Sunday evening, I went to a planning meeting for Occupy Hartford. (For my initial thoughts about the meeting, see my #OccupyHartford blog post.)

One of the topics discussed was about whose attention are we trying to get. Is it business leaders? Is it the politicians? Is it the traditional media? Is it the general populous? Related to that, what is the message we are trying to get across and the results we are trying to accomplish.

A mailing list has been set up, and there is incredible energy on the list, as people work together to reach consensus on some of these topics.

With this being a group drawn together by some general ideas, different people will have different opinions, and many of these opinions will overlap. For example, business leaders, politicians, and journalists are all part of the general populous. So, if we try to reach the general populous, we are trying to reach business leaders as part of that.

Likewise, as we talk, we find ideas that resonate and we can speak individually about the ones that are most important to each one of us.

Since I am a social media person, this plays an important role in how I am looking at things. Years ago, I wrote about 'post-broadcast politics', a phrase I learned from a friend. Yet the post broadcast politics we talked about nearly a decade ago, really didn't take shape. Maybe, now, it really is.

The #Occupy movement, like the Arabic Spring, is powered by social media, where each one of us can have our say, and can say it socially as part of something bigger. It is the sort of direct involvement that has been so elusive for years, and many of us may still have problems tapping into it.

Instead of listening to the news to tell us what they think we need to hear, or even having to have the group agree on exactly what we are going to say, each one of us can say what is important, and the themes others pick up on end up getting the most focus.

This presents difficulties for people used to the older hierarchical broadcast style of involvement, but it is very liberating. #occupy your mind with post broadcast politics.

With this, let me share a few thoughts about what the #Occupy movement is really all about. I'm using #occupy extensively since it seems to be 'the brand', and it is a word that we can do a lot with.

What is it that #occupies your mind? Are you pre-occupied with what is being broadcast to you by the traditional media? By bloggers, and new media or social media? Is your mind occupied with searching for mindless entertainment, or simply getting the next meal? Are you pre-occupied with bread and circuses?

Is your career occupied with an effort to get ahead by taking advantage of others, or does the idea of working together to help one another out occupy a greater place in how you try to live your life?

What matters to me, is reaching the general populous and trying to get them to occupy their minds with post broadcast politics based on collaboratively seeking the common good That, it seems to me, is what is sorely needed today, and is the anti-thesis of the corporate greed where 1% take advantage of the other 99%

On Saturday October 1st, I was pleased to be a part of the The Future panel at the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project event, Election Integrity - Past, Present & Future. The event was to celebrate the 25th anniversary of a conference on voting integrity 1986.

I arrived at the Charter Oak Community Center in Hartford Sunday evening at 5 PM. There was a circle of chairs in the downstairs room, which was being expanded as I arrived. There were about thirty five people there and more were arriving. People were scurrying around to find more chairs, and some people started bringing cushions to put on the floor for people to sit on. I chatted with a couple people and looked around to see who else was there.

It was a mixed crowd, with kids still in college to people who had been in Haight Ashbury in the sixties. One person took the lead to act as facilitator. A note taker was selected as well as a person to keep track of whose turn it was to speak.

One of the first people to speak was from Tunisia. He was very excited to be there and was warmly welcomed. Others had been down at the demonstrations in New York and brought back various reports. There was some discussion about the goals and the near term plans.

As a very broad based group, there were many ideas expressed, from universal health care and bringing the troops home, to challenging corporate personhood and the detrimental effect it is having on our political process.

There was strong support voiced for some sort of direct action, such as occupying Bushnell Park, an abandoned building, and various other locations.

In terms of messaging, the key idea of representing the 99% that hasn't prospered while the richest 1% have received strong support.

I tweeted various parts of the meeting, and shared one picture, although from where I was sitting, the lighting wasn't all that good. I had to leave early to call into Fiona's Radio Show and to get home to wrap up the day. The meeting was only half over, so I look forward to receiving an email with additional notes from the meeting.

There was a lot of support and energy behind the meeting and it will be interesting to see how Occupy Together comes together in Hartford, and the rest of Connecticut.

Was the "online tampering" done by outside hackers? Or was it an insider? Does the Courant have the expertise to determine the cause in this instance and actually create effective controls to prevent future online voting attacks? If so, the editors should be advising the likes of the Department of Defense, banks, and Google.

Today former GOP Candidate for Governor Tom Foley penned this Op-Ed piece in the Hartford Courant about his experience in running for office. He talks about the process and explains this:

Politicians win elections by making promises. Voters decide if the promises are the ones they like and whether, if elected, the candidate will make good on them. Many factors play into the calculus of the voter's choice — likability, plausibility, personal credibility, a candidate's record and the views of opinion leaders, to name a few.

Foley then proceeds to cynically describe the politics in contrast to business and insinuate the politicians habitually lie. He concludes by recommending the creation of a statute that would require politicians to be truthful.

If the former ambassador wishes to understand what happened in this election he needs to detach himself from his own race and look at things from a broader perspective. He ran a race in conjunction with Linda McMahon and together they spent millions of dollars to woo voters. The narrative they ran with was that of being outsiders. Consultants that could fix state government by not being a part of it. Such a narrative is common especially in anti-incumbent years as we've had. It does not sell in Connecticut.

In business when you apply for a job you send them your resume. Your employer looks at your experience, skills, and personality among other traits. Experience is what won out this year. Though Foley had been an ambassador to Ireland he downplayed that and instead focused on his business experience. In contrast Dan Malloy embraced his role as a public servant and all his years as Mayor of Stamford. McMahon played the outsider card as well and handily lost to Richard Blumenthal. The advantage that Blumenthal had is that Connecticut voters already knew him. He spoke at their kids graduations, and has been perpetually present at political events in the state.

This experience will certainly help these legislators and constitutional officers navigate the tricky waters of balancing budgets and producing policy. They can figure out how government might stay afloat amidst this changing tide and try and ease the pain. However at the end of the day the state is still in an economic crises. This crises is as much the product of the free-market as it is of the government. We need business talent and we need it in business. We need all the Republican candidates who were outsiders to go back to doing what they do best to help lift us out of this mess. Politicians cannot and will not solve this problem on their own.

We note that there are two registrars in Bridgeport, elected to use their two eyes and two brains to represent opposing interests toward voting integrity and access. Today, would the Courant maintain or reconsider its past editorial position proposing a single registrar per town, not in the interest of integrity, but in the interest of saving money?

From the details we have so far, we can start our list of issues with the situation in Bridgeport. We continue our issues with election integrity in Connecticut, especially in close elections.

Citizen observation and analysis shows some improvements along with a newly uncovered problem with the random selection process...We conclude that August post-election audits still do not inspire confidence because of:

• failure in the integrity of the random district selection process,
• lack of standards for determining need for further investigation of discrepancies,
• weaknesses in the ballot chain of custody, and
• lack of, consistency, reliability, and transparency in the conduct of the audit.

the list of polling districts for the random audit drawing was missing some districts and is otherwise inaccurate and ambiguous. The integrity of the audit requires an accurate list of districts that is verifiable by the public. We have extended our recommendations to the Legislature to include an efficient fix to this problem.

The New Haven Independent has posted an article about the tasings of Yale students at a club the other weekend: Cell Phone Commands Led To Club Tasings.

The article talks about the New Haven Independent obtaining police reports through a Freedom of Information request after the police refused to disclose details of what happened at the club.

The reports indicate that the two arrests stemmed from the disobeying of an order to put cell phones away. The reports do not explicitly state why that order was given.

The article placed the event in the context of “a number of complaints about excessive police aggression in other incidents”.

The students were charged with “one count each of inciting a riot, interfering with a police officer, and disorderly conduct.”

The case for interfering with a police office appears to be based on the following:

“Lieutenant Reddish explained that Jefferson’s actions hindered the investigation by deterring other officers from doing their duties by having to repeatedly come back to him and tell him to put his phone away

It appears as if the real interference is based on the police department’s repeated efforts to avoid scrutiny of its actions in their unreasonable and unsupported demand that people put away cellphones. If this request had not been made, the officers would not have been pulled away from doing real police duties. This interference is further illustrated by the police department’s refusal to release these reports until compelled to do so under the Freedom of Information Act.

The counts of inciting a riot and disorderly conduct appear to be based on the following:

While the Lieutenant was speaking to him Jefferson kept looking away and rolling his eyes, Jefferson was smirking and laughing at the lieutenant

There is nothing more disorderly than laughing at a police officer on a power trip. Yet these power trips are what do the most damage to law enforcement. There are many great law enforcement officers in Connecticut and I am proud that includes several relatives of mine. It is unfortunate when a few bad apples damage the reputation of law enforcement officials and the City of New Haven would be well advised to weed out those bad apples as quickly as possible.

This is not to say that the students are above reproach. Too often in our country, people place their individual freedoms over and above their responsibilities. They act as if they deserve some special privileges because of the family they are born into, how much money their family makes, or how skilled they are athletically.

However, if we begin tasing people because they act obnoxiously out of their self-importance and belief that their rights outweigh their responsibilities, then we would probably have at least half of the people running for office in hospitals.

All in all, as a person committed to transparency, it appears as if the real fault lies with a few bad apples in the New Haven Police Department who are more committed to coverups than to community policing. It was compounded by recent events around New Haven clubs and senses of privilege that some people have. Either the New Haven Police Department needs to get rid of the bad apples, or it needs a new version of the Miranda Rights:

“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say on a cellphone, or even attempting to use a cellphone in the vicinity of a police officer will be used against you, not only in a court of law, but as justification for excessive physical abuse. You have the right to speak to an attorney. You just can’t do it on a cellphone in the vicinity of a police officer. If you cannot afford an attorney one will be appointed for you. If you go to Yale, you can count on your parents hiring some of the best lawyers in the land, probably Yale Law School graduates or lecturers and suing our asses off.”

Monday evening in New Haven, Connecticut State Comptroller candidate Kevin Lembo sat down with a group of bloggers to discuss his campaign. Different topics interest different bloggers. Some lean more toward activism, others towards journalism, and often they end up somewhere in the middle, so the discussion was fairly broad based.

Many of the bloggers were already well acquainted with Mr. Lembo from his early explorations into running for Lt. Governor and from the Democratic Convention and Primary. War stories and strategy was discussed. Yet the real meat of the discussion came around Kevin Lembo’s vision for the Comptrollers office.

In many ways, the Comptrollers job is pretty nonpartisan. The goals of a good comptroller, no matter what party they are from should be transparency and efficiency, and Mr. Lembo spoke well about both of these topics.

For transparency, he spoke about the State Comptroller’s Bond Allocation Database. It is a useful tool that is probably not well enough known. Mr. Lembo spoke about it being a good start, but that his vision was to ultimately put the whole budget up by agency, by line item and update it regularly as money is spent for the budget items.

As a longer term goal, Mr Lembo hopes to see some of the award winning work of the State Legislature on Results Based Accountability incorporated into an online website for the Comptroller’s office.

He hopes that this will be a valuable tool for people to compare budgets and results across states. Such comparisons and further research has the potential to considerably improve government efficiency beyond the simple efficiencies achieved by making spending more transparent.

When asked about other states, he said that the comparisons would need to be done on a case by case basis. He did speak highly of the work to promote transparency that Susan Coombs, the Republican Comptroller of the State of Texas has done on their Window on State Government.

Some state government spending data is already online here in Connecticut through the Yankee Institute’s CT Sunlight Project. He lauded the project yet he thought this project should have been done by the state, and expressed concern about protecting the security and safety of some people listed in the CT Sunlight Project page.

Another key area for improved government efficiency is in health care purchasing. It is a large part of state and local budgets. By consolidating health care purchasing, even starting simply by bringing in DSS and corrections, Mr. Lembo believes significant savings can be realized. Ideally, he would like to see such savings be used to further expand health care offerings to the uninsured and to small businesses. As a large purchaser of health care, the state can also push for more efficient and better health care.

There were other areas where Mr. Lembo believes that the state can improve efficiency in delivering vital services. This could involve combining agencies to work more effectively together as well as reviewing previous spending records to see where budgets could be adjusted.

The wide ranging and frank discussion focused on the issues our state faces should serve as an example for others seeking office.