Goldy

Some of you may have noticed that my posting has been a little lighter than usual over the past week or so, and I just wanted to reassure folks that no, I haven’t burnt out. I’ve just been busy. Busy teaching myself how to program the iPhone.

It’s been about eight years since I last played around with a compiler, and ten days into the iPhone SDK I’m still not sure that I have sufficient programming chops to get the job done. The unfamiliar Xcode IDE does both more and less than I had expected, and Objective-C, well, it might as well have been Objective-Mandarin for all I knew when I started. I was hoping that with a UI this sparse, Apple might have layered a real RAD environment on top of it — like a Visual Basic or a Hypercard — but no, here I am defining classes and declaring protocols and managing memory for chrisakes. (No garbage collection? What’s up with that?)

Anyway, I’ll keep folks informed of how this project goes, but in the meantime, be prepared for days when I’m a little preoccupied.

Dear Airline Industry,

I’m writing this missive from dreary Seattle rather than sunny South Florida, and you only have yourselves to blame.

For years now, Presidents Day weekend has been the time of year I’ve taken my daughter to visit her grandma and pop-pop near West Palm Beach, a welcome respite from the height of our rainy season, and conveniently coordinated with her school’s mid-winter break. But after months of hesitation on your various reservation websites, I just couldn’t pull the trigger.

Part of the problem is that the Mercer Island district where my daughter now attends middle school only offers a four-day weekend off, but that didn’t stop us the last two years. Combine a red-eye with perhaps an extra day off school, and we could enjoy at least four full days in the sun.

The bigger problem is, the last couple years I’ve come home more in need of a vacation than when I left.

Flying has grown increasingly miserable over the past decade, and to be honest, it just isn’t worth it anymore. You airlines expect me to show up at the gate on time, or else forfeit the value of my ticket, but if your airplane isn’t at the gate to greet me, well, fuck me. Or if we do take off some time that day, but you fail to get me to my connecting flight, fuck me again. Perhaps, you tell me, you’ll get me out on a later flight, or the next day, or the day after that, but in the meanwhile I’m left to fend for myself in Charlotte or Atlanta or Dallas or Chicago or Phoenix or some godforsaken hub airport like that. Snow in Boston, you tell me, means delays in Houston, so you don’t owe me a thing but the promise to get me home sometime, you know, if a seat is available.

And while delays like this have always been a part of air travel, your increasingly hostile attitude has not. There once was a time when you treated us like valued customers, but over time we’ve just become those annoying, fragile things you store above the cargo hold. And as your customer service has declined you’ve increasingly resorted to pulling the post-9/11 security card to keep disgruntled passengers in line.

I know. You’ve done it to me. And fuck if I’m going to pay you for the public humiliation.

So this is probably the third or fourth flight I’ve elected not to take over the past couple years, not because your service isn’t inexpensive, but because it’s cheap. Based on personal experience, I just don’t trust you to get me and my luggage to my destination on time, safely, and in a reasonable amount of comfort. And I simply don’t trust your employees to treat me as anything more than just another potential terrorist.

$400 to fly roundtrip from Seattle to Florida is a good deal, but it’s still $400, and so I kinda expect the people I’m forking it over to not to consistently treat me like shit. You don’t even pretend to care about my business anymore, and that makes me feel like a chump every time I give to you.

So in conclusion, fuck you. Fuck your crappy service, your hostile demeanor and your poorly maintained planes. Fuck paying $7 extra for a pillow, $20 to reserve two seats next to each other and $25 for the privilege of having my valuables stolen out of my checked luggage (even sun screen for chrisakes… they’ve stolen fucking sunscreen). And fuck an industry whose standards have fallen so low that passengers now view themselves lucky to end their flight standing hip dip in water on the wing of a plane in the middle of the Hudson River.

Happy Presidents Day,

Goldy

Well, I suppose that’s one way to deal with education funding at a time of record state budget deficits:

In an effort to bridge a $700 million budget shortfall, Republican state Sen. Chris Buttars has put forth a plan to eliminate 12th grade in high school…

Of course, that’s just one Republican state legislator, and yeah, it’s Utah we’re talking about, so I guess it wouldn’t be fair to brand all Republicans with the same crazy stick, but when your party is philosophically opposed to raising taxes under any circumstances, this is the type of, um, creative proposals you’re gonna come up with.

Republican priorities at work.

Mark 10:25
“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

Luke 12:48
“From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.”

Karl Marx
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”

Discuss.

In America, we’ve come to accept these sorta things as the cost of living in a free society where the Supreme Court gives more weight to the vague caveats of the Second Amendment than it does to the unqualified imperatives of the First, so the only thing really surprising about yesterday’s tragic shootings at the University of Alabama was the identity of the shooter: a woman.

Not some disaffected teenage boy looking to kill himself, and take a few classmates with him, or some crazed homophobe with a grudge against Unitarians. Not a Timothy McVeigh or a Seung-Hui Cho or a Nidal Malik Hassan or a gangbanger, a skinhead, a terrorist or something like that. You know, not a man.

I’m no criminologist, but from anecdotal experience, I’m guessing that Prof. Amy Bishop just doesn’t fit the profile.

Yet, she had a loaded gun. And in America, that’s all you really need to make a mark on the world.

It’s not like we don’t have any QFCs, Walgreens, 7-11’s or McDonalds in our neck of the woods, storefronts where Redbox co-locates its dollar-a-day DVD rental vending machines. It’s just that our QFCs, Walgreens, 7-11’s and McDonalds don’t have any Redboxes.

Hmm.

The other day I offered a free beer to the first Seattle elected official to enthusiastically come out in support of pitching a proposal to participate in Google’s experimental fiber network. Well, Mayor Mike McGinn was the first to answer the call.

Seattle will actively seek to partner with Google in creation of a fiber network here. The city itself has many assets to bring to the partnership, including an extensive existing fiber network of over 500 miles connecting every school, college and major government building in the city. In Seattle, 88% of residents have home computers, 84% have Internet access and 74% already have Internet access faster than dial-up. Seattle is a high tech city, with many technology firms both large and small, and a culture of entrepreneurism and innovation.

Fiber-to-the-premise networks will serve as an engine for business and economic development. Seattle would be an excellent place to construct such a network because we already have a high tech industry and population.

I don’t know how much of a chance we’ll have at winning a spot in the project, but at the very least it will help focus the city’s collective mind on what we need to do to provide our residents and businesses with first-rate, high-speed broadband infrastructure… something many of our neighborhoods sadly lack.

Living only a couple blocks from a major Qwest switch, I reliably enjoy better than 5Mbps downstream via DSL, but that makes me one of the fortunate ones, and while new WiMax service from Clear is (spottily) filling the gap in some neighborhoods, there are many Seattle households that are lucky to sustain 1.5Mbps, regardless of the provider.

But 1Gbps… hell, I’d happily settle for the 20Mbps my sister in suburban Philadelphia is getting from Verizon’s FIOS service.

If Seattle wants to remain a high-tech leader, we need to build the ultra-high-speed broadband infrastructure necessary to nurture and sustain our lead. And if Mayor McGinn wants to drop by Drinking Liberally sometime to discuss his broadband plans, the beer’s on me.

The apparent suicide of a longtime professional signature gatherer threatens to blow wide open the heretofore hidden world of organized petition fraud in Washington state.

Spokane based Dennis O’Shea had worked for years supervising crews of paid signature gatherers for a number of contractors, most recently Citizens Solutions, the Lacey WA firm that gathers signatures for Tim Eyman’s initiatives. Documented back in 2003 making false statements to signers about the initiative he was hawking, O’Shea had years to learn the ins and outs of the sometimes shady signature gathering business. So when detectives reportedly found his body along with a box of documents labeled to the attention of the police, they had reason to take notice.

Next month, partially as a result of the investigation stemming from O’Shea’s death, a mother and daughter signature gathering team will face charges on 45 counts of forging signatures on petitions for Eyman’s 2008 Initiative 985. And judging from both the suspicious circumstances, and the well documented history of petition fraud in other states, there is good reason to suspect that this case might represent only the tip of the iceberg.

According to court documents recently acquired by the Ballot Initiative Network, Theresa Dedeaux came under investigation in June 2008 after two petition sheets were turned over to Spokane County Elections officers, and subsequently the Secretary of State. An SOS official determined that 37 of the 40 signatures on the sheets did not match the signatures on file, and further forensic work by the Washington State Patrol determined a number of these to be forgeries. Affidavits were sent out to all 40 of the alleged signers, and all 29 of the affidavits returned confirmed that theirs was not the signature on the petition.

When confronted with this evidence by the WSP, Dedeaux made a statement to investigators implicating her supervisor: “Everything we did was at the direction of Dennis O’Shea.” When asked what she meant by “we,” Dedeaux went on to implicate her daughter Mercedes, “My daughter did it too.”

While details remain sketchy, it appears that O’Shea committed suicide sometime during the investigation, and according to sources, he left behind a box of documents directed toward the attention of the police, that included copies of several petition sheets collected by Mercedes Dedeaux. Investigators sent affidavits to 34 alleged signers whose signatures were suspected of being forged; all 29 of the returned affidavits attested that the signature was not authentic.

What else was in the box of documents O’Shea left behind? I have no idea, and I have no idea whether it is currently being investigated by the Spokane County Sheriff, the WSP or the SOS. What I do know, is that O’Shea thought it important enough to set aside for investigators as he prepared to take his own life. And I do know that the kind of fraud perpetrated by the Dedeauxs has proven to be common place in other initiative states, and that there has never been any reason to assume that Washington’s signature gatherers are uniquely clean, especially given the laxness of the laws and procedures regulating our initiative process.

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” opponents of initiative reform like to argue, pointing to the absence of evidence of signature fraud in Washington state, but the truth is, we can’t possibly uncover evidence we’re not looking for, and lacking the tools to track signatures to the paid canvassers who gathered them, even evidence of fraud would be unlikely to incriminate the perpetrators.

To that end, there are two bills that are still alive in the current legislative session that attempt to address this issue. The first is HB 2614, which merely closes a loophole created via an opinion by state Attorney General Rob McKenna. Petitions are currently required to contain a declaration identifying the signature gatherer, but bizarrely, McKenna has advised the SOS that the statute does not require the signature gatherer to sign it. HB 2614 would clarify the existing law, explicitly requiring that the signature gatherer sign the declaration before the petition is filed with the SOS.

The second bill, SB 6449, is much more sweeping. In addition to closing the loophole above, SB 6449 would require that paid signature gatherers register with the PDC, and provide evidence of said registration while gathering signatures. Individuals convicted of fraud, forgery, identity theft, elections violations and sexual offenses would be denied registration, and permanently ineligible to work as paid signature gatherers. Volunteer signature gatherers would be exempt from such requirements.

Both of these bills represent prudent reforms that have been successfully implemented in other states with a history of signature fraud and other abuses. As it stands now, nothing would stop the Dedeauxs from working again as paid signature gatherers. Likewise, convicted identity thieves and sex offenders could be out there in front of the Safeway as I type, collecting the addresses and signatures of prospective victims.

Last year the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center ranked Washington’s initiative laws some of the most permissive in the nation, handing us a big, fat “F” in its nationwide Ballot Integrity Report Card. And yet this year, like in past sessions, the smart money is on the Legislature chickening out of addressing these long overdue reforms.

Opponents insist that there is no evidence of fraud, but the Dedeaux case proves otherwise, while the box of documents O’Shea left behind almost certainly contains additional incriminating evidence. Now is the time for the Legislature to act to protect the integrity of our initiative process.

The Virginia House of Delegates recently passed a bill that prohibits companies from forcing employees to be implanted with tracking devices like RF microchips, an act of legislation that as a civil libertarian I find both obvious and laudable.

But far from acting out of a concern for personal privacy in the digital age, Republican Delegate Mark Cole says he proposed the bill out of fear that the implants could turn out to be the mark of the beast as prophesied in Revelation:

“My understanding — I’m not a theologian — but there’s a prophecy in the Bible that says you’ll have to receive a mark, or you can neither buy nor sell things in end times,” Cole said, as quoted at the Washington Post. “Some people think these computer chips might be that mark.”

Uh-huh. It’s good to see that Republicans have their priorities in order.

Um… huh?

FINALLY someone has stood up to the institutional urge at Seattle Public Schools to adopt constructivist or reform math: Judge Julie Spector of King County Superior Court ruled Thursday that the district’s adoption of the Discovering series of high-school math texts was “arbitrary” and “capricious.”

This is a kind of judicial activism, and as a method of selecting or rejecting math books it makes us uneasy. Normally a judge would defer to the School Board. But … Don’t appeal the ruling.

Shorter Seattle Times: This is a kind of judicial activism, but that’s okay when we agree with it.

Apparently unwilling to wait for U.S. cable and phone companies to catch up with the rest of the world in providing ultra-high-speed Internet access, Google just announced plans to build an experimental fiber network, delivering speeds up to 1 gigabit per second to as many as 500,000 homes. From now until March 26 they will be accepting RFI‘s from government officials interested in participating in the project… and Seattle would have to be absolutely crazy not to make a concerted effort to throw its hat into the ring.

Really. First mayor or council member to come out enthusiastically in support of this, I’m buying a beer.

But of course we can’t rely on our elected officials to do this all on their lonesome. Let’s start brainstorming about how to make the most compelling proposal to Google, and how to organize promoting it. You’d think even the trolls could get on board with this, as it’s one of those public/private things that kinda trumps politics.

UPDATE: Pasco kicks Seattle’s ass
I got an email from Matthew Watkins, Mayor Pro-Tem of Pasco, that he started working on his online application the minute he saw the news on Slashdot, about an hour before I posted. So since I didn’t specifically specify a Seattle mayor or council member, I suppose I owe Watkins a beer. But I’ll still buy a beer for the first Seattle mayor or council member to take the lead.

I mean, come on… do we really want to cede the future to Pasco?

Despite the tough economic times, 20 0f 23 school levy and bond measures in King and Snohomish counties are passing, most by comfortable margins. Of the three that are currently failing, two are bond measures receiving over 50 percent of the vote, but which require 60 percent to pass. The only levy to fail is in Federal Way, and just barely at 49.7 percent.

And Seattle’s two school levies are both passing with over 71 percent of the vote.

That’s right, in the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, a comfortable majority of voters in WA’s two most populous counties just voted to raise their own taxes to pay for schools.

Think about it.

I’m not having an easy time making ends meet, and yet I just voted to raise my own taxes to help pay for schools, as will a comfortable majority of voters in school levy elections throughout the state.

Think about it.

Over on Crosscut, Daniel Jack Chasan asks the question: “Are super-majorities in the legislature unconstitutional?”

Simple answer: of course they are… except for, you know, those super-majorities specifically prescribed within the constitution.

Think about it. Washington state’s constitution mandates a two-thirds legislative super-majority to place a constitutional amendment on the ballot, an intentionally difficult legislative hurdle. And unlike in California, Washington’s constitution cannot be amended via initiative.

But if constitutionally prescribed legislative majorities, like that required to amend the constitution itself, can be changed through a simple majority vote — either of the legislature or through a citizens initiative — then there’s really no point in having a constitution at all. What sets a constitution apart from, and primary over the rest of our laws is the extra effort it takes to modify it; if the majority provisions can be changed via simple majority, than so can the constitution, making it in essence, just another set of statutes.

The fact that I-960 makes it more difficult to pass legislation, rather than less, is neither here nor there. The constitution is the constitution.

So why has the Washington State Supreme Court never thrown out I-960 or its predecessor I-601 as unconstitutional? Because its never been forced to rule on the issue.

Hugh Spitzer, who teaches Washington constitutional law at the University of Washington law school, says it seems pretty clear that if the state supreme court were somehow forced to vote on the issue, the court would find the two-thirds rule unconstitutional. But so far, the court has managed to duck the question.

“The court is terrified of having to make a decision,” on the constitutionality of a supermajority, Spitzer suggests. “They do everything they can” to avoid it.

Huh. So here’s an idea that I’m confident my friends in the Democratic caucus will never embrace: why not just up the ante on Tim Eyman’s game of constitutional brinksmanship, and fight fire with fire? If Tim is going to insist on repeatedly running initiatives that increase the majority required to pass certain forms of legislation, then the Legislature should pass a bill — on a simple majority vote — that increases the majority required to qualify or pass certain types of initiatives.

You know, we could attempt to increase the number of signatures necessary to qualify an initiative for the ballot from 8 percent of the previous gubernatorial turnout to 12 percent, and/or increase the majority required for passage at the polls from a simple majority to say, 60 percent.

Of course, such legislation would be challenged, and of course, the Supreme Court would strike it down. You just can’t change such constitutionally prescribed majorities through simple legislation.

And that would settle that constitutional issue, once and for all.