I don’t normally mention my public speaking engagements, but tomorrow I’ve got one that’s free, open to the public, and liable to be of general interest. Tomorrow is the Democratic Party of Virginia’s Jefferson Jackson Dinner, the party’s big annual event. As a part of the day’s activities, I’m speaking on a panel with former (as of two days ago) U.S. CTO Aneesh Chopra, Peter Levin, and Macon Phillips. The topic is open technological innovation and its effects on politics and policy, which is my favorite topic to talk about. It’s at 1:30 PM at the Richmond Marriott.

(Incidentally, I think the women’s caucus should have their own event, focusing on reproductive rights, and call it the “VA JJ Dinner.” Hilarity ensues.)

I’m impressed by Drugcite, a non-governmental website that presents data on prescription drugs using open data sources, displaying it in a simple, easy-to-understand fashion. Today I really needed to research Coumadin, and Drugcite provided one-stop-shopping for that. It’s an open data site in the style of Richmond Sunlight, but rather than focusing on government (as so many such sites do), it simply applies the same concept to something quite different.

Earmarks are back. Now they’re in the form of specific funding riders attached to spending bills. Congress’ budget for the Army Corps of Engineers had $507M tacked on for 26 separate projects that were not requested by the Army, not part of the president’s budget, and weren’t previously part of the spending bill.

I have recently been lamenting the media’s habit of allowing subjects’ false statements to stand, without challenge. This morning I spotted a great example of the right way to handle this, in a story about Mitt Romney from the AP’s Kasie Hunt: “‘I will never apologize for America,’ Romney says oftensuggesting that Obama has done just that, even though the president hasn’t.” Simple and to the point.

Using public records of grocery store locations and vehicle ownership, the USDA has mapped the locations of “food deserts,” regions where people lack access to decent food. Such areas have been popular to talk about and speculate about, but this is the first effort that I’m aware of to actually locate and measure them.

Warren Olney’s “To the Point,” the PRI show carried by NPR affiliates across the country, has long struck me as a bit of a parody of NPR. The name, for starters. I can’t remember the names of any of the faux NPR stations in “Grand Theft Auto: Vice City,” but they’re all names exactly like “To the Point,” created by some sort of random NPR show name generator. But the problem is more how Olney hosts the show. He regards himself as a referee, rather than a host.* He’ll get a pair of guests, one on each side of an issue, and have them take turns talking. So if the topic is global climate change, he’ll have a climate scientist and an Exxon-funded lobbyist debate its reality. The lobbyist will say “climate change doesn’t exist, and there’s no evidence that it does,” and the scientist will say “actually, there’s really no question about it at this point,” and Olney simply has them take turns talking. No common ground is found between the guests; or, if it is, Olney really can’t take any credit. (Olney got in trouble for doing this in particularly awful form a couple of months ago, when he let an anti-gay bigot make hateful, outlandish claims and never once called him on it.)

Compare this to Diane Rehm. When she’s being bullshitted by a guest, she doesn’t just turn to another guest and say “John, what’s your take?” She says “Sara, what you’re saying isn’t true, you have to know it’s not true, don’t you?”

Olney had a pair of guests on a couple of years ago, and the exchange that they had was so extraordinary that I’ve been telling people about it ever since. One of the guests looked like an idiot, but Olney was the worst for the exchangehe came off looking like a buffoon for his unwillingness to acknowledge that his guest was a huckster.

On the January 1, 2010 episode of the show, the featured topic was Barbara Ehrenreich’s newest book, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. I’m a fan of Ehrenreich’s work, and she used to live in Charlottesville, so I tuned in while I was driving somewhere or another. Ehrenreich’s thesis was that a lack of critical thinking was part of what led to the collapse of Countrywide and companies like it, touching off the recession. That the people who advance and do well in those businesses were the people saying “nothing can go wrong with bundling sub-prime mortgages,” not the people saying “I think this is a bad idea, because it could end disastrously.” Olney had a few different guests on the show alongside Ehrenreich, and one of them was John Assaraf.

I’d never heard of John Assaraf before, but a mere glance at his website makes obvious that he’s a shyster. He’s in the business of taking money from suckers by selling them the message that they simply need to imagine themselves rich, and then they will be rich. Of course, somebody listening to the show wouldn’t know this about the guy. They’d only know that he’s a “business growth expert and motivational speaker,” as Olney introduced him.

What Assaraf says is stunning enough, but it’s Ehrenreich’s surprising reveal in her response that led me to exclaim “oh damn!” to my radio while listening. I’ve trimmed this interview down to the illustrative bits, 2:18 in length:

For those who want to hear the entire, unedited portion of the show that includes Assaraf, here it is, 7:05 in length:

So Assaraf spends a minute making outlandish, utterly unsupportable medical claims, with absolutely no education or experience that would allow him to evaluate themsheer bullshitall about how disease can be stopped on a cellular level by thinking happy thoughts, and that’s when we discover that Ehrenreich has a doctorate in cellular immunology. Who saw that coming? Nobody! Nobody could have! It’s astounding! But you know who doesn’t care? Olney. Not in the least. He continues his “so what’s your response?” back-and-forth between the two, never acknowledging that Assaraf has been hopeless owned by Ehrenreich, or that Olney or his producer have erred enormously in matching up a motivational speaker with a cellular immunologist to debate cellular immunology. Olney, presumably not having just fallen off the turnip truck, surely knew he was being bullshitted by Assaraf and that, by extension, his listeners were being bullshitted by Assaraf. But instead he followed his lousy script where he just has two people say their piece, and lets the listeners sort out who they agree with. But that requires honest actors, it requires evenly matched debaters, and it requires that the topic be something on which intelligent minds may disagree. This was not such a topic.

This is what’s wrong with journalism. Right here. Earlier this month, the New York Times‘ public editor publicly pondered whether the paper should point out when interview subjects are lying. The response was swift and vocal that, yes, that’s precisely the purpose of journalism.

It’s not just Olney, of course. This approach is standard, on NPR and elsewhere. I’m not holding him to a higher standard, I just found this incident to be so laughable, so egregious, that I’ve been telling people about it for the past couple of years. Incidents like this highlight why this approach isn’t just bad, but fundamentally dishonest. It allows dopes like Assaraf to stay in business, and surely makes people like Ehrenreich wonder what the point of a doctorate is if it doesn’t make her more of an expert in the field than some random person and why she should bother to be a guest on such shows again. Impartiality is great, but when a journalist is providing a forum for a liar to peddle his wares, it’s time for him to do his job and start ferreting out some truth.

* On reflection, this is not entirely fair to referees. Imagine if, in a game of tennis, Player A called a foul on Player B and, in response, the referee simply asked Player B if he thought he was guilty? My wife suggests that, in this tennis analogy, Olney’s self-assigned role is simply to act as the net.

Earlier this month, in the last few days of his term, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour pardoned five men, including four convicted murderers, who worked in his mansion. The AP FOIAed the records about their pardons anddarnedest thingthere aren’t any. The attorney general says that they’re nowhere to be found. This is headed to court in a couple of weeks.

Chicago recently announced that they’d be sharing the GPS-tracked positions of snowplows online, for people wondering when their neighborhood would be plowed, and what roads are cleared. Now VDOT is doing the same in Virginia, although only upstate.

The 71-year-old paper isn’t convinced that endorsements mean much anymore, and are worried that the practice gives the appearance of bias in their coverage of politics. So they’re giving it up. I wonder if this is the beginning of a trend, or of the Sun-Times will stand alone?

Discussion hosting service Disqus has crunched the numbers on their enormous database of comments and found that people writing under pseudonyms (as opposed to anonymously or under their real name) contribute substantially more comments than others, and those comments are rated more highly than others. People writing under a real name are a close second, and people writing anonymously are a distant third. Fascinating!

Remember that blog entry I wrote last month about trying to make a cheeseburger from scratch? Scientific American has a short article based on it in their February issue. Page 24. I haven’t picked up a copy yet, but I’m sure going to.

I publicly launched Richmond Sunlight five years ago this week. Upon its launch I gave it to the Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy because, as I wrote, “theyre non-partisan, they have an attention span longer than a housefly, and they have access to resources that I dont.” I concluded: “Ill run it for them for the next six months, while we train an editor and a webmaster to take it over. Then I can move on to my next project.” Richmond Sunlight is something that I want to exist, but not something that I actually want to be my problem. But nothing ever changed: the website was Virginia Interfaith’s in a legal sense (on a handshake deal), but in all other practical senses, it was mine. Every bit of the website was mine to run, from stem to stern…which was the opposite of my goal. It occupied enough of my time I couldn’t move onto that next project. In March, I informed the Virginia Interfaith Center that I had just worked my last sessionthey’d need to finally hire that webmaster. And I walked away from Richmond Sunlight, which is what enabled me to get started on Virginia Decoded. (Which is on hold briefly while I’m working for the White House.)

A few weeks ago, the Virginia Interfaith Center decided that they couldn’t operate Richmond Sunlight. The cost of paying somebody with the appropriate skill set would be too high and, besides, they’re between executive directors, and have more important things going on. So I asked for them to give it back, which they did cheerfully.

So I seem to have this website. Now I’m trying to figure out what to do with it. Giving it away hasn’t worked out, so now I need to chart a course that will allow it to grow and thrive, and also be financially sustainable.

Perhaps I could start a 501(c)3 to house Richmond Sunlight, Virginia Decoded, Open Virginia, and my other nascent efforts towards open government in Virginia? But then whatwhere does the money come from? I worry that advertising could make Richmond Sunlight appear disreputable. I think I could get some grants, but that’s ultimately not a business model. Maybe a few site sponsors (advertising lite), though I don’t know that anybody would be willing to pay enough to hire somebody to run the site during session. I do have a mostly completed “pro” version of Richmond Sunlight, but I’ve hesitated to launch it because I can’t provide the support that customers would deserve. (“Sorry it’s broken for you, but I’m at work now. And I’m busy tonight. How’s Saturday for you?”) While there’s a bit of a horse-and-cart problem there, the revenue from that could well make it possible to hire somebody to provide that support and also run the website. Perhaps there’s a partnership waiting to happensome organization with whom the site could have a mutually beneficial relationship?

I’m soliciting ideas. What should I do with Richmond Sunlight? How do I ensure that it continues to exist, fulfills its potential, but doesn’t keep me from moving onto other projects?

“The transcripts of the 2006 [Federal Reserve] meetings, released after a standard five-year delay, clearly show some of the nations pre-eminent economic minds did not fully understand the basic mechanics of the economy that they were charged with shepherding.” It’s a significant understatement to say that they didn’t “full understand” the economy. Their discussions make it look like a dozen econ 101 students were gathered in a room and put in charge of the economy. “Ender’s Game” made real.

The Times’ public editor is asking, in the form of a blog entry, whether the media should be in the habit of pointing out when a subject is lying. That is, a politician says that black is white, should the reporter covering it point out that, in fact, black is black? It’s shameful that this question even needs to be asked. Websites like Richmond Sunlight are in the business of reporting straight-up facts. That has value, no doubt. But the job of media outlets is to take that information, review it, interpret it, package it up, and provide that to readers, to help them to understand the world around them. And the Times is wondering if it’s necessary to point out when their facts are wrong? Yes, yes it is necessary. Get on it, Times.

“Shotgun Golf will soon take America by storm,” said Hunter S. Thompson in this 2004 article. I would definitely play this, though I’d be even more likely to play it with Bill Murray.