Links for July 28th
New York Times: Nutrition Label Gets a Design OverhaulSome of the ideas to overhaul food nutrition labels are pretty clever. New York Times: After Aiding Republicans, Business Groups Press Them on Debt CeilingThe Chamber of Commerce threw the full weight of their support behind getting Democrats replaced by Republicans in last year's congressional election. Now [...]
Links for July 25th
New York Times: Policy Changes Under Two PresidentsThis chart of new costs versus savings under Presidents Bush and Obama is really striking. The total cost of Obama's new policies comes to $1.44T. Bush's? $5.07T. Just his tax cuts alone cost more than Obama's policies, at $1.8T. Once you figure in two wars, TARP, and the [...]
Links for July 24th
Talking Points Memo: White House—We Thought We Were Down To The DetailsTurns out the real reason that Boehner walked out on Obama on Friday is because Boehner demanded a repeal of the individual healthcare mandate. Which, ironically, would actually have worsened things, since the individual mandate will significantly reduce federal spending. New York Times: Some [...]
Links for July 22nd
Wikipedia: Flotsam and jetsamFloatsam is the wreckage of a ship or cargo that is floating in the water. Jetsam is any part of either that was tossed overboard deliberately. ChosenThis is a nice-looking, non-intrusive little jQuery/Prototype plugin that improves the UI of HTML select boxes. I'm not using it anywhere, but I intend to. BBC [...]
Links for July 19th
Sunlight Foundation: Use the Net!Both Sen. Jim Webb and Mark Warner are still filing campaign finance reports with the FEC on paper. They've presumably each got small staffs who do all of their data collection and number crunching on computers, only to them print out their campaign finance reporters, snail-mail them to the FEC, who [...]
Links for July 16th
Tabulaw: What Congress Does When it Runs Out of NumbersCongress recently passed a bill that created section 139D of the tax code. But there was already a 139D. No problem—they just kept the existing one. So there are two section 139Ds. Given my work on codes, this makes my head feel all explodey inside. New [...]
Links for July 14th
Reuters: How I misread News Corp’s taxesPulitzer-prize winning journalist David Cay Johnston broke a story earlier this week about how News Corp had received $4.8B in income tax refunds over the past four years, while paying nothing. Turns out he was entirely wrong. What he'd written was the opposite of the truth. News Corp changed [...]
“Federal default might be what it takes to right the nation’s fiscal ship.”
In the New York Times, Carl Hulse writes of the debt ceiling debate: [I]n the House Republican majority…distrust of the Obama administration runs deep and warnings of economic Armageddon do not seem to be moving lawmakers toward a compromise. Instead, many Congressional Republicans seem to be spoiling for a fight, calculating that some level of [...]
Links for July 12th
GitHub: nysenatecio/OpenLegislationThe New York Senate's online legislative repository is available on Github. Very impressive. Reuters: It pays to be Murdoch. Just ask US gov’t.Over the past four years, not only has News Corp. not paid income taxes, they've actually gamed the system to collect $4.8B in tax refunds. Murdoch has 152 subsidiaries spread among tax [...]
Links for July 9th
GAO: Replacing the $1 Note with a $1 Coin Would Provide a Financial Benefit to the GovernmentGetting rid of the $1 bill would save the government $184M/year. Not an enormous amount, on the scale of the budget, but there's no getting around that $184M is a very large amount of money indeed. Ten years ago, [...]
These geologists who support Virginia uranium mining are familiar.
I was surprised to see that a group of professional geologists are backing uranium mining in Pittsylvania County. These are the people who I’d anticipated opposing this Canadian company’s proposal. The name of the organization rang a bell. The American Institute of Professional Geologists. I’ve heard that name. Oh, right, here’s where: In August 2009, [...]
Links for July 8th
Wikipedia: The National RoadOne of the first highways in the country was the aptly named "National Road," running from Cumberland, Maryland to south-central Illinois, the road was to continue clear to Missouri, but the project ran out of cash. Construction of the 620-mile road ran from 1811–1838, having been authorized five years prior by President [...]
Links for July 7th
PolitiFact: George Allen changes stance again on ethanol subsidiesAllen was against ethanol subsidies. Then he was for them. Now he's against them. It's got to be dizzying, change positions every time the political wind shifts. PolitiFact: Virginia GOP says Phil Puckett voted against sending EPA a messagePolitiFact finds the RPV's criticism of Sen. Puckett to [...]
“The American people.”
A pet peeve of mine: Politicians who insist on talking about what “the American people” want, and what “the American people” think. Every politician who says that believes that—in a striking coincidence—what the American people want happens to be precisely what said politician wants. Never noticed this? You will now. You can hear an example [...]
Links for July 6th
The Register: Google dumps all 11+ million .co.cc sites from its resultsGood. .co.cc sites are almost uniformly worthless—a hive of malware sites and search engine spam. Andrew Sullivan: Boehner’s Economic Terrorism"For the GOP to use the debt ceiling to put a gun to the head of the US and global economy until they get only [...]
Cuccinelli has found support for a UVA ban on firearms, but I’m not sure he’s got it right.
Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli issued an advisory opinion on firearms on campuses (PDF) a few days ago. Before I even read it, I knew I’d be torn about his conclusions, whatever they would prove to be. I own a few firearms (long guns, not handguns), and I paid close attention to Heller a few years [...]
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Waldo Jaquith (JAKE-with) is an open government technologist who lives near Charlottesville, VA, USA. more »
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