Al Franken Senator US Senate Senator Al Franken was born on May 21, 1951, and grew up in St. Louis Park, Minnesota. He graduated from Harvard in 1973, where he met his wife Franni. They’ve been married for 33 years, and have two children: daughter Thomasin, 28, and son Joe, 24. Al spent the last 37 years as a comedy writer, author, and radio talk show host and has taken part in seven USO tours, visiting our troops overseas in Germany, Bosnia, Kosovo and Uzbekistan - as well as visiting Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kuwait four times. In 2008, Al was elected to the Senate as a member of the DFL (Democratic-Farmer-Labor) Party from Minnesota, and was sworn in July of 2009 following a statewide hand recount. He currently sits on the Health, Education, Labor, and Pension Committee; the Judiciary Committee; the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and the Committee on Indian Affairs. Al is a long-time advocate for affordable, accessible health care, an economy that works for our middle class, the protection of a secure retirement, the promise of a 21st century education for our kids, and the creation of a green economy that creates jobs and improves our environment.
dobata / collective / tags / politics
Tagged with “politics”
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An Open Internet: The Last, Best Hope for Independent Producers
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Andy Carvin and Twitter’s New Journalism
February 25, 2011 Twitter and Facebook have been conduits of information throughout the protests in the Arab world. But that news has been atomized, second by second accounts coming from hundreds of unknown sources. Into that relentless stream has stepped NPR’s Andy Carvin, who’s become a one-stop clearinghouse of news by vetting sources and trying to verify individual tweets. Carvin explains how Twitter’s political utility has also created a new kind of journalism.
Tagged with social media twitter facebook politics journalism
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Politics, Power, Cities: Enrique Peñalosa at the LSE
Enrique Peñalosa, former Mayor of Bogotá and one of the world’s most challenging urban thinkers, describes the urgent need for governments to create socially inclusive and well-designed transport systems, public spaces and cities. Addressing mobility, public space, equity, quality of life and social inclusion, Peñalosa will propose that inequality and exclusion are the main causes of the problems that affect cities in developing countries, particularly issues relating to mobility and sustainability. Enrique Peñalosa was mayor of Bogotá, 1998-2001, and now acts as a consultant on urban vision. His advisory work concentrates on sustainability, mobility, equity, public space and quality of life.
From http://www.lse.ac.uk/resources/podcasts/publicLecturesAndEvents.htm
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Scripting News: Dave Does Podcast!
Years ago I did my own called Morning Coffee Notes.
Today, I did a 1/2 hour podcast in the coffeenotes thread.
It’s about WikiLeaks, Wired, Salon and the freedom of the Internet.
New actors, same story!
From http://scripting.com/stories/2010/12/31/daveDoesPodcast.html
Tagged with dave winer wikileaks wired salon internet technology politics
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The Engage Show 19: Futurama with Special Guests JESS3
For our leadoff podcast of the new year, we invited our friends Jesse Thomas and Leslie Bradshaw from JESS3 on to discuss the big trends in tech in 2010 and ventured some predictions on the new innovations we’d see in 2011.
JESS3′s portfolio includes work for Facebook, Google, NASA, Nike, Samsung, and MTV. Follow them everywhere @JESS3 — starting on Facebook and Twitter.
Here are just a few of the stories we discussed in this free-flowing look into the future:
Vegas hotels using Twitter clout to decide who get rooms Where’s my flying car? The future that wasn’t. Feltron Annual Report Will self-driving cars revolutionize traffic?
Tagged with tech politics predictions trends
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Pentagon Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg: Julian Assange is Not a Terrorist
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will remain in a London prison until a British court takes up a Swedish request for extradition for questioning on sexual crime allegations. An international group of former intelligence officers and ex-government officials have released a statement in support of Assange. We speak to one of the signatories, Daniel Ellsberg, the famous whistleblower who leaked the Pentagon Papers about the Vietnam War in 1971. "If I released the Pentagon Papers today, the same rhetoric and the same calls would be made about me," Ellsberg says. "I would be called not only a traitor—which I was then, which was false and slanderous—but I would be called a terrorist… Assange and Bradley Manning are no more terrorists than I am."
From http://www.democracynow.org/2010/12/10/whistleblower_daniel_ellsberg_julian_assange_is
Tagged with wikileaks politics daniel ellsberg
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Keynote at the Coffee Party’s Mock Constitutional Convention
Lawrence Lessig:
25 September, 2010, Louisville, KY: Keynote given at the Coffee Party’s Conference, launching the "mock constitutional convention" that I hosted with Mark McKinnon. This extends the argument for Citizen Funded Elections, linking the movement to what I have elsewhere called "neo-progressives."
Tagged with politics book:author=lawrence lessig
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Niall Ferguson: Empires on the Edge of Chaos
The Centre for Independent Studies 2010 John Bonython Lecture with Niall Ferguson. Is the rise and fall of empires cyclical or arrhythmic? How does economic profligacy - whether the result of arrogance or naivety - contribute to the downfall of civilisations? Today Professor Ferguson will argue that great powers or empires are in the strict sense of the word, complex systems. Made up of very large numbers of interacting components that are quite asymmetrically organised. In other words, he continues, their construction more resembles a termite hill than an Egyptian pyramid. They operate somewhere between order and disorder. Moreover imperial falls are nearly always associated with fiscal crises, when there are dramatic imbalances between revenues and expenditures. Thus alarm bells should be ringing in Washington DC but what does that for mean for Australia?
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Reprieve: Clive Stafford Smith on Sir Peter Gibson bias
Clive Stafford Smith calls on Sir Peter Gibson to stand down as the lead judge on the UK torture inquiry, due to apparent bias.
From: http://www.reprieve.org.uk/2010_07_20_r4_torture_inquiry_call_for_gibson
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Clay Shirky at O’Reilly Media Gov 2.0 Summit
In 2009, Apps For Democracy invited people to freely create applications using raw data generated by the federal government. Within 30 days there were over 40 working applications produced, and Apps For Democracy continues to be a success. However the 2005 L.A. Times wikitorial regarding the War in Iraq ended up at the opposite extreme in less than 48 hours, as debates turned into "flame wars" and indecent disrespect.
Clay Shirky discusses the difference between these efforts to engage the public, and briefly unpacks three important points to keep in mind when attempting to harness collaborative participation: The nature of the "Contract with the Users"; the need to accomodate the unpredictability of the users; and the danger of "Heisenberg’s press release".
Shirky also weaves in an experiment by Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini published in The Journal of Legal Studies on how the absence of clarity or firmness of clarity affects users behavior.
From: http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail4411.html
Tagged with book:author=clay shirky politics government internet technology