Copyright 2008,
James R. Conner,
all rights reserved.
MDT Director Jim Lynch’s slide show on Highway 35 traffic issues near Flathead Lake is as good a place as any to start. Delivered at public meetings on 4 & 5 June 2008 in Polson and Kalispell, Lynch’s presentation is now available for download from MDT as a 3.5-megabyte PDF.
There’s just one problem. That PDF — and apparently every other PDF produced by MDT; even PDFs of agendas for public meetings — is crippled with security restrictions that defy common sense. You can open the PDF, you can print it, and if you’re handicapped (blind), you can extract the text for accessibility.
And that’s all.
Want to select a block of text from Lynch’s Highway 35 slide show to paste into a letter to Director Lynch? Or paste a meeting agenda item into a news story? Not allowed. You’ll have to type the words in letter by letter.
Want to place a page in a page layout program such as Adobe’s InDesign? Not allowed. There are some convoluted workarounds, but none for efficiently placing a high resolution copy of a page in document.
Want to conduct an internet search for the document? “All contents of the document are encrypted and search engines cannot access the document’s metadata.” Forget Google. Your only option is the MDT website’s search function.
Want to risk running afoul of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act? You can use an application such as PDFKey Pro to remove the MDT’s security restrictions and restore your ability to select text and graphics, and to place pages in other documents.
But why should you have to risk legal action under the DMCA just to electronically select text from a document that is in the public domain in the first place?
The policy extends at least as far back as 2004 — and the Schweitzer administration actually has moderated it slightly. The PDF of the 29 October 2004 minutes of the Montana Transportation Commission, available on the MDT’s website, even forbids text extraction for handicapped accessibility. That discriminatory lockout has been discontinued, possibly by accident rather than by design. In any event, MDT today still continues to forbid content copying and page extraction even in documents intended for public distribution such as agendas for meetings of the MTC.
I do not yet know whether MDT is the only state agency that has this PDF policy, but I do know that Governor Schweitzer’s office does not impose these restrictions on PDF documents that it provides for public distribution.
So, let’s hear from you Director Lynch. Why are you doing this? When are you going to stop doing it? And let’s hear from you, too, Governor Schweitzer. Lynch is your appointee. Why are you allowing him to place unnecessary, indeed downright silly, restrictions on MDT’s PDF documents? When will you order him to stop doing it?
The Politico’s Ben Smith reports that Neera Tanden, Hillary Clinton’s former director of policy — and perhaps the leading architect of Clinton’s health care plan — has joined Barack Obama’s campaign as the director of domestic policy.
Hillarites will rejoice at this news. But those of us who favor a sensible health care policy will not. Clinton’s health care proposals, which keep health insurance tied to employment and depend on private insurance, are among the worst policy kludges ever to see the light of day. Hillarycare II is just another attempt by spineless Democrats to buy off the private health care insurance companies.
Obama’s health care proposal, unfortunately, is Hillarycare II without the individual mandate that sends the punitive class of economists into ecstasy. It’s basically Richard Nixon’s proposal.
The only solution to our health care crisis is a single-payer, national health care system; essentially, Medicare for all with benefits better than what the members of Congress now enjoy. Want to learn more? A good place to start is Physicians for a National Health Program.
I’ll have more to say on this subject as the campaign progresses.
There were three surprises. Brittany MacLean defeated Gil Jordan for the Democratic nomination for Senate District 2 (Whitefish and Columbia Falls and points north). I have informal reports that Jordan, a man of considerable accomplishment, may have had a personality that rubbed voters the wrong way. MacLean’s Republican opponent in November will be Ryan Zinke, a retired naval officer who grew up in Whitefish. Zinke easily defeated Suzanne Brooks in a campaign that was marred by rumors of anti-Zinke robo calls.
Scott Reichner defeated Bob Keenan for the Republican nomination for House District 9, the Bigfork seat vacated by Rep. Bill Jones. Keenan, a former legislator who believes he’d make a fine governor, but chose not to challenge Brian Schweitzer, evidently did not campaign. His not entirely complete C5 campaign finance report, filed on 22 May, listed only $250 in contributions, no expenditures, and no cash on hand. It appears, to borrow a term from boxing, that Keenan took a dive.
In the Democratic primary for county commissioner, Steve Qunell, the only candidate on the ballot, received unexpected competition from around 150 write-in votes (no names yet). I suspect that the write-ins were a protest connected to the dispute over who rules the zoning doughnut surrounding Whitefish. This is a toxic issue that I’ll address later this year. It would be a shame were it to derail Qunell, a very bright and capable man who would make a fine county commissioner.
There was no surprise in the Democratic contest in House District 8 (Kalispell), where newcomer Cheryl Steenson defeated veteran Democratic activist John de Neeve by a two-to-one margin. Steenson raised more money than de Neeve and incumbent Republican Craig Witte combined, recruited a small army of volunteers, enlisted savvy advisors, worked hard, ran a smart campaign, and surely benefited from being a fresh face in a year in which the voters seek change. Come November, look for Steenson, a true-blue Democrat with deep local roots, to defeat Witte, a movement conservative who wants to gut government, by a small but convincing margin.
There also was no surprise in Jim Dupont’s decisive win over Gary Hall for the Republican nomination for county commissioner from the northern district. Dupont raised more than $20,000, ran an efficient campaign, and cashed in on the goodwill he generated during his four terms as county sheriff. County commissioners tend to wear out their welcomes rather quickly, and Hall was no exception. Still, he worked hard at the job and deserves thanks for his efforts if not his results. Voters who want more of the same in a different package will vote for Dupont. Voters who want real change will vote for Qunell.
For me, there were three surprises. Eighty-five-year-old Bob Kelleher defeated Michael Lange and Kirk Bushman for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate. More than anything else, I think this indicates disgust and exasperation with the Republican establishment. Kelleher’s name recognition helped, but I doubt it was any higher than Lange’s name recognition, so it’s clear that Lange was not helped by the publicity he received during the last session of the legislature.
Steve Bullock won the Democratic nomination for attorney general. He campaigned hard, promising to rescue Montana from an alleged plague of abuse of prescription drugs (translation: he thinks people should feel their pain, not kill it). Whether the best man for the job won is impossible to tell. Attorney Generals should be appointed on the basis of professional competence, not elected. Most campaigns for attorney general, like most campaigns for a judgeship, degenerate into one-up-manship contests in which the candidates trip over themselves and each other in their attempts to promise to hang ‘em higher than anyone else.
The biggest shocker, or at least disappointment, was John Driscoll’s defeat of Jim Hunt for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. House seat now held by Dennis Rehberg. Driscoll filed at almost the last minute. A former Public Service Commission member, Driscoll, according to the Billings Gazette, “…said he didn’t intend to campaign at all and was offering himself as a choice to voters who wanted someone without financial ties to any interest.”
Hunt, an attorney and member of the distinguished family headed by former Montana Supreme Court justice William Hunt, wanted the job, but began his campaign late by political standards (Bill Kennedy, who campaigned for the job through most of 2007, withdrew last fall citing personal reasons, whatever those were). Therefore, Driscoll had higher name recognition and that made the difference.
Driscoll’s “victory” ensures that Dennis Rehberg will win re-election easily. I find myself wondering whether Driscoll had a beef with Jim Hunt or the Hunt family, or a grudge against attorneys. His candidacy was a spoiler candidacy, and he succeeded in spoiling the best chance Democrats may ever have of defeating Rehberg. Frankly, the Democrats who voted for Driscoll were ignorant fools who just flunked real world civics. The Republicans who voted for Kelleher were a lot smarter.
A huge mushroom shaped cloud, probably a giant thunderstorm that may have risen from the plains west of Cardston, Alberta, towers behind the Teakettle ridge and Heavens Peak in Glacier National Park. Taken from a point 1.5 miles west-northwest of Kalispell using a digital SLR equipped with infrared and polarizing filters.
That’s certainly one interpretation of the following paragraph from the draft policy (download here):
Any student who willfully provides a false sample or otherwise tampers with a sample or undertakes any effort to obstruct, evaluate or impair the accuracy of the drug test will be suspended from participation in the current activity season and the next season for which the student would have been eligible and qualified to participate.
The key word is “evaluate,” for which the Oxford American College Dictionary provides this definition: “form an idea of the amount, number, or value of; assess.”
If the intent of the paragraph is providing a penalty for a student who tries to beat the test by, for example, providing a bogus or tainted sample, the word “evaluate” is not needed. But if the intent is to prevent the student from challenging the results of the test, by, say, alleging a laboratory error, then inserting “evaluate” in the paragraph works reasonably well.
Perhaps this is a case of sloppy writing, a case of one word too many triggering the law of unintended consequences. But it could be a case of deliberately trying to deny students the right to challenge positive-for-drugs test results.
I suspect the latter possibility is more likely. The program of random drug testing proposed for WHS is a policy of guilty until proven innocent. Those who embrace that philosophy, a class that includes the author of the draft policy, are, I think, more than likely to favor denying students who test positive the right to hire lawyers and experts in an attempt to challenge the test result and testing program. In other words, “Hey, kid, don’t talk back, don’t lawyer-up, and don’t evaluate.”
At School District 5’s school board meeting on 8 April, the trustees of School District 5 were briefed, in what I thought was a rather elliptical manner, on the biomass boiler problems at Glacier High School. The bottom line is that the installed equipment is not tough enough to handle the hogged wood that the district wants to burn. In a one-page handout (PDF), facilities manager Chuck Cassidy presented the board with three options:
Updated. It’s not a scandal, but it is an embarrassment: Glacier High School, my sources tell me, was built with the wrong equipment for burning the hogged wood chips that were intended as the school’s primary heating fuel (the backup fuel is natural gas).
If you attend the 5 April 2008 Democratic dinner in Butte, at which Obama and Hillary Clinton will speak, will your name and photograph end up in a Secret Service and/or Homeland Security database?
The great flood of 1964, which took out bridges, roads, and homes, and submerged dozens of square miles of the Flathead in June of that year, is the definitive flood for our valley. But we have experienced other floods of note, among them the inundations of 1894, 1916, 1933, and 1948.
Recently, another major high water event in the Flathead came to light — the late winter flood of 1900 — thanks to researchers from the…
Updated. If the Montana Democratic Party cannot sell tickets to a popular event efficiently and fairly, a simple exercise compared to running a major campaign, how can it expect to win elections?
If you live in Boston, or even Butte, a Saint Patrick’s Day parade is a big deal, a grand march down main street followed by a rousing good time in beer soaked pubs. In Kalispell, however, Saint Patrick’s Day is mainly an excuse to get drunk on green ale, and the parade is an anemic event that’s held out of habit. And so on Saturday, 15 March 2008, graying bagpipers skirled up Kalispell’s main drag…
Fighting Starlings. Making photographs of birds requires four things: patience, luck, a long lens, and bait, in this case suet from a big box store on whose board of directors a current presidential candidate once sat. Using a 55–200mm DX Nikkor, I shot through two plate glass windows. Luck delivered the Harpy-like pose. Window glass degrades the image some, but not by much if you keep the windows clean and the lens wide open and as close to the glass as possible. Larger image.
Flathead Panoramic. We humans have panoramic vision, but most of our cameras do not. Therefore, making a panoramic photograph requires making a series of overlapping images from a single point, keeping the focus and exposure constant. Later, the images are stitched together digitally using software such as Photomerge, the panorama creating software included in the current versions of Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. Flathead Panoramic displays a number of panoramas of the Flathead that I've made during the last two decades.
A clear night in February in the Flathead? During a total eclipse of the moon? The odds of experiencing that happy coincidence are only slightly higher than the odds of winning the Irish Sweepstakes. But last night it happened: the sky was clear and the darkening moon was visible from my front porch.
I mounted an old 400mm lens on a digital SLR, and made 80 images of the eclipse, one of which, showing the almost totally eclipsed moon dimly illuminated with Earthshine, you see to the right. With the camera’s sensitivity at 800, the lens wide open at f/5.6, the exposure was one-half-second. I saved the images in the RAW format and processed the files for a daylight color balance.
The hardest part of making this kind of photograph is not getting the exposure right; it’s keeping your southern exposure from icing-up while you stand still in the below freezing night. But if you’re interested in learning more about the technical aspects of shooting eclipses, the good people in the Flathead’s Big Sky Astronomy Club will be glad to help you.
Few things exasperate me as much as the predilection of both Republicans and Democrats to make a mountain out of a molehill when they discover a technical, but otherwise unremarkable, violation of campaign finance laws.
Earlier this week, a mountain was manufactured by Democrat Kendall Van Dyk, a well regarded state representative from Billings. Van Dyk discovered to both his horror and glee that a fellow named David Fulwiler donated $100 to Roy Brown, the Billings state senator who is running for the Republican nomination for governor…
Update, 9 February. I now believe that Laslovich must live in SD-43 to satisfy Montana’s residency requirements. I have extensively revised this posting.
Suppose that you and your wife both worked in Helena, owned a house there, and lived in that house. Wouldn’t you call Helena home, and use a Helena address if you filed for political office? That’s I would do, and I think, what most people would do.
But not 27-year-old Jesse Laslovich. Although he and his wife, Jill, own and live in a house in Helena, where he works in the Attorney General’s office…
…has been registered — it’s http://www.jimdupont2008.com — but as of 1330 MST today, it’s not on the web. The URL takes you to a note at godaddy.com reporting that the domain has been parked. It was registered on 16 January 2008, which suggests it was an afterthought or that the retired Republican sheriff didn’t decide to run for county commissioner until just before filing opened. I’m betting there’s plenty of money behind Dupont and that his website will be highly professional. His campaign, incidentally, already has made one mistake: it didn’t register www.jimdupont.com, which opens the door to mischief.
Writing in today’s Washington Post, Chris Cillizza lists potential Vice Presidential candidates for both parties. The last on his list for the Democrats? Montana’s governor, Brian Schweitzer:
Updated 17 January. You know the campaign for a seat in Congress is about to begin when the incumbent, in this case Montana’s Republican Congressman, Dennis Rehberg, sends you campaign literature — at taxpayer expense — disguised as an informational mailing for constituents. What I received (PDF) from Rehberg last week was a classic example of that dodge. A large, glossy, four-color, custom-sized card sporting his frank (more on that in a moment), it affirms his steadfast opposition to the unholy trinity of fraud, waste, and abuse, that hoary straw man of every politician, and informs us that he has introduced “critical earmark reform legislation.”