CivicActions

I was watching the nightly news tonight when I heard about this alarming story.

Apparently, Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff has a gut feeling that America might be attacked this summer.

On Tuesday, Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, told the editorial board of The Chicago Tribune that he had a “gut feeling” about a new period of increased risk. He said he based his assessment on patterns of terrorists in Europe and intelligence he would not disclose.

SaveTheInternet.com just launched another great video by Matt Thompson (a Web Of Change alumn). The last day for public comment on Net Neutrality is Monday, July 16th. So take a few minutes to take action and submit your comment to the FCC.

Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski is taking a week-long challenge to raise awareness about the difficulty of feeding a family on a food stamp budget.

From Yahoo News:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070425/ap_on_re_us/a_week_on_food_stamps

Stanford professor and copyright activist Lawrence Lessig, has formed a bipartisan alliance petition asking the Republican and Democratic National Committees "To Ensure All Presidential Debate Video Can Be Legally Put On Sites Like YouTube."

Specifically, it calls for the use of the "Creative Commons" license.

The petition was signed by the who's who of tech and politics, including Jimmy Wales, Craig Newmark, Eli Pariser, Markos Moulitsas, Arianna Huffington, Roger Hickey, Micah Sifry and many others.

Creative Commons is a proud client of CivicActions!

Here is a cute little video from one of my new favorite magazines, Good.

True Majority also has a nice Pie Chart on tax expenditures.

On saturday I attended RootsCampNYC, and unconference dedicated to debriefing on the elections with a decidedly technological flavor. I shot some video with a Samsung SC-210 digital video camera (that I am returning tomorrow because it doesn't play well with Mac despite what the box says.) The video above is a short interview with Sanford Dickert. I've got a few more videos up on YouTube.

Evolve Strategies has developed a Web-based “widget� to collect and report election incidents that may require voter protection intervention.

VoterStory.org is an open-source utility that can be placed on any website to feed data into a central database, which in turn alerts voter protection groups each time a new incident is reported in their district.

Rollingstone has an article on the 10 worst congressmen.

It is great that a music/culture magazine like RS has takes up some big political issues, and, especially before the election, takes the ink to highlight some of the worst folks out there. it would be better though if they actually directed their readers to ways they could get involved in defeating these hacks, or highlighted their alternatives.

Now on a technical front, it would be helpful to readers if they could search the 10 worst by state (at least) and send just a single profile to a friend (rather than the entire article). A TOC would also be a nice feature....

Today MAPLight.org unveiled a pioneering database that lays bare the connection between money and votes in California politics.

http://www.maplight.org

The MAPLight.org website combines information from the Official California Legislative Information website, which contains the official text of each bill and how each legislator voted, and the Institute on Money in State Politics, a national nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to accurate, comprehensive and unbiased documentation and research on campaign finance.

MAPLight.org allows journalists and citizens to answer questions such as: