grade gov

grade gov

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President Barack Obama marked his 100th day in office Wednesday with a primetime news conference in which he told the American people he was pleased but not satisfied with the progress of the nation's economy, and twice advised citizens to wash their hands and cover their mouths when they cough to prevent the spread of pandemic flu.

"I think we're off to a good start, but it's just a start," Obama said of his three-month-old administration. "I'm proud of what we've achieved, but I'm not content. I'm pleased with our progress, but I'm not satisfied."

Obama was asked about the future of the U.S. auto industry, the safety of nuclear weapons in Pakistan, the political significance of Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter becoming a Democrat, what kind of shareholder the government will be and whether the Bush administration tortured detainees.

The president paused and sighed before answering that the methods used against detainees were torture and the information gained by such methods could have been collected other ways. He said he was "very comfortable" with his decision to ban interrogation methods he considers torture.

Concessions from auto workers and creditors have allowed Chrysler to likely avoid bankruptcy and merge with Fiat, Obama said. General Motors has "a lot of good product" and can still emerge a strong and competitive company, he said.

At several points during the news conference, he said he did not wish to run private industries and would prefer a "slimmer portfolio" of tasks.

"I don't want to run auto companies," Obama said. "I've got two wars I've got to run already."

He expressed concern about the stability of Pakistan, but said he believed nuclear weapons were safe.

Obama began his 100th day by welcoming Specter to the Democratic party. He said he does not expect Specter "to be a rubber stamp." The president then delivered an optimistic assessment at a town hall meeting outside of St. Louis, Mo., a battleground state he lost by fewer than 4,000 votes.

"On my 100th day in office, I've come back to report to you, the American people, that we have begun to pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off," he said.

Later, his administration encouraged schools with cases of swine flu to close temporarily to contain the outbreak.

Another story line of the day had lawmakers, news organizations and interest groups assigning grades to the president's performance thus far.

gradegov.com

gradegov.com

This is the hottest news coming right now read below to get more info.

Politico’s Victoria McGrane wrote a piece that got my attention about a new Web site that might help congressional lawmakers stay in touch with their constitutents. The site, GradeGov.com, is still in production, but is supposed to launch next week. It has as its motto: “They work for you. Remind them.” The site’s goal is to give average Americans a means through which they can have their views reach lawmakers without going through the filter of newspapers, pundits, pollsters or paid staff. This sounds all well and good.

GradeGov.com will be designed to allow users to grade individual congressional lawmakers’ performance, write letters and read others, and help users find and follow lawmakers. The site will require users to log in and provide their ZIP code, among other information, so lawmakers can tell where the users that has graded them lives (i.e., whether they are a constituent or not).

After reading McGrane’s article, several of us here at Sunlight put our heads together in order to suggest what we hope is helpful advice. Here are some of our thoughts and questions:

As the article says, the site’s target community is “average voters” with an overall “nonpartisan” bent. With the outliers of obviously corrupt/incompetent lawmakers aside, there is no consensus in American politics of how to rate politicians. For aggregate evaluation to succeed, there must be some general idea of what “good” and “bad” are.

The site will require users to log in and provide their ZIP code, among other information, so lawmakers can tell when a grade comes from one of their own constituents. How is the site going to verify that a voter lives in a particular district?

McGrane writes that one of the GradeGov.com’s goals will be to help solve the problem of constituent voices being drowned out by countless polls. How can this be accomplished by adding another poll? At best it’ll be briefly embraced for its novelty, then eventually consigned to the same level of attention given to other forms of constituent communication. It sounds to us to be destined to be an unscientific poll over sampling the demographics that use the Internet most heavily. We already have quite a few of those.

The in district/out of district ratings idea is interesting, but the political science result that people love their representatives and hate everyone else’s is sufficiently strong that we’d be surprised to see much deviation from it for legislators who aren’t already indicted.

In some ways it sounds as if Gradegov.com will have a lot of overlap with what OpenCongress already is doing, such as gathering ZIP codes during registration and displaying the average rating from all OpenCongress users on each individual lawmaker’s page. OpenCongress also provides some district-specific information, including how constituents rate a member.

With all this said, I’ll look forward to seeing the GradeGov.com in action.