April 2011 Archives

Tulsa Mayor Dewey Bartlett Jr has sent out a mailing inviting the recipient to contribute at least $250 for a series of luncheons hosted by himself and (it is implied) by Senator Jim Inhofe, the former Mayor of Tulsa.

A source provided me with a copy of the contents of the mailing: a cover letter, a glossy four-color, eight-page booklet summarizing Bartlett Jr's accomplishments and policy goals, and a contribution response card. Click the link to see a PDF of the mailing's contents. (My source scanned the contents of the mailing but did so with the text oriented in all directions because of the way the booklet was laid out -- in a couple of cases, opposite orientations on the same page. I extracted the scanned images in the PDF to separate files, cropped and rotated the images so they all have the same orientation, and reassembled the result into a PDF. I then used Acrobat's built-in optical character recognition to scan for text. If you want to compare, here is the original scan I received, a 2.4 MB PDF.)

Here is the text of the letter:

"A SHINING CITY UPON A HILL... ...." MAYOR DEWEY BARTLETT'S LUNCHEON SERIES May 20, 2011

April 10, 2011

Dear Friend,

Over two thousand years ago, Jesus described a "city upon a hill" in his Sermon on the Mount. President-elect John Kennedy returned the phrase to prominence when he described "a city upon a hill-the eyes of all people are upon us". In our most recent recollection of the phrase, it was Ronald Reagan who often cited, "a shining city upon a hill ..... ", as he led our imaginations and delivered us the results of a country that could be restored ..... if we would fix our eyes on such a city!

These words have special significance to me as the mayor of your city. For too long, we allowed our past achievements to dictate our current and future endeavors. We would study, plan, study some more....and rarely act! We did not allow the forces of the marketplace to create the value to the taxpayer and the quality that Tulsan's had historically come to expect. I have spent all of my adult life in the private sector, where your ideas must quickly be moved to action ..and where your past performance is no guarantee of future results. Accordingly, when I entered office as your mayor, I met with a culture and skepticism that can only come from people that have lived in a static society, protected from market forces and continual improvement. With all of the noise in and around City Hall, I decided to take another idea from our hero, Ronald Reagan. He always went directly to the people, and did not allow his vision and results to be left to the interpretation of others....many of whom wished to preserve the status quo and poor results that come from unchallenged governmental performance.

So, I am coming to you, along with my mentor and dear friend, Senator Jim Inhofe, to hold a series of luncheons to share directly with you the many exciting results we are achieving in the use of successful and proven ideas in municipal performance. Senator Inhofe was the last mayor that truly used the Ronald Reagan approach to government, and he was often touted by Reagan as his "favorite" mayor! I have included with this invitation my list of focused action results that are implementing our shared vision of what it takes to return Tulsa to its former position.....one that we haven't seen since Mayor Inhofe was in this office. As you will see here in this publication "Tulsa 2020-Many Voices-One Vision" we are not studying, vacillating and massaging.....we are acting! And those actions have already led to national recognition for our applied solutions to our municipal challenges. Finally, we are leading again, and other cities are follOWing our lead....a true return to Tulsa's greatest days!

I hope you will join Senator Inhofe and me for this most important luncheon. All of this is being paid for privately, absolutely nothing is at taxpayer expense. It would be particularly helpful to me and my efforts if you would consider being a Sponsor ($1,000 per couple), Host ($500 per Couple) or Patron ($250 per Couple). I have included in this mailing the information you will need to provide for participation. We would like to mail general invitations later this month, so it is important that I can hear from you quickly, as we would like to show you on our broader invitation. We will only be able to seat 200 for our first event, so I encourage your prompt attention to this important and timely luncheon with Senator Inhofe and myself.

Should you wish for more information, simply contact Laura Huff at (918) 691-1744, or by email at Laura.Huff@cox.net

Warmest Regards,
Dewey Bartlett
Not Printed At Taxpayer's Expense

The letter was mailed from Dallas, Texas. The zip code on the prepaid return envelope, 75234, is in the Dallas area, and the bulk mail permit for the mailing is from Dallas as well.

The return address on the envelope, and the address on the response card, is

Bartlett for Mayor 11806 S. Pittsburg Ave Tulsa, OK 74137

a residence in the Wind River Subdivision belonging, according to county land records, to the aforementioned Laura Huff and her husband Dustin. (The couple are mentioned in news stories from 2003 as involved in the performance review developed at the beginning of Bill LaFortune's term of office, an effort led by Mrs. Huff's father, former City Auditor Ron Howell.)

I don't have time for a detailed analysis, but here are a few quick reactions to the letter:

The big question: What does he plan to do with all the money he is trying to raise? It's two years -- two long years -- before Bartlett is up for re-election.

I wonder what Bartlett Jr's mentor, Sen. Inhofe, thought of Bartlett Jr's endorsement of Democratic incumbent Mayor Kathy Taylor for re-election (before she dropped out). Taylor's refusal to face fiscal facts put Tulsa in a deep financial hole. Bartlett Jr seemed quite content with the way the city had been run by his predecessors until he actually got into office. Bartlett Jr endorsed and praised Taylor's decision to make City of Tulsa property owners pay for the failure of Great Plains Airlines, despite promises that the taxpayers would not be at risk.

During the 2009 mayoral primary campaign, I asked the candidates whether they would continue following the autocratic leadership style of Kathy Taylor. Sure enough, Bartlett Jr has followed closely in the footsteps of the predecessor he endorsed, building an even worse relationship with the City Council than she had done.

(By the way, in responding to that question back in 2009, Bartlett Jr denounced Chris Medlock's idea of hiring an experienced City Manager to work for the mayor and oversee city departments involved in day-to-day operations. In 2011, Bartlett Jr has named former Broken Arrow City Manager Jim Twombly to do just that.)

Ronald Reagan, whom Bartlett Jr claims as a hero, not only didn't endorse his predecessors, he ran against two sitting presidents, one of whom was a fellow Republican, because he believed that the policies of the Ford and Carter administrations were leading the country to financial and geopolitical disaster.

I see some good ideas in the booklet that came with the mailer, but it's hard for me to trust Bartlett Jr's sincerity. I have to wonder why he hadn't been promoting these ideas prior to his election.

My wife and I know Chuck Stophel as a fellow parent of students at Augustine Christian Academy. Chuck is also one of the school's biggest boosters, and he's invested a lot of time and energy into making classical Christian education at ACA an ongoing reality.

Now Chuck is dealing with a serious and expensive medical challenge, and he and his family need our help. Friends have organized a special event this Saturday evening, April 30, 2011 -- ChuckFest -- at Augustine Christian Academy, 6310 E. 30th Street (just west of Sheridan, a block north of 31st), from 4 to 7 pm. From the ChuckFest Facebook page:

This is a come-and-go fundraiser for Chuck and Sara Stophel to raise money for Chuck's medical expenses and other needs. Tasty heavy hors d'oeuvres, desserts and drinks, fabulous music and entertainment emceed by LEANNE TAYLOR of News on 6, activities for children and a wonderful silent auction will be held. Chuck has given to so many over the years! Please mark your calendars for this wonderful way to show Chuck and his famly how much we love and support them! Invite your friends!

WE HAVE BEEN GENEROUSLY GIVEN 2 TICKETS TO JOSH GROBAN, JEWELRY AND OTHER INCREDIBLE AUCTION ITEMS!!!!

If you are unable to attend, but would like to contribute to Chuck's medical expenses, a fund has been established at MidFirst Bank in Tulsa. Please make donations in the name of "Charles D. and Sara Stophel Support Trust" and mail to: MidFirst Bank, 7050 South Yale, Suite 100, Tulsa, OK 74136. Thank you and God bless you!

Last night, my 14-year-old son decided to spend some of his savings on a set of the Harvard Classics -- a 50-volume treasury of the best of Western Civilization. If you like the idea of a school that can inspire that sort of love of learning, you ought to appreciate and support a volunteer like Chuck who has done so much to make it possible.

A fascinating conference/workshop on technology and government is returning to Oklahoma City for its second annual edition in just over a week: Gov 2.0a.

Gov 2.0 stands for Government 2.0, the application of increased connectivity and new technologies to better help government achieve its goals by being transparent, participatory and collaborative. The benefits of this approach include increased efficiency, improved services, greater accessibility of public services, as well as more accountability.

The Friday program includes speakers to talk about progress in other states, but it also features many Oklahoma leaders: State Rep. Jason Murphey, Oklahoma County Commissioner Brian Maughan, Governor Mary Fallin, Joey Senat of Freedom of Information Oklahoma, urban blogger/activist Sid Burgess, John Butler of Oklahoma Crisis Mapping (also pastor of Beal Heights PCA in Lawton and an early Oklahoma blogger and podcaster). Oklahoma Crisis Mapping is responsible for @okicemap, which combines official government information and crowd-sourced news to depict the extend of ice damage and closures across the state.

Two all-day workshops are scheduled for Saturday: City Camp and Mash-IT-up Camp:

City Camp is an unconference focused on innovation for municipal governments and community organizations. As an unconference, content for City Camp is not programmed for a passive audience. Instead, content is created and organized by participants and coordinated by facilitators. Participants are expected to play active roles in sessions. This provides an excellent format for creative, open exchange geared toward action....

Mash-IT-up Camp is a day long event for software developers, web designers, and online entrepreneurs. The event begins with a half day of short talks that cover various APIs for using online services and accessing online datasets. After a lunch, the second half of the day is allocated to teams of developers working together to 'Mash up' APIs to create new interesting applications. The goal of this event is to by the end of the day have deployed a handful of innovative Gov 2.0 application prototypes....

I'm supposed to go to the Oklahoma Republican Convention that day, but this is awfully tempting, particularly Mash-IT-up.

Registration for the conference and networking receptions is $99. A pass that includes the Friday banquet is $149. The two camps are free, but advance registration is required. Higher last-minute fees go into effect after Saturday, April 30, 2011.

I haven't commented previously about the Obama birth certificate issue. My problems with the president involve his policies, not his place of birth. My guess was that there was something embarrassing on the long-form birth certificate that didn't appear on the certification of live birth that he released earlier.

And now the White House has posted on its website a PDF containing what purports to be a scan of a certified copy of the birth certificate of Barack Hussein Obama, II.

I say "purports" because there are some weird things about it. It's not strange that it's a PDF, rather than an image file, like a JPEG, BMP, PNG, or TIFF. Many scanners generate a PDF by default.

A tweet from Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit alerted me to some oddities with the document. I downloaded a copy of the PDF directly from the White House website, at this URL:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/rss_viewer/birth-certificate-long-form.pdf

The metadata in the file is strange: It indicates that it had been processed in some way by Adobe Illustrator.

I happen to have Illustrator, so I opened the birth certificate PDF in Illustrator and followed the process outlined by Mara Zebest, coauthor of a book on Photoshop:

1. Select the entire document (Ctrl-A)
2. Object | Clipping Mask | Release
3. Repeat step 2 until Release is no longer an option.

When I did it, I could only do step 2 once after which Release was grayed out. But the result was the same: Boxes outlining eight parts of the document as separate objects and one box surrounding it all.

Reopening the original file again, I found that all I had to do was open the file in Illustrator and click using the Selection tool, and I could see all the box elements. In the layers box, there is one layer, composed of one group, which in turn is composed of 9 groups and a clipping mask. Each of those 9 groups is composed of an image and a clipping mask.

After following the above steps 1 and 2, all the clipping masks were converted to paths and the layer was composed of 9 groups and a path, with no intermediate path. Each individual component image could then be made invisible, using the layer dialog.

The nine components:

1. Tiny fragments the same color as the safety paper pattern on the top edge just left of center
2. Tiny fragments the same color as the safety paper pattern on the top edge just above the certification date
3. The letters "Non" from the word None in box 17a.
4. "AUG - 8 196" - part of a stamped date in box 20.
5. "AUG - 8" and the digit 6 in 1961in box 22.
6. "APR 25 2011" at the bottom left of the page.
7. The certification stamp of the state registrar at the bottom right.
8. Most of the remaining typed letters on the form, the handwritten dates, and the last half of Ann Dunham Obama's name.
9. Everything else -- the safety paper pattern, with white ghosts or haloes around the letters were first half of Ann Stanley Obama's signature, the signature of the Physician, all but one letter of the original registrar's signature, the form grid, and scattered letters -- the R in Barack, the K in Kenya, the S in Stanley, the last digit of the sequence number in the upper left of the page, and the handwritten numbers (which look like coding for statistical purposes)

Here's the ninth image -- what's left after the top 8 images are turned off (click the half-size thumbnail to view 997 KB full-size PNG -- I exported it from Illustrator at the same 72dpi resolution as the White House PDF):

I have no idea whether this is evidence of tampering, but it certainly looks different than other scanned PDFs in my possession. For example, here's a scanof ethics filings by Tulsans for Better Government (earlier incarnation of the rule-or-ruin bunch now known as Save Our Tulsa). Like the birth certificate, it's a form -- a mixture of pre-printed text and handwritten text. Opening that file in Illustrator shows what you'd expect -- one image (the entire form) in one group in one layer. Metadata reveals the model of scanner that produced the image (Toshiba e-STUDIO 353).

There's one other odd thing about this birth certificate: There is a sequence number in the upper left corner, which appears to have been produced by a hand stamp, perhaps the sort that automatically advances. The number on Obama's certificate is 61 10641. The sequence number on the certificate of Susan Elizabeth Nordyke, born at the same hospital the following day, is 61 10637. Obama's certificate was accepted by the Registrar General on August 8; Nordyke's was accepted on August 11. How can a certificate processed three days later have a lower sequence number? I'm making an assumption that the sequence number was applied when the certificate was received by the registrar; that assumption could be incorrect.

Does this mean I think President Obama was born in Kenya or is ineligible to be president? No. But I don't understand why Obama would release an image that appears to have been edited or processed in some way, especially given the long-standing controversy over the document which began three years ago during his bitter primary struggle with Hillary Clinton.

MORE: KRMG reports that Tulsa IT professional Scott Grizzle notes that several aspects of the document "don't pass the smell test." KRMG has audio of a conversation with Grizzle and pictures of the various digital pieces of which the document appears to be composed. I've known Scott for several years, and he's as far from an extremist in temperament and ideology as you can get.

(There are a fair number of stream-of-consciousness reminiscences in this piece, so to simplify matters, the main thread of last Friday's story is in normal text, and the flashbacks are in italics.)

My feet hit the floor at 4:15 a.m. Eastern time Good Friday morning; pitch black outside. After a shower, some final packing, a "breakfast" of leftover pulled pork and some broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots from the big bag I got at Sams, I checked out. At 5:15 I pulled out of the lot, making a brief stop at the Wawa on the way out of town for a cup of coffee. As I headed north, I watched the rosy-fingered dawn spread and brighten across the marshes to my right.

At 6:50, I'm pulling my "preferred upgrade," a Mercury Grand Marquis -- not much of an upgrade with gas pushing $4 a gallon -- into the rental return queue. By 7:10, my bag is checked, and I'm ready to go through the nearly empty security line. Or ready as soon as I polished off my four leftover pieces of mozzarella string cheese. (I figured the dry salami slices and the broccoli would be OK, but the cheese constituted a liquid or gel and no doubt would violate TSA rules.)

The TSA agent checking my boarding pass and ID wondered why someone would go through Chicago to get back to Oklahoma, instead of DFW. I explained that DFW was south, and passing through there involved backtracking. That seemed to satisfy his curiosity -- or was it suspicion?

By the end of the day, I came to share his suspicion of anyone that would fly through O'Hare in April. You'd have to question a traveler's sanity, if not his intentions.

On my outward bound trip, on Palm Sunday, my plan to fly through Chicago was thwarted when American delayed the in-bound flight of the plane I was supposed to take to Chicago. I'd miss my connection, so the ticket agent changed my flight, rerouted me through DFW, then went to the baggage room, pulled my bag, and re-tagged it to match the new itinerary. Of course, I didn't learn of the delay until I was at the airport, having rushed around all morning to finish packing, and having skipped lunch with my family to make the flight -- unnecessary as it turned out. And my aim in taking that early afternoon flight -- arriving at the hotel at about 10:30 -- was thwarted, too, by a three-hour margin.

The drunk customer was only buying three donuts and he wanted a donut box to hold them. The clerk insisted he didn't have one. After a few go-rounds, the clerk admits to having the big dozen donut boxes, leading the drunk to exclaim that the clerk was holding out on him. The drunk paid and headed outside, or so I thought. He came back a minute later to ask the clerk to hold the door so he could wheel his trike out of the entryway. I supposed a connection between his condition and his choice of transportation, but wouldn't it still be DUI no matter what type of vehicle you're operating on the public roads?

But back to the dark and stormy Good Friday at O'Hare: American Airlines delayed my homeward bound flight by almost two hours, and eventually they cancelled it, as well as the flight to follow. Looking for an American gate agent, I found one cheerfully suggesting that cancelled Harrisburg passengers might find it convenient to fly to Boston instead. She met my puzzled expression with a shrug. She transferred my reservation to a United flight due to leave about the same time as my cancelled flight, took a description of my bag and the number of my baggage claim check, then wrote a six-digit number (the bag change order number, evidently) on the claim check. All seemed to be well, and I was led to believe my bag would be joining me on the flight home.

I strode over to the United terminal, past the "Kids on the Fly" playground where my oldest played during long layovers, back when my wife worked for Sabre, and we had non-rev privileges on American. I remembered another stormy Chicago spring night, when my oldest, then three, entertained the other passengers at the gate where we waited for the last flight to Tampa. He turned a roll-aboard with the handle extended into a ticket window. I remember that we were strung along, expecting that the final flight would go after the storms moved through. Instead, the flight was canceled, so we claimed our luggage, found a nearby down-on-its-heels hotel with a shuttle service, and as my wife and son slept, I searched Sabre for a flight that could get us within a couple of hundred miles of where we wanted to be. (Miami was our best option, as it turned out. Somewhere, in an old Franklin planner 7-ring binder, I must still have my cheat-sheet of Sabre commands -- N-display, VNR, VNL....)

My oldest had another milestone at O'Hare: He was about 8 months old, on the seat of a parked people-mover cart, and he pulled himself up for the first time, using the back of the seat.

Back to 2011: I found some chairs in the walkway between E and F concourses with power plugs under each seat. By some miracle, the T-mobile hotspot I connected to didn't require me to log in -- must have been the cyber-equivalent of pulling up to an unexpired parking meter. All was well until the 6'5", 300 lb, young man with terrible BO decided the seat next to me was the best place to air out his feet and make a phone call (in some Slavic tongue). I left shortly thereafter.

The United flight left on time. I dozed off and on through the flight, in between attempts to read through the Gospel according to Mark on my PDA. As we crossed into Oklahoma, I had a clear view of Route 66, in sunlight, and a dramatic view of the backside of a line of cumulonimbus clouds which had the Will Rogers Turnpike hidden in deep shadow. We turned west, flew south along Peoria, then at Southern Hills we started the U-turn for landing. The storm had moved through Tulsa by the time we landed.

At the Tulsa airport, I learned that neither United nor American had any idea where my bag was or which airline had custody of it. United's system had no record of it; American's system showed a bag change order but no confirmation of its current whereabouts. Most likely it would come in on American's only uncanceled ORD-TUL flight after 11 pm, and then would be transfered at TUL to United for me to pick up. I filed my phone number and a description of the bag with both airlines, just in case.

At 5:30 -- 14 hours since my feet hit the floor, 13 since I left the hotel -- I walked into my own home, sans checked bag. We debated whether to go to church for the Good Friday Tenebrae service or to have some sort of devotional at home. We decided to have a quick meal -- the soup my wife had been cooking, plus some leftover hoagies -- and head to Christ Pres.

I grew up in a very non-liturgical church but came to appreciate the concept of the church year and in particular, Holy Week. After returning to Tulsa from college, I remember looking for special services to attend. I went to the Three Hours at St. John's Episcopal, Tenebrae at Immanuel Lutheran in Broken Arrow when it was on the hill, Easter Vigil at St Aidan's led by the beautiful baritone of Father Masud Syedullah. That may have been all in the same year, 1988. The following year I was in London on Good Friday, the last full day of a five-week work assignment there. I went to the Litany at St. Paul's Cathedral in the morning, the Three Hours at All Souls Langham Place in the afternoon. I flew home Saturday and went again to a Father Masud-less Easter Vigil at St. Aidan's. It wasn't the same.

So I'm happy to be a member of a church that holds special Holy Week services; all the more reason to forget my weariness and get everyone rounded up and in the car to go to church. We were wrong about the time -- we thought 7:15 instead of 7:30 -- so we were atypically on time.

Tenebrae is Latin for "shadows," and the service involves seven readings that lead from the light of the Last Supper, through the growing darkness of betrayal, abandonment, condemnation, crucifixion, and burial. After each reading, a candle is snuffed out, and at the end of the service the sanctuary is pitch black.

The candles were set in bowl-like holders, arranged on the communion table in the center of the platform. As we waited for the service to start, our associate pastor of 30 years noticed the candles flickering, so he got up from the front pew, shut the air vents that blow onto the platform, and the flames stood still. The associate pastor is a master of detail, and his knowledge of the physical plant pales in comparison to his knowledge of the church members, regular attenders, and even new visitors, and using that knowledge to help connect people with one another. He will be missed.

While we were sitting in the pew, accidentally early, the senior pastor approached to say that the first of seven readers backed out at the last minute and could I read in his place?

The service began with a hymn ("Jesus, Keep Me Near the Cross") and two passages from the Old Testament read by the pastor about the suffering of God's Anointed -- Isaiah 53 and Psalm 22. Another hymn ("Ah, Holy Jesus, How Hast Thou Offended"), and then I walked up to read the first lesson from John 13 where Jesus dips a morsel and hands it to Judas, telling him to do what he has to do quickly. I read slowly and somewhat dramatically, snuffed the first candle, then returned to our pew. As I sat, our five-year-old exclaimed, in an emphatic stage whisper: "Great... job... Dad!"

The five-year-old was not so excited at the end of the service, when all the lights were out and the pastor took the Christ candle to the back of the sanctuary, then led the congregation in "Were You There?" The five-year-old was a bit spooked by the darkness as we left the sanctuary in silence, but as he got into his car seat, he was singing, "Sometimes it causes me to tremble," over and over again.

As we pulled into the driveway, the garage door opener wouldn't work. Then we noticed that the porch light was off. In fact the power was out for our whole block.

We walked in to the darkened house and rounded up the lanterns and flashlights -- standard spring equipment for an Oklahoma household. The five-year-old said over and over again that he was scared. I held his hand and led him with a lantern in the other hand. I got him dressed for bed, gave him his allergy medicine (also standard spring equipment for Oklahoma), brushed his teeth, and tucked him into bed. His 10-yr-old big sister climbed into bed with him and read him a story by flashlight -- The Case of the Great Train Robbery, about a kid with a skunk for a pet.

We found a rechargeable electric "candle" that he could use as a nightlight, and he had his sister's Hello Kitty lantern to turn on if he needed to get up. We said prayers. We couldn't turn on his usual CD, but the toads and frogs were singing in our backyard pond, and his big brother was out on the deck practicing his violin under the light reflecting off of the clouds, softly playing "Maiden's Prayer" and "Tamlin" and snippets of the classical pieces he's been learning.

Shortly after the five-year-old fell asleep, the lights came back on. I head to the airport. A while later, I headed to the airport in time for the arrival of the last AA flight from ORD, delayed by an hour or so. My bag came up on the carousel -- it never had been transferred to United -- so I grabbed it and headed home. My head hit the pillow approximately 24 hours after my feet had hit the floor that morning.

I'm going to be on a blogger panel in a couple of hours, at an American Majority training session for citizen activists. I have several points to communicate about the role blogging can play in local activism; this recent post by my blogpal Tania Gail about the Philadelphia city elections illustrates several of them.

She attended a Tea Party-sponsored forum for Republican candidates for mayor and at-large city council. She took video with her iPhone and posted a couple of excerpts, but she also provided a text summary of the event, along with some context for understanding why these elections matter and why the GOP is in such bad shape in Philadelphia.

If you're going to a candidate forum or a board meeting of a municipal authority, why not take some video and share it with those who couldn't be there? If you're smart about the use of descriptive text, tags, titles, labels, and categories, your blog entry can help those using a search engine to learn about a specific candidate or election.

(I was interested to learn how their partisan at-large system works. Parties nominate up to five candidates; the top seven vote-getters in the general election are seated, except that a maximum of five seats can go to any party. That system would seem to benefit the mushiest, go-along-to-get-along Republicans and hurt those who would challenge business as usual. The best hope for reformers would be to ensure that all five GOP nominees for the at-large council seats are, as Tania puts it, pitbulls.)

The US Air Force is looking for a supplier for Light Air Support aircraft, to be used by the Afghan Air Force and by the USAF to train other partner air forces. Award is expected this summer, and the question is whether the Air Force will pick a variant of an American-designed and -built aircraft it already uses, in the hundreds, or a Brazilian-designed aircraft that would be new to the fleet.

In 1994, the US Air Force and US Navy issued a request for proposals for a new aircraft to be used for primary pilot training to replace the T-34 and T-37 aircraft, along with the flight simulators for the new aircraft. One of the bidders was Beechcraft (then part of Raytheon); the company I worked for at the time, FlightSafety, was part of the Beechcraft team, would design and build the simulators.

To be frank, I didn't think our team stood a chance. The proposed aircraft was a modification of a Swiss-designed single-engine turboprop, and the RFP required the controls and performance of a jet aircraft. But Beechcraft was able to provide jet handling and performance at a turboprop price, using technology to conceal the peculiarities of a propeller-driven aircraft from the pilot, and they won the contract.

I was part of the FlightSafety design team for the simulators for the winning aircraft, dubbed the T-6 Texan II. My job was to develop an Ada 95 framework which would connect software models of flight dynamics, engine performance, radios, instruments, hydraulic, electrical, and fuel systems, and would do so in an object-oriented way without compromising real-time performance.

The T-6 Texan II is now being used by the air forces of seven different nations, and FlightSafety Simulation in Broken Arrow has built dozens of T-6 simulators for the USAF and for Greece's Air Force. (I have no idea if any of my work is still in the simulator, or if it has all been rewritten over the years. Ada 95 lost its DOD status as a "mandatory" programming language about the time we started developing the T-6 sim.) The aircraft itself is built at the Hawker Beechcraft factory on the east side of Wichita, Kansas. It's been a good thing for our region's aviation industry.

There's also an armed version of the T-6. The AT-6 has on-board avionics (based on the system in use on the A-10C) to support surveillance, attack, and reconnaissance. Now the Air Force is looking for an aircraft to fill a light aircraft support and counterinsurgency role for the Afghan Air Force and other military partners.

The only other declared bidder, according to Aviation Week, is Brazilian aircraft manufacturer Embraer. A U. S. company, Sierra Nevada Corp., is the prime contractor, but Embraer would supply the parts from Brazil for assembly in Jacksonville, Florida. The Light Air Support contract will be awarded this summer.

Embraer began as a government-owned aircraft manufacturer in 1969, was privatized in 1994, but the government has retained a "Golden Share" which gives the government of Brazil veto rights over:

• change of our name and corporate purpose;
• amendment and/or application of our logo;
• creation and/or alteration of military programs (whether or not involving Brazil);
• development of third party skills' in technology for military programs;
• discontinuance of the supply of spare parts and replacement parts for military aircraft;
• transfer of our control;
• any amendments to the list of corporate actions over which the golden share carries veto rights, including the right of the Brazilian government to appoint one member and alternate to our Board of Directors and the right of our employees to appoint two members and their respective alternates to our Board of Directors, and to the rights conferred to the golden share; and
• changes to certain provisions of our bylaws pertaining to voting restrictions, rights of the golden share and the mandatory tender offer requirements applicable to holders of 35% or more of our outstanding shares.

I would not want the DOD to be forced by protectionist policies to buy poorly designed and expensive equipment from American companies, but neither would I want our defense dependent on overseas companies who are subject to the whims of a sometimes-friendly, sometimes-not foreign government.

The US has a long history of taking an aircraft and creating variants to extend its use into new mission areas. (The C-130 is a great example.) Parts for one variant often can be used for other variants. A pilot or maintenance technician trained on one variant of an aircraft can quickly learn to fly or work on another.

And if that aircraft and its simulators are built by US companies, it means keeping our tax dollars in the US, supporting American high tech and manufacturing capabilities. I trust the Kansas and Oklahoma congressional delegations are aware that it would also mean high-tech and skilled manufacturing jobs for their constituents.

DISCLOSURE: I have no financial interest (direct or indirect) in the outcome of this procurement. Hat tip to John Hawkins of Right Wing News for calling the issue to my attention.

Legislative redistricting is still in progress, and congressional redistricting isn't due until next year, but the Oklahoma House already has a plan for altering the congressional lines to rebalance population to fit the 2010 census -- HB 1527. Only a handful of precincts will change hands. This is the least radical redistricting in my lifetime, and it's much less contentious than 10 years ago, when Oklahoma lost a seat, and congressional redistricting became a game of musical chairs. (Wes Watkins, already stepping down, lost that game.)

To avoid a lawsuit under the Voting Rights Act, the lines are drawn so that each congressional district has exactly the same population, plus or minus 1 person. The same thing was done in 2000. That level of precision seems ridiculous, given that between the date of the census snapshot (April 1, 2010) and the drawing of the lines a year later, the actual numbers have already changed. Allowing slightly more deviation would allow congressional districts to follow county boundaries, instead of having to be tweaked one block at a time, and some states are allowed to do that, but Oklahoma is not allowed.

As it is, only four counties will be split, and those same four counties were split in 2000: Creek (mostly 3 and a bit of 1), Rogers (mostly 2 and a bit of 1), Oklahoma (mostly 5 and a bit of 4), and Canadian (mostly 3 and a bit of 4). (The links lead to detailed maps in PDF format.)

The changes shouldn't have any effect on partisan balance, which might be considered a missed opportunity. Republicans could have easily drawn the lines to hurt Dan Boren's reelection chances.

As it is, Tulsa will continue to have two congressmen. And two of Oklahoma's congressmen will each represent two military bases -- thus District 4's incursion into Oklahoma County to lasso Tinker AFB -- and that's supposed to help with any future base realignments.

MORE: I had a question via email about my statement that Tulsa will continue to have two congressmen. The City of Tulsa is mainly in Tulsa County (385,613 people, 176.37 sq. mi.), but it extends into Osage (6,136 people, 10.80 sq. mi.), Wagoner (157 people, 13.68 sq. mi.), and Rogers (0 people, 0.13 sq. mi.) Counties as well. (The Rogers County portion is only a narrow fenceline, extending to the Tulsa Port of Catoosa.) Frank Lucas represents all of Osage County, including the 1.5% of Tulsa's population that lives there. The Osage County section of Tulsa includes Gilcrease Hills, Tulsa Country Club, and Country Club Gardens. In the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, the Osage County part of Tulsa was included in the 1st District. It might have been nice had the Legislature moved Tulsa's chunk of Osage County from CD 3 into CD 1 in exchange for the Creek County section of CD 1.

One more thing: The Legislature's early resolution of congressional district boundaries and the minimal changes they made are both huge helps to county election boards. After the 2000 census, the battle between Gov. Keating, a Republican, and the Democrat-controlled legislature over redistricting led to court, delaying official adoption of a plan until June 26, 2002, a mere 12 days before the filing period. County election boards had only two months to redraw precinct boundaries and then sort the state's voters into the new precincts. (By state law, a precinct can't be split by congressional, legislative, or county commission district boundaries.)

This time around, county election boards will have a full year. Maybe the Tulsa County Election Board can use some of that time to match precinct boundaries to city limits and school district boundaries. (I'm thinking in particular of the chunks of west Tulsa in precincts 801 and 802, and a couple of east Tulsa precincts that straddle the Tulsa-BA limit.) Cleanly drawn boundaries prevent confusion at the polling place.

It's odd what sticks with you over the years. A blogpal's Facebook quotation of a surprisingly emotional and romantic passage from Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged (the film version debuts this weekend) was a reminder that Rand and her admirers were not exactly Vulcans, and it brought to mind a cartoon that was published in The Tech, MIT's student newspaper, in the issue following Rand's death in 1982 (PDF). Thanks to the miracle of the Internet, I could find the comic strip, which features two anthropomorphic animals as MIT students, Beaver, the protagonist, and Darwin the Duck, who belongs to MIT's "Objectionist" Society and works on the Ego. (There was a weekly newspaper called Ergo, published by objectivists from MIT and other area colleges.)

I could easily get lost browsing through issues of The Tech from college days. All 131 years of The Tech are online. In 1982, there was a well-drawn, consistently funny strip called Space Epic by Bill Spitzak -- still funny after all these years. Spitzak was a computer science major and went on to develop the Nuke compositor for use with computer-generated special effects, first used in the movie True Lies.

In that same issue, the Tech Coop advertised a special deal on cases of Coke and Tab -- 24 cans for $5.99 (regular price $8.75). It's amazing to think you can still get a case of soda for the same price, when it's on sale.

A few issues later, there was this front page chart with MIT admission stats for application years 1980, 1981, and 1982. I've added the stats for the most recent two years from reports in The Tech (for 2010; 2011):

Stunning. Applications have almost tripled, while acceptances (and incoming class sizes) have remained constant over 30 years. Notice too that the male-female ratio has gone from 3 to 1 my freshman year (which already represented a decline) to almost 1 to 1 today. Also, it appears that "underrepresented minorities" (African Americans, Native Americans, Latinos, but not Asian Americans or Jews) are no longer underrepresented. And despite the higher ratio of international students, they have the worst ratio of applications to acceptances -- about 3%.

Winston Churchill: Walking with Destiny, a documentary on the life and legacy of the greatest man of the 20th Century, continues its run at Circle Cinema in Tulsa's Whittier Square through April 21, 2011.

The newest production from the Moriah Films Division of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, focuses on the years 1940 and 1941, when the Swastika flew over continental Europe. Only England with her back to the wall, under Winston Churchill, remained defiant.

Walking With Destiny highlights Churchill's years in the political wilderness, his early opposition to Adolf Hitler and Nazism, and his support for Jews under threat by the Nazi regime. As historian John Lukacs explains, Churchill may not have won the War in 1940, but without him, the War most certainly would have been lost.

Sir Martin Gilbert, historical consultant for the film and Churchill's official biographer, adds that had Churchill's warnings about Nazi Germany's racial policies towards Jews been heeded in the early 1930's, the Holocaust may never have occurred.

The film examines why Winston Churchill's legacy continues to be relevant in the 21st Century and explores why his leadership remains inspirational to current day political leaders and diplomats.

Showtimes:

Fri, 4/15/2011, 1:30 pm
Sat, 4/16/2011, 9:30 am & 3:30 pm
Sun, 4/17/2011, 4:00 pm
Mon, 4/18/2011, 1:30 pm
Tues, 4/19/2011, 4:00 pm
Wed, 4/20/2011, 2:00 pm
Thurs, 4/21/2011, 11:30 am & 8:00 pm

The H2O Film Festival begins Sunday, April 17, 2011, at the Circle Cinema and runs through Saturday, a series of eight films dealing with the water we drink. Of special note:

GASLAND (Sunday, 4/17/2011, 6 pm): An Oscar-nominated documentary feature on the effects of natural gas drilling and hydraulic fracturing ("fracking"). During my time in San Antonio last fall, there was much talk and concern about the impact of fracking on the Edwards Aquifer, the natural underground reservoir that sustains Austin, San Antonio, and the Texas Hill Country.

RIVER OF WASTE: The Hazardous Truth about Factory Farms (Monday, 4/18/2011, 6 pm): Shortly after his unsuccessful 2006 mayoral campaign, former Tulsa State Rep. Don McCorkell took some film courses and set out to make this film on the impact of factory farming on Oklahoma rivers and lakes, an issue that affects Tulsans every time we turn a tap.

CHINATOWN (Saturday, 4/23/2011, 9:30 pm): 1974's Best Picture, Chinatown is a fictional account of the controversy, corruption, and violence involved in bringing water from the Owens Valley in the Sierra Nevada to Los Angeles to facilitate the development of the San Fernando Valley and to set LA on course to become one of the nation's largest cities. City infrastructure sounds boring, but there are fortunes at stake and plenty of incentive for corruption when planners decide where the next waterline, expressway exit, or transit stop will go.

(For a great non-fiction account of the Owens Valley Aqueduct, the collapse of the St. Francis Dam, and the development of the San Fernando Valley, read Rivers in the Desert: William Mulholland and the Inventing of Los Angeles. A film based on this book is reportedly under development by Phoenix Films with director Frank Darabont.)

(Churchill portrait by British Government [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)

American Majority will hold a day-long citizen activist training session on Saturday, April 23, 2011, at Tulsa Technology Center, focused on training activists to be effectively engaged with state and local government. As part of the event, I'll be joining Jamison Faught of Muskogee Politico and Peter J. Rudy of Oklahoma Watchdog on a local blogger panel. It should be a great program -- hope you can join us.

Here are the details:

Our nation was founded by ordinary citizen activists desiring a government that was accountable to the people. Today, ordinary citizens in every citizen and in every community are tired of the status quo and are ready to get involved like they never have before to demand accountability.

American Majority's purpose is to address these passions by providing education and resources to help you reach your goals.

To that end, American Majority desires to challenge concerned citizens to turn their focus to state and local issues with the first annual Tulsa Battlefield Training.

This event will provide those in attendance with two things:

First, the Tulsa Battlefield Training will give those in attendance a clear picture of what is happening at both the state level and local level with government spending, waste, and clear explanation regarding how all levels of government got into this mess.

Secondly, the Tulsa Battlefield Training will also provide tool, resources, and specific ways that attendees can get involved in the local government structure - whether as informed citizen activists or candidates for local office.

Confirmed Presenters Include:

• Ned Ryun, President of American Majority
• Michael Carnuccio, President of Oklahoma Council for Public Affairs
• Matt Robbins, Executive Director of American Majority
• A Local Blogger Panel Consisting of Michael Bates of Batesline.com; Jamison Faught of MuskogeePolitico.com; and Peter J. Rudy of OklahomaWatchdog.org
• Plus Presentations by the American Majority Oklahoma Staff

The Tulsa Battlefield Training will take place on Saturday, April 23rd at Tulsa Technology Center located at 3420 S Memorial Dr. from 9:00 am to 4:00 pm. Doors open at 8:30 am.

Registration is $20 per person (which includes lunch and all materials) - space is limited.

If you have any questions or would like additional information, call Seth Brown at 405-639-8896 or email him at seth@americanmajority.org

You do not want to miss this event!

American Majority is a non-profit and non-partisan political training organization whose mission is to train and equip a national network of leaders committed to individual freedom through limited government and the free market.

The new issue of the Oklahoma Gazette covers the recently concluded Oklahoma City city council elections, in which candidates backed by a shadowy special interest group won all but one contested race.

The story notes (as was speculated on BatesLine last month) that Majority Designs, the same campaign team that produced the mailers for Dewey Bartlett Jr's campaign for Mayor of Tulsa in 2009, produced the campaign materials for the Committee for OKC Momentum. Majority Designs is an affiliate of AH Strategies, Karl Ahlgren and Fount Holland. Here are four of the Bartlett Jr mailers I received during the general election campaign, connecting Democrat nominee Tom Adelson to national liberals, tagging Adelson as soft on child molesters, making questionable use of a couple of Disney characters to call Adelson a liar, and a piece listing endorsements from Tom Coburn, Jim Inhofe, and John Sullivan.

Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin has declined to issue the executive order necessary to reauthorize the Governor's Ethnic American Advisory Council, according to a story in the Oklahoman.

Fallin had 90 days after she took office in January to decide whether to extend the life of the councils, which were formed by executive orders issued by two earlier governors; Democrat Brad Henry formed the ethnic-American council and Republican Frank Keating formed councils dealing with Hispanic and Asian-American affairs.

Fallin deserves credit for taking the right step, given the predictable backlash from CAIR and their allies. The misleadingly named group, supported with state funds, was not about all ethnic groups or even all Middle Eastern cultures. Middle Eastern Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, Baha'i were not given a seat at the table.

GEEAC would have been more accurately called the Governor's Islamic PR Council. In May 2007, the chairman of GEEAC sought an on-air opportunity to respond to the public TV series America at a Crossroads:

The Governor's Ethnic-American Advisory Council requested a chance to set the record straight after previewing the series before it ran on the Oklahoma Educational Television Authority from April 15 through 20.

"We thought there were a couple of segments that did not put Islam in a positive light," said Marjaneh Seirafi-Pour, the council's chairman.

Later in 2007, GEEAC (an agency of the State of Oklahoma, remember) offered a special centennial edition of the Koran to legislators; legislators who politely refused were publicly excoriated. An story on the Koran controversy by Brian Ervin included quotes from GEEAC chairman that confirmed the group's purpose -- advocating for Islam in Oklahoma.

"The name wasn't of my choosing, but we were happy with it. You'd have to ask the Governor why we're called that," she said.

She offered her best guess, though.

"The thing is, Islam is not limited to the Middle East--there are Muslims of West African descent and other nationalities from around the world," said Seirafi-Pour.

"If it had been called the 'Middle Eastern American Advisory Council,' it would have limited membership to Muslims of Middle Eastern descent," she added.

Seirafi-Pour was as clear on the purpose of GEEAC as Governor Henry was deliberately obtuse.

Thanks to Gov. Fallin for disbanding this inappropriate and deceptive use of taxpayer dollars and government imprimatur. Thanks to blogs like zTruth and columnists like Diana West for helping to shine a light and keep the pressure on. Thanks to legislators like State Rep. Mike Reynolds and former State Rep. Rex Duncan helping to shine the light on GEEAC's activities. And thanks to all the BatesLine readers who took action, turning reports on these pages into a positive result at the State Capitol.

It was the song that took Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys "from hamburgers to steaks." In 1938, they took a fiddle tune called "Spanish Two Step" and ran the melody backwards; the result was a popular instrumental. ("Jazz violinist Joe Venuti, for example, told Wills and members of the band that he had many requests for it and and that Wills needed to do more with it." -- Charles Townsend, San Antonio Rose, p. 190.)

A year and a half later, Irving Berlin's publishing company expressed interest in the song, but wanted lyrics for the tune. The band quickly put together some lyrics and the resulting "New San Antonio Rose" was recorded in 1940, with the 18-piece Texas Playboys big band -- and not a single fiddle on the recording. The song was a gold record for Bob Wills. Bing Crosby's cover sold even more records.

Someone somewhere wrote that the enduring popularity of the song owes something to San Antonio's role in World War II. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of servicemen passed through the city for initial training before being shipped to the battlefields of Europe and the islands of the Pacific Theater. For many a soldier or airman, the song was no doubt a reminder of his own Rose of San Antone.

Shortly after World War II, the Texas Playboys recorded a special version of San Antonio Rose dedicated to Abner (of the hit radio show Lum & Abner). During the song intro, vocalist Tommy Duncan said that when they worked together on a special Armed Forces Radio program, "[Abner] told me that he wore out 21 records of 'San Antonio Rose'."

Paula Allen, local history columnist for the San Antonio Express-News, devoted a recent column to three World War II airplanes -- a P-51 Mustang and two B-17 Flying Fortresses -- named for the hit song:

Through at least the first half of 1941, Wills' original and Bing Crosby's version were almost inescapable. Fights broke out in honky-tonks between "Rose" lovers and others who couldn't stand to hear it one more time on the jukebox. A man in Big Spring who lived near a fire station called the police on the firefighters for playing the record over and over and over again.

The three aircraft had distinguished war records. For example:

The other "San Antonio Rose" Fortress was piloted by Capt. Larry L. Kerr of this city, and it served him well. Shortly after the bomber "dropped a cargo of high explosives over Nazi installations at Solingen (an industrial city in Germany), a burst of flak hit the plane's No. 2 engine and knocked it out," says the Express, Jan. 27, 1944. "The control mechanism was partially disabled (and the propeller) windmilled violently, causing a leak in the oxygen lines." Fighters escorted the Fortress, still under fire, as its crew jettisoned all loose equipment to maintain altitude. With Kerr at the controls, the plane made it back to home base in England, where more than 300 flak holes were discovered. The pilot, who had flown 25 bombing missions over Europe, received the Distinguished Flying Cross with three oak leaf clusters.

A follow-up column by Allen turned up more San Antonio Roses, including a P-39N-5 Airacobra fighter, piloted by retired USAF Col. Charles W. Borders.

"It was found abandoned years later in a New Guinea jungle junkyard," he says, "and has been repainted and refurbished from pictures I sent in 1962 and now proudly adorns a pedestal at the front gate of the J.K. McCarthy Museum in Goroka, Eastern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea."

The City of Tulsa's Election District Commission has released five City Council redistricting plans (click to open the PDF) drawn up by Indian Nations Council of Government staff. The city must redraw the lines to produce districts of nearly equal population, based on the 2010 federal census.

Although the city's population didn't change significantly (it dropped by about 1000), the population did move around a good deal, with population losses in north and midtown Tulsa and growth in the south, continuing a 40-year trend.

To describe the five plans in words:

Plan I: Most stable for north and west Tulsa, radical changes in midtown. District 2 remains the same, District 1 adds downtown, District 3 adds Precinct 40. District 4 would add just about everything north of 31st, and District 9 would extend further east, as would District 7. This has the least population deviation, but 30 precincts move between districts.

Plan II: Most stable overall -- only 12 precincts and 21,725 people change districts. District 3 would lose two precincts that have been strong for Roscoe Turner over the years and gain some northeast Tulsa territory. District 4 would pick up the Owen Park and Crosbie Heights neighborhoods. District 8 would lose two precincts to 7 and 7 would lose two to 9. 2 would remain unchanged.

Plan III: This seems to produce more compact districts generally, but it does involve 36 precincts and 65,294 people changing districts. 4 would become long and skinny -- two miles wide and eight miles long, losing all territory south of 21st, and extending east to Memorial. 3 would lose three of Turner's best precincts on the western edge and gain territory as far south as 21st and Mingo. 2 would lose its territory south of 81st and gain three precincts around I-44 and Peoria.

Plan IV: The most radical plan of all, shifting 58 precincts and 110,917 people. District 4 would lose territory east of Yale, but extend as far south as 36th Street west of Lewis. 3 would lose its western precincts and gain everything east of Yale between 11th and Lynn Lane Rd. 7 and 8 would change from landscape to portrait orientation. 2 would gain precincts west of Peoria as far north as 36th Street, while losing its precincts northeast of 81st and Riverside.

Plan V: Identical to plan 2, except for Districts 7 and 8, which become north-south districts split at Sheridan. 8, which has always been the far-south district, would extend as far north as I-44.

At first glance, I'm inclined to back Plan II (pictured below), but I've got some thoughts on a better plan.

Thanks to Tulsa City Council aide Shannon Compton for sending me a copy of the plans so that I could make them available to the public for free. Previously, the plans had only been available online to subscribers to the daily paper. It seems to me that a citizen shouldn't have to go to a subscription-only website -- or to any privately-owned website, for that matter -- to view government documents. These plans and any future versions should be published on tulsacouncil.org and cityoftulsa.org, along with information on submitting comments about the draft plans to the commission. Shapefiles and datafiles for the maps and redistricting plans should be posted online as well.

Four public hearings on the proposals will be held around Tulsa:

So many people have a blog nowadays that you may stumble across a friend's blog before they let you know that they have one. Here are a few blogs of friends and associates that I've come across recently. They're worth reading, and I'm adding to the blogroll, so you'll see their latest posts show up over on the BatesLine blogroll headlines page and (as appropriate) the BatesLine Oklahoma headlines and BatesLine Tulsa headlines pages.

I've gotten to know Tulsa visionary and restaurateur Blake Ewing through his involvement in organizations like TulsaNow. He doesn't post on his blog often, but when he does post it's usually a blockbuster essay on our city's challenges and possible futures. There's been a lot of talk about his latest: "Grow up, Tulsa." (I disagree with him on a few points and may elaborate in coming days.)

English with Rae is a blog aimed at helping those learning English as a second language go beyond "This is a pen," providing examples of conversational English and American culture in context and presented in a way that makes them interesting even if English is your first language. Rae, a college friend of my wife's, spent many years in Japan and writes from her experience as a second-language learner of Japanese and with Japanese learners of English. A news item about a Honolulu restaurant adding a tip to the bills of non-English speaking guests is the starting point for her most visited article, Tipping Cows and Everyone Else, which covers three different kinds of tipping (restaurant, cow, and advice), introduces customary tipping practices, and provides examples of the Present Real Conditional form, all neatly interwoven.

Gina Conroy is an author based here in Tulsa. We know her through school, and she was my daughter's creative writing teacher. Her blog, Defying Gravity, is devoted to striking the balance in life as a wife and mom and in pursuit of her dream of novel writing. She is under contract to contribute a novella to an anthology, and a recent entry is devoted to the process and pain of cutting a 50,000-word work in progress down to 20,000. She often interviews other writing moms and dads. Many recent entries have been devoted to dreams and ambitions -- rekindling them, thwarting dream-killers, and balancing your dreams.

Urban Garden Goddess is a Philadelphia-based blogger just getting into home organic gardening. As a rookie gardener last year, Tania (a friend through blogging circles) won third prize in the individual vegetable garden category in the Philadelphia Horticultural Society's City Gardens Contest. She's also a runner, and a recent entry is about "solid eating for a solid race performance."

San Francisco architect Christine Boles and I were both active in Campus Crusade for Christ at MIT back when. Her blog illustrates some of the creative solutions she and her husband, partners in Beausoleil Architects, have devised to meet the needs of clients while respecting history and the environment. Her latest entry shows how they turned a ground floor room into a garage while preserving the bay window that makes up the historic facade. In an earlier post, she advocates for "deconstruction" and recycling of building materials over demolition and landfill. This was interesting, too: The importance of the oft-overlooked V in HVAC -- ventilation.

Texas State Representative David Simpson (R-Longview) is married to a high school classmate of mine. Last year he defeated an incumbent Republican in the primary and went on to election in November. His blog has only a few entries, but they provide some insight into the 2011 Texas legislative session and the budding conflict between fair-dealer and wheeler-dealer Republicans. He is an author of HB 1937, which would prohibit TSA groping in the absence of probable cause. His article -- Dividing the Apple -- about the tough budget decisions facing the legislature, is worth reading. An excerpt:

Civil government has nothing except that which it takes from We the People. Unlike God, the government cannot create value or substance out of nothing.

When the Federal Reserve with Congress' approval "prints more money," it simply increases the number of federal reserve notes ("dollars") that are being exchanged in our economy for goods and services. The increase in the number of federal reserve notes in circulation does not represent more wealth. It merely divides the same value of goods and services in the economy into smaller parts. If you divide an apple into 4 parts or 8 parts, it is still just one apple.

The Texas legislature cannot create wealth either. It has no money except that which it takes from We the People. It can divide the apple of wealth we enjoy and redistribute it, but it cannot create more apples.

Even so, we are running out of apple. Even after adjusting for inflation and population growth, the portion of the apple that our state government consumes has grown by 45% over the last decade (that number is 87% without any adjustments). As the state's portion has grown, Texas families and businesses have had to settle for a smaller portion to feed themselves.

As first steps to budget cutting, Simpson has called for cutting all corporate welfare from the budget and reducing administrative overhead in the common and higher educational systems. His name popped up in a recent AP story:

Rep. David Simpson, R-Longview, put together an odd-couple coalition of Democrats and Republicans to approve an amendment zeroing out funding for the Texas Commission on the Arts and redirecting it to services for the elderly and disabled.

Channeling tea-party-like, populist anger right back at his own leaders, Simpson also has railed against hundreds of millions of dollars in what he calls "corporate welfare." It happens to include Perry's job-luring initiatives, the Texas Enterprise Fund and Emerging Technology Fund.

"These parts of the budget are more protected than schools and the weak among us," Simpson said. He failed to redirect the money, but not before raising a stink among Republicans.

Congratulations to Charles G. Hill of dustbury.com, Seigneur de Surlywood, the doyen of Oklahoma bloggers, who marks his 15th anniversary on the World Wide Web today. I hope you'll take a minute to drop by, thank him for blessing us with 15 years of wit and wisdom, and wish him many happy returns of the day.

Charles's interests are wide-ranging -- pop culture and pop music (ancient and modern), politics (local, state, and national), Thunder basketball, urban planning, cars, exotic female footwear, to name but a few. The combination of interests produces enough strange search engine queries to justify a weekly feature highlighting the select strangest. Somehow he manages to write intelligently and amusingly about each topic he takes up. (I envy his brevity; as faithful BatesLine readers are no doubt aware, concision is not my gift.)

Somewhat like the fictional females Charles has cataloged, one of the best features of dustbury.com is... not exactly invisible, but certainly not as visible as the blog. I refer to his weekly column, The Vent, a longer-form essay (but still to-the-point), which also began 15 years ago today. Here's his next-to-latest Vent, a look forward to the site's 20th anniversary. And the one before that: An exegesis of the song "Honey" -- Bobby Goldsboro's 1968 hit -- with a surprising (to me at any rate) conclusion.

The Save Our Tulsa charter amendment petitions -- pushing to add four at-large members to the City Council (including the Mayor), to eliminate partisan labels from city election ballots, and to hold city elections on the same ballot as national and statewide elections -- were certified by City Clerk Mike Kier earlier this week.

Attorney Greg Bledsoe, a leader of Tulsans Defending Democracy, the effort to stop the use of at-large council members to dilute geographical representation, has begun the process of examining the petitions, now that the City Clerk's office has finally complied with an open-records request he made on February 18, 2011.

The City Clerk's office finally let me look at the SOT petition documents on Tuesday, 4-5-11, despite my persistent request under the Open Records Act first made on 2-18-11 and despite being told that the documents had been digitally scanned and that with respect to petition 2010-1 (the at-large petition) the evaluation had been largely completed.

There are 7 volumes of scanned material each containing approximately 500 pages in each volume. I was able to review 100 page in Vol. 1 in about an hour. These pages contained less than 20 signers as most pages had only one or two voters and the signatures were only one page out of a four page pamphlet. The most signatures for one pamphlet was four.

11 of the circulators for these petitions were from out of state:

3 individuals from Fulton, MO, 2 from St. Louis, MO and one from each of the following: Miami, FL; Clifton Park, NY; Tampa, FL; Cincinnati, OH; Kansas City, KS; and McKees Rock, PA.

3 were from Oklahoma City and 7 were from Tulsa.

The circulators for these first 100 pages were verified by only three notaries--mostly by Linda Howard of Moore, OK (first got her comission in October of 2010) and Gregory Gray of Claremore, with one done by Rachel Fedor of Edmond, OK.

Are there no underemployed people in Tulsa who could have been hired to gather signatures? Are there no notaries in Tulsa? Surely John Brock, Bob Poe, or one of the other SOTs have notaries who work for them who could have notarized the petitions. Why go to a brand-new notary who lives 100 miles from Tulsa? And did these out-of-town notaries come to Tulsa to meet with the circulators, or did the circulators drive to Moore, Edmond, and Claremore to get their petitions notarized? Were these petitions ever actually in Tulsa prior to their submission to the City Clerk?

It's strange too that no page had more than four signatures on it. If I were trying to get a petition certified by fraudulently having a few people sign over and over. Scattering the signatures over as many pages as possible would make it harder for anyone to spot multiple signatures with similar handwriting.

U. S. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) illustrates the United States's current headlong rush into a debt crisis in which the national debt would be three times the national economy.

Imagine if you had credit card debts of $150,000 with a $50,000 a year income. You wouldn't be able to afford the interest on that kind of debt, much less paying it off. That's where we're headed if we continue to defer hard decisions on spending.

To those who would complain about the Republican preference to cut spending rather than raise taxes: What percent of the nation's economy should pass through the Federal government? Republicans are aiming to get that number back down to 20%. That still seems too high to me.

Oklahoma towns and cities with a statutory charter (which is to say, no charter at all; they are governed by the default provisions of Oklahoma Statutes Title 11) and some charter cities have elections today, Tuesday, April 5, 2011. Some school board seats will have a runoff, if none of the candidates received 50% of the vote back on February 8.

Here in Tulsa County, Broken Arrow, Glenpool, Jenks, Sand Springs, and Skiatook each have city council or town trustee races on the ballot. It's encouraging to see that nearly every seat up for re-election has been contested.

Broken Arrow and Bixby electorates will each decide four municipal bond issues. Broken Arrow's bond issues cover streets, public safety, parks, and stormwater. Bixby votes on streets, public safety, and parks, and an amendment to a street project approved in a 2006 tax vote.

Tulsa Technology District (vo-tech) Zone 2 has a runoff between former Tulsa Police Chief Drew Diamond and Catoosa school superintended Rick Kibbe (both registered Democrats). The two candidates each received less than 100 votes in the snowbound February primary. Skiatook has a runoff between Linda Loftis (registered as a Republican) and Mike Mullins (registered as a Democrat) to fill an unexpired term for seat 3.

Oklahoma City has a high-profile council runoff, too, between a candidate backed by the shadowy Momentum committee and physician Ed Shadid. Shadid seems to be drawing support from a wide range of Oklahoma City bloggers; the list of endorsers includes Charles G. Hill of Dustbury, Oklahoma City historian Doug Loudenback, young urbanist Nick Roberts, and slightly older urbanist Blair Humphreys.

UPDATE 2011/04/04, 11:00 pm: HB 1992 did not come up for a vote today; it is on the Senate calendar for April 5. There's still time to call or email your state senator. My state senator, Gary Stanislawski, told me he plans to vote against HB 1992.

UPDATE: HB 1992 was killed outright on April 12 in the Senate. Some senators who opposed the language (like Sen. Stansilawski) voted for the bill with the title struck, which would have moved the bill to a conference committee where the objectionable material could have been removed.

A point of pride for me as an Oklahoman is that politicians here can't raise taxes on us without asking our permission. That distinctive advantage is currently under threat because of a bill that has already passed the State House and which comes before the State Senate later today.

A bill in the Oklahoma legislature, HB 1992, would allow a city to pay operational costs out of the sinking fund -- property tax revenues set aside to pay general obligation bonds for capital improvements and court judgments. While there's some merit in diversifying the revenue base for Oklahoma municipalities, the current proposal would allow city officials to divert property tax funds from their intended purpose, resulting in an effective increase in property taxes without a vote of the people.

Instead of carrying over any sinking fund surplus as a reserve against future lawsuit settlements or to pay down G.O. bonds, city officials could transfer the money without the voters' permission, and property taxes would have to go up by the same amount to fulfill future G.O. bonds and settlements.

While cities can currently claim a sinking fund surpluss if they have absolutely no outstanding lawsuits or bonds, HB 1992 allows them to pretend that scheduled bond and settlement payments in future years don't exist for the purpose of declaring and claiming a surplus in the current year.

(It's bad enough that city officials already have an incentive to capitulate in the face of a tough lawsuit. Fighting a suit drains money from the general fund, but settling means money comes out of the sinking fund, which is replenished by raising the property tax rate without asking the permission of the voters.)

What's worse, the bill changes who is authorized to request the funds from the county excise board. Currently, such a request (under the very limited circumstances allowed by current law) must come from the governing board (usually the city council). The new law changes the language to "governing board or, with respect to a municipality, either its governing board or a municipal official authorized by law or city charter to act upon behalf of the municipality." I suspect the intent is to allow the mayor to pursue this money without the consent of the City Council, since the mayor can by charter and statute act on behalf of the city in many regards. So not only do we have a tax grab here, it looks like it may be a power grab as well.

And it gets worse: In Section 2, this "municipal official authorized... to act upon behalf of the municipality" would be given the power unilaterally to spend this money on "funding the planning and development of capital improvements or professional services, or... to create an economic development fund, or to fund information technology improvements, or energy-efficient improvements to public buildings...." Previously, the surplus money could be either spent to construct public buildings or returned to the voters through reduced property tax rates.

Keep in mind that "professional services" (e.g. bond advisors, attorneys) are not subject to competitive bidding requirements.

AND IT GETS EVEN WORSE: The bill repeals the section of the current law that requires the city to file an application for the surplus funds in district court and gives any taxpayer, bond holder, or judgment holder the opportunity to contest the application.

Tulsa County Assessor Ken Yazel is sounding the alarm on HB 1992. From the April 1, 2011, Bixby Bulletin:

Tulsa County Assessor Ken Yazel today is making public his opposition to House Bill 1992, which allows cities to transfer the property tax surplus in their sinking funds to their general revenue fund, where it can be spent however the city wants....

The property tax surplus in the City of Tulsa sinking fund for fiscal year 2011 is $11,820,230. If House Bill 1992 was already law, property taxes this year in the city would increase by 3.82 mills, or $59.20 on a $150,000 home....

The City of Tulsa's sinking fund request to the County Excise Board for FY 2011 was $64,837,708. After deducting the surplus of $11,820,230, the Excise Board approved $53,163,129.

If the law allowed the City of Tulsa to sweep the $11,820,230 surplus into its general fund, the Excise Board would have approved $64,837,708. The difference would have to be made up by an increase in the property tax millage - 3.82 mills in this instance.

A reserve in the amount of 10% of a sinking fund request is allowed for uncollectables. Since nearly 100% of all property taxes are collected - through property sales by the county treasurer if necessary - this 10% "reserve" eventually becomes "surplus". The result is a permanent tax increase on the citizens of Tulsa.

From fiscal year 2010 to 2011, the City of Tulsa sinking fund request increased by over 20%. If House Bill 1992 passes, next year the City of Tulsa sinking fund will increase again by over 20%.

Two midtown Tulsa Republicans, Rep. Dan Sullivan and Sen. Brian Crain, are backing this bill, which comes before the State Senate today. To register your opposition, contact Senate President Pro Tempore Brian Bingman's office at (405) 521-5528 or check the Senate website to locate contact info for your state senator.

MORE:

Text and status of HB 1992

The current law: 62 O. S. 445, 62 O. S. 446, 62 O. S. 447

Ken Yazel will be on 1170 KFAQ at 8:05 am to discuss the bill.

Tulsa's sole daily newspaper, the Tulsa World, will launch its new paywall this coming Monday, according to a story at PaidContent.org, which, ironically, is free. The paywall will allow viewing only 10 locally-produced stories a month without a subscription. According to the announcement in the World (see it free while you can), an online subscription will cost $16.99 per month, with discounts for paying for six months or a year in advance. Print subscribers will get the online version free; $12 per month will get you a Sunday-only print subscription plus "unlimited access to [the paper's] digital products."

The PaidContent.org story notes that this is not the World's first paywall:

The paper decided to charge $60 a year for an online-only subscription in 2000--and had attracted 2,000 online-only subscribers by the time it was taken down in 2005, according to a Newspaper Association of America report. Publisher Robert Lorton III told the NAA that the removal of the paywall resulted in a tripling of the newspaper's online pageviews and online ad revenue that was more than seven times what the World had been able to bring in from online subscriptions.

I can certainly appreciate the need to generate revenue to pay for news coverage. And as someone who likes delving into local history, I appreciate the archival importance of print publications -- not just newspapers but also telephone directories, city "criss-cross" directories, and street, highway, and fire insurance maps. However incomplete or biased that record may be, at least with a newspaper you have a contemporaneous record that some significant event occurred.

To the paper's credit, it appears that the World is making an effort to minimize the annoyance factor to subscribers and to occasional visitors drawn to a local story of national interest. The metered approach should keep the paper from being shut out of search engine results; that was a problem with their earlier paywall. PaidContent.org quotes the paper's web editor as saying the system was developed in-house by a team of 13 designers and developers. That will allow them to control the site's inner workings and to avoid software license fees. On the other hand, with custom software, they will lose the formal and informal product support that comes with using a commercially available or open-source platform in wide use.

That said, the likely result of the new, friendlier Whirled paywall will be an increase in visitors to the websites of local TV and radio stations, who will continue to offer their local news content online free of charge, as they already do over the airwaves.

The paywall won't fix the Whirled's biggest problem: The paper long ago lost the trust of the very people who ought to be a local paper's lifeblood -- the Tulsans who are passionately engaged in civic and political activism. These people from across the ideological spectrum are the sort who want details about, e.g., this week's planning commission meeting, who would value local in-depth news content enough to pay for it -- if they felt they could trust it.

The problem for the Whirled is that many, perhaps most, of these people have experienced the cognitive dissonance that comes from attending a public meeting and reading about it in the paper the next day. Perhaps a key point in the debate was omitted, perhaps a seemingly harsh statement was run without its ameliorating context, perhaps an especially unflattering or (occasionally) flattering photo of one of the protagonists ran with the story. And there's the suspicion that the significant omission, the sneering photo, and the comment out of context weren't the result of carelessness but were deliberate. Even if the bias is the result of ideological blind spots and group think, the effect on the potential readership is the same as if it were the result of a grand conspiracy.

Over the years I've been involved in local politics, it's been my observation the Whirled has consistently chosen to side with the few and against the many. That's a problem when numbers, the larger the better, are at the heart of how you make money.

Pro-lifers, historic preservation advocates, people concerned about illegal immigration, neighborhood activists, Tea Partiers, Tulsa City Councilors, and tax hike opponents wouldn't expect the Whirled to take their side all the time. They'd just like to be treated fairly and respectfully, not as a lunatic rabble. But that kind of evenhandedness seems to be beyond their Ken.

I've said before that I think it will take some sort of public mea culpa, some acknowledgment that the paper has been unfair and unbalanced in its coverage of local issues, before many local activists are willing to trust the paper enough to pay for a subscription.

My trust in the Tulsa World began to erode in 1991, as a result of their coverage of a controversial zoning decision in Brookside.

Any lingering trust dissipated in 1992, when (according to Tribune editor and publisher Jenk Jones, Jr.,) the World's publisher refused to extend a joint operating agreement that had been in place for a half-century, leading to the closure of Tulsa's afternoon paper, the Tulsa Tribune. (I can't find the quote online, but it was in TU's daily student-run newspaper, the Collegian, about a month after the demise of the Tribune.)

I decided then never again to subscribe to the Whirled. While the World had the right to refuse to extend the agreement, the paper forfeited any claim to having Tulsa's best interests at heart, and I didn't want to see them benefit by picking up any new subscribers as a result of (for all practical purposes) killing our city's second newspaper.

On Twitter, I follow hundreds of active, involved Tulsans who represent a diverse range of interests and opinions. A similar group of hundreds (with a fair amount of overlap) are friends of mine on Facebook. So it's telling that my Facebook and Twitter feeds each had only three mentions of the new World paywall. It's another indication that the World isn't even on the radar for the very people who should be its most loyal constituency.

RELATED: In the December 1992 issue of American Journalism Review, investigative reporter Mary Hargrove wrote about the last days of the Tulsa Tribune. It includes this interesting tidbit:

Tribune staffers debated slogans for the back of the final edition T-shirt, playing off the name of the surviving Tulsa World. "Good-bye Cruel World" and "The World Is Not A Perfect Place. The Tribune Just Made It Seem That Way." The suggestions were posted on the wall along with a few harsher sentiments including, "Roses are red/Violets are blue/The World got it all/And we got screwed."

The slogans ignited the lingering animosity between the two papers as an angry World publisher had one of his photographers shoot pictures of the T-shirt doggerel. (The Tribune rented space in a building owned by the World.) World Publishing Co. President Robert Lorton called Tribune Chairman G. Douglas Fox the night before the closing and demanded the slogans be taken down. The signs were removed.

On the last day, Tribune staffers were warned they could not re-enter the building after 3 p.m. Maintenance workers began changing the locks at 11 a.m. as staffers watched in disbelief -- one more humiliation.

UPDATED 2023/01/05 to move links to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. The PaidContent story is now on an archive of old PaidContent and GigaOm articles.