Tag: politics
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Truth to Power
It’s no secret that the disinformation swirling around our new president and how he got elected have been a boon for the troubled media business. Americans have taken a new interest in good journalism and are looking more carefully at where they get their information. Subscriptions are up at places like the New York Times […]
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Caught in the Crossfire
The hastily announced executive order banning people from several Middle Eastern countries for 90 days and all refugees for four months caused confusion, anguish, and anger across the United States this past weekend. As I monitored the stories that were coming in from airports across the nation, it was the stories of innocent people caught […]
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California and Sanctuary Cities
I think it’s charming that the California State Legislature opens the session with a prayer from a Buddhist priest. I also love that the Governor begins the swearing in of the new Attorney General with a jocular, “Are you ready?” and ends with a casual, “That’s it! Congratulations!” But if you want to skip ahead […]
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We’ve been hacked before
If you look hard enough, current events always have precedence in history. Maybe the players are different and the circumstances changed but, to turn a phrase from Mark Twain, “History may not repeat itself but it does rhyme.” In a few days we will swear in a new president whom many think was put in place […]
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What happened last night?
There’s a video is going around in Japan trying explain to people there how Donald Trump tapped into the under-represented and dispossessed to win the election. Over the moaning cellos from Hans Zimmer’s Interstellar soundtrack, Michael Moore rants in a clip from his latest movie TrumpLand against a gliding montage of Ken Burns-ed images of Trump supporters. Moore warns of the political landslide to […]
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Fun with Google Trends Real Time
Google Trends announced last week that they’ve upgraded their service to be real time. Using their tools, I created a dashboard so you can quickly see who’s trending in Google Search for the past 7 days. If I did this right, this page should continually update. I’ll manually add/remove names as the list of candidates […]
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Presidential Candidate 404 Pages
As the 2016 US Presidential Election gets going, each candidates website 404 pages give us a rare glimpse into the personality behind each campaign. Let’s have a look. Democrats Hillary Rodham Clinton – her page looks like a misplaced snapshot and speaks to the basic, simplistic style of her Middle American base. Look what we […]
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Barbara Lee, my representative in Congress
Barbara Lee is my Congresswoman. She was the lone voice of reason who, in the wake of September 11th, questioned the language around the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) which was drafted in response the the terrorist attacks because there was no one we could declare war upon. Radiolab did a podcast on […]
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Visualizing the Uninsured
Another data map for you. This one by the New York Times based on the most recent census data shows the percent in each region that have either public or private insurance or are uninsured at all. Be sure to allow your browser to read your location and you’ll shortcut to your local region.
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Data Mining the Electorate
The New York Times Magazine had a cover piece on the Obama data mining team that used modern data-mining techniques to more efficiently target the undecided voters that they needed to bring across the fence to win the election. Check out the last line (emphasis mine) on their clever use of Facebook photo tags as […]