A New Way // Journalism In The Public Interest > Keeping You Informed

A New Way to Keep an Eye on Who Represents You in Congress

by Derek Willis
ProPublica, April 28, 2016, 11:10 a.m.

Today ProPublica is launching a new interactive database that will help you keep track of the officials who represent you in Congress.
The project is the continuation of two projects I worked on at The New York Times — the first is the Inside Congress database, which we are taking over at ProPublica starting today.
But we also have big plans for it. While the original interactive database at The Times focused on bills and votes, our new project adds pages for each elected official, where you can find their latest votes, legislation they support and statistics about their voting. As we move forward we want to add much more data to help you understand how your elected officials represent you, the incentives that drive them and the issues they care about.

This isn’t the only congressional data site out there, and our goal is to send visitors to other sites that offer valuable features. That’s why we’re linking to individual lawmaker and bill pages on GovTrack and C-SPAN, for example. Like GovTrack, our news app will provide some calculated metrics that visitors can use to help learn more about their representatives. We also have vote cartograms that show not only how each lawmaker voted but the relative clout of delegations.
That’s where you come in - we’d like to know what kinds of congressional information would make it easier to hold Congress accountable for its actions (or inactions)? Would more comparisons between lawmakers’ votes and legislative proposals be helpful? We’re currently showing recent bills by subject, but are there other ways of organizing information about bills that would be useful? What do you want to know about the activities of Congress?
Please let us know — either in the comments below or by sending me an email at derek.willis@propublica.org.
Selected excerpts from this source: ProPublica

7.0 Quake/Solar Coronal Mass Ejection/CERN

Why all these earthquakes lately? .... changes in the magnetosphere creating hydroflares on the surface of The Sun.
Uploaded yesterday 28 April 2016.
Connects Our Planet Earth and the solar surface

New Series: Interactive Public Art #2

What do U see when you take a look at public art installations on the streets here DTMesa?
A monument to public education with mother and children or the spontaneous juxtaposition of a jarring image about the homeless?

Please take a closer look [image taken at sunrise just the other day]

New Series: Interactive Public Art in The New Urban DT Mesa: How Do U Do It?

Just can't pass up some "Tongue-in-Cheek" comments about different people's takes on the ongoing size-able inve$tment$ to promote an Arts-and-District district here . . . People are all over the place via social media.
Take this image for example .... dudes just wanna have fun!

The AZ GOP Sideshow Comes To Town Today: 58 State Delegates Up For Grabs

The Republican Party State Convention, taking place today and tomorrow, April 30, 2016 at the Mesa Convention Center is where the state delegates elected by the PCs* assemble to elect 55 delegates to be sent to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in July, where the Republican Nominee for President is selected.
Is this selection process going to get complicated? There is so much at stake - Arizona's 58 RNC Convention delegates could be 'the tipping-point" in the first round ballot to win a minimum of 1,237 votes for the GOP President nomination. Is it going to be ugly? 
On March 22nd, 286,743 Arizona voters cast their ballots for Donald Trump to be the Republican Party presidential nominee.  Ted Cruz got 172,294 votes - fewer votes than Bernie Sanders - in a state that is supposed to be conservative.According to the rules Trump needs 1,237 delegates to win the nomination at the Republican Party National Convention in Cleveland.  
According to the rules, his overwhelming Arizona victory means that all 58 Arizona GOP delegates are required to vote for Mr. Trump on the first round of voting but not any possible subsequent rounds.
* Republican Precinct Committeemen (PCs) are elected by Republican voters in each of Arizona’s nearly 1,500 voting precincts statewide.
PCs have gathered each month to conduct party business, and state law permits them to vote by proxy if  unable to attend a particular meeting. PCs can provide a signed, witnessed (or notarized) proxy form to a trusted Republican from their precinct who is attending the meeting, and who may cast their vote for them. The practice assures each and every PC can vote on party business, even if unable to physically attend the meeting.
[ In typical party meetings about half the votes are cast by proxy. For example at  a meeting in February of Maricopa County Republican PC’s chaired by Tyler Boyer there were 1,006 present at the meeting and an additional 989 who voted by a proxy given to another member. ]

 

Media Summit In Phoenix Today: Prevalent + Emerging Issues in The Four Corners

PHOENIX – UNITY: Journalists for Diversity in partnership with the Native American Journalists Association (NAJA) is presenting today 29 April an exciting media summit in Phoenix at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication on April 29.
Join UNITY for an exciting two days in one of the country’s most diverse cities!
ABOUT UNITY > UNITY Journalists for Diversity is a strategic alliance that:
Advocates fair and accurate coverage about diversity — especially race, nationality, ethnicity, gender identity and sexual orientation.
Aggressively challenges that industry to staff its organizations at all levels to reflect the country’s diversity.
The UNITY board is made up of representatives from the Asian American Journalists Association, the Native American Journalists Association, and NLGJA: The Association of LGBT Journalists.
The regional event titled “Stories from the Four Corners: Empowering the Southwestern Perspective” on April 29, 2016, will bring journalists from around the country to Arizona State University for an event centered on prevalent and emerging issues within the Southwest.
Workshops will include education, immigration, law enforcement, public records, community outreach and entrepreneurial journalism.
Scheduled speakers include
Fernanda Santos, Phoenix correspondent from The New York Times
Felicia Fonseca, Flagstaff correspondent from The Associated Press
Nigel Duara, Tucson correspondent from The Los Angeles Time;
Astrid Galvan, Tucson correspondent from The Associated Press
Cynthia Zwick, AZ Community Action Association
Alia Beard Rau, Arizona Republic
Hector Rodriguez from Rio Bravo Comics.

New Book Out By Leader of DiEM2025: Europe's Crisis + America's Economic Future

Ya know, and let's get serious here dear readers, what we like about Bernie Sanders is his loud echo for what's going on all over world.
We are being distracted by mainstream media who are sideshows of the P.T. Barnum of American Politics who brings the circus every where in the extreme he goes - Donald Trump.
The "reality show" in the 2016 Presidential Election campaign every day is hyped-up, ratings-driven entertainment filled with 20-second sound bytes, "see all you need to know in three minutes", and then the warm-and-fuzzy and Aw! Stuff with cute animals, then "good news" and - whoops!! ....threatening extreme weather, millions in the line of storms and more on the way while we ignore, or get even know about - global and international finances

For those with short attention spans you can watch an interview on Democracy Now  

The crisis in Europe is not over - it's getting worse.
In this dramatic narrative of Europe's economic rise and spectacular fall, Yanis Varoufakis, former finance minister of Greece and 'the emerging rock-star of Europe's anti-austerity uprising' (Telegraph), shows that the origins of the recent collapse go far deeper than our leaders are prepared to admit - and that we have done nothing so far to fix them.
In 2008, the universe of Western finance outgrew planet Earth.
When Wall Street imploded, a death embrace between insolvent banks and bankrupt states consumed Europe. Half a dozen national economies imploded and several more came close. But the storm is far from over...

From the aftermath of the Second World War to the present, Varoufakis recounts how the Eurozone emerged not as route to shared prosperity but as a pyramid scheme of debt with countries such as Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain at its bottom.
Its woeful design ensured that collapse would be inevitable and catastrophic. But since the hurricane landed Europe's leaders have chosen a cocktail of more debt and harsh austerity rather than reform, ensuring that the weakest citizens of the weakest nations pay the price for the bankers' mistakes, while doing nothing to prevent the next collapse.
Instead, the principle of the greatest austerity for those suffering the greatest recessions has led to a resurgence of racist extremism.
Once more, Europe is a potent threat to global stability.
Drawing on the personal experience of his own negotiations with the Eurozone's financiers and offering concrete policies and alternatives, Varoufakis shows how we concocted this mess and how we can get out of it.
And "The Weak Suffer What They Must? reminds us of our history in order to save European capitalism from itself.

Publisher: Vintage Publishing
ISBN: 9781847924032

Source  >> Waterstones