Obama’s comedy routine at the White house Corrrespondents’ Dinner was both funnier and edgier than I would have expected. Oh, some jokes were pure Johnny Carson, (“How about that Joe Biden? I wouldn’t say he’s talkative, but he’s personally responsible for the Amtrak Quiet Car now having armed conductors. Heyo!”), but some had real bite. Fun.

Wanda Sykes was funny, too, although she did go over the line a couple of times, imo. The Limbaugh jokes in particular were just mean. But I’d rather have the institutionalized dinner go over the line than say so far below it. (See here, starting 2 minutes in. And watch the audience cutaways.)

The whole ritual is as close as we get to giving our president a court jester to keep him humble. But the expectation that the president is going to do stand-up, well, it’s a tad bizarre. And I like it.

[Tags: obama wand_sykes roasts humor comedy ]

2 Comments »

Adrienne Redd uses her research into the expectations of nation-states since WWII to analyze the language in Obama’s town hall talk in Strasbourg a couple of weeks ago. She finds evidence of an understanding that the fate of sovereign nations are nonetheless intertwined…

[Tags: obama nations politics globalism adrienne_redd ]

Be the first to comment »

Tim O’Reilly explains why we should be excited by Obama’s choice of Aneesh Chopra as national CTO. Tim makes a compelling case.

I’m excited.

[Tags: aneesh_chopra obama cto federal_cto e-gov egovernment egov ]

1 Comment »

James Fallows has an insightful analysis of a seemingly simple answer Obama gave to a question about American exceptionalism. And in it, you can see the workings of Fallows’ writerly mind.

[Tags: obama exceptionalism james_fallows ]

2 Comments »

A: When you get 104,003 questions for the President.

I applaud the Obama administration for soliciting online questions for the President’s online town hall. And they let us all see the questions that our fellow citizens (of the US and the world) were submitting. Excellent!

But if you get that many different questions, it’s pretty much guaranteed that you really got far fewer unique questions. If people can’t easily find the question they had, they asked it again. This dissipates the votes on the questions as well.

I don’t know how to fix it other than by manual intervention, or possibly automagic natural language processing, or some such. Or maybe you could show people questions like the one they just posed (through just a little bit of automagic NLP) and offer to let them vote for those questions rather than pose their own. This might cause some clustering around questions: Why ask “You, dude, when are you going to make pot legal? PS: You can come by our place in White Plains any time if you do.” when you’re shown that the question, “Do you support the legalization and taxation of marijuana?” already has 983,455 votes?

[Tags: obama egov egovernment e-gov ]

13 Comments »

Now that Sanjay Gupta has decided that the money isn’t good enough to become the US Surgeon General — just how much does patriotism pay, anyway? — let’s give it to Howard Dean! (Thanks, Stephen Fox!)

[Tags: howard_dean obama surgeon_general politics ]

3 Comments »

The Friday post at Whitehouse.gov is a little livelier — a little more voice, a little more air. Heck, it’s even got a broken link! (The link to the Energy-Housing partnership is a bridge to nowhere.) The post points to an OMB post that I thought was terrific, explaining and defending the reduction in charitable deductions for the 5% wealthiest Americans. It features a photo of Gaza (promoting State’s question of the week) that isn’t all about happy Israelis and holding hands with happy Gazans. (THat’s why we have Photoshop, people.) And the post points to the ever-lively TSA blog, one of the voicier government blogs around.

The next step I’d take if President Obama made me Blog Czar — I keep writing to him and asking! — is having the people who actually write the blog sign their posts. Baby steps, but that’s how you learn to walk. Next, no press releases! Then, invite in a sequence of non-WH bloggers to blog for a week at a time. Eventually, carefully open up the comments. Then start a flame war with, say, the Belgians, and we will have arrived.

[Tags: whitehouse blogging obama egov e-gov ]

1 Comment »

Aaron Swartz reports that the stimulus bill requires that government agencies use RSS [LATER: or Atom] to report on the stimulus money they disperse, so that those who are interested can get automatically updated. And those who are interested will include institutions and individuals aggregating that information so that the alarms can sound … and, we hope, the bouquets can shower down.

[Tags: rss stimulus e-gov egovernment egov transparency obama everything_is_miscellaneous metadata ]

4 Comments »

Live blogging a Florida meeting. Hope for the White House blog…

[Tags: ego e-gov obama ]

3 Comments »

The new rumor is that Vivek Kundra will be made administrator of e-government and IT for the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB), not the federal CTO as previously rumored.

This would be good news, although it would leave the rumored good or bad news about the national CTO open to rumor.

[Tags: vivek_kundra omb obama cto e-government e-gov egov ]

Be the first to comment »