Eminem's Anger.....Powerful

Just ame back from one of our twice-weekly West Wing lunches at work where we previewed the new anti-Bush Eminem video for "Mosh". I was incredibly impressed with how intelligently anti-Bush it was as well as how powerful. I was actually moved and I'm not remotely a fan.

Instead of focusing on the usual "Bush is stupid", "Bush can't talk pretty", or "Bush is a former drunk and druggie" it focused on tax cuts hurting middle-class America and the war in Iraq. There was some conspiracy theorist notions but he portrayed them as such.

Go watch it....a lot....and spread the word.

Stewart is the MAN for the PEOPLE

This is cruising around the Internets at light speed but it's worth it for once. Jon Stewart appeared on CNN's Crossfire and skewered its hosts for hurting the American people by being partisan hacks rather than bringing legitimate, honest debate to the political process. Love it, laughed at it, need more of it.

• Metafilter
• Daily Kos
• Fark
• Video: iFilm

Be an Election Monitor - Or Help One

I stumbled across this via a mailing list I'm on. I'm very happy to see that People for the American Way have set up an Election protection group to monitor elections and have volunteers at major urban polling areas to educate people of their rights.

Someone should send this to the UN and other Human Rights NGOs as well as foreign organizations and citizens who want to see a more fair US election. This may be one way for them to participate in the political process even if they cannot vote. I hope someone also tells the National Lawyers Guild groups that were at the DNC & RNC. They will also be useful in this respect.

Spread the Word.

FOAF, Politics and RDF

During lunch the past couple of days, I've been working on a way for people to define their political views in a FOAF file or any RDF for that matter. As a result of my first attempt, I've realize that we first need a way to define a series of political districts in which voting for an elected official takes place. I think I've captured that with the below bit of code.

The <Region> tag is the parent for defining all the various <locale>s in which voting takes place for a person. You define the localetype - which is just the name for the voting region - the proper name for the locale via <localename> and the various <localepositions> via individual <localeposition> entries. Finally, you define what hierarchial order the locale appears in the governmental structure via the <regionorder> tag. Most of what you see below is logical however despite that the Massachusetts Representative Districts can sometimes include a single city, most voting districts span cross-county hence why I've listed the "District" localetype above the "County" localetype.

Once I defined my various voting regions, I created an election instance using dc:date, and started laying out each individual <Vote> by pairing the localeposition with details of the candidate. I need to come up with a better way to identify an individual candidate because I'm not sure foaf:mbox would work. For cases where I was undecided, I created a <votestatus> tag that defined as such.

Ideally, my political voting region vocabulary could become generalized for the world and voting informational sites would generate PoliticsRDF data for people to stick in their FOAF files. If people didn't want to idenfity their votes until they've voted, a <Vote> item could be converted to something along the lines of CurrentlySupporting in case ones views change overtime.

Unfortunately, I haven't created any sort of RDF schemas so I could use some assistance in making this a reality. I don't even know if I have the proper triples setup. Once that is done, we can add tags to define a particular political view and attach a "status" with regard to that view such as "for" or "against".

Comments are welcome - please help me enhance and internationalize this. I think it would be a fascinating way to constantly take polls and the like.

Continue reading "FOAF, Politics and RDF"