Transcript.Gov parallel to Data.Gov. What have our leaders been saying? 

Data.Gov shows is an invaluable tool detailing laws, regulations, studies and spending. But, when we as voters are deliberating whether to reward our leaders with another term or to throw the rascals out, we need to know what they promised and how these promises were either fulfilled, forgotten or “fine tuned” over time.

A comprehensive clearinghouse of transcripts of campaign pledges, floor speeches, press conferences, interviews, depositions and hearings, parallel to Data.Gov, would allow us to quickly and easily check the integrity of our public servants.

With the press pathologically preoccupied with late-breaking news and devoting astonishingly scant resources to in-depth, historical analysis, such a resource could help give us an empirical perspective on how our politicians are doing. A comprehensive analysis could point out trends and conflicts in the data which might be obscured in the cacophony of scattered snippets currently available.

Perhaps a Wikipedia type web site could be setup to consolidate this information for at least the most high-profile actors in the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives. The peer review and fact checking available on a user-editable site would ensure complete and factual content. It could be indexed and searchable by person, date, venue and keyword to make it as accessible as possible.

Weaseling political opportunists would probably prefer to keep us focused on what they said today hoping that memories of previous promises would soon fade. Could we trust those currently in power to disseminate the data in a timely manner or would they simply hold hearings, conduct studies and establish blue ribbon panels which would drag on until they were out of office?

Would it be better to have an organization, independent of government, carry out the research and post the findings before the next election cycle? If we could find a few hundred dedicated archivists to each research and document one Executive, Senate or House bigwig, we could have an effective system online in a few weeks. I'll take Evergreen.

Let's have a good look at the whole, historical picture before we send the next bunch to Washington.

BrianP
Austin, TX USA

Legalize Marijuana? And what about the Children? 

One of the reasons opponents of marijuana legalization state most often is that legalization would make it more accessible to our children. I believe they are 180 degrees off on this point.

In the current situation, there are tens of thousands (millions?) of pushers who make their living selling grass to both children and adults. If ganja were treated exactly like alcohol and tobacco, the financial incentive to sell it would be taken away. When was the last time you were approached by a moon-shiner offering to sell you some “rhumatis medicine”?

The taxes generated on alcohol sales in the US in 2006 were $5.4 billion [1]. In an ABC News report, they estimated that the value of marijuana produced in this country in 2006 at almost $40 billion. A 10% tax would generate $4 billion each year. [2]

If even a tiny fraction of the tax were spent on drug eduction and treatment, it would almost certainly have a far greater effect on keeping our kids off of cannabis, out of the criminal justice system and in school.

We could possibly save as much as $10 billion each year in law enforcement costs if they quit checking ash trays for roaches and spent more time tracking down murders. Since 1992, there have been roughly 6 million persons arrested for marijuana crimes, 87% for simple possession. How many billions are we spending each year to have the police chase potheads, have the courts try them and have the prisons house them? [3]

Estimates are that 100,000 deaths per year are due to the effects of alcohol, 17,602 due to drunk driving crashes in 2006, 60% of homicides, 40% of accidental deaths and huge numbers of health related deaths. [4] Cancer.org reports that tobacco is responsible for 1 in 5 deaths and is the leading, preventable cause of premature deaths. [5] The US Surgeon General warns about marijuana effects on “perception and skilled performance” but fails to give any estimate of the death toll. [6] In contrast they list 443,000 deaths from tobacco. [7] If people were dropping dead by the dozen from pot, they would be screaming about it.

How big a bite would be taken out of organized crime's profits if one of their largest income streams were suddenly truncated? How many little kids are told each year that their parent won't be home for 10 years because the cops found pot plants growing in the garden?

Isn't it time we stopped squandering untold billions on cops, courts and prisons, failing to scoop up billions in tax revenues and ruining millions of lives by enforcing laws even more stupid than the 1919 prohibition on alcohol?

My $0.02,
BrianP


[1]: www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Docid=399
[2]: abcnews.go.com/business/story?id=2735017&page=1
[3]: skeptically.org/recdrugs/id8.html
[4]: wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_alcohol_related_deaths_occur_each_year
[5]: www.cancer.org/docroot/PED/content/PED_10_2X_Cigarette_Smoking.asp?sitearea=PED
[6]: www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00001143.htm
[7]: www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/publications/aag/osh.htm

Clamp down on frivolous lawsuits and disbar repeat offenders.  

Health care costs are sky-rocketing in large part due to frivolous lawsuits. Doctors are practicing “defensive medicine” as a result, costing billions every year. Businesses often settle completely bogus cases due the the crippling costs of litigation.

Tort litigation in America costs almost $1000 per person, vastly higher than any other developed country. It's a lawyer's lottery. Even if they loose, they are only out their time and everybody else pays. Lawyers siphon off almost as much as the injured parties are paid in damages. A nearly 50:50 split between lawyers and victims is both unfair and unaffordable.

In most of the rest of the world, the loser pays all legal expenses. The litigation costs in France and the UK are a third of what they are here. Look for lawyers in the business of filing frivolous suits and disbar them. Instituting a “loser pays” system like the rest of the civilized world has would stop the vast majority of these senseless suits almost overnight.

We all know that trial lawyers are consistently one of the largest groups of contributors to Democrats so this will not be easy for a Democratic administration. If it were easy, somebody would have already done it.

Fix this web site width to make information more easily available. 

Hi,
I use Firefox, not evilnet so please test on it. These pages are hard wired at 3 feet across with tiny fonts. When I make the fonts readable, I have to scroll 3 times to read one line. This is not efficient. On a small monitor, this would pose a severe usability restraint.

In the page rendering html, use '%' as the size units to adjust the content to the page. The 'px' unit assumes you know how large people's monitors and windows are and gives you an absolute number of pixels. It seems to be set to ~5000 pixels and nobody has a monitor that big.