Computer hackers 1, D.C. govt. 0: Mike DeBonis blog in WaPo: "Hacker infiltration ends D.C. online voting trial"; Hail to the Victors!

The Washington Post
Hacker infiltration ends D.C. online voting trial

By Mike DeBonis
October 4, 2010; 2:14 PM ET

Last week, the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics opened a new Internet-based voting system for a weeklong test period, inviting computer experts from all corners to prod its vulnerabilities in the spirit of "give it your best shot." Well, the hackers gave it their best shot -- and midday Friday, the trial period was suspended, with the board citing "usability issues brought to our attention."

Read the whole post at his popular blog on local D.C. government at:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/debonis/2010/10/hacker_infiltration_ends_dc_on.html

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/debonis/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/

Speaking of the University of Michigan, in case you forgot it when I brought it up here before, Dolphins QB Chad Henne never beat Ohio State when he was the Wolverine's QB, either. Henne was zero for four.

"Sub-sub-sub-culture" exposes Japanese men to ridicule as they take 'virtual girlfriends' on holiday - augmented reality for lovelorn otaku nerds

Russia Today is a 24/7 English-language news channel based in Moscow and other international cities that I first watched the Saturday morning in April when Polish President Lech Kaczynski's plane crashed outside the airport in Smolensk, on his way to represent Poland at a ceremony commemorating the 1940 Katyn massacre, killing all 97 people on board..
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/apr/11/world/la-fg-polish-president-crash11-2010apr11
RT was the only TV news network reporting the story LIVE from near the scene, plus had well-informed analysts on the phone from various European capitals, including Warsaw, who could speak knowledgeably about Kaczynski's personal life and Polish political history and how these events all connected in one horrible day for modern-day Poland.

As I wrote at the time here, since I was awake when it happened, the Fox News Channel was first U.S. cablenet to report the crash, and as usual, MSNBC slept, showing one of their many old crime documentaries they lard their overnight and weekend schedule with, rather than break into it.  
That was not the first time that I saw MSNBC be the last TV cable net to air some breaking news, so now I never even bother flipping to them to see their take on anything.
Homepage: http://rt.com/

Their YouTube Channel has some interesting videos.
https://www.youtube.com/user/RussiaToday

Alyona Minkovski in particular interviews all sorts of characters on her show:
http://www.youtube.com/user/TheAlyonaShow
Here's a video from her show about the topic du jour: lovelorn otaku nerds in Japan taking their virtual girlfriends on holiday with them to a hotel in Atami on the Pacific Coast.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebrvafpjIlg



Some of you longtime readers may recall me writing in the past here on the blog that my first year living in Washington, D.C., I lived next door to (in front of) the Japanese Ambassador's official residence on Nebraska Avenue, N.W., thus putting yours truly in one of the safest neighborhoods in the city, due to all the security details in the area, which I greatly appreciated. 
This was when the crime and murder rate in D.C. was out-of-control and made D.C. America's murder capital.

I was living just down the street from the campus of American University, as well as the Swedish Ambassador's home, NBC-TV's Washington news bureau and their DC affiliate, WRC-TV, as well as the real-life HQ for NCIS.  (Years later, when I was living in Arlington County, I had an NCIS agent for a neighbor.)

Wall Street Journal's Japan Real Time blog:
http://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2010/09/03/this-weeks-hits-virtual-girlfriends-walkman-beats-ipod-calling-the-boj-shots/

'Love Plus' resort: A solo romantic getaway
Why are men with virtual video-game girlfriends flocking to a Japanese beach resort town?
http://theweek.com/article/index/206736/love-plus-resort-a-solo-romantic-getaway

Konami Digital Entertainment http://www.konami.com/

http://news.discovery.com/tech/love-plus-dating-game.html

Blizzard déjà vu! Carol Joynt gives you a Georgetown view of the Blizzard of 2010

"It's déjà vu all over again" -Yogi Berra.
Above, cover of today's Washington Post


Above, a Washington Post cover from my
last brutal blizzard, January of 1996, when I
lived on Pershing Drive in the Clarendon
neighborhood of Arlington County, off of
Washington Blvd. and near Fort Myer,
home of "The Old Guard" of the U.S. Army
and the site of the historic first plane flight in
Washington.

(One of my former Arlington housemates was
a Sentinel at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier
at Arlington National Cemetery.

That Fall I moved to another part of northern
Arlington County, just off of N. Glebe Road,
south of Lee Highway, where I had some very
hilly areas to deal with carefully whenever we got
heavy snow, and I had to make my morning and
evening walk to the Ballston Metro, which was
about a 25-minute walk sans snow.

All the video and photos I've been looking at every
day for the past week on the Washington Post
and Baltimore Sun homepages have reminded me
all over again about the absolute worst part of so
much snow: lazy and inconsiderate home owners
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/capitalweathergang/
http://www.baltimoresun.com/

In my case, lazy and inconsiderate home owners
who lived on the high east-side of curving, uphill
Glebe Road, with their alleyway/side street rear
entrances to their homes, who continually "forgot"
to shovel their sidewalks, despite the County
promising to take it seriously.

Folks like me who took the Metro into work in
D.C. every morning had to walk facing traffic
on main roads, just two feet from passing cars,
constantly on alert for skidding cars or blasts
of snow falling on us as cars moved past us.

I seldom took the bus running from McLean
south on Glebe Road to the Ballston Metro
station on days like that, because even though
the bus stop was within of my bedroom window,
they were almost always running so far behind
schedule that it was quicker -if more arduous-
to walk, albeit very carefully.

Being very coordinated and graceful person,
I hated slipping and falling on ice, esp. in front
of a crowd!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/metro/passable-streets/

First saw this great video in my daily email from
David Patrick Columbia's New York Social Diary
http://www.newyorksocialdiary.com/

The added reason to see the post at his website today,
Nary a flurry outside; not so at the Leviev
salon is the photo of talented, savvy and oh-so adorable
designer Shoshanna Lonstein Gruss at the
City Harvest benefit held at the Leviev diamond
jewellery flagship store on Madison Avenue.
http://www.shoshanna.com/
She's got brains and personality to spare -love her!


Below, Carol Joynt gives you the Georgetown
grounded birds-eye view of things during the
Washington Blizzard of 2010, starting with an
establishing shot of M Street and 32nd Street, N.W.


Also see: http://www.caroljoynt.com/and
http://www.youtube.com/user/TheQandACafe

Things to look for in the future on The Real World: D.C.; no future for "Blonde Charity Mafia"

Tonight, at 10 p.m. Eastern, is the
premiere of the 23rd incarnation of
MTV's The Real World, a show
I once followed very closely but
have not watched in quite a while,
much like this season's Desperate
Housewives or Heroes, despite
having invested a lot of quality prime
time with them in the past.

Real World XXIII: Washington DC - MTV Shows

Video from The Washington Post:
D.C. cast members of 'The
Real World' show off their house,


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/video/2009/10/28/VI2009102804296.html

Washington's Newest Monument, Courtesy of MTV
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/video/2009/08/14/VI2009081402016.html

In fact, I hadn't watched a second
of MTV at all this year until I went
to check out their coverage of the death
of Michael Jackson just moments
after TMZ first reported it, even while
the LA Times dawdled and kept their
online version of the story the same until
even lame MSNBC was reporting the
Breaking News of his death and
not merely word of his hospitalization.

(I was on my computer at the time
TMZ broke the news, which is why
I mention that pertinent fact about
the slow-poke LAT.)

My interest in flipping over to MTV
was simply the curiosity factor to see
what their Breaking News coverage
might consist of on a day when their
audience numbers ought to have been
huge.

Would it simply be old clips or would
they actually conduct live interviews
with some serious and thoughtful music
professionals and journalists
-like certain IU grads I could name-
or would it consist largely of cringe-worthy
blather audio/texts from teenage girls,
run over countless video shots of guys
Moonwalking outside the Apollo Theater
and other well-known international locales,
as long as the TV camera lights were on?

What makes me mention The Real World
at all, of course, is that this season will be
based out of a former mansion in Washington's
quirky and often exasperating Dupont Circle
neighborhood, north of the downtown core
where I and most of my friends worked,
along K Street and Connecticut Avenue.

That's an area I know very well from having
lived in Washington and Arlington County
for 15 years, and since that's the case,
I wanted to share a few thoughts here
and mention some things you may want
to look for, because of where they've
chosen to situate the show, knowing that
the producers cast it with certain plot
narratives and sub-plots clearly in mind,
or, at least, with fingers crossed..

So, that said, based on my own experiences
and those of friends and former colleagues,
here are a few things you might want to
be on the lookout look for in the weeks
ahead, which might tell you if the show is
even more heavily edited than usual, say,
if by the fourth or fifth episode:

a.) Someone in the house is not shown
bitching or cracking wise about how
f----ed-up the local D.C. govt. is, with
a glaring example of the nonsensical
outrage, and everyone else in the house
finally realizing that the horror stories
they'd heard about D.C. govt. were
all too true.
Welcome to D.C.!

b.) Some friend of theirs arrives for a
weekend visit -and someone always is!-
and when they drive over to the Adams
Morgan area to go to a bar or restaurant
after driving around DC showing their
friend the sights, they don't show some
unknown guys, either African-American
or Salvadoran, suddenly jumping out
of nowhere and suddenly standing in a
street parking space -IF they can find
one- who want to be paid for finding
and/or watching the spot, as if they're
Columbus or The Secret Service.

The implicit warning: If they don't pay,
something WILL happen to the car.
Welcome to D.C.!

It'll no doubt remind some of you of the
famous "No Radio Inside" sign days
in New York of the '80's, sometimes
punctuated by a note near the broken car
window, hours later, with someone having
thoughtfully scrawled, "Just checking!"

c.) There isn't at least one segment or
two of a cast member discussing something
of theirs that was stolen, and the DC Police
telling him or her that it was their own fault.
Welcome to D.C.!

d.) Someone doesn't say in a condescending
way that DC's Chinatown, while perhaps
having a few very good restaurants, isn't
as nice as New York or San Francisco's
Chinatown.
Yes, because it's MUCH, MUCH
smaller, dummies!

On the other hand, Arlington County's
Little Saigon area on Wilson Blvd.,
next to the Clarendon Metro, couldn't
be beat for VERY GOOD and inexpensive
Vietnamese food, and very friendly
service, to boot.

That was a Day-after-Thanksgiving
tradition for me if I and my friends
were hanging around town and weren't
out-of-town with family or significant
others doing the turkey thing.

After which, thoroughly stuffed, we'd
head back to my place to watch the
annual grudge match between
Texas-Texas A&M, with yours truly
playing navigator, and explaining
to the others where these small Texas
towns the players were actually located.

Talk about something from my
regular routine in DC that I really
miss here in South Florida
-Little Saigon.
http://blogs.nationaltrust.org/preservationnation/?p=4519
http://washington.bizjournals.com/washington/stories/2009/08/17/tidbits9.html

(Two weeks ago, thanks to the wonders
of DirecTV, I watched the Abiline-Katy
Texas 5A High School football championship
game at The Alamodome, LIVE on
Fox Sports Southwest, Channel 676.
Their excellent coverage and production
values put that of of the Miramar -Deland
FL 4A state title game in Lakeland over
on Fox Sports Florida/SUN to shame.
It was night-and-day, like the difference
between MLB and the low minors.)

For more on The Real World, see:
http://www.mtv.com/shows/real_world/Washingtondc/series.jhtml

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/29/AR2009122902739.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/13/AR2009081304164.html

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-real-world30-2009dec30,0,5130304.story

http://jezebel.com/5436535/meet-the-new-8-strangers-of-the-real-world-dc/gallery/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2009/08/14/DI2009081401732.html?sid=ST2009081403688

Also, in other Washington area reality news,
TheWrap TV Editor Josef Adalian reported
yesterday that, as he aptly put it,
CW's 'Blond Charity Mafia' Sleeps With the Fishes

America's distaste for all things Washington apparently extends to "Blonde Charity Mafia."

After months of delays, the CW Tuesday confirmed that it will not be airing the soapy reality docusoap after all. The decision isn't much of a surprise: After originally slotting the show for a six-week run in July and August, the network then pushed the show to "the fourth quarter."

Said quarter ends Thursday. And there's no sign of the "BCM."

Read the rest of the story at:
http://www.thewrap.com/ind-column/cws-blond-charity-mafia-sleeps-fishes-12332

Former Miami Herald reporter Debbie Cenziper's new series at WaPo: Wasting Away: The Squandering of D.C.'s AIDS Dollars

Former Miami Herald reporter
Debbie Cenziper's new eye-opening
series at the Washington Post:
Wasting Away: The Squandering
of D.C.'s AIDS Dollars
--------------------

Wasting Away

The Squandering of D.C.'s AIDS Dollars

Staggering need, striking neglect

The nation's worst-hit city awards millions for care and shelter without ensuring it gets to those it's meant to help

By Debbie Cenziper
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 18, 2009

Staggering need, striking neglect, The nation's worst-hit city awards millions for care and shelter without ensuring it gets to those it's meant to help, Failing HIV/AIDS Patients in an Ailing City,
A three-part documentary explores troubled AIDS groups and the lives affected by a lack of adequate care.
A breakdown of where the money went, highlighting questionable spending throughout the city.

Series webpage
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/metro/aids-funding/

Sunday's first story:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/17/AR2009101701984.html?hpid%3Dskybox&sub=AR

I'll have more to say about this later.

DCWATCH kindly reminds us how ineffectual Eric Holder was as U.S. Attorney for D.C.

Sunday, December 14, 2008 
5:25 PM

As a longtime reader of dcwatch.com -and more recently, an actual subscriber via email- I just wanted to send up another flare to you re Eric Holder, like some of my previous head's up,
where dcwatch was the first to really ring the bell on the Cult of Michelle Rhee and her failure to produce "any measurable improvement in student performance" in D.C., the lack of national media attention shown to Mayor Adrian Fenty's autocratic ways, etc., which you'd think even the cablenets would've noticed by now, once the election was over.

But no, and certainly not now that we all have Rod Blagojevich to keep the cablenets yakking.
Anger and Indignation http://www.dcwatch.com/themail/2008/08-02-03.htm
A City of Enemies http://www.dcwatch.com/themail/2008/08-08-20.htm
Practice Makes Imperfect http://www.dcwatch.com/themail/2008/08-12-03.htm

They have been all over the Michelle Rhee story in a way that nobody else in the country has been, even while columnists all over the country, who are unaware of the reality, jump on her media bandwagon and join the flack army with nary a thought.

I remember when I first read the Washington City Paper story below about Eric Holder eleven years ago. It immediately reminded me of another one of the corruption stories I heard about shortly after I moved to Capitol Hill, ironically, across the street from Sen. and Mrs. Moynihan, the man who first publicly defined deviancy down.
Right near the intersection of East Capitol Street and S.E. 7th Street where an early DC friend of mine who worked at the State Dept. was beaten robbed at gunpoint my first summer on 'the Hill.'

It was one of those news stories that made me stop and think, "Only in DC!," in the same incredulous way I'd always though about certain things being "Only in South Florida!" from having grown up done here and being deeply involved in Dade and state politics at an early age in the '70's -and having a father who worked as a Dade County policeman for over 25 years.
Usually, the "Only in South Florida!" story had the requisite foreign intrigue angle or something about crates marked bananas actually being weapons being smuggled out towards some distant war zone, or allegations about someone really being either a foreign spy or CIA or...

The DC Public Schools had decided to create a summer program for employees who were cafeteria workers at schools eight months out of the year.
The idea was to supplement their pay by during the summer to ensure they stayed afloat financially and ensure they'd be available once school started up in August.
Now as I recall it, once you signed up, you were assured of getting a paycheck, regardless of whether you actually were called in to do some work over the course of the summer.

Well, naturally, things being what they were in DC at the time, with little advance thought given to the overall process or what sort of audit control system they'd have, other than names being written down on a list -somewhere- things went about as bad as possible.
If there were X amount of legitimate workers entitled to be in the system, DCPS was actually paying something along the lines of 2.3X in checks, with hundreds of people who weren't legit actually receiving govt. checks for months on end.
Result: Most people getting DCPS' summer checks didn't actually work for the school system.

I don't recall now if there were any federal funds attached to the summer worker program, though my guess is yes, since the DC school system then wasn't exactly a great incubator of bright ideas or overflowing with cash.

It's also important to grasp a point the article hints at: DC juries then were a notoriously bad way to try to prosecute crime and corruption, because to many, the whole city was tainted, and not a place that respected the rule of law but rather the law of opportunity, with no judgment given or taken for how people got their hands on money.

Over 15 years of living in the area, I had my fair share of friends who served on DC juries who later told me that it was one of the worst experiences they ever went thru, largely because of the number of people on the jury with them who were not the least bit interested in upholding their responsibility.
Or, even in paying attention.
It literally scared them to death to think about all the people whose fates had been left up to such dis-interested DC residents, a subject they'd never hertofore considered, their personality and politics being what it was.
And if you don't think that experiences like this give people pause, and cause them to re-think their decision to eschew the suburbs for the city, for some abstract idea of living in a diverse urban village, you're very much mistaken.
Actually, in two specific cases I can think of, it proved to be the last straw, and led to them moving the family out towards me in Northern Virginia.

This laissez-faire attitude towards crime and corruption was brough home to me personally by a very brilliant and dedicated friend who was a prosecutor under Holder, but someone who, initially, took DC's culture of crime, cronyism and corruption a little too personally.
I felt like Jack McCoy trying to shake her out of her funk.

After I met her and we'd become trusted friends, I started attending her trials whenever I could manage, which -shocker!- often involved gangs, guns and lots of mayhem.
She later told me she thought it was odd that local DC media, who always seemed to be camped outside of the courthouse, and who came to recognize who all the other courthouse "regulars" were, never thought to wonder aloud on the air or in print, why so many young teens were always congregating inside the courthouse who didn't have a legitimate reason to be there.

She was right of course, as the sense of obliviousness by so-called security in the courthouse was palpable to anyone paying even the slightest amount of attention.

Yeah, witness intimidation was yet another thing that if not exactly winked at, got MUCH less
attention -and media attention- than it rightfully deserved then.
It finally got to the point that once she'd arrived at the Metro train station closest to our neighborhood, she'd walk thru a very large office building lobby, so she could be sure that nobody was following her home from the courthouse.

Having first heard and then seen what I had, what was I going to do, tell her that she was wrong to be concerned, when there was ample evidence she was right?

Personally, I think unless he's prepared to put the whole thing around President Clinton's neck, the more that Eric Holder tries to describe his own role in the Marc Rich pardon, the more difficult his nomination will be to swallow whole by the Senate.
Plus, there's the prospect of him having to discuss Elián González...
_______________________________________________
excerpt from the latest dcwatch.com posting

Partying in the mail, December 10, 2008
Dear Partiers:

For some reason, which is unrelated to local DC affairs and which we therefore won't mention (Blagojevich), we've been thinking about government corruption a lot today.
The problem with political corruption in the District of Columbia, as opposed to some other unnamed states (Illinois), is that political corruption is almost never prosecuted here, and there aren't any negative consequences for engaging in it. (The DC workers who stole from the Office of Tax and Revenue weren't engaged in government corruption; they were practicing just plain old-fashioned thievery.)
One of the best examples of official overlooking of official corruption occurred in the last term of Mayor Marion Barry. The US Attorney for the District of Columbia for three-and-a-half years of that term never prosecuted a single instance of official corruption, and his inattentiveness didn't seem to hurt his career (see Stephanie Mencimer, "Placeholder?", http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/display.php?id=12207). _________________________________________________
Washington City Paper
PlaceHolder?
With 12 years' experience prosecuting public corruption at the Justice Department, U.S. Attorney Eric Holder was a perfect choice to clean up a corrupt city. But after three and a half years, he may be moving on, and D.C. is still one of the most crooked cities in the nation.
By Stephanie Mencimer
Mar. 7 - 13, 1997 (Vol. 17, #10)

When President Bill Clinton tapped Eric Holder to be U.S. Attorney for D.C. in 1993, he immediately became the District's black sheriff in the white hat. The first African-American ever to hold the job, Holder's appointment broke a stretch of 12 years of white Republicans overseeing the predominantly black city. Not only was Holder representative of the city's majority population, but the former D.C. Superior Court judge had gone straight from Columbia Law School to the Justice Department's public integrity section, where he had spent 12 years successfully prosecuting corrupt public officials. Many people in the District were thrilled; Holder arrived with both exceptional qualifications and the moral authority to crack down on public corruption without the taint of racism that derailed his predecessors.

Up to that time, the city's relationship with the U.S. Attorney's office had been an awkward one. During the 1980s, the city watched as former U.S. Attorneys Jay Stephens and Joseph diGenova went after Mayor Marion Barry and his cronies only to be thwarted by juries that saw their prosecutions as politically and racially motivated crusades aimed at bringing down a popularly elected black mayor. Not only did Barry prevail in court, he came back and then some, reclaiming his old job in 1995. In spite of his history of personal malfeasance, a majority of city residents were willing to give Barry the benefit of the doubt. But many drew confidence from the fact that when Barry moved into 1 Judiciary Square, Holder would be a block away, looking over his shoulder. Holder seemed like a gold-plated insurance policy promising that Barry wouldn't get one over on the city. After all, Holder knew as much about prosecuting corruption as Barry seemed to know about perpetrating it.

After three and a half years on the job, Holder is still revered in the city's halls of power and widely respected by his peers in the legal field. He is the presumptive nominee to replace outgoing U.S. Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, a major plum position. He is infinitely qualified by all accounts, and his appointment would be a historic one, since the position has never been held by an African-American. But for all the love Holder has engendered in the community as U.S. Attorney, he has had precious little impact on the city's endemic municipal corruption. Barry has returned to his old tricks, nudging contracts and city jobs to old cronies and new girlfriends. Holder is apparently leaving, and he hasn't thrown a punch.
It isn't for lack of targets.

To read the rest of this great article, go to
http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/display.php?id=12207

Stephanie Mencimer is now at Mother Jones.
For her more recent work, go to
http://www.motherjones.com/people/Stephanie-Mencimer.html

South Florida suffers in the comparison -AGAIN!; DC's Shaw neighborhood is getting cleaned-up!

This is a January 31st post I made on parent blog, South Beach Hoosier, which has obvious lessons for Hallandale Beach.
________________________________
Wow!!!

Was spending some time on the computer yesterday double-checking some information about a local matter back up in DC, and happened to come across some really amazing news that took place in the long-beleaguered Shaw neighborhood of Washington, something that should've taken place years ago if the city was run more for the benefit of its citizens and residents instead of the commercial interests.
The amazing photos tell the tale better than I ever could.

Whether they represent gang territory, a drug market, the
site of other criminal activity or some combination of all those things, DDOT and MPD crews were out this morning removing all of the shoes from one of the trees on the south side of the 400 block of Q Street NW. This particular problem has been ignored for years and residents have stated that the sight of these shoes caught up tree branches, or on cobra-style street lights, contributed to a threatening environment — much like gang tags.

I found this most happy nugget on the post of January 29th on the forum and blog of DC Advisory Neighborhood Commission (ANC) 2CO2's Commissioner Kevin Chapple.
http://chappleanc.com/public/index.php/sitesnsounds

See also the cogent blog comments and photos at both the dcist and jimbo.info
http://dcist.com/2008/01/29/ddot_removes_sh.php and http://www.jimbo.info/weblog/2008/01/the-deshoeing-of-the-sycamore.html

I can only imagine what people coming home from work all around the greater Washington area must've thought when they first turned on their TV.
Rather than being confronted with the latest in a series of never ending bad news, whether drive-by shooting of innocent kids, or the latest account of ethics/criminal charges involving some local pol, actually heard some positive and uplifting news for a change: nothing.
They were too dumbfounded for words!

I'm sure that the whole electronic armada of Washington's local TV news satellite trucks were on hand to record the event for posterity, and get the somewhat dazed comments of happy neighbors, who, in all likelihood, probably thought the shoes might never come down before the whole tree did.

South Florida public policy types like myself can only look from afar and sigh wistfully when confronted with this.

Not only the actions taken but also the impressive way that Mr. Chapple has empowered his community with useful information to communicate to the general public and neighborhood activists -and the outside world- the likes of which I've never seen or heard about in this part of the world.

Knowing how things are really done down here, we can only bow our heads in shame when comparing Commissioner Chapple's efforts to the rather shocking bare-bones or even schlock government website portals that so many local elected officials down here hide behind.

Let me remind you of but one example I've already written about before in this space.

This past summer, during the height of the drought, when I tried to alert the City of Aventura to a rapidly spreading water leak on a sidewalk alongside U.S.-1, after nobody at Aventura City Hall would take my phone call shortly before 5:00 p.m., I sent an email with all the particulars to the mayor, city manager and assorted council members, hoping that someone would see it.
Moments later, my email to them was returned to me, marked as possible spam by Aventura's own website!
What a slap in the face!

After this confounding affair, I called the Aventura Police Dept., and reported the water situation, but only after asking the officer I spoke with why it was that the Police Dept. were the only folks in the so-called "City of Excellence" actually answering their telephone during normal city business hours.

And let's not forget life in the the postage stamp-sized duchy where I live, the City of Hallandale Beach.

Nearly a year after I first alerted City Hall officials to some rather obvious longstanding problems on A1A, U.S.-1 and Hallandale Beach Boulevard, as well as at the public beach, and later placed supporting evidence by way of photographs of just some of the offending problems on my blog, www.HallandaleBeachBlog.blogspot.com , the city STILL hasn't done a single thing to rectify these solved problems!
In fact, recent walking tours of the offending areas show it's actually worse!

There is a car fender/bumper and other small auto parts, as well as broken glass, from some sort of car accident that took place almost three months ago, on the south sidewalk of the 1100 block of East Hallandale Beach Blvd.
There's been yellow tape around it all this time, but it never gets cleaned up!!!!!!!

I'll have photos of that perfect example of the city's incompetency up on my Hallandale Beach Blog in a few days, including some from a point of view that show how ridiculously close it is to the Hallandale Beach Chamber of Commerce.
It's not hiding, it's in plain sight: on one of the three main roads of the city.

In November, I had what I thought at the time was an earnest one-hour talk at City Hall with two people from City Manager Mike Good's office about the myriad problems I'd publicly
identified in this blog, and discussed over and over with my family, friends and fellow citizens.

Armed with enough facts & figures and logic & reason to leave them somewhat dazed at the amount of specific information I could give them without notes, I started telling my story.

After about thirty minutes of recounting one embarrassing anecdote after another of the city's cluelessness -like placing giant water pipes in the Fire Lane of an apt. complex full of senior citizens, without anything around it!- I got my second wind.

After a while, the two city employees seemed to get a bit shell-shocked at the sheer amount of detailed information I could identify that was self-evident to anyone with eyesight.

Towards the end, they seemed somewhat pained at how far short the city seems to be in delivering for its citizens and residents, if not outright embarrassed.
But maybe I'm projecting.

I recounted many anecdotes, only a fraction of which I've ever mentioned in my HBB blog.

The ones I did mention all had one thing in in common: how poorly the City of Hallandale Beach continues to be managed, administered and coordinated, regarding even the most basic of services.

When I reminded them that the problems were so obvious that I'd placed photos of them on HBB, they just sighed.

Most galling of all, of course, is that I told them that there seem to be a complete absence of any sort of real punishment or rebuke for city employees NOT doing their jobs properly, or ignoring problems that could hardly be more obvious.

And here we are, more than two months-plus since that conversation, and an observant walk around the city reveals that nothing's changed!

Welcome to the City of Hallandale Beach in the year 2008.