Obama Staff Arrives to White House Stuck in Dark Ages of Technology - washingtonpost.com
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/21/AR2009012104249.html

"The team members, accustomed to working on Macintoshes, found computers outfitted with six-year-old versions of Microsoft software. Laptops were scarce, assigned to only a few people in the West Wing. The team was left struggling to put closed captions on online videos."

"It is kind of like going from an Xbox to an Atari" And the geeks shall inherit the Earth.

En arrivant à la Maison Blanche, l'équipe Obama, qui a mené la campagne la plus "2.0" de l'Histoire a découvert l'horreur d'une institution qui est resté à l'âge de pierre...

Yes, the Whitehouse now has a blog.

Yes, the White House has a blog. It started up the day of the inauguration.

The official blog from the White House.

site du washington post sur l'administration obama (participatif)

Awesome site provided by the Washington Post that provides in-depth information on many of Washington's inside elite.

WhoRunsGov.com offers a unique look at the world of Washington through its key players and personalities.

Washington Post experiment

minister

Follow UK political scene with your twitter feed

the place where real life and politics tweet. :.

Forget the corridors of power... You can take an active role in UK politics right here, right now. How? Follow and Tweet MPs and Parliamentary Candidates, and use the power of Twitter to track UK politics, make your voice heard and conversations more open. You can take a back seat... or you can tweet.

england

Absolutely Brilliant. Transparency in Government will take back our country.

Herramientas que pone el estado Americano para contactar con la administración Publica

web 2.0 and collaborative communication

Techcrunch

open-source democracy.

Obama nutzt die Onlinedienste von Google, Facebook etc auch als Präsident. Spannende Entwicklung, neben der bejahenden Tech-Sicht fehlt noch die kritischere Hinterfragung.

Politico44 is a new and innovative way to cover the Obama presidency, minute-by-minute. Powered by the largest White House staff around, it will be the go-to place for news and analysis about the president, the staff, the first lady, the vice president, and the new administration.

Very cool site that gives you details about what Obama is doing and who he meets every day.

President-elect Obama has made a clear commitment to changing the way government relates to the People. His campaign was a demonstration of the value in such change, and a glimpse of its potential. His transition team has now taken a crucial step in making the work of the transition legally shareable, demonstrating that the values Obama spoke of are values that will guide his administration. To further support this commitment to change, and to help make it tangible, we offer three “open transition principles” to guide the transition in its use of the Internet to produce the very best in open government.

President-elect Obama has made a very clear commitment to changing the way government works with its citizens. To this end, we offer these three principles to guide the transition in its objective to build upon the very best of the Internet to produce the very best for government.

Thoughts on how to make the transition between presidential administrations as open and transparent as possible.

President-elect Obama has made a very clear commitment to changing the way government works with its citizens.

http://open-government.us/

Constitution-free zone

Using data provided by the U.S. Census Bureau, the ACLU has determined that nearly 2/3 of the entire US population (197.4 million people) live within 100 miles of the US land and coastal borders. The government is assuming extraordinary powers to stop and search individuals within this zone.

I live within 100 miles of the coastal border and "the government is assuming extraordinary powers to stop and search individuals within this zone." I don't have constitutional rights. ...Wait, what?

America's

now if you know what you need, you can just download the forms... no income limits

about captioning

via rodcorp

On the problems of torture and benefits of simple detective investigation: "We got to know our enemies, we learned to negotiate with them, and we adapted criminal investigative techniques to our work [...] 'I decided that everything I was told about Americans was wrong. That's why I decided to cooperate.' [...] I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo"

I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It's no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me -- unless you don't count American soldiers as Americans.

"I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq.The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. "

How could anyone deny the opinions of someone one the ground ... especially someone on the ground who was successful.

Until we renounce the sorts of abuses that have stained our national honor, al-Qaeda will be winning.

Interrogator reveals practical reasons why torture was not just wrong in principle, but counterproductive in practice.

Everyone knows how well Barack Obama's presidential campaign made use of new media to raise money and market the candidate. We also know how big a role social ...

thought you might be interested in this

The centerpiece of President Obama's domestic agenda is an $819 billion economic stimulus plan. The Senate will consider the measure this week, with an eye toward the amount of tax cuts and spending. Republicans and Democrats spar over what to consider a tax cut. An analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office tallies the tax-cut portion to be significantly less than the one-third Democrats claim it to be.

The Washington Post's breakdown of the stimulus package.

not the clearest visualization. could benefit from some compactness, perhaps via mouse interaction/exploration. but definitely a lot of good research and data in here.

Congressional reports made public...

The 6,780 reports, current as of this month, comprise over 127,000 pages of material on some of the most contentious issues in the nation, from the U.S. relationship with Israel to the financial collapse. Nearly 2,300 of the reports were updated in the last 12 months, while the oldest report goes back to 1990. The release represents the total output of the Congressional Research Service (CRS) electronically available to Congressional offices. The CRS is Congress's analytical agency and has a budget in excess of $100M per year.

obama's fc plan

obama plan website

A few weeks ago Obama's new secretary or treasury Tim Geitner unveiled the outlines of a plan to fix the financial crisis in our Country. One of the problems with these massive plans from the government is that citizens want to know exactly where their money is going. This is the treasury secretary's answer to that problem this site will document where all the money for the proposed plan will be documented and will be able to track.

Obama run site to track stimuls package spending

Republican Senators are questioning whether President Barack Obama’s stimulus bill contains the right mix of tax breaks and cash infusions to jump-start the economy. Tragically, no one from either party is objecting to the health provisions slipped in without discussion. These provisions reflect the handiwork of Tom Daschle, until recently the nominee to head the Health and Human Services Department. Senators should read these provisions and vote against them because they are dangerous to your health. (Page numbers refer to H.R. 1 EH, pdf version).

A lot of this is twisted but she's wrong about the position being new - Bush created it in 2004 from HHS.Gov - In 2004, the President issued an Executive Order establishing the position of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology within the Office of the Secretary of HHS. The primary purpose of this position is to aid the Secretary of HHS in achieving the President’s Goal for most Americans to have access to an interoperable electronic medical record by 2014.

Based on Tom Daschle's desire to emulate failed European health care market models, the porkulus plan has provisions to create a government run health information system which will track individual health records and recommend treatments. Daschle said we have to expect less health care as we get older because you're old and you're going to die soon anyway. Still the liberal elites will always be able to opt out of this system just like members of Congress don't pay into Social Security. The health part of this bill is all about getting more people under government run care in order to create dependence on politicians and bureaucrats. The only way to get as many people as possible under a government system is to ration.

Who in the world thinks this woman has any credibility criticizing health care plans after 1993?

Eye-opening glimpse of dealing w healthcare costs; suggests treating HC as a growth industry vs. cost drain but gives no guidance

describing the nationalizing of healthcare in the stimulus plan

Imagine if the White House was run democratically where everything was voted on by the public. Well, this site tries to simulate just that.

An interesting exercise in the effect of Digg and Democracy

mmmmm, what´s this?!

Government outlines plans for UK’s digital transition.

digital britain - interim report Government outlines plans for UK’s digital transition.

Here's the website of the Monarchy in Britain

My fascination with the British Monarchy continues to grow as my stay in the UK lengthens

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rssstimulus RSS Hits the Big Time (Aaron Swartz's Raw

Via David: Obama segna un punto per la trasparenza. Il pacchetto stimulus richiede alle agenzie governative di produrre un feed con le elargizioni di denaro. Gov meshup, here we come.

The US Government are requiring agencies to publish funding information through RSS feeds. "For each of the near term reporting requirements (major communications, formula block grant allocations, weekly reports) agencies are required to provide a feed (preferred: Atom 1.0, acceptable: RSS) of the information so that content can be delivered via subscription."

the new stimulus bill’s implementation instructions require that each government agency report the money it gives out in RSS: For each of the near term reporting requirements (major communications, formula block grant allocations, weekly reports) agencies are required to provide a feed (preferred: Atom 1.0, acceptable: RSS) of the information so that content can be delivered via subscription.

"the new stimulus bill’s implementation instructions require that each government agency report the money it gives out in RSS:"

As chaunceyt pointed out, the new stimulus bill’s implementation instructions require that each government agency report the money it gives out in RSS

sweet sweet RSS nozzle

"For each of the near term reporting requirements (major communications, formula block grant allocations, weekly reports) agencies are required to provide a feed (preferred: Atom 1.0, acceptable: RSS) of the information so that content can be delivered via subscription." --- Now, someone needs to figure out where each of these feeds is (will be?) published, and write an aggregator so that there's a one-stop-shopping end-point.

"[T]he new stimulus bill’s implementation instructions require that each government agency report the money it gives out in RSS… The document is very clear that the items in the feed can’t simply be unstructured text, but have to be reusable data… Pretty amazing to see a government so tech-savvy."

Leader Online

Striking editorial by murdered Sri Lankan journalist published posthumously.

An editorial by Lasantha Wickrematunge that was published after his assassination in which he spoke of...

No other profession calls on its practitioners to lay down their lives for their art save the armed forces and, in Sri Lanka, journalism. In the course of the past few years, the independent media have increasingly come under attack. Electronic and print-media institutions have been burnt, bombed, sealed and coerced. Countless journalists have been harassed, threatened and killed. It has been my honour to belong to all those categories and now especially the last.

nice

wow, nice

resource

Must read. 210309

The President is holding a new kind of online town hall where he will answer the questions you submitted and voted on for him. The event begins here at 11:30am ET. You can read the most popular questions submitted on the economy below.

WhiteHouse.gov is the official web site for the White House and President Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States. This site is a source for information about the President, White House news and policies, White House history, and the federal government.

The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform.

But these various policies—lightweight regulation, cheap money, the unwritten Chinese-American economic alliance, the promotion of homeownership—had something in common. Even though some are traditionally associated with Democrats and some with Republicans, they all benefited the financial sector. Policy changes that might have forestalled the crisis but would have limited the financial sector’s profits—such as Brooksley Born’s now-famous attempts to regulate credit-default swaps at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, in 1998—were ignored or swept aside.

A withering op-ed by Simon Johnson on the policy disaster that is our financial sector. But he's still not willing to re-evaluate the underlying premise of perpetually debt fueled exponential economic growth. How, exactly, was this all supposed to work out?

The most lucid summary I've read to date on the current global financial crisis. Written in a clear manner by Simon Johnson, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and a former the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. His conclusion: Nationalize the banks immediately, break up the financial oligarchies which have brought us to this point, and recast the entire banking sector so the blackmail of "we're too big too fail" cannot be used again.

The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time.

But I must tell you, to IMF officials, all of these crises looked depressingly similar. Each country, of course, needed a loan, but more than that, each needed to make big changes so that the loan could really work. Almost always, countries in crisis need to learn to live within their means after a period of excess—exports must be increased, and imports cut—and the goal is to do this without the most horrible of recessions. Naturally, the fund’s economists spend time figuring out the policies—budget, money supply, and the like—that make sense in this context. Yet the economic solution is seldom very hard to work out. No, the real concern of the fund’s senior staff, and the biggest obstacle to recovery, is almost invariably the politics of countries in crisis. Typically, these countries are in a desperate economic situation for one simple reason—the powerful elites within them overreached in good times and took too many risks. Emerging-market governments and their private-sector

The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises.

"In its depth and suddenness, the U.S. economic and financial crisis is shockingly reminiscent of moments we have recently seen in emerging markets (and only in emerging markets): South Korea (1997), Malaysia (1998), Russia and Argentina (time and again). In each of those cases, global investors, afraid that the country or its financial sector wouldn’t be able to pay off mountainous debt, suddenly stopped lending. And in each case, that fear became self-fulfilling, as banks that couldn’t roll over their debt did, in fact, become unable to pay."

A former head of the IMF offers an insightful and alarming look at how the United States has been hijacked by a cabal of rotten financiers.

cool visual on where tax dollars are spent

A Visual Guide to Where Your Tax Dollars Go Interesting, detailed poster. Obama's budget requests.

Tying the hands of a person who is speaking, the Arab proverb goes, is akin to "tying his tongue." Western soldiers in Iraq know how important gestures can be when communicating with locals. To close, open and close a fist means "light," but just opening a fist means "bomb." One soldier recently home from Iraq once tried to order an Iraqi man to lie down. To get his point across, the soldier had to demonstrate by stretching out in the dirt. Translation software could help, but what's the best way to make it available in the field?

iPod is becoming tool of choice for US Military

Apple’s New Weapon To help soldiers make sense of data from drones, satellites and ground sensors, the U.S. military now issues the iPod Touch.

The US military has been looking for a device that is both versatile and easy to use to help its soldiers make sense of information they receive from satellites, drones, and ground sensors while in the field. The iPod Touch has become that new device. It's cheaper than the current devices distributed to soldiers and Apple has already done all of the necessary research and manufacturing for the devices. As the iPod Touch gains more functionality, it is hoped that soldiers will gradually be able to shed soem of their other devices and just carry the iPod.

To help soldiers make sense of data from drones, satellites and ground sensors, the U.S. military now issues the iPod Touch.

@SalonMedia - "The success of drug decriminalization in Portugal - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com" http://hub.tm/?LWZYD [from http://twitter.com/carreonG/statuses/1337259173]

Evaluating the policy strictly from an empirical perspective, decriminalization has been an unquestionable success, leading to improvements in virtually every relevant category and enabling Portugal to manage drug-related problems (and drug usage rates) far better than most Western nations that continue to treat adult drug consumption as a criminal offense.

Particularly in the U.S., there is still widespread support for criminalization approaches and even support for the most extreme and destructive aspects of the "War on Drugs," but, for a variety of reasons, the debate over drug policy has become far more open than ever before. Portugal's success with decriminalization is highly instructive, particularly since the impetus for it was their collective recognition in the 1990s that criminalization was failing to address -- and was almost certainly exacerbating -- their exploding, poverty-driven drug crisis. As a consensus in that country now recognizes, decriminalization is what enabled them to manage drug-related problems far more effectively than ever before, and the nightmare scenarios warned of by decriminalization opponents have, quite plainly, never materialized. The counter-productive effects of drug criminalization are at least as evident now for the U.S. as they were for pre-decriminalization Portugal. Beyond one's ideological

"Evaluating the policy strictly from an empirical perspective, decriminalization has been an unquestionable success, leading to improvements in virtually every relevant category and enabling Portugal to manage drug-related problems (and drug usage rates) far better than most Western nations that continue to treat adult drug consumption as a criminal offense."

to read

How Rich Countries Die

This is a book report on The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities, by Mancur Olson. There isn’t a whole lot about how nations pulled themselves out of their medieval stagnation (see A Farewell to Alms for that), so a better title for this still-in-print book from 1982 would be “How Rich Countries Die.”

read the actual torture memos

Torture memos 1

Top secret documents released by ACLU proving the US torutred

28 cases

"Human cases of swine influenza A (H1N1) virus infection have been identified in the United States. Human cases of swine influenza A (H1N1) virus infection also have been identified internationally. The current U.S. case count is provided below."

Beeindruckende Fotos aus dem Weißen Haus in Washington. Soviel Präsenz und Offenheit und Unverkrampfheit würde unserer Regierung auch mal gut zu Gesicht stehen!

The White House is on Flickr with great photos.

All the data we've used in this first launch are produced and published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau's Population Division. They did the hard work! We just made the data a bit easier to find and use. Since Google's acquisition of Trendalyzer two years ago, we have been working on creating a new service that make lots of data instantly available for intuitive, visual exploration.

Google launched a new search feature that makes it easy to find and compare public data. So for example, when comparing Santa Clara county data to the national unemployment rate, it becomes clear not only that Santa Clara's peak during 2002-2003 was really dramatic, but also that the recent increase is a bit more drastic than the national rate. If you go to Google.com and type in [unemployment rate] or [population] followed by a U.S. state or county, you will see the most recent estimates. Once you click the link, you'll go to an interactive chart that lets you add and remove data for different geographical areas.

http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=usunemployment&met=unemployment_rate&idim=county:CN060850#met=unemployment_rate&idim=county:PS060900

Adding search power to public data 4/28/2009 12:17:00 PM Earthquakes are not the only thing that can shake Silicon Valley. After the dot-com bubble burst back in 2000 the unemployment rate of Santa Clara county went up to 9.1%. During the last couple of months, it has gone up again:

Google has launched a cool, if somewhat limited, new feature that makes it easier to search for and visualize statistics gleaned from public data. You can search for "unemployment rate" or "population" for any area in the United States and Google will provide you with information from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau.

"We just launched a new search feature that makes it easy to find and compare public data... If you go to Google.com and type in [unemployment rate] or [population] followed by a U.S. state or county, you will see the most recent estimates... Once you click the link, you'll go to an interactive chart that lets you add and remove data for different geographical areas."

How to stop the drug wars

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13237193 Howtostopthedrugwars Economist 2

Whilst technically possible for sometime now, the use and ethics of DPI needs careful consideration.

Canada has been investigating several complaints involving ISP use of deep packet inspection technology.

The purpose of Data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government. Although the initial launch of Data.gov provides a limited portion of the rich variety of Federal datasets presently available, we invite you to actively participate in shaping the future of Data.gov by suggesting additional datasets and site enhancements to provide seamless access and use of your Federal data. Visit today with us, but come back often. With your help, Data.gov will continue to grow and change in the weeks, months, and years ahead.

WOW "The purpose of Data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government."

The purpose of Data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government.

The new U.S. federal open data site is live! "Data.gov will open up the workings of government by making economic, healthcare, environmental, and other government information available on a single website, allowing the public to access raw data and transform it in innovative ways."

外国投资人购买美国国债情况一览表

Treasury Stats on holders of US debt

Thailand ranked high

Foreign-held U.S. treasury debt

MAJOR FOREIGN HOLDERS OF TREASURY SECURITIES

China our wingman with 750 billion in Treasury Bills.

Government Data in XML (web services etc)

More datasets courtesy of uncle Sam.

Listado de direcciones del gobierno de EEUU con WebServices que permiten acceder a informacion publica

"Opening government to new audiences and constituencies is the 21st century battle cry in societies everywhere. At the heart of this movement is open government data, readily accessible over the internet, in a form that maximizes comprehension, interactivity, participation, and sharing, delivered at a fraction of the cost of today's data download sites."

This used to be the site called blist.

AWESOME source of data sets, .csv

Join us in digging through the documents of MPs' expenses to identify individual claims, or documents that you think merit further investigation. You can work through your own MP's expenses, or just hit the button below to start reviewing.

Investigate your MP's expenses Join us in digging through the documents of MPs' expenses to identify individual claims, or documents that you think merit further investigation. You can work through your own MP's expenses, or just hit the button below to start reviewing. (Update, Fri pm: we now have a virtually complete set of expenses documents so you should be able to find your MP's)

We hope that many hands can make light work of the thousands of documents released by Parliament in relation to MPs’ expenses. We, and others - perhaps you? - are using these tools to review each document, decide whether it contains interesting information, and extract the key facts.

Nice crowdsourcing

Guardian crowd sourcing investigative journalism

Join us in digging through the 700,000 documents of MPs' expenses to identify individual claims, or documents that you think merit further investigation. You can work through your own MP's expenses, or just hit the button below to start reviewing. (Update, Thurs evening: More added now and more coming all the time. Check back if you haven't found your MP yet) Already created an account? Log in here.

Brilliant! Help the Guardian find suspicious MP expenses claims that can be flagged to the authorities! Aaaah, the wonders of the internet!

Social media on CDC site

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) are working together to provide consumers and partners with social media tools that access information about the ongoing 2009 H1N1 Flu outbreak. Visit the CDC.gov 2009 H1N1 Flu and PandemicFlu.gov Web sites for information on 2009 H1N1 Flu.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) are working together to provide consumers and partners with social media tools to access information about the ongoing 2009 H1N1 Flu outbreak.

157 Investments Evaluated by Agency CIOs Arrow View detailed chart by agency Note: All descriptions, dates, and costs are as reported by agencies. Major investments (Investments Evaluated) represent only a portion of the agency's entire IT portfolio reported in Exhibit 53.

drupal site

Matt Taibbi on how Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression

How Goldman Sachs Has Engineered Every Major Market Manipulation Since the Great Depression" The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

They use the same playbook over and over again: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. When it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again.

Notes from Tim Berners-Lee

Print page

Personal Finance, career-work

Yeah, good to the point article. It's nice to hear someone plea for the waning party's success. Whatever the faults with a two part system it's better than one and no matter the way you lean there had better be something to lean against

Noonan sends Palin off in style

an even better article on palin

in fact rather proud of it: It was evidence of her authenticity. She experienced criticism as both partisan and cruel because she could see no truth in any of it. She wasn't thoughtful enough to know

Good WSJ article on Palin myths and the harm she did to the Republican party.

!!! [Palid is horrible, says Peggy Noonan] "She's not Ivy League, that's why her rise has been thwarted! She represented the democratic ideal that you don't have to go to Harvard or Brown to prosper, and her fall represents a failure of egalitarianism." This comes from intellectuals too. They need to be told something. Ronald Reagan went to Eureka College. Richard Nixon went to Whittier College, Joe Biden to the University of Delaware. Sarah Palin graduated in the end from the University of Idaho, a school that happily notes on its Web site that it's included in U.S. News & World Report's top national schools survey. They need to be told, too, that the first Republican president was named "Abe," and he went to Princeton and got a Fulbright. Oh wait, he was an impoverished backwoods autodidact!

Wendell Potter explains exactly hoe the health insurance companies are fucking you.

With almost 20 years inside the health insurance industry, Wendell Potter saw for-profit insurers hijack our health care system and put profits before patients. Now, he speaks with Bill Moyers about how those companies are standing in the way of health care reform.

Wendell Potter

Wendell Potter, former executive at Cigna, talks about the power of the health care lobby and the way the industry manipulates congress to increase the fortunes of their shareholders, at great public cost.

Co-produced by TechWeb & O'Reilly Conferences, September 09 - 10, 2009, Washington, DC

WA State Congressional delegation tracker

Legistalker combs a variety of news, social networking, and government sites to pool information about members of the U.S. Congress. Searching for a Senator or Representative will return mentions of that individual in the media, Twitter updates, YouTube videos, Capitol Words—a nifty weighted cloud of the words they've used in interviews and floor speeches—and their voting record which includes what they've introduced and votes yes or no on.

Breaks down references to U.S. representatives and senators in the news, on Twitter, and on YouTube.

An accountable government requires an informed citizenry. Every day, Congress relies more and more on the Internet to communicate with the world. Legistalker makes it easy for you to stay on top of what your elected officials say and how they vote. Legistalker was created by Forum One Communications as an entry for the Apps for America competition. The ever-growing database is updated every 20 seconds, and relies on data from Twitter, YouTube, Capitol Words, literally hundreds of different news sources, and others.

The mission of OSA is to educate decision makers in the U.S. Federal government about the advantages of using free and open source software; to encourage the Federal agencies to give equal priority to procuring free and open source software in all of their procurement decisions; and generally provide an effective voice to the U.S. Federal government on behalf of the open source software community, private industry, academia, and other non-profits.

"This problem is made worse by the fact that actually paying for your health care is a loss from an insurers’ point of view — they actually refer to it as “medical costs.” This means both that insurers try to deny as many claims as possible, and that they try to avoid covering people who are actually likely to need care. Both of these strategies use a lot of resources, which is why private insurance has much higher administrative costs than single-payer systems. And since there’s a widespread sense that our fellow citizens should get the care we need — not everyone agrees, but most do — this means that private insurance basically spends a lot of money on socially destructive activities."

There are a number of successful health-care systems, at least as measured by pretty good care much cheaper than here, and they are quite different from each other. There are, however, no examples of successful health care based on the principles of the free market, for one simple reason: in health care, the free market just doesn’t work. And people who say that the market is the answer are flying in the face of both theory and overwhelming evidence.

atode

Twitter guide written by UK Government

Government's Twitter guidelines in 20 pages (oh the irony)

Director of Digital Engagement

New government guidance has been published urging civil servants to use the micro-blogging site Twitter. Launched on the Cabinet Office website, the 20-page document is calling on departments to "tweet" on "issues of relevance or upcoming events". The website is already used by Downing Street, the Foreign Office and many individual MPs.

/.../Finally, some of the benefits I've found of having this document in my armoury are: -To get buy-in, explain Twitter's importance to non-believers and the uninitiated, and face down accusations of bandwagon-jumping -To set clear objectives and metrics to make sure there's a return on the investment of staff time (and if there isn’t, we’ll stop doing it) -To make sure the channel is used consistently and carefully, to protect corporate reputation from silly mistakes or inappropriate use -To plan varied and interesting content, and enthuse those who will provide it into actively wanting to do so. -As a briefing tool for new starters in the team who will be involved in the management of the channel

USA.gov: Connect with Government -- RSS feeds, blogs, videos, podcasts, social networking, and much more...

This page lists all the ways the US government is on the social web.

US government on the (social) web (via @levyj413)

Site do Governo dos EUA com diversas ferramentas de web2.0 para interação com o cidadão americano.

Sadly, @jasoncalacanis has it right. The whole ecosystem would be better if Apple opened their hardware/software. Not sure if it will keep the public at large from their move to MacBooks and iPhones.

For the birther/townhaller crowd: http://www.whitehouse.gov/realitycheck/ [from http://twitter.com/foolsby/statuses/3267512826]

WhiteHouse.gov is the official web site for the White House and President Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States. This site is a source for information about the President, White House news and policies, White House history, and the federal government.

this is homebase, but they are using their social media channels to drive people back to homebase.

With a projected $1.8 trillion deficit for 2009, several trillions more in deficits projected over the next decade, and with both Medicare and Social Security entitlement spending about to ratchet up several notches over the next 15 years as Baby Boomers become eligible for both, we are rapidly running out of other people's money. These deficits are simply not sustainable.

Testify brother, I think only business owners truly understand the ideas of free markets.

Here's what the CEO of Whole Foods actually said.

Great slide show on drinking and economics.

This is short, funny and nice story about taxes and tax cuts. We are sure you'll find it interesting and would appreciate your vote for the presentation. FYI.... THIS PRESENTATION WAS CONCEIVED, DESIGNED AND DEVELOPED IN ABOUT 27 HOURS. That story of how we managed it is coming up shortly as a separate presentation

Guía para utilizar Twitter en las comunicaciones entre gobierno y ciudadanía

• Human: He warns that Twitter users can be hostile to the "over-use of automation" - such as RSS feeds – and to the regurgitation of press release headlines: "While corporate in message, the tone of our Twitter channel must therefore be informal spoken English, human-edited and for the most part written/paraphrased for the channel." • Frequent: a minimum of two and maximum of 10 tweets per working day, with a minimum gap of 30 minutes between tweets to avoid flooding followers' Twitter streams. (Not counting @replies or live coverage of a crisis/event.) Downing Street spends 20 minutes on its Twitter stream with two-three tweets a day plus a few replies, five-six tweets a day in total. • Timely: in keeping with the "zeitgeist" feel of Twitter, official tweets should be about issues of relevance today or events coming soon. • Credible: while tweets may occasionally be "fun", their relationship to departmental objectives must be defensible.

Fascinating breakdown of how a bureaucracy tries to fit itself within 140 characters. Some aspects are right on, others are only fascinating. At least they're looking at what government "digital engagement" might look like.

Guidelines suggest tweets should be frequent, timely and credible

Even its author (Neil Williams) admits that a 20-page strategy paper for government departments on how to use Twitter might be regarded as "a bit of over the top" for a microblogging tool with a limit of 140 characters a message. (...) He suggests that nothing too onerous is involved. Each department's "digital media team" should only need to spend less than an hour a day running their Twitter streams. A quick discussion of potential tweets at the morning press cuttings meetings should be followed by emails to minister's private offices to gather more material, and any incoming messages should be replied to. However, the idea of official government use of a tool that provides a confidential and confessional glimpse into somebody's personal life and views appears at first sight to be something of an oxymoron.

I’m a businessman, and in no sense a health-care expert. But the persistence of bad industry practices—from long lines at the doctor’s office to ever-rising prices to astonishing numbers of preventable deaths—seems beyond all normal logic, and must have an underlying cause. There needs to be a business reason why an industry, year in and year out, would be able to get away with poor customer service, unaffordable prices, and uneven results—a reason my father and so many others are unnecessarily killed.

Why can't every city have this?

City of SF opens site containing datasets

"DataSF is a clearinghouse of datasets available from the City & County of San Francisco. While there is plenty of room for improvement, our goal in releasing this site is: 1) improve access to data, 2) help our community create innovative apps, 3) understand what datasets you'd like to see, 4) get feedback on the quality of our datasets."

"DataSF is a clearinghouse of datasets available from the City & County of San Francisco. While there is plenty of room for improvement, our goal in releasing this site is: (1) improve access to data (2) help our community create innovative apps (3) understand what datasets you'd like to see (4) get feedback on the quality of our datasets."

It's not the bonuses. It's that AIG's counterparties are getting paid back in full.

What is the deeper relationship between Goldman and AIG? Didn't they almost merge a few years ago but did not because Goldman couldn't get its arms around the black box that is AIG? If that is true, why should Goldman get bailed out? After all, they should have known as well as anybody that a big part of AIG's business model was not to pay on insurance it had issued.

The Real AIG Scandal It's not the bonuses. It's that AIG's counterparties are getting paid back in full. By Eliot Spitzer

Everybody is rushing to condemn AIG's bonuses, but this simple scandal is obscuring the real disgrace at the insurance giant: Why are AIG's counterparties getting paid back in full, to the tune of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars?

Reading: Why Aneesh Chopra is a Great Choice for Federal CTO [feedly] http://tinyurl.com/c9vq5q [from http://twitter.com/br524/statuses/1565453164]

@timoreilly makes an excellent case for "Why Aneesh Chopra is a Great Choice for Federal CTO": http://bit.ly/15t7t [from http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe/statuses/1554514397]

"The news has now been leaked that President Obama intends to nominate Aneesh Chopra as the nation's first Chief Technology Officer."

What's wrong with America? Here's one thing...

When did the profit motive become the only reason to do anything? When did that become the new patriotism? Ask not what you could do for your country, ask what's in it for Blue Cross/Blue Shield.

Sounds like whoever drafted the bill had just finished watching Die Hard 4.

Critics question revised proposal from Sen. Jay Rockefeller to let the White House do what it deems necessary to respond to a 'cybersecurity emergency.' Read this blog post by Declan McCullagh on Politics and Law.

The new version would allow the president to "declare a cybersecurity emergency" relating to "non-governmental" computer networks and do what's necessary to respond to the threat. Other sections of the proposal include a federal certification program for "cybersecurity professionals," and a requirement that certain computer systems and networks in the private sector be managed by people who have been awarded that license.

When Rockefeller (D-W. Virginia), the chairman of the Senate Commerce committee, and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) introduced the original bill in April, they claimed it was vital to protect national cybersecurity. "We must protect our critical infrastructure at all costs--from our water to our electricity, to banking, traffic lights and electronic health records," Rockefeller said. The Rockefeller proposal plays out against a broader concern in Washington, D.C., about the government's role in cybersecurity. In May, President Obama acknowledged that the government is "not as prepared" as it should be to respond to disruptions and announced that a new cybersecurity coordinator position would be created inside the White House staff. Three months later, that post remains empty, one top cybersecurity aide has quit, and some wags have begun to wonder why a government that receives failing marks on cybersecurity should be trusted to instruct the private sector what to do.

Infográficos de dados públicos

1. Pick a data set - /> orange circle Poverty Rate 2. Choose an operator - /> choose: - × ÷ 3. Pick another data set - /> blue circle Unemployment Your Mashup! - /> venn diagram Poverty Rate Unemployment

To empower people to discover and discuss government data through manipulation and mapping.

DataMasher is a tool that takes these vast quantities of information and allows you to whittle it down into simpler terms, offering an easy way to get hard data on certain topics without any intrusive media spin.

In The Wall Street Journal, Andy Kessler writes that AT&T is dying and dragging down the rest of us by overcharging us for voice calls and stifling innovation in a mobile data market critical to the U.S. economy.

It wouldn't be so bad if we were just overpaying for our mobile plans. Americans are used to that—see mail, milk and medicine. But it's inexcusable that new, feature-rich and productive applications like Google Voice are being held back, just to prop up AT&T while we wait for it to transition away from its legacy of voice communications. How many productive apps beyond Google Voice are waiting in the wings? The FCC better not treat AT&T and Verizon like Citigroup, GM and the Post Office. Cellphone operators aren't too big to fail. Rather, the telecom sector is too important to be allowed to hold back the rest of us.

With Google Voice, you have one Google phone number that callers use to reach you, and you pick up whichever phone—office, home or cellular—rings. You can screen calls, listen in before answering, record calls, read transcripts of your voicemails, and do free conference calls. Domestic calls and texting are free, and international calls to Europe are two cents a minute. In other words, a unified voice system, something a real phone company should have offered years ago.

As Americans search for the cure to what ails our health-care system, we've overlooked an invaluable source of ideas and solutions: the rest of the world. All the other industrialized democracies have faced problems like ours, yet they've found ways to cover everybody -- and still spend far less ...

In this regard, there’s a CNN story from last April that I like to tell: a road into a state park in Kauai was washed out, and the state government said it didn’t have the money to fix it. The park would be closed. Understanding the impact on the local economy, a group of businesses chipped in, organized a group of volunteers, and fixed the road themselves. I called this DIY on a civic scale. Scott Heiferman corrected me: “It’s DIO: Not ‘Do it Yourself’ but ‘Do it Ourselves.’” Imagine if the state government were to reimagine itself not as a vending machine but an organizing engine for civic action. Might DIO help us tackle other problems that bedevil us? Can we imagine a new compact between government and the public, in which government puts in place mechanisms for services that are delivered not by government, but by private citizens? In other words, can government become a platform? We have an enormous opportunity right now to make a difference. There’s a receptivity to new ideas t

The USA as the most interesting tech startup of '09, Anil Dash style.

was at 16 min in video... really interesting interview from US gov CIO/Wired

Ireland needs to reward govt APIs.

I think the most promising new startup of 2009 is one of the least likely: The executive branch of the federal government of the United States.

Each site has remarkably consistent branding elements, leading to a predictable and trustworthy sense of place when you visit the sites. There is clear attention to design, both from the cosmetic elements of these pages, and from the thoughtfulness of the information architecture on each site. (The clear, focused promotional areas on each homepage feel just like the "Sign up now!" links on the site of most Web 2.0 companies.) And increasingly, these services are being accompanied by new APIs and data sources that can be used by others to build interesting applications.

One-stop access to U.S. Government H1N1, avian and pandemic flu information.

Flu.gov provides comprehensive government-wide information on pandemic influenza and avian influenza for the general public, health and emergency preparedness professionals, policy makers, government and business leaders, school systems, and local communities.

614797, Influenza Pandemics

The US Dept of Health and Human Services has an excellent Web site with information and resources related to all forms of flu, including PSAs featuring Elmo from Sesame Street, K-12 guidance for school planning, FAQs, information on H1N1 etc.

"While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can’t put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him. Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws were treated terribly."

The Prime Minister has released a statement on the Second World War code-breaker, Alan Turing, recognising the “appalling” way he was treated for being gay.

finally

"We’re sorry, you deserved so much better."

did everyone read this: The Prime Minister has released a statement on the Second World War code-breaker, Alan Turing, recognising the "appalling" way he was treated for being gay. > http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page20571

This site comes from the University of Richmond. Use it to find maps of all presidential elections from 1840-2008.

Examples of open government in USA

USA initiatives in eGov and eP

In the Innovations Gallery, the public can browse examples of new ways in which agencies across the Executive branch are using transparency, participation, and collaboration to achieve their mission.

"The Innovations Gallery celebrates the innovators and innovations who are championing the President’s vision of more effective and open government."

The Innovations Gallery celebrates the innovators and innovations who are championing the President’s vision of more effective and open government. In the Innovations Gallery, the public can browse examples of new ways in which agencies across the Executive branch are using transparency, participation, and collaboration to achieve their mission.

EXAMPLES listed on WhiteHouse.gov

list of innovations by the White House that are open to participation

Übersicht der Gov Web Innovationen des White House

WhiteHouse.gov is the official web site for the White House and President Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States. This site is a source for information about the President, White House news and policies, White House history, and the federal government.

CitySourced is a real time mobile civic engagement tool. CitySourced provides a free, simple, and intuitive tool empowering citizens to identify civil issues (potholes, graffiti, trash, snow removal, etc.) and report them to city hall for quick resolution; an opportunity for government to use technology to save money and improve accountability to those they govern; and a positive, collaborative platform for real action. Our platform is called CitySourced, as it empowers everyday citizens to use their smart phones to make their cities a better place. CitySourced is powered by FreedomSpeaks, the leader in interactive civic engagement

a real time mobile civic engagement tool

Gore attacks edmund again

A conversation with Gore Vidal unfolds at his pace.

to re-read

California has the highest unemployment rate in the last 70 years

"Los Angeles, 2009: California may be the eighth largest economy in the world, but its state staff are being paid in IOUs, unemployment is at its highest in 70 years, and teachers are on hunger strike."

Los Angeles, 2009: California may be the eighth largest economy in the world, but its state staff are being paid in IOUs, unemployment is at its highest in 70 years, and teachers are on hunger strike. So what has gone so catastrophically wrong?

California may be the eighth largest economy in the world, but its state staff are being paid in IOUs, unemployment is at its highest in 70 years, and teachers are on hunger strike. So what has gone so…

California may be the eighth largest economy in the world, but its state staff are being paid in IOUs, unemployment is at its highest in 70 years, and teachers are on hunger strike. So what has gone so catastrophically wrong?

뉴욕타임즈 전 칼럼니스트 앤드류 설리번, 칼럼모음 수록.

Some readers have asked me to put all the various odd lies of Sarah Palin that the Dish has compiled in one helpful place. So that's what we've done. A couple of months ago, I asked an intern to re-fact-check all of them to make sure new details hadn't emerged that might debunk some. And I also asked to get any subsequent statements by Palin that acknowledged that she had erred in any of these statements that are easily rebuttable by facts in the public record and apologized and corrected. She has not. Since this was a vast project over the last ten months, it's possible there are some nuances or errors that need fixing. Please tell us if you find one and we'll acknowledge and fix. But it has been put through the ringer a few times. After you have read these, ask yourself: what wouldn't Sarah Palin lie about if she felt she had to?

@newsycombinator: "Chile Wants Your Poor, Your Huddled Masses, Your Tech Entrepreneurs http://bit.ly/Jcm2n" (from http://twitter.com/newsycombinator/status/4762877839)

Looks like an awesome deal!

Правила продажных блоггеров в оригинале

Ab Dezember gelten neue Regeln, die die US-Wettbewerbsbehörde jetzt erlassen hat. Danach müssen Blogger oder Nutzer, wenn sie ein Produkt bewerten, "die materiellen Beziehungen, die sie zu den Anbietern des Produktes oder der Dienstleistung haben, offen legen". Sonst droht eine Geldstrafe in Höhe von 11.000 US-Dollar - ganz gleich ob Geld gezahlt oder Test-Produkte bereitgestellt wurden.

la legge

US government launch the OpenInternet. Gov site It includes videos, statements and discussion on all Federal Communication Commission activities on the issue, including coverage of broadband.

OpenInternet.gov is a place to join the discussion about the important issues facing the future of the Internet. Through this site you can stay connected to all FCC activities on the issue, and share your thoughts and ideas on open Internet.

OpenInternet.gov is a place to join the discussion about the important issues facing the future of the Internet.

Tools for Public Sector

one-stop shop of tips and tools for the public sector from Google

Most people reach government and other public sector websites by using Google and other search engines. This site is a guide to the tools and best practices that can help you reach, communicate and engage with your community. Most of these tools are free, so they can also help you do more with less.

Google: Tools for Public Sector Organizations. Make your agency website, and the information it offers, easier to find.

um. hm. i don't agree with a bunch of this, but... the info flow is interesting.

left vs right stats information info

Ideas, issues, concepts, subjects - visualized!

America’s spy agencies want to read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates — even check out your book reviews on Amazon

America’s spy agencies want to read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates — even check out your book reviews on Amazon. In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using ”open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day. Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn’t touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what’s being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords.

Since the Great Depression, presidents have frequently experimented with Keynesian economics to combat recessions. Three economists chronicle the history of government policy during past recessions and explain what worked and what didn’t.

Keynesian economics

A possible web page for International Finance of Princ of finance

Infrographic on the dividing politics of the world

[US or World version]

kommentar von o'reilly "Giving modifications back to the Drupal community is the next breakthrough announcement that I'll be looking for."

Yesterday, the new media team at the White House announced via the Associated Press that whitehouse.gov is now running on Drupal, the open source content management system. That Drupal implementation is in turn running on a Red Hat Linux system with Apache, MySQL and the rest of the LAMP stack. Apache Solr is the new White House search engine.

Palantir Technologies has designed what many intelligence analysts say is the most effective tool to date to investigate terrorist networks. The software's main advance is a user-friendly search tool that can scan multiple data sources at once, something previous search tools couldn't do.

Palantir Technologies has designed what many intelligence analysts say is the most effective tool to date to investigate terrorist networks.

Portal que intenta hacer pública información sobre los secretos de Washington DC

RT @cshirky: RT THIS is a big deal. OpenSecrets.org releases 200 million [gov't] data records. Today. http://bit.ly/fdXS [from http://twitter.com/danielgillval/statuses/1512025784]

Measuring Link-Bait of Articles I have flagged in the past.

OpenSecrets.org opens up its data -- feel free to mashup information on campaign finacnce, lobbying, personal finances and much more

data.australia.gov.au is the home of Australian government public information datasets. We encourage you to make government information even more useful by mashing-up the data to create something new and exciting! Make sure you pay attention to the licence attached to the datasets you are interested in using.

data.australia.gov.au is the home of Australian government public information datasets. Like Data.gov, it has a wide variety of downloadable government data on topics such as crime, weather, and public lands--as well as some very Australian topics, such as the location and attributes of barbecues on public lands.

the home of Australian government public information datasets. We encourage you to make government information even more useful by mashing-up the data to create something new and exciting! Make sure you pay attention to the licence attached to the datasets you are interested in using. Each licence should make clear what you can and can’t do with the data. If you’re unsure, please contact the contributing agency.

data.australia.gov.au is the home of Australian government public information datasets. We encourage you to make government information even more useful by mashing-up the data to create something new and exciting! Make sure you pay attention to the licence attached to the datasets you are interested in using. Each licence should make clear what you can and can’t do with the data. If you’re unsure, please contact the contributing agency.

There is absolutely no way I’ll be able to make this relevant to tech. But I’m posting it anyway. Our Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, vetoed a California legislative finance bill – AB 1176. The letter is terse and to the point. And the first letter of each line in paragraphs 2-3 are even terser and more to the point.

There is absolutely no way I'll be able to make this relevant to tech. But I'm posting it anyway. Our Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, ...

See us at the Audience Conference, Nov 5-6th in New York » Schwarzenegger Gives California Legislature A Hidden Finger

A bit of http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/latestnews/index.php?id=144

An example of a twitter guide from the UK government

SHARED USING: http://www.tagle.it

Polls can affect president's hold on party - USATODAY.com

The Gallup organization first started asking Americans how they approved of the job the president was doing in the 1940s. See how each president since then has fared in the approval poll, look at some news events that influenced public opinion and compare how approval ratings evolved for each president.

Presidential approval ratings over time

ISPs may not act for years on local complaints about slow Internet—but when a town rolls out its own solution, it's amazing how fast the incumbents can deploy fiber, cut prices, and run to the legislature.

"ISPs may not act for years on local complaints about slow Internet—but when a town rolls out its own solution, it's amazing how fast the incumbents can deploy fiber, cut prices, and run to the legislature."

Leet, leet, leet. Would have been awesome if they could prevail against TDS.

Minnesota town wants fast fiber broadband to the curb. Cable internet monopoly refuses. Town passes a referendum funding construction of a municipally owned network. Cable company sues town frivolously in order to delay construction of said network, and installs its own first. What a crock of monopolistic bull. This kind of crap is why we don't have fiber to the door.

Regional telco TDS Telecommunications last week issued a press release announcing a major milestone for the company: 50Mbps service over fiber optic cable to residents of Monticello, Minnesota. The Minneapolis suburb became one of the few non-FiOS communities in the country to experience full fiber-to-the-home deployment, and subscribers will all receive a free upgrade from 25Mbps service to the new 50Mbps tier

To enable the citizen masher to do their wizardry, the administration will be opening up a veritable candy store of goodies: Semantic Web, RDF, Linked Data, SPARQL, RDFa, SIOC, ATOM, RESTful APIs, JSON, Widgets, Wikis, XForms, P2P Networks. Wow. They only forgot the lions and tigers and bears oh my… This is an unbelievable stack of technology. I didn’t think the government even knew what an RSS feed was :)

8th Grade history -- US documents

Science for parents of primary kids - UK government website.

Elechanical turk de la transpatencia

US Transparency crowd sourcing website

Coordinates distributed digitization of government data as well as things like finding state officials on Twitter. Great example of both microvolunteering and the ecosystem needed for creating an effective evaluatory section of the government cycle.

Transparency Corps is the Sunlight Foundation's answer to the question, "How can I help?". There are many big problems that we can solve with technology, but we can't solve them all. For many of the projects that make government transparency a reality, human eyes and analysis are required. With Transparency Corps, we break those tasks down into short, small actions that make a BIG difference.

awesome! Sunlight's http://transparencycorps.org project now asks for help crowdsourcing national directory of state officials on Twitte ... [from http://twitter.com/marshallk/statuses/3058548525]

There are many big problems that we can solve with technology, but we can't solve them all. For many of the projects that make government transparency a reality, human eyes and analysis are required. With Transparency Corps, we break those tasks down into short, small actions that make a BIG difference. Join the Corps, and let's get started!

Practical Tips for Government Web Sites (And Everyone Else!) To Improve Their Findability in Search

The president has packed his economic team with Wall Street insiders intent on turning the bailout into an all-out giveaway. By Matt Taibbi

"What's taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history. Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place. This new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle-up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside."

The controversial Matt Taibbi December 2009 Rolling Stone article.

European Parliament speech of 26/03/09.Daniel Hannan is a Conservative MEP for the South East of England and author of The Plan: Twelve Months to Renew Brita...

The YouTube hit.

this still gives me a warm fuzzy feeling...

"you can not spend your way out of recession or borrow your way out of debt"

hannan pillors gordon brown

Excellent visualisation of UK government spending volume

Link referenced in #4change chat, 23 July 2009. Interesting blog post on 'why the Internet isn’t like electrification or shipping containers'.

Written in the run-in to the release of the Digital Britain report from a website with a mission to expand the UK's democracy.

Article about how the Government should improve its application of the Internet.

These services are reducing traditional institutions ability to charge for information, seize big consumer surpluses, limit speech or fix marriages. It has, in other words, become harder to be a big business, newspaper, repressive institution or religion. Nor is this traditional ‘creative destruction’ going on in a normal capitalist economy: this isn’t about one widget manufacturer replacing another, this is about a newspaper business dying and being replaced by no one single thing, and certainly nothing recognisable as a newspaper business. This common pattern of more powerful tools for citizens making life harder for traditional institutions is, for me, a cause for celebration. However, I am not celebrating as a libertarian (which I am not) I celebrate it because it marks a historic increase in the freedom of people and groups of people, and a step-change in their ability to determine the direction of their own lives.

cost of Marshall Plan

costo del rescate de bancos en la crisis económica del 2008

How much does the bailout cost, compared to other grand government programs? More.

oh. my. god. and where the hell is this money coming from, anyway???

Bailout costs more than Marshall Plan, Louisiana Purchase, moonshot, S&L bailout, Korean War, New Deal, Iraq war, Vietnam war, and NASA's lifetime budget -- *combined*!

$4.6165 trillion? That'sa spicy meataballa!

"As we've seen in the past several years, salaries and prices fall when unemployment is high. By artificially inflating both, the New Deal policies short-circuited the market's self-correcting forces."

Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Price, wage-fixing, and collusion blamed for length of 1930's Depression.

final report Digital Britain: The Final Report - 16 June 2009

The Digital Britain Report is the Government's strategic vision for ensuring that the UK is at the leading edge of the global digital economy. It is an example of industrial activism in a crucial growth sector. The report contains actions and recommendations to ensure first rate digital and communications infrastructure to promote and protect talent and innovation in our creative industries, to modernize TV and radio frameworks, and support local news, and it introduces policies to maximize the social and economic benefits from digital technologies.

Department for Culture Media and Sport - final report

Given these numbers, the authors estimate that even a moderate-sized botnet of 10,000 machines could successfully obtain identity verifications for younger residents of West Virginia at a rate of 47 a minute.

Two researchers have found that a pair of antifraud methods intended to increase the chances of detecting bogus social security numbers has actually allowed the statistical reconstruction of the number using information that many people place on social networking sites.

RT @applicants: The Obama Economy http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123604419092515347.html [from http://twitter.com/Captoe/statuses/1276487461]

WSJ edit page fires a shot across Obama's bow.

As the Dow keeps dropping, the President is running out of people to blame.

Read Entire Package Here

Provides a high level breakdown of how much money is allocated to each agency

Stimulus Spending Breakouts

see very bottom for foreclosure information

A site for consumer protection and with links to government agencies and resources for the consumer.

Consumer Action Handbook, including the consumer topics, the directory listings, the sample complaint letter, and the index.

buying car/home, identity theft, credit, consumer complaints

It appears China can't play nice with the other kids.

Very big news you should read this!

wow, good

Congrats to Google for raging against censorship, but WTF? A blog post accusing a foreign government of attacking them? Maybe they're getting a little too big? Ya think?

Whoa. China attacks Google (to steal business information and human rights activist email). Google withdraws from China.

UK government stats online

UK government opens up its data - using Drupal!

A financial crisis is the worst time to change the foundations of American capitalism.

an insane article, on this day there were videos of tent camps in Sacramento, CA filled with people who had lost jobs. The editorial is by Michael Boskin

Tehgrauniad's search engine for government data sets.

more info : http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/jan/07/government-data-world

The one-stop shop for World Government datasets from The Guardian.

Buscador de datos gubernamentales mundiales de The Guardian

Governments around the globe are opening up their data vaults – allowing you to check out the numbers for yourself. This is the Guardian’s gateway to that information. Search for government data here from the UK (including London), USA, Australia and New Zealand – and look out for new countries and places as we add them.

"Advised by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt and others, government are opening up data for reuse. This site seeks to give a way into the wealth of government data and is under constant development. We want to work with you to make it better. We’re very aware that there are more people like you outside of government who have the skills and abilities to make wonderful things out of public data. These are our first steps in building a collaborative relationship with you.[...]"

ça y est ! le site open data UK est public !

Advised by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt and others, government are opening up data for reuse. This site seeks to give a way into the wealth of government data and is under constant development. We want to work with you to make it better. We’re very aware that there are more people like you outside of government who have the skills and abilities to make wonderful things out of public data. These are our first steps in building a collaborative relationship with you.

WOW. As a library worker, I find this to be appalling...

"The New Book Banning" - can childrens books pre-1985 give lead poisoning? ( http://bit.ly/6wcqH ) [from http://twitter.com/aphofer/statuses/3149346529]

It’s hard to believe, but true: under a law Congress passed last year aimed at regulating hazards in children’s products, the federal government has now advised that children’s books published before 1985 should not be considered safe and may in many cases be unlawful to sell or distribute. Merchants, thrift stores, and booksellers may be at risk if they sell older volumes, or even give them away, without first subjecting them to testing—at prohibitive expense. Many used-book sellers, consignment stores, Goodwill outlets, and the like have accordingly begun to refuse new donations of pre-1985 volumes, yank existing ones off their shelves, and in some cases discard them en masse.

Why Iran has such a sh1t government

concise and straight forward explanation of a decidedly complicated government

How Iran is ruled

Note:50% of the adult population is missing. So that's all what they call democracy

The members of the American Association of Homes and Services for the Aging (AAHSA) help millions of individuals and their families every day through mission-driven, not-for-profit organizations dedicated to providing the services that people need, when they need them, in the place they call home. Our 5,700 member organizations, many of which have served their communities for generations, offer the continuum of aging services: adult day services, home health, community services, senior housing, assisted living residences, continuing care retirement communities and nursing homes. AAHSA's commitment is to create the future of aging services through quality people can trust.

Rectangles in the chart are sized according to the amount of spending for that category. Color shows the change in spending from 2010.

President Obama's proposal for the 2011 budget.

Nice graphical representation of Obama's 2011 budget proposal, and how the budget changes from 2010.

Beautiful infographic.

A Strong Middle Class

US Government

Official blog of V.P. Joe Biden's Middle Class Task Force

This is the official web page of the White House Task Force on Middle Class Working Families.

WhiteHouse.gov is the official web site for the White House and President Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States. This site is a source for information about the President, White House news and policies, White House history, and the federal government.

The zero-rupee note. I like this. How long til the Tea Party in United States latches on and starts using something similiar in political protest against...well....all things not Tea Party.

"One such story was our earlier case about the old lady and her troubles with the Revenue Department official over a land title. Fed up with requests for bribes and equipped with a zero rupee note, the old lady handed the note to the official. He was stunned. Remarkably, the official stood up from his seat, offered her a chair, offered her tea and gave her the title she had been seeking for the last year and a half to obtain without success. Had the zero rupee note reached the old lady sooner, her granddaughter could have started college on schedule and avoided the consequence of delaying her education for two years. In another experience, a corrupt official in a district in Tamil Nadu was so frightened on seeing the zero rupee note that he returned all the bribe money he had collected for establishing a new electricity connection back to the no longer compliant citizen."

In addition, officials want to keep their jobs and are fearful about setting off disciplinary proceedings, not to mention risking going to jail. More importantly, Anand believes that the success of the notes lies in the willingness of the people to use them. People are willing to stand up against the practice that has become so commonplace because they are no

This is one way to end bribery.

He came up with the idea of printing zero-denomination notes and handing them out to officials whenever he was asked for kickbacks as a way to show his resistance....In another experience, a corrupt official in a district in Tamil Nadu was so frightened on seeing the zero rupee note that he returned all the bribe money he had collected for establishing a new electricity connection back to the no longer compliant citizen.

Fed up with requests for bribes and equipped with a zero rupee note, the old lady handed the note to the official. He was stunned. Remarkably, the official stood up from his seat, offered her a chair, offered her tea and gave her the title she had been seeking for the last year and a half to obtain without success.

Official information and services from the U.S. government.

Access government resources on health care, insurance, diet, fitness, public health, and more.

this site will help providing care, benefits, long-distance caregiving, legal matters, support for caregivers in an online atmosphere that will give you information about how the healthcare debate rages on .

Top 5 priorities - a year ago and still valid

The most scary thing about the Internet for your government is not pedophiles, terrorists or viruses, whatever you may have read in the papers. It is the danger of your administration being silently obsoleted by the lightening pace at which the Internet changes expectations.

RT @timoreilly: MySociety's top 5 Internet priorities for government is, as expected, right on. http://bit.ly/ghZl6 [from http://twitter.com/NicMcPhee/statuses/1330269653]

Volume 14, Number 5 - 4 May 2009; Contents: Introduction; What is the cloud? Who uses the cloud? Where is the cloud? What rules govern the cloud? Conclusion: Clouds without borders?

FirstMonday - Peer Reviewed Journal

Article from First Monday 14 (5) (4 May 2009)

Geography, Economics, Environment, and Jurisdiction in Cloud Computing.

read this! Cloud computing

more: http://www.researchbuzz.org/wp/a-library-full-of-digitized-government-comics/

Government comic book collection.

Comics created or commissioned by the US Government. Over 180 items.

Propaganda Comics

Government publications, comic books format

government comics on variety of topics (firefighting, army motors, conservation &c &c) … front page thumbnails to data page, from which download pdf.

Vintage public service pamphlets/booklets in which recognised artist-illustrators contributed drawings, often featuring their famous cartoon/comic characters. You can see the front page of these works as jpeg images but you need to d/load as pdfs. [University of Nebraska-Lincoln collection via CONTENTdm structure]

“We have a Facebook page,” said one official of the Department of Homeland Security. “But we don’t allow people to look at Facebook in the office. So we have to go home to use it. I find this bizarre.”

best stuff is in the comments

Hoe ga je om met web 2.0 en bestaande richtlijnen? Die kunnen elkaar gelukkig heerlijk in de weg zitten ... Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fbits.blogs.nytimes.com%2F2009%2F03%2F17%2Fgovernment-20-meets-catch-22

Jeg har altid gerne villet være pirat.

The US copyright lobby has long argued against open source software - now Indonesia's in the firing line for encouraging the idea in government departments

Whitehouse.gov Redesign: The Change Has Come

this is the "shotgun over the mantle" of the financial debacle we are living through -- those few with a sense of history or drama KNEW it would be fired before the play ends... and here we are

Phil Gramm

news of the repeal of the steal-glass act

The decision to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 provoked dire warnings from a handful of dissenters that the deregulation of Wall Street would someday wreak havoc on the nation's financial system. -- boy did it ever!

Ground zero for the financial crisis. 1999.

The Obama administration is now completely wedded to the idea that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the financial system — that what we’re facing is the equivalent of a run on an essentially sound bank.

The Obama administration is now completely wedded to the idea that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the financial system — that what we’re facing is the equivalent of a run on an essentially sound bank. As Tim Duy put it, there are no bad assets, only misunderstood assets. And if we get investors to understand that toxic waste is really, truly worth much more than anyone is willing to pay for it, all our problems will be solved.

We should just let the banks and institutions that have been poorly managed fail.

To this end the plan proposes to create funds in which private investors put in a small amount of their own money, and in return get large, non-recourse loans from the taxpayer, with which to buy bad — I mean misunderstood — assets. This is supposed to lead to fair prices because the funds will engage in competitive bidding. But it’s immediately obvious, if you think about it, that these funds will have skewed incentives. In effect, Treasury will be creating — deliberately! — the functional equivalent of Texas S&Ls in the 1980s: financial operations with very little capital but lots of government-guaranteed liabilities. For the private investors, this is an open invitation to play heads I win, tails the taxpayers lose. So sure, these investors will be ready to pay high prices for toxic waste. After all, the stuff might be worth something; and if it isn’t, that’s someone else’s problem.

Krugman talks about structural problems that make Geithner's plan highly unlikely to work, and msot definitely transfers all risk upon the tax payer http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/23/opinion/23krugman.html

Krugman analyzes The Geithner plan

In effect, Treasury will be creating — deliberately! — the functional equivalent of Texas S&Ls in the 1980s: financial operations with very little capital but lots of government-guaranteed liabilities. For the private investors, this is an open invitation to play heads I win, tails the taxpayers lose.

This plan will produce big gains for banks that didn’t actually need any help; it will, however, do little to reassure the public about banks that are seriously undercapitalized. And I fear that when the plan fails, as it almost surely will, the administration will have shot its bolt: it won’t be able to come back to Congress for a plan that might actually work.

We type on, engrossed in conversation, forgetting we're being recorded and those recordings might come back to haunt us later. Oliver North learned this, way back in 1987, when messages he thought he had deleted were saved by the White House PROFS system, and then subpoenaed in the Iran-Contra affair. Bill Gates learned this in 1998 when his conversational e-mails were provided to opposing counsel as part of the antitrust litigation discovery process. Mark Foley learned this in 2006 when his instant messages were saved and made public by the underage men he talked to. Paris Hilton learned this in 2005 when her cell phone account was hacked, and Sarah Palin learned it earlier this year when her Yahoo e-mail account was hacked. ... Ephemeral conversation is dying. Cardinal Richelieu:If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged."

"Conversation used to be ephemeral. Whether face-to-face or by phone, we could be reasonably sure that what we said disappeared as soon as we said it. Organized crime bosses worried about phone taps and room bugs, but that was the exception. Privacy was just assumed. This has changed. We chat in e-mail, over SMS and IM, and on social networking websites like Facebook, MySpace, and LiveJournal. We blog and we Twitter. These conversations -- with friends, lovers, colleagues, members of our cabinet -- are not ephemeral; they leave their own electronic trails. We know this intellectually, but we haven't truly internalized it. We type on, engrossed in conversation, forgetting we're being recorded and those recordings might come back to haunt us later."

When he becomes president, Barack Obama will have to give up his BlackBerry. Aides are concerned that his unofficial conversations would become part of the presidential record, subject to subpoena and eventually made public as part of the country's historical record.

"When he becomes president, Barack Obama will have to give up his BlackBerry. Aides are concerned that his unofficial conversations would become part of the presidential record, subject to subpoena and eventually made public as part of the country's historical record."

But as technology makes our conversations less ephemeral, we need laws to step in and safeguard ephemeral conversation.

"The younger generation chats digitally, and the older generation treats those chats as written correspondence. ... until we have a Presidential election where both candidates have a complete history on social networking sites from before they were teenagers -- we aren't fully an information age society." (via Oblinks)

Official Homepage of the FCC National Broadband Plan

Cidadania na Internet

This could be a great tool for google hearings and stuff like that.

extensive CSPAN archives going way back.

Good #infographic explaining American politics: http://infobeautiful.s3.amazonaws.com/leftright_US_1416.gif – Chris Harrison (cdharrison) http://twitter.com/cdharrison/statuses/10324141855

Liberal vs. Conservative, Left vs. Right, Progressive vs. Traditional

Excellent infographic comparing the left-wing and right-wing government

googles monopoly

Even Google itself is starting to worry about the possibility that the Department of Justice may seek regulation, possibly even the break-up of Google.

What An Antitrust Case Against Google Might Look Like

irlines initially chose to participate early, when participation in the CRSs was free. Only later, when agencies had come to depend upon CRSs, and thus when airlines had become dependent upon CRSs as well, did Sabre and Apollo institute high fees for reservations, ticketing, and other services they provided to the airlines.

"Let me provide some expamples -- by no means an exhaustive list -- of where the Right as gotten itself stuck in a swamp of hypocrisy, hyperbole, historical inaccuracy and hatred..."

Everyone should read this, regardless of party affiliation.

many many references to GOP shenanigans

best blog entry ever

created by Kevin "KAL" Kallaugher @ UMBC with students.

Kal's site on crazy politics

AmericanDad blogs about how lunatics and hypocrites in high places have hijacked the Republican party, and he calls for true conservatives to boot them out and take their party back. Tons of links and references.

Crazy amount of links about how the repubs are crazy

Former National Security Agency analyst Russell Tice, who helped expose the NSA's warrantless wiretapping in December 2005, has now come forward with even more startling allegations. Tice told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann on Wednesday that the programs that spied on Americans were not only much broader than previously acknowledged but specifically targeted journalists.

Article was updated. One time there were military helicopters that were hovering directly over me and Kenneth's apartments in Bowling Green. I went to tell Francis Gardler what had just happened to me and he just dismissed me as paranoid and crazy. Of course, military helicopters really did hover directly over our apartments. That's about the time that I started losing respect for Gardler.

Whether you were in Kansas and you never made foreign communications at all. They monitored all communications: says Whistleblower Russell Tice

組織やシステムの不備や怠慢を、個人個人の優れた能力と自己犠牲で切りまわしてきた、世界にも稀に見る“個人プレイ”が得意な民族なのではあるまいか

> アメリカ人は、互いに異質でバラバラのやつらが、まとまればまとまるほど賢く強くなってゆき、日本人は、個々人は優れている均質なやつらが、集まれば集まるほどアホになり弱くなってゆく。

Julkishallinnon mashupeja.

"If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from."

Questions: of all the video and audio footage there, no footage? And also, really? They wanted to enjoy a spring day during a protest. Absolutely logical. Seems politicians never tire of the "Look there! A (racist, bigot, socialist, etc.)"

To find a prototype for the overheated reaction to the health care bill, you have to look a year before Medicare, to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Both laws passed by similar majorities in Congress; the Civil Rights Act received even more votes in the Senate (73) than Medicare (70). But it was only the civil rights bill that made some Americans run off the rails. That’s because it was the one that signaled an inexorable and immutable change in the very identity of America, not just its governance

Oivaltava artikkeli siitä, kenen kaikkien välillä ja mihin suuntaan datan tulee liikkua (hallinto-kansalaiset) (kansalaiset-hallinto) (hallinto-hallinto) ja (kansalaiset-kansalaiset) What we really want (or what I really want anyway) is not simply government transparency, but an open civic system - a civic system that operates, and flourishes, as a fully open system, for whatever level we happen to be talking about - federal, state, city, neighborhood, whatever. And transparency is a big part of that open civic system, but it is still only one part. In fact there are four parts to a functioning open civic system. These are:

Citizen to Citizen (C2C). Okay so now we have both open G2C and C2G data flows going, and that's great - huge amplification of civic activity, great realization of efficiency with regards to interaction between government and people. But there are all sorts of ways to improve civic life that don't really need to involve the government at all - what about those things? That's where Citizen to Citizen, or C2C, data flows come in. C2C is the citizens' brigade of data flow - it's the people doing it for themselves, whatever "it" happens to be. Clever Commute, in New Jersey, is one example of a great C2C data flow.

By John Geraci

Comments on Open Government (eGov in the UK)

THIS IS REALLY REALLY GOOD.

The wrong policy? (Via Daring Fireball: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2009/04/20/pot-alcohol ).

'nuff said

Under the Bush team a prominent and profitable bank, under threat of a damaging public audit, was forced to accept less than $1b of TARP money. The gov insisted on buying a new class of preferred stock which gave it a tiny, minority position. The money flowed to the bank. Arguably, back then, the Bush administration was acting for purely economic reasons. It wanted to recapitalize the banks to halt a financial panic. Fast forward to today, and that same bank is begging to give the money back. The chairman offers to write a check, now, with interest. He's been sitting on the cash for months and has felt the dead hand of government threatening to run his business and dictate pay scales. He sees the writing on the wall and he wants out. But the Obama team says no, since unlike the smaller banks that gave their TARP money back, this bank is far more prominent. The bank has also been threatened with "adverse" consequences if its chairman persists. That's politics talking, not economics.

I must be naive. I really thought the administration would welcome the return of bank bailout money. Some $340 million in TARP cash flowed back this week from four small banks in Louisiana, New York, Indiana and California. This isn't much when we routinely talk in trillions, but clearly that money has not been wasted or otherwise sunk down Wall Street's black hole. So why no cheering as the cash comes back?

Video - CNBC.com

Intense reaction by some financial analysts in Wallstreet to the current plans

Rick Santelli expresses outrage at the prospect of government rewarding bad behavior.

"CNBC's Rick Santelli and the traders on the floor of the CME Group express outrage. . ." It's good to see and hear people who are appropriately angry. Also, note the paternalistic, faux-aristocratic comments of the other anchors, though; particularly how they try to paint a dissenting, informed, concerned, and eloquent citizen as a demagogue stirring up, "mob rule."

Excised

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB260/index.htm Very interesting history of a once "black" agency.

'It's kind of like going from an Xbox to an Atari,' an Obama aide says

If the Obama campaign represented a sleek, new iPhone kind of future, the first day of the Obama administration looked more like the rotary-dial past.

"If the Obama campaign represented a sleek, new iPhone kind of future, the first day of the Obama administration looked more like the rotary-dial past."

"Two years after launching the most technologically savvy presidential campaign in history, Obama officials ran smack into the constraints of the federal bureaucracy yesterday, encountering a jumble of disconnected phone lines, old computer software, and security regulations forbidding outside e-mail accounts." I guess at least they didn't remove all the Ws from the keyboards.

If the Obama campaign represented a sleek, new iPhone kind of future, the first day of the Obama administration looked more like the rotary-dial past. Two years after launching the most technologically savvy presidential campaign in history, Obama officials ran smack into the constraints of the federal bureaucracy yesterday, encountering a jumble of disconnected phone lines, old computer software, and security regulations forbidding outside e-mail accounts. What does that mean in 21st-century terms? No Facebook to communicate with supporters. No outside e-mail log-ins. No instant messaging. Hard adjustments for a staff that helped sweep Obama to power through, among other things, relentless online social networking. "It is kind of like going from an Xbox to an Atari," Obama spokesman Bill Burton said of his new digs.

Nice to see the White House is just like any other bloody office I've worked in then!

The Economist

content type: text/html;charset=UTF-8

The Federal Reserve is refusing to identify the recipients of almost $2 trillion of emergency loans from American taxpayers or the troubled assets the central bank is accepting as collateral.

Congresspersons, after what happened in Iraq, why did you give a green light here, then get surprised that Paulson is acting like a douche?

``We need oversight,'' Paulson told lawmakers. ``We need protection. We need transparency. I want it. We all want it.''

The Federal Reserve is refusing to identify the recipients of almost $2 trillion of emergency loans from American taxpayers or the troubled assets the central bank is accepting as collateral

"The Federal Reserve is refusing to identify the recipients of almost $2 trillion of emergency loans from American taxpayers or the troubled assets the central bank is accepting as collateral."

Site regroupant un gros paquet de données de la banque mondiale.

assessment

Like other technology and communications companies, we regularly receive requests from government agencies around the world to remove content from our services, or provide information about users of our services and products. The map shows the number of requests that we received between July 1, 2009 and December 31, 2009, with certain limitations.

Google vient de publier une carte des requêtes gouvernementales adressées à ses services (de Google donc). Google dévoile, sur un planisphère, le nombre de demandes d'accès aux données privées et le nombre de demandes de suppression de contenus qu'il a reçues de la part de chaque gouvernement - ou presque.

Brazil, Germany, India the top3 in removal requests from Google + Many EU countries. Interesting. http://bit.ly/cCaDwF

Here's the problem for states that want to pry more money out of the wallets of rich people. It never works because people, investment capital and businesses are mobile: They can leave tax-unfriendly states and move to tax-friendly states.

Why states need to cut taxes: http://tr.im/lEOG #tcot [from http://twitter.com/Underdown/statuses/1836031711]

It's already happened in Maryland.

I'll up the ante. What if they were Muslim? @laughingwoman Tim Wise: What if Tea Partiers were black? http://bit.ly/cZzE8K

Protest is only seen as fundamentally American when those who have long had the luxury of seeing themselves as prototypically American engage in it. And this, my friends, is what white privilege is all about. The ability to threaten others, to engage in violent and incendiary rhetoric without consequence, to be viewed as patriotic and normal no matter what you do, and never to be feared and despised as people of color would be, if they tried to get away with half the shit we do, on a daily basis.

RT @CarriBugbee: Ephphatha Poetry: "Imagine if the Tea Party Was Black" - Tim Wise ""Imagine if the Tea Party Was Black" - Tim Wise" htt ...

"Protest is only seen as fundamentally American when those who have long had the luxury of seeing themselves as prototypically American engage in it. When the dangerous and dark “other” does so, however, it isn’t viewed as normal or natural, let alone patriotic. . . . // And this, my friends, is what white privilege is all about. The ability to threaten others, to engage in violent and incendiary rhetoric without consequence, to be viewed as patriotic and normal no matter what you do, and never to be feared and despised as people of color would be, if they tried to get away with half the shit we do, on a daily basis." (avoid the comments)

Excellent article on white privilege

"In other words, imagine that even one-third of the anger and vitriol currently being hurled at President Obama, by folks who are almost exclusively white, were being aimed, instead, at a white president, by people of color. How many whites viewing the anger, the hatred, the contempt for that white president would then wax eloquent about free speech, and the glories of democracy? And how many would be calling for further crackdowns on thuggish behavior, and investigations into the radical agendas of those same people of color?" Via Debbie.

And this, my friends, is what white privilege is all about. The ability to threaten others, to engage in violent and incendiary rhetoric without consequence, to be viewed as patriotic and normal no matter what you do, and never to be feared and despised as people of color would be, if they tried to get away with half the shit we do, on a daily basis.

Wow this is potentially huge! Thoughts? RT @timoreilly:Bulk Data Downloads:A Breakthrough in Government Transparency http://bit.ly/EizO3 [from http://twitter.com/jhelmus/statuses/1283585077]

On getting greater access to government documents and data, with an amendment now in the House

Until last month, the clock had enough digits to measure US debt levels The US government's debts have ballooned so badly the National Debt Clock in New York has run out of digits to record the spiralling figure.

The US government's debts have ballooned so badly the National Debt Clock in New York has run out of digits to record the spiralling figure. The digital counter marks the national debt level, but when that passed the $10 trillion point last month, the sign could not display the full amount.

US debt clock runs out of digits

BBC News

Licences for the use of open source software are generally free of charge and embrace open standards, and the code that powers the programs can be modified without fear of trampling on intellectual property or copyright.

The UK government says it will accelerate the use of open source software in public services.

The UK government has said it will accelerate the use of open source software in public services. The shift from proprietary standards could save the government £600m a year.

16 open data principles. Josh Tauberer

This document is a best practices guide for governments embracing the notion of "open data". It discusses why open government data is beneficial to society, i.e. how it is civic capital, and what kinds of technological considerations must be made when making government data open. The document is intended to be read both by web managers, who may wish to skip the final Recommendations section, and by government web developers.

This document is a best practices guide for governments embracing the notion of "open data". It discusses why open government data is beneficial to society, i.e. how it is civic capital, and what kinds of technological considerations must be made when making government data open. The document is intended to be read both by web managers, who may wish to skip the final Recommendations section, and by government web developers. By Joshua Tauberer

"Given that governments are inherently reactive, rather than proactive (I need give no examples), how can this be compatible with the rapidly evolving world of social software?"

Dr. Mark Drapeau about government 2.0.

"Ironically, however, many government agencies block such sites for use at work. For example, I cannot access MySpace or YouTube from the computer in my office at the Department of Defense, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) blocks most social networking sites besides LinkedIn. At least one part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) blocks Google Chat. Not only do these policies make little sense (there are legitimate research uses for all of these sites, while email, iTunes, and non-blocked websites are ‘abused’ daily), the policies are inconsistent. Despite this, there are overt sprinklings of Web 2.0 influence all over the federal government. For example, in mid-2007, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) sponsored a public blog about pandemic influenza, which I contributed to due to my work on global health security. This was a great early example of a government agency engaging with an interested, and in many cases, expert audience. "

Mark Drapeau blog on social government

A diagram comparing the cost of the current economic crisis with large and costly events in US history

It is exceedingly difficult to convey exactly how much we are spending on all these bailouts. Whenever I start talking trillions (versus mere billions), I get puzzled looks from people. Humans have a hard time conceptualizing any number that large. I wanted a graphic way to clearly show how astonishingly ginormous the amounts involved were. So I once again went to Jess Bachman at Wallstats. I gave him my list of expenditures (inflation adjusted of course!) and he went to work. This early Bailout Nation graphic shows the the total costs to the taxpayer of all the monies spent, lent, consumed, borrowed, printed, guaranteed, assumed or otherwise committed. It is nothing short of astonishing.

18 jun 09 / early Bailout Nation graphic shows the the total costs to the taxpayer of all the monies spent, lent, consumed, borrowed, printed, guaranteed, assumed or otherwise committed. It is nothing short of astonishing. It includes the total outlay for all the bailouts to date. In just about one short year (March 2008 - March 2009), the bailouts managed to spend far in excess of nearly every major one time expenditure of the USA, including WW1&2 (omitted from graphic), the moon shot, the New Deal, total NASA budgets (omitted from graphic), Iraq, Viet Nam and Korean wars — COMBINED.

The Cybersecurity Act gives the president the ability to "declare a cybersecurity emergency" and shut down or limit Internet traffic in any "critical" information network "in the interest of national security." does not define a critical information network or a cybersecurity emergency-- left to the president. grants the Secretary of Commerce "access to all relevant data concerning [critical] networks without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule, or policy restricting such access." This means... can monitor or access any data on private or public networks without regard to privacy laws. The bill could undermine the Electronic Communications Privacy Act enacted in the mid '80s, requires law enforcement seek a warrant before tapping in to data transmissions between computers. might violate the Constitutional protection against searches without cause. Once information is accessed, it can be used for whatever purpose, no matter the original reason for accessing something

from the page: "The Cybersecurity Act of 2009 (PDF) gives the president the ability to "declare a cybersecurity emergency" and shut down or limit Internet traffic in any "critical" information network "in the interest of national security." The bill does not define a critical information network or a cybersecurity emergency. That definition would be left to the president... It also grants the Secretary of Commerce "access to all relevant data concerning [critical] networks without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule, or policy restricting such access." ... When one person can access all information on a network, "it makes it more vulnerable to intruders," Granick says... "Once information is accessed, it can be used for whatever purpose, no matter the original reason for accessing something... Who's interested in this [bill]? Law enforcement and people in the security industry who want to ensure more government dollars go to them...""

Will Obama Shut the Internet Down. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/04/should-obama-control-internet [from http://twitter.com/HenryDubb/statuses/1451549136]

"They work, what, 27 hours in a good week" , "19 holidays a month" Huuuuu, 41 hours a week and 11 holidays a year: http://www.touteleurope.fr/fr/actions/social/emploi-protection-sociale/presentation/comparatif-le-temps-de-travail-dans-l-ue.html

Viewpoint: As Washington rushes to nationalize troubled parts of the economy, the inescapable reality is that we're all French now

Viewpoint: As Washington rushes to nationalize troubled parts of the economy, the inescapable reality is that we\'re all French now

Article discusses how socialist the US has become, despite conservative's contempt for the concept.

Freedom Of Information Act Search Engine

EFF's Freedom Of Information Act project has gathered thousands of pages of material. These shed light on controversial government surveillance programs, lobbying practices, and intellectual property initiatives. You can use the EFF FOIA Search Engine below to search and examine the documents' contents. If you find something you think is significant, send us an email: foia@eff.org.

EFF's document collection-obtained through requests and litigation under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)-covers some controversial government initiatives, including the FBI's Investigative Data Warehouse and DCS 3000 surveillance program and the Department of Homeland Security's Automated Targeting System and ADVISE data-mining project.

EFF's Freedom Of Information Act project has gathered thousands of pages of material. These shed light on controversial government surveillance programs, lobbying practices, and intellectual property initiatives.

The unprecedented expansion of the money supply could make the '70s look benign. - ARTHUR B. LAFFER

Freedom of Information

"The only reason we know anything about all those claims for light bulbs and moat cleaning is that campaigning journalist Heather Brooke has spent the last five years fighting tooth and nail for MPs to come clean about their expenses ..."

"The only reason we know anything about all those claims for light bulbs and moat cleaning is that campaigning journalist Heather Brooke has spent the last five years fighting tooth and nail for MPs to come clean about their expenses."

The only reason we know anything about all those claims for light bulbs and moat cleaning is that campaigning journalist Heather Brooke has spent the last five years fighting tooth and nail for MPs to come clean about their expenses ...

Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis report on how Argentina's worker-run factories have nurtured a powerful social movement, while seamstress Matilda Adorno explains how a dispute over pay became a political struggle ... There were many popular responses to the crisis, from neighbourhood assemblies and barter clubs to resurgent left-wing parties and mass movements of the unemployed, but we spent most of our year in Argentina with workers in "recovered companies". Almost entirely under the media radar, workers in Argentina have been responding to rampant unemployment and capital flight by taking over businesses that have gone bankrupt and reopening them under democratic worker management. ... "We formed the co-operative with the criteria of equal wages and making basic decisions by assembly; we are against the separation of manual and intellectual work; we want a rotation of positions and, above all, the ability to recall our elected leaders."

Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis report on how Argentina's worker-run factories have nurtured a powerful social movement, while seamstress Matilda Adorno explains how a dispute over pay became a political struggle

In South Africa, we saw a protester's T-shirt with an even more succinct summary of this new impatience: "Stop Asking, Start Taking".

Occupy, resist, produce

"Capitalism produces and distributes not just goods and services, but identities. When the capital and its carpetbaggers had flown from Argentina, what was left was not only companies that had been emptied, but a whole hollowed-out country filled with people whose identities - as workers - had been stripped away as well. As one of the organisers in the movement wrote to us: "It is a huge amount of work to recover a company. But the real work is to recover a worker and that is the task that we have just begun.""

- State Dept. says keep tweeting... ( http://bit.ly/rwobD ) [from http://twitter.com/aphofer/statuses/2196162891]

State Department to Twitter: Keep Iranian tweets coming http://bit.ly/b4WX7 [from http://twitter.com/KeithDriscoll/statuses/2200387369]

The importance of social networking

While officials would not say whether they were communicating with Iranians directly, one senior official noted that the US is learning about certain people being picked up for questioning by authorities through posts on Twitter.

WASHINGTON — The capital flew into a bit of a tizzy when, on his first full day in the White House, President Obama was photographed in the Oval Office without his suit jacket. There was, however, a logical explanation: Mr. Obama, who hates the cold, had cranked up the thermostat.

Honest Tea

The rug is still there, as are the presidential portraits Mr. Bush selected — one of Washington, one of Lincoln — and a collection of decorative green and white plates. During a meeting last week with retired military officials, before he signed an executive order shutting down the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Mr. Obama surveyed his new environs with a critical eye. “He looked around,” said one of his guests, retired Rear Adm. John D. Hutson, “and said, ‘I’ve got to do something about these plates. I’m not really a plates kind of guy.’ ”

A Tally of Federal Rescues http://nyti.ms/cwSSVf Mind blowing ! The New York Times > Week in Review > Image >

visualization of the recent bailout

Need some time to wrap my head around these figures

Comment 42: William: "That, and our economy runs on paper money that the world doesn't accept as currency due to no gold standard. See the financial reasons for war in Iraq and Iran being next due to both economies no longer accepting US Dollars as main trade currency, instead switching to the Euro for its more stable fluctuation in value. When the US buys, the US prints, thus inflating their own economy, essentially taking it out on US citizens, and devaluing the money the foreign sellers recieve. They get tired of taking $9.50 worth of bills at which time of agreement was worth $10; in which time we declare them an international threat and takeover their government to re-establish the dollar as currency to maintain the image in the world. One large economic nation such as China or India stopping trade in US Dollars and our economy is finished." -- Basically

Google Begins to Make Public Data Searchable http://bit.ly/11uBIO <-- event of historic importance [from http://twitter.com/marshallk/statuses/1642481003]

Google just announced its first foray into making public data searchable and viewable in graph form. The company is starting with population and unemployment data from around the US but promises to make far more data sets searchable in the future. The potential significance of making aggregate data about our world easy to visualize, cross reference and compare can't be overstated.

Nice flow chart for the Bill to Law process

drupal open source code at whitehouse

RT @robpierson: opensourcing of @whitehouse website = 1 step closer to @timoreilly's vision of gov as platform: http://www.whitehouse.go ...

Web Services as Governments http://bit.ly/dcQn3M via @VenessaMiemis | Related: War http://www.flickr.com/photos/25036088@N06/3424896427/ [from http://twitter.com/CircleReader/statuses/16160255165]

As I thought about it, it became clear that web platforms really don't make much. Instead, they create the conditions that encourage others to invest their time and energy to create useful services. The value of Twitter is not in the software that runs on their servers; it is in the content that 180 million people contribute to their network - same with Facebook. Many would argue that Apple makes things, but even there, the full experience of the iPhone has a lot to do with the 200,000 applications that others created to run on the device. A lot of people have begun using the term ecosystem to describe these big platforms. That captures their decentralized, emergent character, but ecosystems do not have a central point of control. Apple decided to eliminate third party analytics between one release and the next. That doesn't happen in an ecosystem. The right analogy is a government.

Apple, Facebook, Craigslist, et all as governments (totalitarian, state economies, libertarians?)

Social networks act as governments with their APIs.

From day one, Mark Zuckerberg wanted Facebook to become a social utility. He succeeded. Facebook is now a utility for many. The problem with utilities is that they get regulated

Brilliant insight. RT @jangles: More on Facebook: reading @zephoria 's thought-provoking "Facebook is a utility" http://is.gd/cb5ij [from http://twitter.com/PaulSweeney/statuses/14083869118]

"Facebook speaks of itself as a utility while also telling people they have a choice. But there’s a conflict here. We know this conflict deeply in the United States. When it comes to utilities like water, power, sewage, Internet, etc., I am constantly told that I have a choice. But like hell I’d choose Comcast if I had a choice. Still, I subscribe to Comcast. Begrudgingly. Because the “choice” I have is Internet or no Internet. I hate all of the utilities in my life. Venomous hatred. And because they’re monopolies, they feel no need to make me appreciate them. Cuz they know that I’m not going to give up water, power, sewage, or the Internet out of spite. Nor will most people give up Facebook, regardless of how much they grow to hate them."

"I hate all of the utilities in my life. Venomous hatred. And because they’re monopolies, they feel no need to make me appreciate them. Cuz they know that I’m not going to give up water, power, sewage, or the Internet out of spite. Nor will most people give up Facebook, regardless of how much they grow to hate them."

Facebook & Radical Transparency http://bit.ly/9eVJMe, a rant by @zephoria, with a follow-up http://bit.ly/b69GjU [from http://twitter.com/CircleReader/statuses/14075940793]

A federal government Website managed by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services 200 Independence Avenue, S.W. - Washington, D.C. 20201

Healthcare.gov is a new online portal where anyone can go to find insurance options in their state, went live. It's a very handy resource for information that used to be difficult to find. It's available to help millions who need insurance find it, and as a resource for those who want to shop around for new options or find out their new benefits under the new law. (a federal government Website managed by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services)

neutral reference on health insurance under new laws

Top Secret America (Washington Post)

One of the best uses of Flash to display data that I've ever seen.

Questi sono alcuni dei risultati di un'inchiesta portata avanti per due anni dal Washington Post. Dice @riotta su twitter che non ci sono scoop, però.

Great piece of journalism from Washington Post: Top Secret America, A hidden world, growing beyond control. http://is.gd/dyx7L #Terrorism

Interesting.

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

tl;dr Government is too big.

To ensure that the country's most sensitive duties are carried out only by people loyal above all to the nation's interest, federal rules say contractors may not perform what are called "inherently government functions." But they do, all the time and in every intelligence and counterterrorism agency, according to a two-year investigation by The Washington Post. What started as a temporary fix in response to the terrorist attacks has turned into a dependency that calls into question whether the federal workforce includes too many people obligated to shareholders rather than the public interest -- and whether the government is still in control of its most sensitive activities.

To ensure that the country's most sensitive duties are carried out only by people loyal above all to the nation's interest, federal rules say contractors may not perform what are called "inherently government functions." But they do, all the time and in every intelligence and counterterrorism agency, according to a two-year investigation by The Washington Post.

RT @redlog: RT @ananny Phenomenally good reporting from the Washington Post: "Top Secret America", http://bit.ly/9Ja5Fi

invetigaciones especiales acerca del gob de EUA

tl;dr Government is too big.

To ensure that the country's most sensitive duties are carried out only by people loyal above all to the nation's interest, federal rules say contractors may not perform what are called "inherently government functions." But they do, all the time and in every intelligence and counterterrorism agency, according to a two-year investigation by The Washington Post. What started as a temporary fix in response to the terrorist attacks has turned into a dependency that calls into question whether the federal workforce includes too many people obligated to shareholders rather than the public interest -- and whether the government is still in control of its most sensitive activities.

To ensure that the country's most sensitive duties are carried out only by people loyal above all to the nation's interest, federal rules say contractors may not perform what are called "inherently government functions." But they do, all the time and in every intelligence and counterterrorism agency, according to a two-year investigation by The Washington Post.

RT @redlog: RT @ananny Phenomenally good reporting from the Washington Post: "Top Secret America", http://bit.ly/9Ja5Fi

invetigaciones especiales acerca del gob de EUA

tl;dr Government is too big.

To ensure that the country's most sensitive duties are carried out only by people loyal above all to the nation's interest, federal rules say contractors may not perform what are called "inherently government functions." But they do, all the time and in every intelligence and counterterrorism agency, according to a two-year investigation by The Washington Post. What started as a temporary fix in response to the terrorist attacks has turned into a dependency that calls into question whether the federal workforce includes too many people obligated to shareholders rather than the public interest -- and whether the government is still in control of its most sensitive activities.

To ensure that the country's most sensitive duties are carried out only by people loyal above all to the nation's interest, federal rules say contractors may not perform what are called "inherently government functions." But they do, all the time and in every intelligence and counterterrorism agency, according to a two-year investigation by The Washington Post.

RT @redlog: RT @ananny Phenomenally good reporting from the Washington Post: "Top Secret America", http://bit.ly/9Ja5Fi

Interesting governmental site dealing with freedom (of the use of music potentially)

Web para eliminar leyes innecesarias

^CK HMG using an off the shelf crowd-sourcing package.

This site gives you the chance to tell us which laws and regulations you think we should get rid of.

@nick_clegg et al really cracking down on new/duplicate websites http://yourfreedom.hmg.gov.uk/ http://spendingchallenge.hm-treasury.gov.uk/

Interesting governmental site dealing with freedom (of the use of music potentially)

Web para eliminar leyes innecesarias

^CK HMG using an off the shelf crowd-sourcing package.

This site gives you the chance to tell us which laws and regulations you think we should get rid of.

@nick_clegg et al really cracking down on new/duplicate websites http://yourfreedom.hmg.gov.uk/ http://spendingchallenge.hm-treasury.gov.uk/

@jasongreen she might have mentioned it, but the rule says nothing about it http://www.copyright.gov/1201/ – Ira Socol (irasocol) http://twitter.com/irasocol/statuses/19610158731

@budtheteacher http://www.copyright.gov/1201/ – Meredith (msstewart) http://twitter.com/msstewart/statuses/19607502254

Statement of the Librarian of Congress on the Anticircumvention Rulemaking: Text

Jailbreaking and bypassing DVD CSS DRM is now legal for fair use purposes Rulemaking on Exemptions from Prohibition on Circumvention of Technological Measures that Control Access to Copyrighted Works

The Librarian of Congress has announced the classes of works subject to the exemption from the prohibition against circumvention of technological measures that control access to copyrighted works. Persons making noninfringing uses of the following six classes of works will not be subject to the prohibition against circumventing access controls (17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1)) until the conclusion of the next rulemaking.

Hey @Canada_Gov I think you should read this -> DMCA exemptions now make it legal to rip DVDs for education http://bit.ly/5zLPnr