Plate 0′ Shrimp

A couple of weeks ago we obtained come walnuts from my Mom’s walnut tree. She said she never gets walnuts, because the squirrels get them first. So we picked a couple off of the ground, and then some off the tree that were about ready. I figured we could set them out on my porch to dry. I forgot that squirrels are everywhere!

Here’s the little guy staring me down. They are HIS walnuts!

Can’t quite get at them? Guess you aren’t so smart after all!

Giving me the sideways eye.

No walnuts for you… yet.

My son is an avid gamer, and a couple of years ago, when we lived in Fremont, I signed him up for a video game design summer camp through the City of Fremont Department of Parks and Recreation. He loved it, so when I saw TechKnowHow Summer Computer Camp - Game Design 2 listed in the City of Pleasanton recreation guide, I signed him up, along with his sister, who’s now old enough. At $350 each, it is a little steep, but we are looking at the computer game design major at UC Santa Cruz.

Here’s the summer camp description from the website, http://www.techknowhowkids.com/

Create your own computer games with interesting characters, storyline, music and settings. You’ll learn how to animate objects & characters, how to use scripts for 3d graphics, fog & lighting, and how to add screen effects, such as snow and rain.

Your first game will be a role-playing (RPG) adventure game, featuring controls for navigation, items to collect, power-ups, and offensive and defensive powers.

Your second game will be a 3d game with a first-person point of view. Travel through rooms looking for prizes and avoiding obstacles. Select or design characters & bosses, add sound effects, music, health, score tables, and more.

Take home your games to play on a Windows-based PC at home.
(The 3d game requires a computer with a 3d video card and at least 16MB of video memory).

Class Prerequisite: To enroll, a student must have taken Game Design 1 or be at least 11 years old, due to the advanced lessons.

Note: There is a $10 materials fee in addition to the tuition for this course. This enables students to take home a registered copy of the game design software so that they can continue to make games on a Windows-platform computer at home.

The one week camp is held at Amador Valley High, here in Pleasanton. You could call it “summer camp for nerds,” but MY kids aren’t nerds, so I won’t.

The lids on Tree Top apple juice bottles are tapered in such a way that incredible strength is required to unscrew them. Other apple juice bottle lids, and other juice bottle lids in general, are not so hard to unscrew.

Here’s a slideshow of some pics I took last month at Horsetail Falls

It’s been over 3 months since my last blog posting! Busy like the bee. How appropriate is it then, that my first blog posting after so much time be a review of a beer, given to me as a Christmas present in June! Appropriate.

The bottle has a cork in it, like wine, so I initially thought it was wine. It’s also a pint bottle, so about the right size for wine too. But don’t be fooled! It is beer.

It’s a product of Belgium, which is par for the course for my beer sampling. Unfiltered and bottle conditioned. So it’s a cloudy beer with sediment. 8.5 percent alcohol? Doesn’t that seem like a lot for beer?

The taste has a hint of the typical of a Heffeweisen flavor, but, on the whole, taste more to me like vodka or some other hard liquor. Not a bad taste, but the high alcohol content is apparent.

Let’s see what the beer has to say for itself. “In the pastoral province of Hainaut; the ‘artisinale ale belt’ of Belgium, is the Dupont family farm and brewery. Famous for their Saison Ale, Brasserie Dupont is also renowned in Belgium for their Moinett. This sturdy ale has an herbal bouquet that indicates its well hopped character. But unlike it’s drier cousin, its body is fuller and rounder with a slightly sweet finish. Delicious before a meal and with foods like marinated meats and barbecue.”

It’s good with chili too. Take if from me.

Fred’s Birthday Party 2007
Originally uploaded by philis99@sbcglobal.net.

We had a party at Crest Ranch for Fred’s *%th Birthday. It rained Saturday, but was mostly sunny on Sunday.

From: http://www.blackboxvoting.org

THE ROAD TO BOONDOGGLE IS PAVED WITH GOOD INTENTIONS

(Warning: You might really hate this story.) This story represents months of original research by Black Box Voting. We went into this looking for the defense industry contractors we’d heard had lobbied for the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). That legislation has been blamed for the touch-screens (DREs) that showed up all over America. Well, that’s not what we found. The real story on who was behind HAVA may come as a surprise to you. It was to us..

THE ROAD TO BOONDOGGLE IS PAVED WITH GOOD INTENTIONS:
HELP AMERICA VOTE ACT (HAVA) LOBBYIST LIST

Question: What happens if you lobby a lawmaker for $4 billion in expenditures for touch-screen voting machines and go back to that same lawmaker two years later asking to dump DREs?

Answer: You lose credibility. It might be hard to lobby for other things. It’s politically embarrassing. And your members, or funders, might have a few questions to ask about the prudence of your lobbying expenditures.

BUT HOW COULD ANYONE HAVE KNOWN?

The road to voting computers was paved with good intentions. No one knew that some of the programmers for voting computers would turn out to be convicted embezzlers.
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/2197/14318.html

No one realized that the main sponsor of the HAVA bill — Rep. Bob Ney — would end up going to jail on corruption charges.
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/8/46466.html

Few realized that the federal testing labs, Ciber and Wyle, weren’t doing their jobs and their overseers — NASED and now the EAC — failed to check their work.
Wyle failures (Bowen Hearing): http://www.blackboxvoting.org/itahearing.pdf
Ciber failures: http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/8/46428.html

HAVA bought a lemon.

WHO BIT INTO IT?

Progressive public interest groups. Labor unions. Civil rights groups.

While many election reform activists are under the impression that touch-screen (DRE) voting machines were some sort of Republican plot to take over America, the truth is that lobbying for the DRE-seeking “Help America Vote Act” came primarily from the foundation of the Democratic Party itself.

Activists throughout America have expressed surprise at the Democratic Party’s unwillingness to pull DREs off the shelf. One reason is simply this: To do so would damage the credibility of those who lobbied for HAVA. And those who lobbied for HAVA just happen to be the biggest funders and activist workhorses for the Democratic Party itself.

WHO INVESTED THEIR CREDIBILITY (AND MEMBERSHIP FUNDS) TO LOBBY FOR HAVA?

1. Public interest groups - mostly progressive
2. Big labor
3. Minority rights groups
4. Disability rights groups
5. Industry

Of these, the first four tend to favor Democrats but the fifth group — industry, the group charged with writing the computer code that counts America’s votes — is made of vendors that are more often close to the Republican Party.

Democrats lobbied HAVA in but to a large extent, Republican-affiliated vendors executed the mechanics of the plan. Some would call this comical; others, tragic.

PUBLIC INTEREST GROUP HAVA LOBBYISTS

1. People for the American Way
2. Common Cause
3. American Civil Liberties Union
4. League of Women Voters
5. American Jewish Committee
6. Hadassah
7. American Association for Retired Persons
8. Public Citizen
9. American Network of Community Options and Resources
10. Constitution Project (Georgetown University)
11. Open Society Policy Center (Soros)

LABOR UNION HAVA LOBBYISTS

1. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME)
2. Laborers International Union of North America
3. International Brotherhood of Teamsters
4. United Auto Workers
5. American Federation of Teachers
6. AFL-CIO
7. UNITE (Industrial & Textile employees)

Of the seven HAVA-lobbying groups above, five are among the Top-20 largest donors of all time to any political party. All five donate almost exclusively to the Democratic Party and its candidates. None of the top 20 Republican donors lobbied for HAVA.

According to OpenSecrets.org, the labor unions that lobbied for HAVA have given nearly $150 million to support Democrats since 1989, and six were in the Top-20 Democratic PAC funders for 2006-06.

MINORITY RIGHTS HAVA LOBBYISTS

1. NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc.
2. National Council of La Raza
3. Mexican American Legal Defense & Educational Fund (MALDEF)

DISABILITY RIGHTS HAVA LOBBYISTS

1. American Foundation for the Blind
2. The ARC of the United States
3. National Disability Rights Network
4. Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund
5. United Cerebral Palsy Association

Black Box Voting has been unable to locate the lobbying disclosure forms for the American Association of Persons with Disabilities (AAPD) featuring the vocal Jim Dickson, nor did we find any disclosure forms for the National Federation for the Blind (NFB), the group that took $1 million from Diebold. Misfiled? Misnamed? Overlooked? Omitted?

Link for NFB $1 million from Diebold: http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/73/36492.html

COUNTY GOVERNMENT HAVA LOBBYING
1. Riverside County, Calif.
2. San Diego County, Calif.
3. Ventura County, Calif.
4. Miami-Dade County, FL

INDUSTRY & BUSINESS HAVA LOBBYISTS

1. Accenture
2. VoteHere
3. Election Systems & Software
4. AccuPoll
5. Danaher
6. Association of Assistive Technology Act Programs
7. US Business & Industry Council
8. Assocation of Technology Act Projects

Not found on lobbying forms pushing HAVA: The SAIC, the ITAA, and Diebold.

Diebold Election Systems Inc does not show up on the 2001-02 HAVA lobbying forms, but did lobby for elections issues in 2004 and 2005.

Also notably missing are the firms referenced by R. Doug Lewis of “The Election Center” in an August 2003 meeting. In this tape recorded meeting, he said that HAVA was put into place by an election systems task force which included Lockheed, Northrop-Grumman, EDS, and Accenture.

Of these, only Accenture shows up the lobbying forms, and there is no entity called Election anything, except for Election System & Software and another company, election.com, which lobbied for Internet voting. (See Chapter 8 of Black Box Voting for more on the Saudi-owned election.com, which was later taken over by Accenture - http://www.blackboxvoting.org/bbv_chapter-8.pdf - See Chapter 16 for more information on the tape recorded meeting: http://www.blackboxvoting.org/bbv_chapter-16.pdf )

What about Choicepoint? Choicepoint says it didn’t lobby for HAVA. Choicepoint says it hasn’t had any involvement in elections.

The lobbying forms don’t show lobbying for voting machines, but a lobbying firm called Fleishman-Hillard Government Relations filed a registration form in 2002 indicating they planned to lobby for “Election Reform” on behalf of Choicepoint. Muddying things up, no 2002 lobbying form appeared showing that they did. In 2001, however, a lobbying form clearly puts Choicepoint in the middle of HAVA lobbying, showing that Choicepoint was involving itself in lobbying for the voter registration component of HAVA.

Choicepoint has repeatedly stated that they have “no involvement whatsoever” in elections, and in rebuttal to a controversial article that appeared for a short while on OpEd News, Choicepoint came on to deny that they lobbied for HAVA. More on Choicepoint here:
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/17778.html

Choicepoint, a controversial database broker, clearly cannot state that it has “no involvement in elections.”

Choicepoint stakeholder Donna Curling, wife of Choicepoint chief Doug Curling, has continued to fund election reform lobbying by providing funding for some of the activists working on the Holt Bill.

THEY THOUGHT DRE VOTING MACHINES WOULD HELP THEM BUILD THE DEMOCRATIC BASE

Those who lobbied for HAVA were convinced that the DRE machines would solve problems, helping more people vote.

1. Many of the HAVA reformers believed that with DREs, people with less education would be more likely to fill out the whole ballot. In fact, they reasoned, the DRE machines would be easier to use for educationally disadvantaged populations, minorities, non-English-speaking voters, and the disabled.

Few studies back these conclusions up, and those that do have generally not been replicated, or were not peer reviewed, and sometimes show methodology that is as flawed as the lemons HAVA bought. The occasional studies that have been done — even those prepared by DRE advocates — sometimes end up with troubling caveats. A Georgia study purported to show that “most people like voting on the DREs” (but rarely mentions the small print: The same study showed that the African-Americans surveyed distrusted the touch-screens).

2. The citizens’ right to oversee local elections — and especially the citizens’ right to even get access to information — has been all but eliminated through the implementation of HAVA. The original civil rights concept was virtuous.

Federal Government is the entity that enacted civil rights, HAVA reformers reasoned, so therefore let’s ask the federal government to fix our elections process.

Be careful what you ask for. It just might get “fixed.”

REAL SOLUTIONS

If federal government is going to correct anything, it should start with enacting tougher standards to give citizens Freedom of Access to Elections Information — mandating that the system actually PRODUCE the information needed for citizens to make sure the right candidate was place in office, in a TIMELY manner, that is COST EFFECTIVE and USABLE, prohibiting removal of the information through proprietary claims.

And above all, local CITIZEN oversight must be protected. In almost every case, discoveries of problems with elections and the computers that count them have been discovered by ordinary citizens, not by government oversight, auditors, consultants, certifiers, or experts.

And if we are going to rid ourselves of the DREs, we need to get past the — er — little “problem” of the threat to credibility if former HAVA lobbyists take the courageous step of changing course.

They couldn’t have known. Perhaps a set of tough investigative hearings can provide the evidence to brace those backbones for the change in direction. Look to Calif. Secretary of State Debra Bowen’s well-prepped, no-nonsense hearings on the certification process for examples, and start by issuing subpoenas to Diebold’s master programmer, Talbot Iredale, and Ciber’s Shawn Southworth (who refused to show up for Bowen’s hearing).

This thing can be done. It doesn’t need a bandaid, it needs a disinfectant.

SEE FOR YOURSELF HOW HAVA CAME TO BE:

Photocopies of the lobbying forms are in the process of being uploaded to the Black Box Voting Document Archive. You will find lobbying forms for all of the groups listed above as they are uploaded here:
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/2197/46539.html