Google Elections Video Search Gadget

It uses " speech recognition software to automatically produce rough transcripts of presidential campaign videos." You can get it here.

Using the gadget you can search not only the titles and descriptions of the videos, but also their spoken content. Additionally, since speech recognition tells us exactly when words are spoken in the video, you can jump right to the most relevant parts of the videos you find.

SearchEngineWatch.com says it "leaves a lot to be desired" because it only transcribes "fragmented snippets" of political speech. I searched for Kentucky and this is how it transcribed Hillary Clinton's speech the night Barack Obama clinched the nomination:

"sex is the media west Virginia and Kentucky why don't we go and."

I'd say that about sums up the campaign so far.

"Speechology. Political rhetoric examined."

 Speechology offers "User-powered analysis of political debates, speeches and campaign ads."

Speechology is an archive of videos that show politicians stumping for your vote. If a candidate or elected representative said it on TV, we want you to be able to find it on here.

But instead of just showing you the video, we invite you to do your own research and then tell the rest of us what you found. Speechology is a place that does not care what your political preferences are. We only care if you contribute good research. If you would like to argue over politics, go somewhere else. Here, we value facts.

Enhanced campaign finance maps from the FEC

The Federal Election Commission has improved its online maps showing contributions to presidential, House and Senate candidates. The FEC says "The latest changes make it easier to view contributions from individual states and to download this information into a spreadsheet." You can search data for the most recent reporting period by contributor name, employer, city and ZIP code and download the results of your search in spreadsheet-friendly formats and XML. "Additional map features include graphs and charts that summarize each candidate’s campaign finance information," the FEC says. "These displays ... can be used to compare each candidate’s cash-on-hand totals, receipts, disbursements and debt balance." Here's last month's press release.

[via ResourceShelf]

Watchdog.net

... aims to "build a hub for politics on the Internet."

Our plan has three parts:

Data: There's a lot of great information out there about politics – district demographics, votes, lobbying records, campaign finance reports – but unfortunately it's split across a dozen different web sites and often hidden behind confusing interfaces. We're pulling all of that together and letting you explore it in one elegant, unified interface. (Plus, we're sharing all the results so you can come up with new ways to explore it.)

Action: Just giving you information isn't enough. Unless you can do something about it, it's just going to get you down. So we're building a series of first-class tools for getting involved – ways to write and call your representatives, send letters to local media, and figure out who to vote for.

Causes: But politics isn't about people doing things in isolation; it's about coming together around shared causes. That's why we let you start your own causes and campaigns, invite your friends to join them, and let you learn about other causes that could use your help.

The site is just getting started so there's not a lot to see yet (" ... we're building this site right before your eyes. So expect things to break, fix, appear, and disappear before your very eyes"), but it's backed by a grant from the Sunlight Network and its founder is Aaaron Swartz, co-founder of Reddit and creator of theinfo.org, mentioned here previously.

Watchdog.net is soliciting help of all kinds and making its source code and data available to all.

First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton's Daily Schedules

... are now available online. As The New York Times reports, they were made available in response to a Freedom of Information request and a lawsuit. It will be interesting to see what the blathersphere makes of these. Unfortunately, not only are they PDFs, which makes extracting useful information difficult, but 4,746 of the pages have been censored. Says the Times:

The dry records carry all the emotional punch of a factory worker’s time card, showing where she was for much of her eight years in the White House but telling nothing about what she was saying, thinking or doing.

[via]

Congressional pay rates, 1789-2008

Via beSpacfic, a Congressional Research Service report (PDF) giving Congressional pay rates since 1789. But there's no attempt to adjust for inflation, so you can't make any judgments about how well compensated legislators are now versus then. It also explains how Congressional salaries are set. The current "payable salary" from the report: $169,300. Good work if you can get it.

Bill Moyers Journal: "Mr. Heath Goes to Washington"

Bill Moyers Journal profiles David Heath, a reporter for the Seattle Times who once worked at The Courier-Journal, and his year-long investigation of Congressional earmarks. The half-hour TV show chronicles how Heath and the Times, which has nine full-time investigative reporters and editors, built a database of Congressional earmarks and cross-matched them against campaign contributions to expose some outrageous examples of wasteful spending. You can read the series and look up earmarks in the database online. At one point, an intern for the Times who helped type data into the database, tells the TV show she learned that investigative reporting isn't glamorous, as you would think from tales of the exploits of Woodward and Bernstein, but "really tedious."

Planetizen: The Planning & Development Network

Planetizen "is a one-stop source for urban planning news, commentary, interviews, event coverage, book reviews, announcements, jobs, consultant listings, training, and more."

Planetizen is read by a diverse array of people interested in the built and natural environments, and their interaction. Planetizen's audience includes professional urban planners, developers, architects, policy makers, educators, economists, civic enthusiasts and others from across the United States and around the world.

Planetizen prides itself on covering a wide number of planning, design, and development issues, from transportation to global warming, architecture to infrastructure, housing and community development to historic preservation. We provide a forum for people across the political and ideological spectrum, ensuring a healthy debate on these and other important issues.

State Voter Registration Verification Web sites

The Department of Defense's Federal Voting Assistance Program maintains a list of State Voter Registration Web sites. Here's the direct link to Kentucky's and to Indiana's. With Kentucky's, if you have someone's first and last name and a date of birth, it will return their home address, their party affiliation, whether they're eligible to vote in the primary, their precinct and the state and federal legislative districts for their elected representatives.

Politweets

Politweets mines Twitter for tweets on the presidential race in real time.

U.S. Congress Money Race Widget

MAPLight.org now offers widgets that summarize fundraising for more than 1,500 congressional candidates across the U.S. You can easily embed the widgets in Web sites and blogs, picking and choosing the candidates to show.

Here's a widget showing Kentucky candidates:

There are also presidential widgets the non-profit released last summer.

Making money by data mining voters

James Verini of Vanity Fair writes about "Big Brother Inc.":

Knowing your business is big business for Aristotle Inc., whose Orwellian database of voter records has been an essential campaign tool for every president since Ronald Reagan. As the 2008 race heats up, the company’s shadowy founder, John Aristotle Phillips, unveils his most powerful personal-space invader yet.

I remember reading about Phillips during my days as an undergraduate at Boston University studying political science. Phillips won fame back then for drawing up plans to make a nuclear bomb while at Princeton and for nearly winning a race for Congress while in his early 20s.

The article notes that in 2003 he sued Kentucky for access to its voter list. The writer's point of view (or at least the editor's) is obvious from the title, "Big Brother Inc." and the use of words like "Orwellian" and "shadowy," but my thought throughout was: What's so wrong with making it easier for candidates to find like-minded voters? Isn't that the essence of democracy? For me, the article didn't make the case that this is a bad thing.

D.C. Librarians' Society Legislative Source Book

The Law Librarians' Society of Washington D.C. offers a detailed online Legislative Source Book.

Some of it is for members only, but free content includes:

1. Internet and Online Sources of U.S. Legislative and Regulatory Information (PDF)
2. Quick Links to House and Senate Committee Hearings and Other Publications
3. A Research Guide to the Federal Register and the Code of Federal Regulations
4. Selected Telephone Numbers and Web Sites With Useful Legislative Information
5. State Legislatures, State Laws and State Regulations: Web Site Links and Telephone Numbers

Using Google's Location Syntax for Election Information

... as explained by WRAL.com:

Google News, at http://news.google.com, looks very much like Google and works very much like Google. You enter a few keywords and get your search results. But Google News is different in that it has a few special search syntax that allow you to really narrow your search. One of the syntax is called location:. In this blog post I'm going to give you some pointers on using location: to get election information.

Punch Clock Map

Interesting:

Beginning in 2006, the Sunlight Foundation launched the Punch Clock Campaign, asking all candidates for congressional office - challengers and incumbents - to promise, if elected, to post their daily schedules on the Internet. Lawmakers who agree to share their schedules, including who they’ve met with and why, show that they are responsive, open, transparent and above all accountable, leading to greater public trust. ...

The Punch Clock Map is an extension of the Punch Clock Campaign. It provides a visual representation of the meetings detailed in each member's schedule, to make it easy for everyone to see whom lawmakers have met with and how they serve their district's needs. Each point on this map represents the home-base location of the person or organization with whom a member of Congress has met, not where the meeting took place. The site also provides a weekly updated RSS feeds of the schedules for each member.

Unfortunately, no Kentucky or Indiana lawmakers have taken the pledge. Guess that makes it unlikely we'll get them to Twitter non-stop anytime soon, either.

Tech Tools for Voters

Information Today's NewsBreaks gives a rundown of "Tech Tools for Voters":

Election 2008 has unleashed a whole new tool chest for the voting public to engage, discuss, and interact with presidential candidates and members of Congress. Do you want more, in-depth answers to complicated questions on healthcare, global warming, border security, or social security? Do you want detailed, articulate, thoughtful answers to these and other complex issues that will affect the entire country for generations to come? The issues are too complicated and too important to be boiled down to a 30-second sound bite. Recently, several groups have launched tools and widgets that can help the average voter ask questions of the candidates. ...

U.S. Government RSS Library

USA.gov has collected links to federal news and information feeds in the "U.S. Government RSS Library." These are feeds on business and economics, consumer issues, the military, education, the environment, family issues, health, law enforcement, science and more.

Bulk Access to Congressional Record, Federal Register and more

Tim O'Reilly reports that Carl Malamud, who is credited with shaming the SEC into making its files freely available on the Web, among other things, is now working to give bulk access to Government Printing Office data, which includes the Congressional Record, the Federal Register, presidential papers, Congressional bills, Congressional hearings and other government documents.

Federal election statistics, 1920-2006

... are available in PDF format from the Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives:

Since 1920, the Clerk of the House has collected and published the official vote counts for federal elections from the official sources among the various states and territories. These documents, out of print for many years, have been collected and scanned in a format to make them once again available to researchers and students.

GovernmentDocs.org: A FOIA'd document database

As of this writing this site hasn't even officially launched, but I love the concept:

The goal of the database is to create a central repository of government documents, promoting greater transparency into the inner-workings of our government.

Traditionally, government watchdog groups have either posted FOIA documents on their websites as unsearchable PDFs, or statically highlighted several pages within a document to bolster their findings. This has historically limited the public's access to FOIA documents, and minimizes the opportunities for use by researchers, journalists and citizen reviewers for further research and disclosures. Governmentdocs.org changes that:

• Each and every document goes through an optical character recognition (OCR) process, so that the text of each document is entirely searchable.

• A powerful search engine provides full-text searches and hit highlighting.

• Citizen reviewers can add information to each document page and highlight important findings, allowing for more robust and targeted searches.

• Every page of every document has its own unique URL so that documents can be linked, shared, or posted onto websites.

• The database is a coalition effort, so all of the organizations’ documents will be housed on governmentdocs.org and searches will work across collections.

The participating organizations are Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Project on Government Oversight, Public Citizen and the Sunlight Foundation.