DMV COMMISSIONER UNVEILS NEW EMPIRE GOLD LICENSE PLATES

New York State Commissioner of Motor Vehicles and Chair of the Governor’s Traffic Safety Committee David J. Swarts today unveiled the “Empire Gold” license plate which will be issued to most vehicles registered in the state beginning in April, 2010.

Our committee spent eight months trying to come up with something that looked like “work”, and the only thing we agreed on was this ugly-ass license plate. You know, the same one we got rid of 20 years ago.

“The bold colors of the new license plate reflect New York’s force and its resilience,” said Commissioner Swarts. “These new plates, in the official colors of the State of New York, will help maintain highway safety, reduce the number of unregistered and uninsured vehicles on our roads, and generate $129 million in General Fund revenue over two years, which will help address the State’s financial crisis.”

We could probably help the budget crisis by reinstating a more progressive tax structure and reducing graft, inefficiency, and corruption. Or we could just nickel and dime you schmucks for $129 million, because even though it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the $12 billion deficit, it still looks like we’re “doing something”.

State Police Superintendent Harry J. Corbitt said, “License plates are a fundamental tool of law enforcement that has been enhanced in recent years through a variety of technologies that improve their readability, especially under low light conditions. The State Police has worked cooperatively with DMV to ensure that the new plates will continue to serve the law enforcement community effectively.”

Oooh, they’re shiny! And reflective!

“This project will benefit law enforcement efforts, and therefore enhance public safety, in several ways,” said Denise E. O’Donnell, Deputy Secretary for Public Safety and Commissioner of the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services. “For instance, nearly 300 police agencies in New York State are currently deploying approximately 500 computerized license plate readers (LPRs) that enable authorities to quickly identify vehicles that have been stolen or used in a crime. These new plates will ensure that the LPRs are as effective as possible.”

Oh my god, we are laughing so hard that you people let us get away with buying all this crap.

DMV will begin issuing the new plates for registration renewals that expire in May 2010. Customers renewing their vehicle registrations in person in a DMV office, over the phone, by mail or through the Internet, will receive their new Empire Gold plates in the mail. Customers completing an original over-the-counter registration transaction will receive their plates immediately. [ . . . ] A plate fee of $25.00 will be added to the registration renewal fee. Single plate registrations (e.g. motorcycles) will be charged a plate fee of $12.50. Motorists registered in the Passenger (PAS), Commercial (COM), Motorcycle (MOT) or Trailer (TRL) registration classes will have the option to keep their current plate number/letter combination. Those with vehicles registered in other classes may also have this option. The registration renewal invitation will tell motorists if this option is available. Those choosing to keep their current plate number/letter combination on the new Empire Gold plate will be required to pay a $20.00 fee. Those motorists holding a personalized plate will automatically be re-issued the same number/letter combination on their new plate. Because they currently pay an annual personalized plate fee, they will not be required to pay the $20.00 fee. Most plates with the New York skyline banner across the top of the plate will begin to be replaced by the new Empire Gold plate in April. Custom picture plates will be replaced at a later date. The DMV will also be electronically sharing updated plate number information with EZ-Pass so that motorists who participate in that program will not have to do so.

We’re making the entire process as obtuse as possible so that we can smack you with additional fees and fines when you inevitably fuck it up the first time. Good luck!

Representatives of the government torture innocent citizens into unconsciousness, on camera, in United States courtrooms with tasers. They use them on prisoners and on motorists and on political protesters and bicycle riders, on mentally ill and handicapped people and on children. And it’s happening with nary a peep of protest.

America’s torture problem is much bigger than Gitmo or the CIA or the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The government is torturing people every day and killing some of them. Then videos of the torture wind up on Youtube where sadists laugh and jeer at the victims. It’s the sign of profound cultural illness.

-Digby, guest blogging for Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com

I read everything Digby posts on Hullabaloo, but her philippics on the rising abuse and misuse of tasers always hit me especially hard. Go read this entire piece at Salon. I can’t guarantee it won’t turn your stomach—in fact, I hope it does—but it’s essential reading for anyone who has even the slightest concern about the creeping authoritarian state.

Ahem.

Atlas Shrugged is a novel, and a tedious one at that. It is tortured fiction, and nothing more. It is not an effective societal blueprint for pouty glibertarians who are still angry that their mommies never let them stay out past their curfew, they didn’t get the toy they really really wanted for their 12th birthday, and their fraternity of choice didn’t let them into the pledge class freshman year.

Grow. The fuck. Up.

Thank you. Now, back to the snark.

I could go on, but it’s really just a big pile of lukewarm excuses. What we really owe you, the justifiably disappointed progressives and liberals and gay rights orgs of the world — but also you over in the salivating right-wing nutball Limbaugh/Glenn Beck homophobe core, all you gun-hoardin’ sodomy-fearin’ paranoids who adore California for our endless supply of Things You Do Not Understand and Therefore Must Fear and Despise Even as You Secretly Desire to Lick Them All For a Month — is a sincere apology. We let you down. All of you.

Fear not, however. We shall regroup. We shall try again. In fact, we already are. Know this for certain: We aren’t the kind of state to let a perfect opportunity to pinch the lazy ass of the human experiment slip by for long.

The always awesome Mark Morford, from Apologies from California in today’s SFGate.

Rebuilding the actual physical infrastructure is all well and good, he argues, before going on to declare that so far there is very little public talk about the massive spending on non-defense research and development that would be required to make such a “green” economic revival possible.

His points all make complete sense; yes, money alone will not help the technical problems and yes, we need to reestablish science as a pillar of our educational system.

Yet with many research universities facing massive devaluations of their endowments and higher education becoming less affordable (if not impossible) for even many upper-middle-class families, I wonder if there will be enough properly educated domestic brainpower to even conduct the amount of R&D Revkin calls for.

At the risk of being called a socialist¹, I don’t see any reason why part of an economic recovery plan can’t include federal grants for college students who pursue science degrees related to the green technologies being tapped as the key to an economic turnaround. That’s not to say that other fields aren’t as important, but if we’re collectively agreeing that we’re fundamentally behind in R&D in the green science we’re depending on to pull us out of recession, shouldn’t we be enabling the intellectual infrastructure by actually getting students into research programs?

Did you vote today? I did.

If you did too, then show me your sticker. To mark this historic day, I want to assemble a photo collage of all my friends, family, peeps, admirers, fans, stalkers, and other acquaintances with their “I voted today!” stickers.

So please, leave a comment on this post with a link that points to a photo of you with your sticker (faces not necessary if you’re camera shy). Wherever the photo lives is fine – Flickr, TwitPic, MobileMe gallery, Picassa, whatever. You can even email it to me if you want – send it to stickerpic@delgrosso.com.

Now, go click those levers, hang those chads, check those boxes, press that touchscreen button, or whatever it is you do in your crazy state to mark your votes. Then get that pic, and show it off.

What are you waiting for? Go!

To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.

I’d really like to meet some of these people, and then kick them right in the junk.

Everyone is aware of the difficult and menacing situation in which human society — shrunk into one community with a common fate — now finds itself, but only a few act accordingly. Most people go on living their every-day life: half frightened, half indifferent, they behold the ghostly tragi-comedy which is being performed on the international stage before the eyes and ears of the world. But on that stage, on which the actors under the floodlights play their ordained parts, our fate of tomorrow, life or death of the nations, is being decided.

Those words are as true today as when Albert Einstein wrote them in 1950.

Have you called your member of congress or senator about the criminal $700B Wall Street bailout plan?

Have you taken any steps to protect what’s left of your dwindling civil rights?

Have you considered what will happen when the state owns and controls the industry you work in?

Have you had honest and open discussions within your family about what your future holds, and how you’re preparing for it?

Have you given thought to how else we could be spending the $12B per month that we’re currently throwing at the Iraq occupation¹?

I could go on. But I think you get the idea. Am I being wee bit histrionic? Sure. And I know you don’t come here to read this sort of thing². But I’m getting so weary of the lack of outrage around me. Things are going from bad to worse on a daily basis, but it doesn’t have to be that way. You have a voice.

Look, I’m not saying we all have to be activists; we have jobs and families and more responsibilities than we can manage as it is. And I’m not saying that we all need to stop what we’re doing and spend our time in a sky-is-falling mood; we all need our hobbies and distractions to keep us entertained and healthy and creative. But please, think of just one thing that is of great concern to you right now, and do something about it. Civil rights, energy independence, corporate welfare, Iraq or Afghanistan, breast cancer, autism, whatever. Make a phone call. Send a fax. Sign a petition. Hell, just make a $5 online donation to a local progressive candidate or a cause that’s meaningful to you. But do something. Today.

(I now return you to ddc’s usual nerdery and snark. Thanks for indulging me.)

[ 10:55am - 4th paragraph edited slightly for clarity ]

But one issue that has always mystified me is why there has not been a more intense, or at least more vocal, push for extended light rail and commuter rail in the area.  I’ve talked to many local and state legislators about it over the past few years, and the answers given have been hollow and unsatisfying.

The Buffalo-Rochester-Syracuse-Albany corridor is stuck in a death-spiral of economic stagnation, yet connecting them via a robust commuter system would let businesses tap into a regional workforce rather than merely local ones.  And that’s not even mentioning the additional boost that connecting such a system to the NYC/Hudson region would bring.  Add in connections to Canadian rail via Toronto and Montreal, and the BUF-ROC-SYR-ALB corridor could thrive.

I’ll admit I’m not up on the economics of the situation, or the administration of such a system (private vs. public), but in my mind the largest obstacle is the running joke that is NYS government.  On a local level, I think getting Bob Duffy¹ and Byron Brown together to talk about such a system would be a good start.  Add a couple of business leaders like Tom Golisano and Bob Davis to the conversation, and something might come of it.

I can only imagine that there are hundreds if not thousands of workers and jobs that are separated in cities only 60 minutes from one another upstate.  So we have the fuel.  How can we not want to build an infrastructure to get that economic engine running at full throttle?

George Orwell’s diaries are being published as a blog, posted in realtime exactly 70 years after the entries were written.  Incredible.

From the 8/11 entry:

This morning all surfaces, even indoors, damp as a result of mist. A curious deposit all over my snuff-box, evidently residue of moisture acting on lacquer.