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Staturday: Buying Influence in the Obama Administration
More than 40 percent of Obama’s top fundraisers have secured posts in his administration, according to a new report by USA Today. -
The House Votes on Health Care Tomorrow!
The House is voting on its health care reform bill tomorrow. Exciting! There’s a summary of the bill and rules for the vote here. Will Americans be able to afford insurance? Will our country go bankrupt? Are we on a slippery slope to socialism? If you want to get in a last-minute call to your representatives to let them know what you think, you can do that here. Once the House votes, it’s the Sentate’s turn. … -
No One Likes the Homebuyer Tax Credit
It’s tax policy time! The Homebuyer Tax Credit (official site here) gives $8,000 of taxpayers’ money to people buying new homes. It was about to expire, but Congress just signed off on an extension through April. Everyone seems to think this was a big mistake. Ezra Klein (speaking in the third person) says it’s pointless because most people who are buying homes aren’t moved to do it by a paltry $8,000: Like a lot of renters, Klein took… -
Suing the State Over Crappy Education
Only the ACLU would think of this: They have banded with parents and student of Palm Beach County and mounted a trailblazing class-action lawsuit, the only of its kind (ever?), claiming that students’ constitutional rights are being violated by the incredibly horribly awful schools there, which result in low graduation rates, particularly among blacks and Latinos. The county, for its part, says it’d doing a fine job, of course. So let’s look real quick at the numbers. According… -
The Transition Town Debate
Transition Towns, if you haven’t heard, are communities that are preparing themselves for peak oil and climate change by reducing their energy use and carbon emissions, eating locally, and sometimes even setting up their own currencies. There are 243 official Transition Towns at the moment (the list is here). Most of them are in the United Kingdom, where the movement started, but Transition Towns are springing up elsewhere in Europe, and in Oceania and the States.… -
Ontario’s New Plates Will Help
Ontario is going to introduce a new, green license plate, available exclusively for plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles. And the benefits of the plates won’t just be aesthetic: Electric vehicles with the plates will be able to travel in the province’s carpool lanes until 2015 — even if only one person is in the vehicle. Owners of eligible vehicles can also use recharging stations at GO Transit and other provincially owned parking lots. Owners of those… -
Mixed News On Same-Sex Marriage
So in Maine yesterday, the voters reversed the state’s law allowing gay marriage by a margin of 47-53. This is unfortunate news, especially on the heels of the passage Prop 8 in California. But here’s some encouragement. Over at The Baseline Scenario, James Kwak presents the following chart, which shows how much different age groups support same-sex marriage, and concludes that “Barring a backlash even bigger than the one we’ve seen over the last ten years (during which… -
Obama Celebrates Anniversary by Pushing Controversial Education Reform Program
Well this is interesting: The President and Arne Duncan are celebrating Obama’s first anniversary in office by pushing states to come up with bold ways to reform education. Until recently, it seemed to me that education had fallen off the administration’s priority list entirely. Then Obama delivered his intense and hated-by-conservatives stay-in-school plea (follow that link for video and transcript), where he put the onus on kids to take responsibility for their own education, and now… -
Top Digital Cities Announced for 2009
Each year the Center for Digital Government takes a survey of U.S. cities to evaluate how municipalities are integrating information technology into operations to better serve their citizens. This year marks the ninth annual Digital Cities Survey and also a year full of challenges for city governments. From pit bulls to tighter budgets, local governments have had many obstacles to overcome this year. Cities have had to become more innovative and creative with the way… -
Bloggers Behind Bars
Global Voices, defenders of free speech online, have launched a new tool called Threatened Voices that lets you look up where bloggers have been arrested or threatened by their governments. China, Iran, and Egypt look particularly bad. And here in the States, Elliott Madison was arresed for using Twitter to help G20 protesters evade the cops. Via Boing Boing.
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Politics
How can we work to solve the world's problems through policy and government?
