Yule Heibel's Bookmarks tagged politics →  View Popular

Existing online platforms share data about the more powerful elected officials, such as federal and state lawmakers. Congresspedia allows wiki-style editing of pages about members of Congress, while OpenCongress allows several ways for users to interact, including writing blog posts about specific bills.

And for detailed information about lobbyist activity and campaign contributions, there are sites that track such spending, including one for members of Congress and another covering major state elected officials. Such databases attempt to better organize information that is already available for public scrutiny but is cumbersome to obtain.

When people like Colin Powell say Mr. Obama is a “transformational figure,” they’re suggesting that an Obama administration can somehow heal the deep divisions within the American electorate and move the country forward, the way Franklin D. Roosevelt did during the Great Depression. And certainly projected Democratic majorities in Congress make that kind of transformation appear plausible.

<!-- end #inTP -->I wish that would happen. But I doubt it will, and the reason is simple: The divisions run too deep. The realignment that propelled and kept FDR in office is not happening today. American politics is distinguished today by shifting electoral coalitions, candidate-centered elections, and what some political scientists call de-alignment. America isn’t just suffering from political polarization, but a burgeoning economic divide and class war.

Republican strategists have exploited this shift to their party’s advantage, beginning with the ever-prescient Kevin Phillips’s identification of the “silent majority” of white working-class voters in 1968.

The rise of the creative economy generated a shift in social values. Tolerance, diversity, and self-expression became prized. Diversity and self-expression became necessary for the creative economy to flourish and function.

As it grew and became more concentrated in locations such as San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Boston, and Washington D.C. - what we now know as blue America - the working class fell further and further behind. Globalization shipped jobs overseas, while institutional supports that led to higher working-class incomes during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s - powerful U.S. companies and powerful unions - were simultaneously being undercut. The great genius of former Bush political strategist Karl Rove was to seize upon the church as the one remaining constant in the lives of working Americans and to use it to his political organizational advantage.

Pluralism may be Canada's new reality, entirely appropriate in a country that grows ever more urban and diverse. Diversity, of course, is shorthand for racial variety, simple ethnicity, multiculturalism, but it goes beyond that.

At the same time, traditional political distinctions – Conservative and Liberal, right and left – are less helpful today. Indeed, they have become obstacles. And though we cling desperately to outdated national myths, this is already the most urban century the world, let alone Canada, has ever seen.

The messy outcome of the federal election reflected the form of urban reality, but not its substance. As always, our system favoured rural over city voters.

There's no reason to believe this will change any time soon; Canadians have grown accustomed to federal governments that play little or no role in urban life, other than to set tax rates.

We talk about economic turmoil and taxes without articulating an idea of what we want Canada to be. Our political system has never seemed so out of touch, so unable to cope.

Undervalued and overwhelmed, Canada's cities, where the vast majority of us live, are fighting to remain competitive, but it grows harder and harder. National housing, transit and infrastructure programs are conspicuous in their absence.

In our coverage of the Idaho and Washington state caucuses, there emerged a lean toward Obama in my students’ writing about the Democratic contest. This pro-Obama frame occurred for three reasons:

• Because some of the students have serious political crushes on him, even though they’ve tried to keep all this in check. He inspires them — and I haven’t sought to squelch this, being a prof interested in helping students become citizens.
• Because the class is set up as a blogging class, in which politics meets alternative journalism. So their opinion shines through in places, and this was fine as long as they didn’t cross over into fan mail.
• Because the Obama campaign treated us like pros — they called us back within minutes, set up interviews, got us press passes, went out of their way to make the campaign accessible. The Clinton campaign, in contrast, didn’t return a single phone call, didn’t provide press access, and did virtually nothing to encourage our coverage. It was either arrogance or disorganization on the Clinton campaign’s part.

When my students had trouble reaching the Clinton campaign in the run-up to the caucuses, I made a call to her national office. I figured that maybe they’d respond to a UW professor better than a student — which would be an error on their part, but still one that we might use to help our coverage. I told them we were having trouble reaching people — anyone — on the ground in Washington state with the Clinton campaign, and I implored them to make sure my request on behalf of my students for press access to Clinton’s event in Seattle received a response. They assured me I’d hear from them. I emphasized my point a second time. They kindly repeated that I would certainly hear from people on the ground here.

I’m still waiting for that call.

It seems that the take-home point here is this: The Clinton campaign has made the case that Obama is nothing but rhetoric; he’s supposedly all words, while she’s all action. Our experiences showed us that their campaigns — at least in Seattle — were exactly the opposite. In their treatment of my students, Clinton’s campaign was all talk, while Obama’s was all walk.

It suggests to me that the Obama campaign’s appeal to younger people is not just because of Obama himself. It’s a campaign that treats young people like full adults. And across Washington state, Obama crushed Clinton, defeating her in every county in the state. It’s been a pattern repeated in every contest since.

With a few exceptions, no one on council has started to think about Toronto as a whole. The system discourages that at the best of times, never more so than now. The result has been a sharp drop in civic self-confidence; a growing sense Toronto has entered a downward spiral. The blame extends well beyond city hall, but the low level of debate, divisiveness, bitterness and triviality of council meetings has led to feeling that we're no longer able to deal with the problems we face.

The psychology of amalgamation hasn't created more solidarity between neighbourhoods, but a masochistic, let's-hate-Toronto attitude. But Toronto is us, and we are Toronto. In the decade since amalgamation, we have become our own worst enemy.

The hope is the winning city can be named within the next eight or nine months, with construction of gallery completed by 2011 or 2012 - a decade after the Liberal government of Jean Chrétien first announced it would build the gallery in the reconstituted 1932 Beaux Arts-style building on Wellington. The original construction cost for the refurbishment was $22-million, but by spring, 2006, the overall cost had risen to $45-million, which includes an estimated $11-million that has already spent on design, site preparation and management fees.

Last fall, numerous media reports indicated the Tories had killed the project. However, nothing official was declared and the resultant vacuum was filled with reports that the minority Harper government was considering establishing the gallery as, variously, an online museum, a touring showcase and, finally, as a permanent fixture in the huge EnCana Centre now under construction in downtown Calgary. (The portrait gallery is currently overseen by Library and Archives Canada, a Crown corporation, and its collection stored in a climate-controlled vault in Gatineau, Que.)

Nine cities are invited to compete for the prize of securing the portrait gallery. Toronto is on the list, along with Halifax, Quebec City, Ottawa-Gatineau, Montreal, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Calgary and Vancouver. The catch: this will be a private/public partnership.

Translation: someone in the lucky city that wins gets to pay the bills so that Stephen Harper's government won't have to.

The federal government wants nine cities across Canada to compete for the right to host the national portrait gallery originally slated to open in Ottawa.

"Our government has set forth the notion that national cultural institutions do not necessarily have to be located in the national capital," said Heritage Minister Josée Verner at a news conference Friday announcing what she called "a bold and innovative step."

As for the politics of possibility, Nordhaus and Shellenberger make a case for a massive governmental program in developing cheap, clean energy, as the Defense Department did with microchips or jetliners. It won't happen in the private sector alone, since they "rarely initiate technological revolutions," and there is actually very little innovation going on in the energy sector today. By contrast, when the Pentagon in the 1960s effectively guaranteed the market for microchips, it touched off a revolution that drove down the costs and spread the technology to many sectors of the economy. "An investment of roughly $200 billion would bring the price of solar energy down to that of coal," they estimate.

The authors adopt a politics of hope, rather than fear. "Cautionary tales and narratives of eco-apocalypse tend to provoke fatalism, conservatism, and survivalism among voters -- not the rational embrace of environmental policies," they contend. "Young and grassroots environmentalists are more inspired by the vision of creating a new energy economy than regulating the old one." Got that Al Gore?