreading false information. The copy of the database that I obtained contained approximately 37,000 people. 8,400 were Republicans. Around 7,200 of the records had ‘special notes’, and about a thousand of the special notes were about Republicans.

The bigger issue is whether or not she is qualified to run for Attorney General. On the one hand, there is the legal question that is being argued in the courts right now. I’ve argued before that I believe the statute that some are trying to use to exclude her from the ballot is unconstitutional. We will see what the courts decide. Yet the bigger question is not whether she is qualified in the courts view of the statute and constitution, but whether she is qualified in the public’s mind in terms of her experience as an attorney. As CTNewsJunkie reports, the transcripts of her deposition show Bysiewicz has little litigation experience. This is the real question that should be looked at.

Unfortunately, large media corporations, like other special interest groups, seem to have little interest in what is best for the voters or for the state and seem to go for juicy stories to boost readership, instead of informative stories that really help voters understand the issues and become more involved.

So, will Larry Lessig address the complicity of the large media organizations that profit from the current political system? Will he talk about the issues of how we elect or appoint judges and whether the judicial branch is in as desperate need of reform as the legislative branch? Will he comment on Singer’s concern about other paths to change?

Or, is Dr. Horrible right, that we're treating a symptom while the disease rages on, consuming the human race. The fish rots from the head, so they say. Is Dr. Horrible right about needing to cut off the head? What will your role be in all of this?

Note: For those who don’t recognize the references to Dr. Horrible, Captain Hammer and Penny, please check out Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.

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Wordless Wednesday



Fiona and the Calf, originally uploaded by Aldon.

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