Politics & Communication with Joshua Gee

I don’t really have much to add to the debate surrounding Sotomayer. I can hit the high points very quickly: She seems eminently qualified, not quite as liberal as I would like and the right really doesn’t have any cards except for the race card. It also seems to me, after watching Senator Sessions equivocate over racism and the filibuster on Meet the Press, that Sotomayor’s nomination won’t be all that contentious. 

What I can add to the debate is an encyclopedic knowledge of The West Wing. I am increasingly comforted by how reality seems to be bending to become more Sorkin-like. First President Obama names Josh Lyman to be his Chief of Staff, now this:

Fans of the show will remember that during the first season President Barlet nominated Judge Roberto Mendoza to replace retiring Justice Joseph Crouch. Mendoza, also a Hispanic from New York, didn’t have the same educational credentials as Judge Sotomayor he had a more compelling life story. 

There was one nomination-crippling issue for Judge Mendoza. During the nomination process he was arrested (falsely) for drunken driving while on vacation with his family. However, White House aides were able to cover up the arrest before it became public. Mendoza was confirmed and President Bartlett considers the appointment one of his proudest accomplishments while in office. So don’t be confused if you see David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs in a rented van on the Merritt Parkway, they are there on business. 

Editors Note: Hardcore fans of the show will remember that President Barlet also successfully appointed a woman to the Supreme Court. During season five, in an episode called The Supremes, he nominated both the ultra-liberal Glenn Close and the ultra-conservative Guy from “Invasion” as part of a deal with Republican Senators. Apparently the nominations went flawlessly as they were never mentioned again. I thought this device and episode were stupid so I have decided they are not canon.

David Carr has an article today’s New York Time analyzing Newsweek’s redesign. My Dad, because he is old and gets up early like a freak, has already written a great summary for the laymen:

As become customary for Big Media reporters, Carr said the problem with the re-design is that it doesn’t account for the Internet, which has made the newsweekly obsolete, along with the newspaper, and for all I know, the filling station.

Big Media look out for each other. Carr felt obliged to write his real message between the lines of his article. Any alert or even one-third alert reader got Carr’s subtext, namely, “this product is Christ-awful and Meacham is the champion ass of journalism.” 

During the article Carr holds The Economist up as the holy grail of weekly newsmagazines and print journalism in general. It is one of the few dead tree outlets that is booming. Carr mentions the image-concious nature of Economist readers while my Dad argues that the Economist is simply a great magazine that dares to be worth the money you pay for it. I side with pops on this one. 

What’s next for Newsweek? Find out after the jump. 

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Yesterday, the Obama administration took a big step forward on transparency by launching Data.gov. This has been something the Obama administration has been talking about for a while and it is nice to see that they could bring it to fruition so quickly. Obama’s Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra outlines his hopes for Data.gov in a short video posted to the Open Government Initiative’s Youtube Channel:

Overall, I think the site is a solid start but could use some improvements. I don’t really know enough about programming to know whether or not the data is in enough modern developer-friendly formats, but since I haven’t heard much outcry I am going to assume it is. One criticism I had was that after a good 20 minutes of searching, I didn’t find many useful data sets. That isn’t entirely true, I found some staggeringly useful data from the Department of Transportation on Airline On-Time Performance and Causes of Flight Delays. However, a lot of the sets I found didn’t strike me as particularly illuminating of the American experience. This could mean I am too slow to use the site correctly (a distinct possibility) but I think it just means that they have some work to do populating the site. However, people who know more about policy and data management can probably do amazing things with the lists that I shrugged off as unhelpful – the exact reason a site like this is so important.

The site has a small number of social features (you can comment on the data and suggest new data sets) but I think this Data.gov could really benefit from an attached blog. It would help make the data feel less impersonal and could serve to explain some of the more complex aspects of the site (like all of it) in layman’s terms. Additionally, a blog would be a way to highlight cool apps as they are developed, highlight new data sets as they are added and be a place where the White House could engage directly with the developer community. They might try to run some of that functionality through the Open Government Blog, but it doesn’t seem like they are or that it would be a good fit.

What makes me really excited is that the site has already spawned initiatives like this. The Sunlight Foundation is launching Apps for America 2: The Data.gov Challenge, a $10,000 contest to design “compelling applications that provide easy access and understanding for the public, while also showing how open data can save the government tens of millions of dollars by engaging the development community in application development at far cheaper rates than traditional government contractors.” Ever since reading Wikinomics, I have been dreaming of the government creating projects like this. Even cooler would be if the administration began offering contracts for data analysis in more of a contest format – thought that is probably illegal or something. Whatever, big companies get paid a lot for government data analysis and don’t always do a good job. Beyond just offering the data, this could introduce some open competition into that arena.

Even though Data.gov could use a little more time to develop, it is a huge step forward and my favorite kind of initiative: the kind that combines good policy with good PR.

• via Techpresident, which for some unfathomable reason (laziness) is not on my listed blogroll. I will correct that as soon as this is posted.

Going to see Hodgman speak tonight. While I am gone enjoy these various things that happened on the internet.

• So little time, so many great books on politics to read.
• Great blog post on a conference I am sorry I missed.
• Matt Yglesias loves to blame institutions. He is frequently right. This is one of those times. And he has a plan.
• This post on social media monitoring is the most useful post I have read all day. That is probably a bad thing.

While not scientific in any way, this is a pretty awesome graph about the life of a trending topic (click to enlarge). With so much of the conversation being meta, I wish there was a way to know how much baseline perception can be affected by a trending topic. For example, after checking out the current trending topics I now know who Adam Lambert is and that Prime Minister’s Questions is going on (and has its own hashtag!). Are those things irrelevant to me? Not really, but I am much more aware of them than I was before.

Since I am trying to get back into blogging but also trying to be more efficient at work, here is a quick rundown of what I don’t have time to write about.

• The above logo is Blackwater’s attempt at rebranding. Apparently they are transitioning from the mercenary business and focusing more on their copier division. I just want to know if the subpoenas will still have the bear claw.
• Political TV commercial production and ad buying for dummies.
• Time’s feature on “Why The Taliban is Winning the Propaganda War.” I would like to see a little more nuance on the Afghan media landscape and more details about what the Afghan government’s communications apparatus looks like. But then again, I am a nerd.