Lincolnite

I can't help but feel that all of this praise for Nebraska's Democratic caucus -- such as the LJS' enthusiastic editorial -- is overdone. It apparently was a huge success, and from the sounds of it, most participants had a great time. (But not Cindy Wieger.) Perhaps more importantly, Nebraska even managed to be talked about in the national media. It has been a while since anybody gave a hoot about Nebraskans' choice for presidential candidate. Still, I'm not ready to declare the caucus a long-term winner. A big part of its success was due, not to the process, but to the candidates. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are having an energizing effect on voters, whereas the Republican candidates are, well, boring, and the fact that John McCain is the front-runner is causing the right wing of the party to sink into depression. It's easy to make the news when you're making news. The difficult part is sustaining the momentum. If Nebraska's Democrats can one day be competitive in November ... well, that'd be something to really talk about. The LJS makes the claim that:

... there’s little doubt that the [Democratic] party found new energy and connected with people who only days ago were outside the system.

That's likely true. But what about the 34,000 people who voted in the 2004 primary but who didn't participate this year? Who are those people, why didn't they participate, and what effect did their absence have on the outcome? Few people seem to be publicly asking those important questions. It's entirely plausible that certain demographic voting patterns were skewed by the caucus. If I were a party person, I would want to know more about those missing participants, and what effect they might have in the general election. (Then again, maybe I'm blowing things out of proportion. Surely long-time caucus states have looked at such patterns of participation and non-participation before. I wonder what they found?) In the end, I do think the Nebraska Democrats deserve a pat on the back for bringing a little enthusiasm to the state in this looooong election season. Beyond that, in my opinion the jury is still out.

Mayor Chris Beutler today announced a public input process that will include a telephone survey and deliberative discussion, along with some sort of online comment-gathering system. The data will be gathered and analyzed by the University of Nebraska Public Policy Center [PPC] and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Bureau of Sociological Research [BOSR]. I, for one, am glad this is going to happen. It's a good sign that Mayor Beutler not only says that he is interested in receiving public input to support the budget process, but that he has followed through with a plan to gather that input. The methods chosen are relatively inexpensive, and the resultant data -- assuming the survey instruments are solid -- should be useful, both to the City and to its residents. On the point of the robustness of the survey instruments, I have faith that the PPC and BOSR will do an excellent job. Both organizations have many years of experience in many types of data collection and analysis. I don't know who else was in the running for the job, but it seems natural that the resources available from NU and UNL should be utilized for this sort of thing. And there's the first problem. Many Lincolnites will object to University involvement in the collection of opinions on topics that may include those that benefit NU and UNL. I'm not talking just about UNL expanding into the State Fair Grounds; UNL could benefit from other projects -- such as a Haymarket arena -- as well. Skeptical Lincolnites will say that stinks like a conflict of interest. I understand their concern, but I'm cautiously optimistic that such concerns are overblown. One of the best ways the City can reduce skepticism is to make public all of the gathered data and survey instruments promptly following the completion of the process. Mayor Beutler will need to have the data quickly in order to use it for his budget preparations later this spring. In order to truly build public trust, Mayor Beutler should release the data around the same time he receives it. Remember, almost any entity -- public or private -- could very well come with similar conflicts. Mayor Beutler could have outsourced, but doing so comes with its own share of backlash. Another potential problem is the cost. The City's press release makes no mention of the amount being paid to the PPC and BOSR, nor does it say from which of the City's "pots" the money will come. Considering that we're spending money in an effort to better allocate resources in the next budget cycle, I think it's a mistake not to have mentioned these things. It's certainly not an accidental oversight -- nothing in these press releases is accidental -- so therefore it feels like the information is being hidden. Why? Both parties -- the City and the University -- are public entities. The funding mechanism should be transparent. Look for a City Council member or two to have a few choice words regarding the money. Speaking generally, if this process proves successful I hope it is repeated periodically. Elections are an imperfect means of gathering public input, and public meetings are poorly attended, and rarely are the attendees representative of a cross-section of the city. A telephone survey or any sort of polling process that gathers input from a random selection of the population helps fill in the information gaps. I could easily get behind a biennial process of some sort. [Disclosure: I used to work for the PPC]

Did any of you get bit by the Aquila billing bug? Apparently an Aquila employee misread a bunch of meters, causing some customers' bills over the past three months to be too low. Now Aquila has to catch up, and it's biting customers in the behind with a surprisingly large bill this month. I wonder if that employee still has a job?

Look for a 5 percent increase in your electric bill from LES. That's lower than the 5.5% LES requested, but higher than the 4% and 4.5% requested by LIBA and the Lincoln Employers Coalition, respectively. What will LES do without the extra 0.5%? That remains to be seen. I wouldn't be surprised if we see a voluntary "support sustainable energy" checkbox on our bills in the future. I don't see such a thing being extremely successful. Why not? Because LES hasn't (yet) given us any concrete goals to work toward. "Help LES build five new wind turbines" sounds like something I can get behind. "Help LES make posters and billboards to tell people to be more environmentally conscious" isn't nearly as sexy.

Here's a nasty little adoption-related scenario playing out in Nebraska:

An adoption agency [Nebraska Children's Home] and birth mother want to take back a 3-month-old baby boy from a couple who wanted to give him a home, after learning that the adoptive mother was pregnant. The 22-year-old biological mother says in court documents that she wanted the parents who adopted her son to not have their own biological children. She wanted them to either raise her son alone or adopt more kids if they wanted to expand their family. But Jason and Angela Vesely say they didn’t purposely hide Angela’s pregnancy when they applied to adopt a child. They say they were never asked if she was pregnant by the private agency and didn’t know it had rules against applying mothers being pregnant.

Yikes, talk about a situation with no winners. It isn't unusual for Nebraska Children's Home to have a policy regarding an adoptive mother's pregnancy status or the adoptive family's number and age of current children. That's all par for the course. What would be unusual is if NCH didn't make its policies crystal clear. There was no mistaking our agency's policy: if The Missus were to get pregnant before the placement, we would be dropped from the waiting list. It's not intended to be a punitive policy, nor is it to prevent families with biological children from adopting. It's simply about ensuring that a newly adopted child receives the attention he deserves; it's very difficult to give that attention if two new children are battling for the parents' focus. Unfortunately, the LJS article creates more questions than it answers. Was it an open adoption? (The fact that the mother's name appears in the article leads me to believe that it was.) Has the adoption been finalized? (If so, that was very speedy.) I could go on and on. Child custody cases are rarely pretty, but they are often fascinating. I, for one, hope to keep an eye on this case because the end decision could potentially have interesting implications for all adoptive parents. Any case that is perceived to hurt adoptive parents has a chilling effect on adoptions. The biggest losers are usually domestic and open adoptions, two areas that most adoption proponents are trying to strengthen.

Are Lincolnites in a winter funk? Or perhaps we're just masochists? I ask because the third most-read HuskerExtra story this morning is this flashback to October. I'm not sure why anybody would want to relive those days.

The LJS editors have hopped on board the movement to change Lincoln's snow removal policies. Mayor Beutler has expressed interest in reviewing the city's policies as well. Then again, Mayor Beutler has also promised to review overall city spending -- with methods including an upcoming citizen survey of some sort -- so if the snow budget goes up, something else is probably going to have to go down. The Mayor is under a lot of pressure to keep the budget in check. And there's the rub. Is snow removal a service Lincolnites are willing to pay (more) for? I think it probably is ... right up until the new tax bills arrive. That's when folks tend to get cranky. I wonder what we could accomplish with the equivalent of, say, a buck a person?

Chief Casady spent some time reviewing his website statistics, which got me thinking about how it had been a while since I had looked at mine. A couple interesting items: First, I was extremely pleased to see that nearly 30% of Lincolnite's visitors use Firefox. Good job, folks! Some of you really need to upgrade, though. It's easy: Help -> Check for updates. Firefox takes care of the rest. Almost exactly half of the site's users use Internet Explorer, and of the IE users, half use IE7 and half use IE6. (And 2,500 hits came from IE 4.01. What?!) If you IE6 folks are able to upgrade, I strongly recommend upping to IE7. Well, actually I recommend switching to Firefox, but if you want to stick with IE, at least switch to IE7. Let's move on to locations. A surprising 2.5% of my traffic comes from France. Huh? I mean, thanks for coming, but I don't understand the draw. Obviously most of the site's visitors are from Nebraska, and 75% of those are from Lincoln. There's also quite a bit of traffic coming from California. Hi West Coasters! Search engine traffic is all over the board. But who cares about the normal items, I love the odd search phrases. Like these from January 2008:

• "Tori+Amos"+"To+Venus+and+Back" (47 hits)
• wrappers for hardshell tacos (2 hits)
• jennifer gray (32 hits)
• ferris bueller sloan (2 hits)
• keg prices in lincoln ne (4 hits)

I don't think I'm ready for Robbie to speak. In some ways it's great. I ask, "Robbie, what would you like for lunch?" And he responds, "Pea buh" (peanut butter). How handy is that? But in other ways, it's not such a good thing. I can't even think words like "damn" or "stupid", much less the fouler nouns, adjectives, and verbs, without Robbie picking up on them. Sure, it's hilarious for a few moments to see your son walking around the house saying "damn damn damn damn". But then you realize you're leaving for your parents' house in five minutes... It really is amazing how quickly his vocabulary is expanding. For a long time his only recognizable words were "uh oh" and "Daisy", not to mention the dreaded "No". Now he uses new words every day. Like "skiving" (Thanksgiving), which he uses to refer to a certain photograph on the wall. And today for the first time he referred to the hand mixer as "beats". Every time my mom watches him for us, she asks, "When did Robbie learn [some new word]?", and more often than not, we didn't even know he knew that word. It's incredible. It's also amusing to watch Robbie begin to test his boundaries. He might try to put his feet on the table while he's eating, for example. We'll say, "No no, Robbie. No feet on the table". So then he tests us. He'll hover his foot over the table, or he'll graaaadually lower the foot off the table until he gets the sense that he's in the safe zone. The little turkey loves to find the boundary between allowed and forbidden. Robbie is beginning to sing as well. So far "EIEIO" (Old MacDonald), "round round bus" (The Wheels on the Bus) and "ba ba BEANS" (Beans! by The String Beans) are his favorites. I especially love it when he tries to sing the Beans song. Unfortunately, it has not spurred an interest in eating beans. Physically, Robbie has been near the head of the class. He keeps up with older kids at the playground, at the YMCA, and elsewhere, and they seem to really enjoy playing with him. As a result, it's easy to compare Robert to older (2 and 3 year-old) kids. It's difficult to believe how much Robbie is going to change in the next few months. We're going down to Albuquerque in May for my sister-in-law's un-wedding (long story). Robbie will have just turned two. Even though it's only 3 months away, I can tell by watching other kids that Robbie will be much different by then. Grandma and grandpa will be shocked.

Mr. T, Moses, and I will be at Burrito Shack (approx. 9th and M) today at 12:45. If any of you would like to stop in and enjoy some tasty grub, I'd love to say hi. Also, The Missus, Robbie, and I will probably drop by Duggan's on Sunday to honor George Landolt's memory with some mass taco consumption. We haven't decided when we'll go, but it some of you want to go as a group, we'd be happy to meet up with you.

Chelsea Clinton will be in town today to campaign for her mom. She'll be on the UNL campus at the Union at 2:00pm, then she'll head to the Coffee House at 3:00. I could be wrong, but I can't help but feel like sending in her daughter isn't enough to get Clinton above the 30% mark in Saturday's caucus. Michelle Obama will be in town on Friday to campaign for her hubby. No details have been announced.

Chief Casady's squad is a little red-faced today after a lapse in judgment resulted in the Fourth Amendment helping to free a suspect in the Scheels robbery last October 1. Prosecutors were forced to drop their case against Jameal Gaines when a critical piece of evidence was ruled inadmissible because it had been acquired illegally. Mistakes like this happen now and then in every police department. The unfortunate thing about this situation for LPD is that the robbery was very high-profile. Losing one of the main suspects due to a violation of his Constitutional rights is very embarrassing. It'll be interesting to see if Chief Casady addresses this publicly on his blog. He probably won't (and maybe even can't) address this situation specifically, but it would be interesting to read his general perspective on suspect rights during evidence gathering. UPDATE: Indeed, Chief Casady has chimed in. An excerpt:

The probation order specified the conditions, and number 12 on that list was a requirement that the defendant "shall submit to search of his person, home, and school locker by the juvenile probation officer." The police officers spoke to the juvenile court probation officer via telephone, who advised them that they could search based on the court's order. The District Court, however, ruled that the probation officer can't transfer the authority of the Juvenile Court's order authorizing the search to a police officer.

Emphasis in original.

• Don't go to school today
• Don't park on the even side of the street
• Don't forget to take Mr. Wilson out for lunch

Looks like Time Warner Cable's Road Runner has taken another step toward the dark side. As of today (from my office, anyway), if you try to visit a domain that doesn't exist, you are redirected to a page that contains "helpful" suggestions and, of course, advertisements. Go ahead, try to visit this website and see what happens. At this stage you can still opt out of the service. To do so, either:

1. Click "Why am I here?", followed by "Preferences"; or
2. Click the "Opt In or Out of This Service" link at the very bottom of the page

On the next page, change your settings as appropriate. I personally recommend setting everything to "Disabled", but that's just me. Unfortunately, this may represent a tiny step toward a future in which internet service providers inject themselves more and more into your daily web browsing routine. The companies will promote this sort of a thing as a "service" intended only to help people find their way on the big bad World Wide Web. Fair enough, though the advertisements strewn across the page lead me to believe that altruism isn't their sole motivation. The average user probably won't bat an eye at this, and frankly, it's really not that big a deal at this point. I just don't like the notion that somebody is interfering with the steps between my action (requesting a website) and the expected outcome (either the website or an error arrives). Call me a pessimist, but I see this move as a foot in the door.