Beyond Red vs. Blue

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[beyondredversusblue]

[wherelibertydwells]

[beyondredversusblue]

This chart shows the percentage of people aged 15 to 64 years old who are employed in the US as compared to the EU and to Germany.

[sunfoundation]

[beyondredversusblue]

In the 2010 election cycle, 26,783 individuals (or one in ten thousand Americans) each contributed more than $10,000 to federal political campaigns. Combined, these donors spent $774 million. That’s 24.3% of the total from individuals to politicians, parties, PACs, and independent expenditure groups. Together, they would fill only two-thirds of the 41,222 seats at Nationals Park the baseball field two miles from the U.S. Capitol. When it comes to politics, they are The One Percent of the One Percent.

[treedance]

[beyondredversusblue]

Fox’s Graphics Department is Having a Very Bad Week

And it’s only Wednesday.

The unemployment graph where 8.6 is magically greater than 8.8 or 8.9 floated through the Tumblr on Monday (the horizontal lines have been added to the original Fox graphic).

Now it’s on to geography. Let’s admire how New Hampshire replaces Vermont and Utah is now Nevada.

[politicalprof]

[beyondredversusblue]

Comparing who benefits from the Cain, Perry and Gingrich tax plans.

From Ezra Klein, the Washington Post

[antigovernmentextremist]

[beyondredversusblue]

An Associated Press article purporting to correct the errors of the candidates in last weekend’s GOP presidential debate includes the following passage:

RON PAUL: “We have dumped the debt on the American people through TARP funding as well as the Federal Reserve. So the debt is dumped onto people. And what did we do? We bailed out the people that were benefiting during the formation of the bubble. So as long as we do that, we’re not going to have economic growth.”

THE FACTS: The $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program was proposed by President George W. Bush and passed by Congress in 2008 to help rescue banks and other imperiled financial institutions. Nearly all of the money has been paid back, with interest.

Most economists credit the program with keeping the financial system from freezing up and helping to prevent the worst recession in 30 years from becoming another Great Depression. The Federal Reserve does not operate on taxpayer money and does not receive any operating funds from the Treasury. In fact, it makes money every year from its banking operations, and turns over profits to the Treasury.

A necessarily speculative counterfactual claim made by some economists is scarcely a “fact,” and we might wonder about the value of a consensus among economists in the first place in light of their rather unimpressive performance in understanding the economy over the past ten years. David Stockman, on the other hand, notes that “30 months after the fact, evidence that the American economy had been on the edge of a nuclear-style meltdown [at the time TARP was passed] is nowhere to be found.”

[curiositycounts]

[beyondredversusblue]

A sobering visual guide to income distribution in the US, part of a larger infographic

[joshsternberg]

[beyondredversusblue]

Only on Fox News is 8.6% the same as 9% and higher than 8.9% and 8.8%.

[joshsternberg]

[beyondredversusblue]

The Pentagon released total number of American deaths in the Iraq War: 4,487

[theeconomist]

[beyondredversusblue]

Tens of thousands of middle-class Muscovites hold a peaceful rally in the centre of Moscow, the biggest such event since the early 1990s. Astonishingly, there was not a single arrest. Some carried white flowers, others made jokes. “146% of Muscovites are for free elections” one sign read.

[todaysdocument]

On December 12, 1906 Theodore Roosevelt became the first American to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.  Roosevelt was awarded the prize for his work negotiating the Treaty of Portsmouth ending the Russo-Japanese War in 1905.

Theodore Roosevelt, 1907

[motherjones]

[beyondredversusblue]

A short, shady history of how American elections are paid for.

[breakingnews]

[beyondredversusblue]

76% of registered US voters say most members of Congress do not deserve re-election, according to a Gallup poll.

[fastcompany]

[beyondredversusblue]

Al Jazeera is doing some of the most innovative journalism in the world. Case in point: Somalia Speaks, the first ever large scale survey of citizen sentiment in that region, and rather than using traditional methods they are collecting data via sms text messages. 

Al Jazeera partnered with several organizations to bring the project to life. Middle Eastern classified advertisement NGO Souktel (whom Fast Company has written about before), mapping non-profit Ushahidi (ditto), enterprise crowdsourcing platform Crowdflower (…and ditto again) all contributed to the project, along with another organization called the African Diaspora Institute. Souktel managed the SMS gateway, Ushahidi provided the project’s mapping platform and assistance, and Crowdflower is assisting with offering a mechanism for crowdsourced analysis and translation of replies.

[journalofajournalist]

Check out my new article for @fastcompany @fastcoexist about how Al Jazeera is using text message/SMS technology to cover the Somalian conflict. Seriously, it’s cool.

[npr]

Is public political discourse any different in the new age of social media? Survey says: Yes.

Also, How Twitter’s Trending Algorithm Picks Its Topics

[treedance]

[beyondredversusblue]

Chicago Lobbyists

ChicagoLobbyists.org is a great example of what can be done with open data: create a Web app that increases governmental transparency and informs citizens about a key aspect of contemporary governance.

From the creators:

What is this?

ChicagoLobbyists.org is an open data, open government, and open source project intended to improve the transparency of interactions between the City of Chicago and lobbyists and their clients. All data comes from the City of Chicago Data Portal.

Who built it?

This is a project by Chad Pry, Derek Eder, Paul Baker and Ryan Briones. It started on July 16th, 2011 at the Google Hackathon with some amazing help from Chirag Patel, Ruthie BenDor and Nick Rougeux. Paul noticed the lobbyist data, conceived the project, and got the team together. Chad and Ryan did the bulk of the backend development with help from Derek and Chirag. Derek and Ruthie did the frontend development. Nick and Paul worked on the user interface prototypes.