Yearly Archives 2010

Yes, I still believe in the president. Yes, I think he's made some awful mistakes and miscalculations. No, I'm not convinced blinking on tax cuts for the super-rich was one of them. I keep flashing back to 1994-95, when no one was villifying President Clinton more loudly than my progressive friends (which is most of my friends), and most of them, and most of everyone else, were predicting one Clinton term. For some perspective on that, see yesterday's post on historical midterm approvals from CNN: According to a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Monday, the public is split on how Obama has handled his duties, with 48 percent saying they approve and an equal amount saying they disapprove. President George W. Bush had an approval rating of 63 percent in December of 2002 - the end of his second year in office - as did his father, President George H.W.…

Spent the latter half of the week at Open Government Data Camp, created by the UK's Open Knowledge Foundation (www.okfn.org). Will be digesting for a while all the ways the creativity and expertise there can inform my work, but here are a few things we all need to think about from some of the gifted thinkers there: In this clip from @kresin on Twitter, David Eaves talks about the manifest need for and right to data from the government on its own activity: It's yours to use as much as a highway, he says. But as he notes, distrust makes the public discussion about open data more toxic than it needs to be: Governments fear "gotcha journalism," with users combing the data for embarassing revelations, while users assume that unreleased information is incriminating information (when it's often inertia, bureaucracy or lack of capacity that keeps data locked away in official…

I was at a wedding this weekend at the Church of the Guardian Angel and I saw in a stained glass window looking down on the altar a crucifixion featuring the spear-carrying centurion who stabbed Jesus while he was on the cross.

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