grist

this is the talk we need

I know that the deeds we need are not always the same as the talk we need, but I know that this is the talk we need. And that matters ...

[W]e know that real leadership is about candor, and judgment, and the ability to rally Americans from all walks of life around a common purpose – a higher purpose.

We are up against decades of bitter partisanship that cause politicians to demonize their opponents instead of coming together to make college affordable or energy cleaner; it’s the kind of partisanship where you’re not even allowed to say that a Republican had an idea – even if it’s one you never agreed with. That kind of politics is bad for our party, it’s bad for our country, and this is our chance to end it once and for all.

We are up against the idea that it’s acceptable to say anything and do anything to win an election. We know that this is exactly what’s wrong with our politics; this is why people don’t believe what their leaders say anymore; this is why they tune out. And this election is our chance to give the American people a reason to believe again.

And what we’ve seen in these last weeks is that we’re also up against forces that are not the fault of any one campaign, but feed the habits that prevent us from being who we want to be as a nation. It’s the politics that uses religion as a wedge, and patriotism as a bludgeon. A politics that tells us that we have to think, act, and even vote within the confines of the categories that supposedly define us. The assumption that young people are apathetic. The assumption that Republicans won’t cross over. The assumption that the wealthy care nothing for the poor, and that the poor don’t vote. The assumption that African-Americans can’t support the white candidate; whites can’t support the African-American candidate; blacks and Latinos can’t come together. ...

... from Obama S.C. victory speech. More re. South Carolina primary.

I leave and look what happens ...

While I was at the ACLU, my colleague and superfriend Allison Walker deferred to my judgment on Internet matters with that funny combo of enthusiasm, and TOEFL skepticism that still greets Internet staff almost everywhere.

So imagine my superdelight to see that Allison is blogging from Sundance for the ACLU, on the roster of social issue films on offer this year.

As one time indie pioneer Sylvester Stallone said in Rocky IV about another beautiful blond, "If I can change, and you can change, everybody can change!"

1000 words

This NYT photo by Todd Heisler says so many things about gender, the presidential race and the U-S of A.

NGOs as "sunglasses?"

At CAP's Internet Advocacy Roundtable on transparency, Bill Allison mentions that even if data is available from Congress, the GAO, etc., it often takes help from NGOs to interpret, standardize, aggregate the data for people to be able to make connections and glean the benefit of the knowledge.

Group's like The Sunlight Foundation, where Bill works, are harnessing the Internet's power to collect information and literally open a window into it on your desktop.

But is raw data, even standardized, well-coded, cross-referenced data, ultimately an opaque pearl before well-intended swine? Do real-people activists get the most out of simple information, or do they get infinitely more from the interpretation (or at least the organization of information) that real-people advocates and experts provide?

As I write, it becomes clear that all the panelists have been thinking about this. "People care more about issues than they do about money and politics" in particular, Dan Newman of MAPLight is saying. So MAPLight is organized around those issues.

GovernmentDocs.org is not just offering virtual reams and reams of PDFs, but a really good interface to browse the important docs, and, even more brilliantly, a very simple "Reviewer's" interface that prompts anyone who offers to review with smart questions about each page and document that only a real person reading the page could answer. (We did similar chopping, indexing and OCR-ing when we set up the searchable database of torture documents released to the ACLU under FOIA.)

And Sarah Schacht explains how the newly-launched Knowledge As Power offers a function that will give readers an 8th Grade definition of any jargony legalistic word in a bill that they don't understand - because no one would.

It's exciting to see these groups and technologists using the net not just to get the raw information out into the sun, but to string the stakes for the vines, build the greenhouses and plow rows through it so that knowledge can grow from information and people can move through the field and pick fruit they can actually digest.

socksenfreude

People say that Hillary's troubles are due in part to Clinton fatigue. On Sunday Frank Rich noted how, in her Iowa concession speech, "Mrs. Clinton had her husband, the most tangible totem of her experience, standing right beside her, yet she didn’t mention him or so much as acknowledge him."

But what if it's more than fatigue? What if the country likes watching the Clintons in trouble? What if they're more satisfying to the electoral audience as an impending train wreck than as a second coming? They hope they're Mr. and Mrs. Bartlet (the Bartlets would hardly exist without them, after all), but they're really Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

Look at these photos from NYT and the NY Post. There's a glee to the Hillary Shakeuppary.

And it's not even partisan glee. And maybe not even a backlash against the Clintons' real or perceived arrogance. Maybe we just want to see anyone we associate with authority and notoriety squirm. Maybe that's what happens when the rich well-educated people who are supposed to protect you from hijackers, high gas prices and rising water let you down.