Bass & Beatdown

Saturday, May. 16, 2009 - 6:13 a.m.

My bass guitar is here. And it's wonderful.

I will have images to share in the near future.

And I'm practicing like there's no tomorrow, in the form of playing a song in iTunes and trying to find and perform the bass line.

So far, all I'm doing is the 1-5-4 patterns, but occasionally I am adding grace notes, too.

It's a great guitar, and I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

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Now then -- did you know that the Secretary of State's office harassed Art Cee -- a homeless veteran -- until he took his websites down, because he was including the California state seal on his website?

All he did was display the seal, seen here, linked directly from the site, like I'm doing:

and try and reproduce the wording that he saw on his pamphlet. He did this because he thought it was a nice-looking seal, and thought it would make his plea for the citizens of this state to vote a little more interesting.

Art's blog was decorated in a way that only a true moron would have mistaken it for an official document.

And then THIS guy showed up. Draw your own conclusions.

Here is the thanks Art received for his troubles:

From: Loren, Mark
Date: Tue, May 12, 2009 at 4:45 PM
Subject: Message from Secretary of State's office
To: a[email]@gmail.com

Dear Mr. Cee,

It has come to our attention that you are displaying what purports to be the Secretary's certificate of correctness for the ballot pamphlet, including the Secretary's signature and the Great Seal on your blog, the Daily Drivel. However, the wording of the certification has been altered.

Please be aware that Penal Code 115.3 provides that "any person who alters a certified copy of an official record, or knowingly furnishes an altered certified copy of an official record, of this state, including the executive, legislative, and judicial branches thereof, or of any city, county, city and county, district, or political subdivision thereof, is guilty of a misdemeanor."

Please understand that, as the Secretary of State, the role of our office is to oversee and assist in the fair and unbiased administration of elections in California. While we understand that including the seal and the Secretary's signature may have been part of your efforts to create dialogue about these Special Election measures, we do not want voters to be misled or attribute your commentary as being associated with our office. We therefore ask that you promptly remove the certificate of correctness statement, Debra Bowen's signature and the Great Seal of the State of California from your blog site. We anticipate compliance at your earliest opportunity and, upon removal, will consider this matter closed.

Sincerely,

Mark Loren
Chief Investigator
Secretary of State
Election Fraud Investigation Unit

Here's the twist: Art didn't steal the great seal sign from the Secretary of State's office website -- instead, all he did was rebroadcast it.

I've rebroadcast official and non official things from other websites instead of stealing them, because that way, the look and feel of the rebroadcast materials is still in the hands of whoever created it. And whenever anybody has wanted to show my images on their own websites, the only thing I have asked is that it be left intact and on my server space so that I remained in sole control of the appearance of the image.

Here's another twist. If he'd gone to an extreme end and said stuff like "Debra Bowen may or may not have been spotted blowing dogs for dimes in Tijuana" or "Mark Loren may or may not have an extremely small penis" then THAT sort of thing would have been perfectly okay, and protected under freedom of expression and parody laws and so on.

But no, an attempt to reproduce the text and illustrations, and a near-miss of the text? That's a beat down.

I wrote to Mark Loren myself, though, and here is what I said:

Dear Mr. Loren:

Since you've been to Art Cee's website approximately twenty times until he got tired of the hits from your office eating his bandwidth and was forced to shut the blog down, then you saw his website and you saw the disclaimer across the bottom of each and every web page that said some things are copied and pasted, and everything that appeared on that blog was for entertainment purposes only.

Art Cee is a homeless veteran. He owns three shirts, two pairs of pants, some shoes, and a laptop computer. Everything he owns fits into one backpack. All Art was doing was trying to get out the vote and make sure the people of California were reading the items they were voting for. He used the state seal, directly rebroadcast from the official site instead of downloaded / stolen, as part of that process.

Are you really telling me that the website he had up, which was resplendent with pictures of Felix The Cat and Elvis Presley, was in danger of defrauding voters and making them think it was a division of the Secretary of State's office?

Why your office decided that it was okay to try and intimidate a homeless veteran is beyond me. You discharged your duty by sending the aforementioned email -- but the subsequent visits to his website to make sure he knew you were keeping an eye on him were needlessly frequent, and I see no reason for the flurry of hits other than to show up on his website and intimidate him.

Abuse of government power is a worldwide scourge. It shouldn't be happening here in California.

Meanwhile, I now have the email that Art forwarded to me from your office. Since Art is no longer blogging due to the intimidating tactics of the repeated hits from the Secretary of State's office, I am making it a goal to make certain that as many people as possible see how you treated a homeless veteran. Not just any homeless veteran, mind you -- a homeless veteran who still loves his country enough to vote.

With sincerity and intent to act, I am

Very truly yours,

Brin Marie McLaughlin

My email to Mr. Loren also included an open copy to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. We'll see how things go. I do not disagree with Mr. Loren's concerns about reproducing governmental materials on a civilian website -- but I strenuously disagree with the tactics used to make his point. And I'm god-DAMNED if this was in fact, the most pressing election fraud issue he and his minions could find in this entire state.

If I get any kind of response, I'm going to post it publically, along with any action I subsequently take, or any updates as to whether Art puts his site up again.

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Nothing else to report. Have a good Saturday.

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