A "crowdsource" request is more than a request for help. I am asking all of you who read this blog to put in a little bit of your knowledge of this situation in the comments as part of my research for this story.

What I need from all of you is to give me whatever information you have about the Taxi Alliance strike that is going on right now and that will continue until Friday morning (that's when the scheduled 48 hours of the strike will end).

I could actually write off-the-bat a littany of reasons why the GPS system that is being rammed down the throats of taxi drivers is a really bad idea --not just from an ethical standpoint but also from a legal one; especially if we are talking about how this would impact not just the civil rights of drivers but of passengers as well.

But the one sticking poing in this situation is the division between the two unions. On one end is the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, led by a woman called Bharavi Desai. On the other end is the opposing union, New York State Federation of Taxi Drivers, led by a Fernando Mateo.

I have spoken to Ms. Desai and have gotten background on their grievances. I have tried contacting Mr. Mateo to no avail.

This is what I am missing in this story :

Albany's Times-Union has a really good article on how Verizon is trying to get away with defrauding the state of million dollars in emergency government subsidies it should not have collected from the government after 9/11.

The article outlines it's 'double-dipping' accounting:

Auditors found that Verizon failed to tell the federal government just how much a private insurance settlement paid the company for its emergency 9/11 repairs.

Claims already covered by insurance and non-emergency repairs that didn't qualify for full reimbursement weren't all that state auditors questioned. They also disallowed almost $21 million in expensed straight time pay for employees and about $35 million for other costs that did not meet audit evidence standards.

In all, Verizon claimed more than $230 million more than the plan allowed and, as a result, collected almost $39 million more than it was entitled for emergency repairs, auditors concluded.

The auditors' report also said Verizon delayed or tried to obstruct the audit team's effort to document Verizon's claims. "As the audit progressed, we encountered serious difficulties in obtaining information from Verizon on such key items as labor and insurance proceeds. During the course of the audit, the latter issue developed into the single most significant topic," the auditors wrote in their report.

It would take over a year for the auditors to obtain documentation of Verizon's $825 million insurance settlement for all its 9/11 damages, according to the audit report.

Schumer, who worked to bring federal aid to New York City after 9/11, had no immediate comment on the audit.

The audit report comes at a time when Verizon Chief Executive Ivan G. Seidenberg is being scrutinized by shareholder activists focusing on excessive payments to executives.

I guess Verizon needs all that extra money to pay it's lobbyists so they can give it back to their favorite porkers on Capitol Hill.

A quick look throughout both FollowTheMoney.org and OpenSecrets.org gives us a clue as to how Verizon spent some of that money in Washington and Albany.

more like a shot of chocolate Ex-Lax.

Oh grock ...  how I hate that site!

There is nothing appealing about it.

• It has a harsh monochromatic palette.
• It's too much a link and B2B directory
• It really doesn't tell me anything about New York state on that front page.

I have been thinking long and hard about Eliot Spitzer's battle cries of reform for Albany. I take it to heart that he means serious business. The problem is, there is no visible measure of how this change is happening.

Spitzer and Bloomberg are kind of cut from the same political rug when it comes to how they are not implementing technology as an agent of practical government change. Because, honestly, we should not ask what is government. and why it is not working. We need to ask who is government and why aren't they effective.

One of the main issues covered in John and Teresa Heinz Kerry’s book, This Moment on Earth, is energy. The Kerrys highlight what companies and cities are already doing in America to reduce energy use. Texas Instruments hired people do design a manufacturing plant with energy efficiency as the primary concern…and would up saving gobs of money. Portland, Oregon, has carefully redesigned itself to cut back its carbon emissions…and has done so WHILE experiencing a period of economic growth. This Moment on Earth shows that not only CAN it be done, but it is BEING done and done at a profit. Any excuse to ignore global warming and continue on our old, destructive way is obsolete. The entirety of chapter 7 and Appendix A are dedicated to energy policy and are worth reading.

Two cornerstones of what can be done, should be done, and increasingly IS done, are increasing energy efficiency (as Texas Instruments learned) and use of renewable energy sources (currently primarily wind and small hydroelectric and, on a smaller scale, geothermal). John and Teresa Heinz Kerry cover this very well in their book. But about a month and a half before their book came out, the February 9th issue of Science (subscription only...go to your nearest university science library to find it) came out covering some of the same ground: the future of energy. In fact, this particular issue of America’s foremost scientific journal was titled: “Sustainability and Energy.”

I was surprisingly inspired by John and Teresa Heinz Kerry’s new book, This Moment on Earth, coming out March 26th, 2007. This inspiration snuck up on me around the third chapter. Prior to that, I found the book good, well worth reading, but a little bit like just one more book outlining what humans are doing wrong. Starting around the third chapter I realized I was referring to the book in several conversations and several blog diaries and that several of the people and organizations featured in the book I mentally filed away as worth looking into for future political connections, diaries and general research.

In short, almost without my realizing it, John Kerry’s book was getting into my brain and inspiring me. The book starts a bit dull but by the end is excellent.

My earliest impression, from the press material that arrived with the book and from the introduction, was that this book promised something really new and welcome. The book was billed as the next step in the evolution of the environmental debate. I was ready for a book that took as given the problems and focused primarily on solutions. Having been through way too many “debates” online where I yet again outlined the very clear scientific evidence for global warming only to have yet the same false claims that global warming was some kind of scam or myth (these claims are never backed up by scientific evidence of any substance), I really was ready to have a book that moved beyond that.

I wrote about this yesterday, but I am revisiting it with the smoking gun letter uploaded rather than just linking as a PDF. I want to emphasize that this is a scan of the letter sent by the company that makes the voting machines Sarasota County used warning of a glitch. This warning was ignored by Kathy Dent, the Sarasota County Supervisor of Elections. The result was an election with an unprecedented, and HIGHLY suspicious, 18,000 vote undercount for Congress and that undercount is believed by election experts to have changed the outcome of the election, essentially stealing the election from Democrat Christine Jennings. Here's the letter:

This letter suggests a specific action...which the Sarasota election board NEVER ACTED UPON. Furthermore, posters were sent by the company that were meant to be posted at each polling place to warn voters of the delay. The posters were never posted. Finally, and probably criminally, Kathy Dent never released this letter when Christine Jennings' legal team filed a letter of discovery. That essentially is a cover up.

We all saw with horror as yet another Florida election was mired in uncertainty and missing votes. A whopping 18,000 votes for Congress in the FL-13 Congressional race disappeared, mostly from Democratic districts. This is an almost unprecedented undervote that raises red flags that SOMETHING went seriously wrong with that election. This is further evidence that touchscreen voting machines are just too unreliable. And many elections experts agree that the results of the election were affected by this undervote and, had those votes been properly recorded, the Democratic candidate, Christine Jennings, would have won.

But...it looks like the Florida election board had full warning there was a problem and were even offered a patch but IGNORED IT. Then they tried covering it up.

According to a letter dated August 15th (PDF from the Christine Jennings campaign) from the company that made the machines used in FL-13 to the Florida elections board, a problem had been identified that gave a slow response time on the computer, slower than what a voter would expect. The letter claims that this would not affect the integrity of the vote (covering their asses) but it is likely that this kind of delay could lead to a voter being out of sync with the computer and would be exactly the kind of thing that could lead to an unrecorded vote. If the computer takes too long to respond, and the voter has moved on, then a vote will go unrecorded. It warrants further investigation to see if the delay is the cause of the undervote.

My wife, as I have often mentioned, is a climate scientist. And sometimes she hears some great stuff at seminars, hearing the facts straight from the horse's mouth. A couple of times she passed on stuff I REALLY wanted to blog but was a little confidential. You should have heard what the NASA administrators were trying to tell the scientists during the whole censorship scandal. Pretty scary stuff. But not something I can pass on.

Something she passed on to me recently, though, really got me thinking and doesn't involve any inside secrets as far as I know.

Some scientists have been advocating some pretty radical ideas to deal with Global Warming. One such idea is to lace our atmosphere with sulphate particles to increase the albedo of the atmosphere. This idea seems pretty crazy: possibly acidifying our atmosphere at who knows what cost to take a chance that it will reflect back enough solar energy to reduce warming. Apparently another such idea is even more crazy: increase the albedo of the ocean by covering large areas with white styrofoam. Hmmmm...

But back to sulfate particles. Apparently, one problem here is that no one actually, until recently, actually did the calculations to see if it would work or if it would cause massive acid rain. Well, according to data submitted for publication, calculations show that it COULD work and that the amount necessary to make a difference shouldn't have a large effect on acid rain. So, that actually is kind of promising. But...and here is where things get sticky when dealing with such ideas: the cost would be in the trillions (on a ROUGH calculation) AND no one knows what the dynamics would be. In other words, how long the sulfate particles would stay in place and how they would be distributed globally are completely unknown. I suspect that lack of understanding of the dynamics would include not being sure that LOCALIZED acid rain problems might not happen if concentrations became unusually high in spcific locations. A similar situation arose with the chemicals that caused the ozone holes: they reached exceptionally high concentrations at the polar regions and the specific dynamics of those locations made them particularly potent. We don't know what would happen with the sulfates in terms of the dynamics of the situation.

The foundation of any democracy has to be free and fair election. I have written considerably about the danger the over-priced, insecure and non-verifiable DRE eVote machines are. By now you'd think the evidence was more than enough to kill any interest any state might have in these machines.

To me one of the deciding factors should be the fact that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has advocated the decertification of these machines because:

According to an NIST paper to be discussed at a meeting of election regulators at NIST headquarters in Gaithersburg, Md., on Dec. 4 and 5, DRE vote totals cannot be audited because the machines are not software independent.

In other words, there is no means of verifying vote tallies other than by relying on the software that tabulated the results to begin with.

The machines currently in use are "more vulnerable to undetected programming errors or malicious code," according to the paper.

The NIST paper also noted that, "potentially, a single programmer could 'rig' a major election."

The Politicker's Azi riffs on Apple's new must-have, the iPhone, noting that it reserves its most appealing and fun features for when the beautiful thing is in a WiFi network.

Thing is, WiFi is still not anywhere near the coverage of cell phone networks. So yes, there are political ramifications from this product launch. If this new gadget is anywhere near as successful as the iPod, it will have the unintended side effect of showcasing that broadband access is of right a public utility, a necessity akin to roads and running water.