Touch-screen voting

I was one of the first reporters in the mainstream media to raise questions about the accuracy of touch-screen voting machines and I returned to the subject frequently. Here's a column about a hero who spoke out despite political heat:





VOTE MACHINES CAN'T GO WRONG, GO WRONG, GO WRONG
Date: Sunday, March 26, 2006
Edition: Palm Beach Section: LOCAL Page: 1B
Byline: HOWARD GOODMAN COMMENTARY

TALLAHASSEE - It's simple. In close elections, we need to be able to recount the votes.

That's most obvious in Palm Beach County, where voters booted out the long-serving supervisor of elections, Theresa LePore, in 2004 -- partly because she didn't think the new touch-screen technology, brought in to replace those disastrous punch cards, needs paper backups.

Unfortunately, the paper trail has gone cold under LePore's successor. Instead of leading the charge for change, Arthur Anderson is taking it slow.

But Anderson's complacency isn't the only roadblock to a paper trail.

Here's a potentially bigger hurdle: Florida has rewritten its elections law to eliminate almost all manual recounts in touch-screen voting.

The reasoning is that the computerized touch-screens are incapable of error. After all, the machine won't let you overvote or undervote -- that is, vote for too many candidates or unintentionally leave blanks, the major problems in past election challenges.

Just one problem.

The machines can be wrong.

Not to the manners born

Bringing education to the table

by Howard Goodman | Commentary

When you pick up the knife -- with the right hand, of course -- you place your palm over the handle and your forefinger on the top of the blade. That finger on top allows you to press firmly in the event the knife is dull or the meat tough.
While you're chewing, you place your knife and fork on your plate in the so-called resting position. That is, you arrange the utensils in a cross, with the fork face down, the tines bridging the knife.
So much I never knew!
And to think I'd learn it by watching fifth-graders in one of the lowest-income elementary schools in Palm Beach County.
We're in Rebecca Hinson's class on the Art of Table Manners. The art teacher at South Grade Elementary in Lake Worth has put away the paints and pottery. She's dimmed the lights, piped in soft piano music and laid out a lace tablecloth.
One by one, over the past few days, her five fifth-grade classes have been coming in for high tea.
This, in a section of Lake Worth that no one would confuse with the town of Palm Beach.
In this neighborhood, people don't read French on the menus. They speak Spanish, Creole and Guatemalan languages at home.
Some 97 percent of the kids get federally funded free lunches -- the highest proportion of any school in the county's coastal areas, said Principal Michael Riley.
The teaching staff here doesn't think any of that is reason for them to think small.
"We want them to go to college," Hinson said, "and when they get there, we want them to fit in. We don't want them going to Duke, Harvard and Stanford not knowing the proper way to behave."
Table etiquette is not a subject that Hinson's students were exactly dying to learn.
Let's face it. For most kids, dinner manners mainly involve whether it's proper to grab the remote with greasy fingers.
"The boys especially are always saying to me, `I'm never going to use that,'" Hinson said.
She tells them they never know. When they're older, they might be invited to a wedding. Or expected to make a toast as a best man. Or taken to lunch on a job interview.
"They need to know these things," said Hinson.
She is no socialite herself. She grew up, she says, on the wrong side of the tracks in a small South Carolina town. A single mother, she works two jobs ("so I can afford to be a teacher").
As she sees it, learning the proper way to use a knife, fork and napkin isn't a frill. It's an essential life skill.
"In order to dig yourself out of poverty," she said, "you have to know what to do in special settings."
We've got a school system obsessed with teaching the three Rs. At South Grade, at least, students are also taught to mind their Ps and Qs.
"We must teach our youth to respect themselves and others," Riley said. Table manners are a way of doing that. But not the only one.
At South Grade, little kids will hold the door for you and say "Please" and "Thank you." That's no accident.
The school runs an array of character-building programs. Kids are encouraged to deplore bullies and celebrate random acts of kindness.
A little after 1 p.m., kids are filing into Hinson's room. They're gingerly taking seats at a long table set out with three-deck silver trays.
English muffins with ham and melted cheese on the bottom tray. Chocolate-covered cream puffs in the middle. Strawberries on top.
Very proper.
The 19 kids in Wednesday's session all had passed a test based on Tiffany's Table Manners for Teenagers by Walter Hoving, a former Tiffany & Co. chairman. But they look nervous, like they're afraid of breaking something.
Hinson gives instructions: Unfold the napkin and put it in your lap. Hold the serving spoon and fork in the palm of each hand and serve yourself two cream puffs and two strawberries. Cut the strawberry in pieces around the stem.
It's a lot to keep straight.
I soon spot Cordarius Joseph eating a strawberry with (horrors!) his fingers. Claudeson Azurin holding his fork with the (egad!) tines facing up.
Monique Horne, on the other hand, daintily finishes off her English muffin like a natural. She's a singer.
She says this stuff might come in handy "when I'm older, or if I become famous."
Before long, lots of kids are standing up and, following Hinson's example, giving toasts.
Kevin Bradlow, a glass of fruit punch aloft, toasts Hinson as his "best teacher."
"I'll miss her in the sixth grade," he says.
I know. There's something inherently silly about a course in table manners.
We've always made fun, in America, of hoity-toity types who jut their pinky fingers while drinking tea. Our movies are filled with stuck-up debutantes getting their comeuppance, snobs in top hats brought to earth by Joe Average.
But if you ask me, this course is a pretty good testament to the American ideal of social mobility.
Every one of these kids, this course is saying, can rise above their backgrounds. Go places. Be somebody.
Every one is capable of someday eating at the Ritz.

Rock'n'roll, fathers'n'sons

Taking son Ben to see the rock legends inspires reflections.

 

Stones bridge gap of generations

By Howard Goodman | Commentary 

Keith Richards picked up an acoustic guitar. Played that familiar Middle Eastern-like intro.
Then Charlie Watts beat his tom-tom: dumm dumm dumm dum-dum, dumm dumm dumm dum-dum.
My son Ben sprang out of his seat, his fist high.
"Yes!!!"
It was Paint It Black, a song way up in the pantheon of his very favorites, and we were hearing it live, just the way it sounded decades back, hearing it from the guys who wrote it and put it on tape and therefore into radios and stereos and the deep-memory places of our brains.
And I felt an irrational wave of fatherly happiness and -- is this allowed when speaking about the Rolling Stones? -- satisfaction.
This was Sunday night two weeks ago, and we were at the BankAtlantic Center in Sunrise, sitting toward the back of the arena in $200 seats to see the Rolling Stones. A father and teenage son on a splurge to see the living legends.
Legends I first saw 40 years ago.
Turn the time machine way back to 1966. Paint It Black was a radio hit. I was 17 and I thought rock 'n' roll not yet the universal musical idiom, was pretty dumb.
I looked down on Elvis Presley and Beatlemania. My tastes ran to folk and Broadway musicals.
The dirty, loud excitement of the Stones changed all that.
Now Ben, on the day before his 16th birthday, was seeing the group that turned me into a rock 'n' roll fan those many years ago. A fairly obsessed, record-collecting, concert-going, radio-listening, lyric-perusing, music-press-reading, mad-dancing fan.
Unlike me at his age, Ben is a serious rock music devotee. He's already collected memories of greats in concert: Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Jethro Tull. He loves old quirky bands like the Velvet Underground, and new gutbucket bands he counts as personal discoveries: the Black Keys, the Hentchmen, the 22-20s.
This makes me unreasonably proud.
It feels good when your kid likes the same music you do. And to see that he understands why it mattered to you so much.
You expect that your kids will be hip to what's current: video games, cell phones, the Internet, Family Guy.
Yet you really treasure it when they appreciate the old: Casablanca, West Side Story, All the President's Men. James Bond. The Chicago Cubs.
Fathers used to pass on survival skills to their sons: how to hunt or fish, or build a house. In our tamer modern world, a father is more likely to pass on sensibility and attitude and taste.
So when my friend Michael the Attorney said we should surprise our boys with Stones tickets, he spoke to my sense of parental responsibility.
"Once in their life, they have to see the Rolling Stones," he said.
Just as, at least once in your life, you have to see Mount Rushmore.
The Stones weren't monuments when I saw them 40 years ago, on their fifth U.S. tour. The gatekeepers of culture were pretty sure that what they did wasn't even music.
They sneered. They were kind of ugly. Mick Jagger seemed like a gangly grad student trying look sexy
and not totally succeeding, banging a tambourine and dancing and braying.
"I see a red door and I want it to turn black ..."
The music was raw and dark and insistent. And giving in to the band and the crowd in Chicago's vast Arie Crown Theater, from a $7 seat in the last row, was way more fun than anything I'd ever been part of. The '60s took their dark turn before I saw the Stones again, in 1969 in Madison Square Garden. I was a college radical and the Stones were the dangerous figures of Street Fighting Man and Sympathy for the Devil, sorcerers who captured the zeitgeist of an America whose ghetto streets were burning, whose gunships were dropping napalm in Southeast Asia, whose idealistic leaders were assassinated.
No band was ever more urgent.
When I saw them next, in 1981 in Detroit, rock wasn't counterculture any more. And I wasn't, either.
Their show was a extravaganza of art direction and set design and celebrity worship. It was great theater, a good time. But the Stones were no longer central.
I didn't expect them to tell us what the era was about. They weren't breaking boundaries. They couldn't threaten the establishment. Kings of the concert business, they were the establishment.
Twenty-five years have passed since then, when they already were fighting against being a nostalgia act.
I kept my expectations low for this 2006 show. I was just hoping the aging Stones wouldn't creak too much and embarrass us oldsters.
I shouldn't have worried. In Sunrise they performed with more power and energy and high spirits than ought to be human.
"It's insane," Ben said as the Stones took their bows and left the stage. "They're like, the ideal of rock 'n' roll."
And then we were part of the exiting crowd that was singing "Woo, woo!" -- the background part in Sympathy for the Devil -- as we slowly filed out of the arena, a happy mass numbering thousands, young and old, who didn't want the good time to end.

You've got to be taught

For all the progress we make in America, hate crimes never seem to go away. Here's a column I wrote about one such incident in a quasi-rural area called Loxahatchee.






HATE CANNOT DIE IF PARENTS KEEP PASSING IT ALONG
Date: Sunday, March 5, 2006
Edition: Palm Beach Section: LOCAL Page: 1B
Byline: HOWARD GOODMAN COMMENTARY

There's a swastika in red paint and a swastika in blue on Marva Moodie's garage and two more swastikas on her driveway.

There are two wobbly "KKK" marks. And a scrawled "WP" shorthand, probably, for "white power."

Defacing the home of a black woman and her two sons, their ugly message is unmistakable.

You can't say much for their craftmanship. They look like the hurried work of illiterates. Or kids. Maybe both.

It feels like the country out here, with big lots, piney trees all around, a road that's more dirt than blacktop.

People move out here to Loxahatchee for a little elbow room, a little privacy, the chance to express themselves with more freedom than is available in the city or burbs.

Some of Moodie's neighbors have horses in their back yards. One man, a few doors down, flies four NASCAR flags along his front fence.

Moodie's house looks all-American: big yard, basketball hoop, screened-in swimming pool in the back, bicycles and sneakers casually left outside the front door. Not bad for a Jamaican immigrant, a former U.S. Army sergeant who makes her living as a psychiatric nurse.

You wish the hate symbols smeared on Moodie's house early Thursday were an isolated thing, an aberration.

But only a couple miles away on Friday I saw a white Ford truck with a 4-by-5-foot Confederate flag snapping proudly overhead.

I listened to neighborhood teens tell me about "redneck" white kids who fling the n-word at dark-skinned people and tell Hispanics to "get back on the banana boat."

Gleb Barabanov, 14, who lives two houses away from Moodie, said, "The redneck people sometimes get on me because I'm from Ukraine."

This stuff is everyday reality, kids told me. But the kind of vandalism at Moodie's house is new.
It's drawn investigations from the Sheriff's Office and State Attorney's Office as a possible hate crime. A county anti-graffiti crew got rid of it on Saturday.

Detectives suspect teenagers. You know, our hope for tomorrow.

Pledge of Allegiance controversy

Defying pledge is a principle as American as they come

By Howard Goodman | Commentary

It seems ridiculous that the Palm Beach County School District should pay $32,500 to settle a lawsuit from a Boynton High teen who refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
We're talking about a classroom dispute that never should have turned into a federal lawsuit. But it did, thanks largely to the overreaction of teacher Cynthia Alexandre when Cameron Frazier, 17, refused to rise and recite the pledge in her algebra class on Dec. 8. The situation was a first in her fourth-period class, since the pledge usually is said earlier in the day.
According to the lawsuit, Frazier told Alexandre he has sat out the pledge since sixth grade and didn't intend to change.
Some teachers take a relaxed attitude toward the pledge. The high-school student I live with tells me it's been months since the pledge ceremony has even been held in his classes.
But in this instance, the lawsuit states, Alexandre reacted to Frazier's refusal by saying: "Oh, you wanna bet? See your desk? Now look at mine. Big desk, little desk. You obviously don't know your place in this classroom."
Alexandre went on to call Frazier "ungrateful," "disrespectful" and "un-American," then summoned an assistant principal, another administrator and a school cop to take him to the office, the lawsuit says.
Alexandre assumed she had state law on her side. Since 1942, a Florida statute requires students to get a parent's written permission to be excused from the pledge. And even then, the student must stand at attention while it's recited.
But the state statute is contradicted by federal case law that says a student can't be forced to say the pledge or salute the flag.
This gave the ACLU some powerful ammunition when Frazier turned to the First Amendment advocates for help.
"We get several of these requests a year," said Jim Green, an ACLU attorney from West Palm Beach.
"Usually we send a letter and the school officials back down."
Not this time. The school district waited until a lawsuit was filed -- and then caved. Last week, the district's lawyers agreed the state statute was unconstitutional. They settled on the ACLU's terms and handed Alexandre a written reprimand. The $32,500 mainly is for legal costs and a "nominal" award for Frazier, Green said.
The suit continues against state education officials. The ACLU hopes to get the state statute overturned.
It's tempting to look at all this and say, "There go those liberals again, encouraging people to spit on this country's symbols."
No. What this case says is that no one should be forced to speak or think in lockstep.
That's an old principle, as American as they come. It was best articulated in 1943 in a U.S. Supreme Court case that upheld the right of a Jehovah's Witness to defy a West Virginia law requiring students to salute the flag each day.
This was in the midst of World War II, when the United States was fighting for its survival against Nazi Germany and militarist Japan.
Still, the court voted 6-3 to say that freedom of expression includes the right to decline to salute the nation's most cherished symbol.
As Justice Robert Jackson, writing for the majority, wrote: "If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion."
Imagine that. Even in wartime, the authorities can't dictate what is or isn't cool to say or believe.
In other words, no teacher or principal ought to be ordering a student to say the pledge.
No Capitol cop should be hauling from the gallery someone with a T-shirt reading "2,245 dead -- How many more?" as happened to Iraq war protester Cindy Sheehan, arrested before last week's State of the Union address.
And neither should cops eject the wearer of a shirt reading "Support the Troops -- Defending our Freedom," as was Beverly Young, the wife of U.S. Rep. C.W. "Bill" Young, a Republican from St. Petersburg. 

Freedom always has a price. This time it's $32,500 in local taxpayers' money.

Homelessness amid plenty

Palm Beach County is synonymous with wealth. But county policies toward the homeless were pure see-no-evil. Here's one blast I took at the commissioners over the situation.






COUNTY'S VIEW OF HOMELESS A DISGRACE

Date: Thursday, February 2, 2006
Edition: Palm Beach Section: LOCAL Page: 1B
Byline: HOWARD GOODMAN COMMENTARY

The place needs a coat of paint, probably a new ceiling.

A good dusting, at the very least.

Westgate Tabernacle Church looks as down on its luck as the poor and homeless it welcomes under its leaking roof.

Associate pastor Alan Clapsaddle looks beyond the appearances. "We're a community of love," he says.

He's a former deputy sheriff from Pennsylvania who wears a golden cross on his neck and speaks with practicality and tenderness about the people his church embraces -- people with schizophrenia, sexually transmitted diseases, drug and alcohol addictions and with out-of-wedlock children.

"Whosoever will, let him come," is the operative injunction. It stems from Revelation. It isn't easy to translate into day-to-day life.

After Hurricane Wilma

When you write for a newspaper in Florida, you write a lot about hurricanes and how to cope with them I did this piece two mornings after one of the biggest ones hit us.






OUR GOOD LIFE HAS CHANGED . . . FOR NOW
For Cecile Levant, the search for a cup of coffee took her all the way from Century Village in Deerfield Beach to North Federal Highway in Boca Raton.

And to, of all places, a hardware store.

She stood outside the front door of Belzer's Hardware Co. on Wednesday morning with her fellow huntress, Merlene Humphrey, a home health aide who works in that same Century Village.

They had money in their hands from five neighbors who had the shared hope they'd come back with the small item that loomed large in their notion of survival: a Master Glow Backpack/Expedition Stove.

It is a contraption with two pieces: a grapefruit-size propane canister and a spider-shaped metal stovetop, which can grip a small pot or a can of beans, and heat it over a flame.

This feat seems almost like magic when the electricity is out for you and 6 million of your fellow South Floridians.

It was the second post-Wilma day that Levant and Humphrey made their way to Belzer's, their second 20-minute wait to be let in the door.

"I love a cup of coffee in the morning," said Levant, a pert white-haired woman in a pink workout suit, explaining her need for the stove. "That's why I'm so determined."

Rosh Hashana shooting

This was a story that the cops reporters covered copiously. I was hoping to capture the elements that were particularly hurtful to this community. A child nailed it:






SYNAGOGUE SHOOTING EVEN PAINFUL TO GOD
Date: Thursday, October 6, 2005
Edition: Palm Beach Section: LOCAL Page: 1B
Byline: HOWARD GOODMAN COMMENTARY

The hole was about 2 1/2 inches wide, as indicated by the stick-on measurement left by detectives, and surrounded by webbings of shattered glass.

It pierced a wall-length window of the Chabad Weltman Synagogue west of Boca Raton.

Josh Goldberg is 6. He wore shiny black shoes and dress pants, his holiday wear, and stood on the sidewalk surrounding the shopping-center synagogue where he goes to Hebrew school once a week.

He stared with a look of sorrow at the uncovered hole and the shattered glass.

"The old man," he said, "shot a part of God's heart."

Hurricanes, from Alpha to Omega

If you write a column in Florida for any length of time, you're bound to write a lot about hurricanes.

You don't often get to write anything funny about these hugely destructive events, but every now and then, just to relieve the tension, I'd try to raise a smile.

FEMA follies

FEMA did too little, too late in New Orleans after Katrina. The problems were different in South Florida. Here, FEMA doled out sacks of money to people who suffered no hurricane damage at all. Made me wonder if anyone there had any brains at all. Hence:






ARE YOU FEMA MATERIAL? TAKE THE TEST
Date: Tuesday, September 20, 2005
Edition: Palm Beach Section: LOCAL Page: 1B
Byline: HOWARD GOODMAN COMMENTARY


Dear Applicant:

Thank you for your interest in joining the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

As you know, this is a challenging time for our agency. Hurricane Katrina and the news media have created a difficult working environment.

We are looking for the very best people to perform the vital work of rebuilding the Gulf region and preparing for future disasters and terror attacks.

You can help us by filling out the following aptitude test.

(Note: If you have executive experience in Bush-Cheney election campaigns, or were a college roommate of an executive in a Bush-Cheney campaign, you may skip the test. You're in.)