Discover Top Posts Tagged with #obameter

Tech Master Amr Sohby-of the MorsiMeter Fame- and his many Innovations

Some people are never satisfied. They react to success or failure by doing more, creating more, emptying their bag of ideas and refilling it over and over again.

Credit: Friends.youthaward.com

Egyptian Amr Sohby is a die-hard innovator; he just never stops! Born in 1988, the young man’s initial claim to fame was the co-creation of the MorsiMeter website; a digital initiative and online platform…

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#Amr Sohby #Egyptian revolution #Gazar #MorsiMeter #Obameter #Pushbots #Zabatak

Promise: Invest $50 billion in auto manufacturing facilities for fuel efficient vehicles Update: No way to measure total private investment Status: In the works

Promise: Improve high school graduation rates Update: Lack of good data makes it impossible to know yet Status: In the works

#Obameter #barack obama #politics #election 2012

Promise: Bring Democrats and Republicans together to pass an agenda Update: Record-setting partisan divide Status: Broken

Promise: Secure the borders Update: Border is more secure, but not to everyone's satisfaction Status: Compromise

Promise: Cut the cost of a typical family's health insurance premium by up to $2,500 a year Update: No cut in premiums for typical family Status: Broken

#barack obama #politics #election 2012 #obameter

No traction for the infrastructure bank

(My last article with PolitiFact! Unfortunately, it's kind of a downer, but you should still read it.)

During his 2008 presidential campaign, President Barack Obama promised to create a "National Infrastructure Bank to expand and enhance, not supplant, existing federal transportation investments.” Obama promised to provide $60 billion to the fund over the next 10 years for transportation projects across the nation, saying the fund would create up to two million jobs and "stimulate approximately $35 billion per year in new economic activity.” Obama made infrastructure a priority with the 2009 stimulus act, which allocated almost $100 billion towards transportation and infrastructure projects. However, the way an infrastructure bank works is very different from how the administration"s grant-based stimulus functioned.

#obama #obameter #robbie feinberg #politifact #brookings

Public/private partnerships in the arts: Have they increased?

(My fourth clip from PolitiFact.)

During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama promised to "increase resources for the U.S. Department of Education's Arts Education Model Development and Dissemination grants, which develop public/private partnerships between schools and arts organizations” and to "engage the foundation and corporate community to increase support for public/private partnerships." According to the Education Department, Arts Education Model Development and Dissemination Grants help elementary and middle schools integrate arts into their curriculum. The Department of Education provides a list of how much money is appropriated each year to fund the grants. We took those numbers since 2007 and put them into a table to get a clear picture of how funding has changed for the program since Obama took office.

2007: $12,505,343

2008: $12,928,130

2009: $13,697,000

2010: $14,616,000

2011: $14,206,690

Since Obama took office in 2009, there has been a largely steady increase in the amount of money appropriated for the grants. Funding increased by over $700,000 from 2008 to 2009 and over $900,000 from 2009 to 2010. And while funding did decline in 2011, it nonetheless represents an almost 10 percent increase from pre-2009 levels. However, those increases only tell part of the story. Obama"s fiscal year 2013 budget proposal includes the consolidation of the Arts in Education program and these grants into a new program called Effective Teaching and Learning for a Well-Rounded Education. This program would combine grants for arts, foreign language, literacy and other subjects into one large program. At a Feb. 2, 2010 briefing on the administration"s proposed 2011 budget, Assistant Secretary of Education Carmel Martin addressed the potential consolidation of the grants. "What we"d like to do is fund the best proposals,” she said. "The intention is not to break it down into individual programs again.” Narric Rome, spokesman for the arts advocacy group Americans for the Arts, said this would mean that "the model program would cease to exist as a discrete grant competition.” However, as of now, the administration has continued to increase resources for the grants. In his promise, Obama also promised to "engage the foundation and corporate community to increase support for public/private partnerships.” Obama first addressed this issue as part of the stimulus passed in 2009. Part of the act created the Investing in Innovation Fund, providing grants for schools and nonprofits to work together to improve student achievement. One category is development grants, which provide up to $5 million to schools or nonprofits that find a philanthropic organization or business that will match 20 percent of the funds. In 2010, the fund provided $650 million in grants for 49 awards, with three specifically going to arts education programs. In 2011, the fund provided $150 million in grants, and the department launched a third round of applications for grants in February 2012. The administration has also worked with the National Endowment of the Arts to create more opportunities for partnerships between the public and private sectors. NEA spokeswoman Victoria Hutter said that under the Obama administration, the NEA has launched a few new programs with the intent of creating more public and private partnerships. One major program is Our Town, launched in 2011 to improve the quality of life in towns and cities through arts partnerships involving government bodies, nonprofit organizations and the private sector. Hutter specifically cited an Our Town-funded project in Chattanooga, Tenn. led by the nonprofit Allied Arts of Greater Chattanooga. According to Hutter, the organization partnered with a foundation, a landscape company and a business development firm to transform a vacant lot into a new urban park. Hutter said that the fund has been so successful that the administration is seeking to double funding for the program from $5 million to $10 million in its 2013 budget proposal. Since Obama took office, the administration has increased funding for Arts Education Model Development and Dissemination Grants while also working with the Department of Education and the National Endowment of the Arts to increase public and private partnerships in the arts and art education. We rate this as a Promise Kept.

#obama #obameter #arts #NEA #americans for the arts #national endowment for the arts #robbie #feinberg

Obameter: Did Obama fulfill his promise to open consulates around the world?

Note: I'm now writing for the fact-checking site PolitiFact, and I'll be posting stuff that I've written over there from time to time. It's a pretty awesome website, so check it out.

During his presidential campaign, President Barack Obama promised to “stop shuttering consulates and start opening them in the tough and hopeless corners of the world.” In our last update, we defined a consulate as a foreign office, somewhat similar to an embassy, “responsible for fostering economic, commercial, scientific and cultural relations" between the country it represents and the area in which it is located. To get an idea what consulates have been opened since Obama was inaugurated, we spoke with the Department of State, which was able to provide us with a list of consular offices opened from the beginning of 2009 to the end of February, 2012. The department told us that since 2009, the administration has opened consulates in Wuhan, China; Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan; Herat, Afghanistan; Almaty, Kazakhstan and in the cities of Erbil, Basrah and Kirkuk in Iraq. It is difficult to objectively define what makes areas “tough and hopeless,” but we looked at statistics on life expectancy, literacy rates and mortality rates to get a rough approximation of the quality of life in these countries. We charted those statistics in a table and included the world ranking for each nation out of 221 countries:

(Note: There was a table, but Tumblr doesn't like tables, so I turned it into a list.)

China: 75 years (95th), 92.2 percent (101st), 16 per 1,000 births (111th)

Kazakhstan: 69 years (148th), 99.5 percent (15th), 24 per 1,000 births (82nd)

Iraq: 71 years (144th), 74.1 percent (151st), 41.7 per 1,000 births (61st)

Afghanistan: 45 years (217th), 28.1 percent (202nd), 149.2 per 1,000 births (2nd)

While the statistics for China, Kazakhstan and Iraq aren’t near the top of the world rankings, each country still ranks above over 60 other nations in terms of literacy rate, mortality rate and life expectancy at birth. So while the citizens of these countries certainly may be struggling, it might be an overstatement to describe their situations as “tough and hopeless.”

#Obama #PolitiFact #Obameter #Consulates #Afghanistan #Robbie #Feinberg #PolitiFact.com