I didn't get around to posting an entry last Friday so I'll try to make this one extra special. I've got a bunch of items I would have used last week as well as stuff from this week.
Think of this as Thanksgiving leftovers.
Are you an iTunes user? Are you broke? If so, you can still get plenty of great stuff for free. If you go to the iTunes store, you'll notice a section called iTunes U. This is a great resource if you're someone like me who likes to download a bunch of quality media for free. I decided to check out the history section and downloaded a PBS documentary on FDR. It's 4 hours long, commercial free and has a good enough resolution to watch on full screen. The documentary itself is an excellent introduction to Franklin Roosevelt and has a ton of footage of him speaking. If you're interested in how our greatest president got us out of the last depression, it's definitely worth a watch if you're like me: recently laid off with 4 hours to spare.
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As for our current President-Elect, Barack Obama, cnet has a nifty article about how he'll be the most photographed and documented president in our history.
Citizens and paparazzi armed with camera phones and a variety of other multimedia devices will chronicle every movement he makes in public and post it online.
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Along similar lines, The New York Times ran a piece about Joe Biden having to give up riding the train:
Not since Jacob K. Javits took near-daily flights back to New York City (mostly to please his wife, Marian, who refused to leave Manhattan) have a senator’s commuting habits been so carefully documented. But Mr. Biden’s nightly 90-minute Amtrak rides to Wilmington, Del., will grind to a halt in January, when he and Dr. Biden, an English professor, take up residence at No. 1 Observatory Circle, on the grounds of the United States Naval Observatory, the official home of vice presidents since 1974.
Mr. Biden will be the first vice president to move into the residence without previously living in Washington, said Donald Ritchie, a Senate historian.
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Unfortunately, there's no new Get Your War On episode for this week. However, since I didn't have an entry last week, I'll just post last week's GYWO Thanksgiving episode this week:
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Last week, The New York Times also published a piece on an all girl rock band from Saudi Arabia who can't reveal their identities but is becoming something of an underground hit in the Kingdom:
“In Saudi, yes, it’s a challenge,” said the group’s lead singer, Lamia, who has piercings on her left eyebrow and beneath her bottom lip. (Like other band members, she gave only her first name.) “Maybe we’re crazy. But we wanted to do something different.”
In a country where women are not allowed to drive and rarely appear in public without their faces covered, the band is very different. The prospect of female rockers clutching guitars and belting out angry lyrics about a failed relationship — the theme of “Pinocchio” — would once have been unimaginable here.
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Newsweek published an article about how the Obama presidency will use the internet to get people more involved in government:
Call it Government 2.0. Instead of a one-way system in which government hands down laws and provides services to citizens, why not use the Internet to let citizens, corporations and civil organizations work together with elected officials to develop solutions? That kind of open-source collaboration is second nature to the Net-gen kids who supported Obama and to technologists from Silicon Valley who are advising him. "An open system means more voices; more voices mean more discussion, which leads to a better decision," Google CEO and Obama adviser Eric Schmidt told a roomful of policy thinkers in Washington last week, gathered for a discussion on the role technology will play in government. "A community will always make a better decision than an individual."
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Like me, maybe you're out of work. It might be nice to have a stable government job since the private sector has gone to shit. We might be in luck:
Obama's election represents a new generation in the White House, but he'll take office to find a far larger generational transition happening under his feet. By the end of his first term in office, the Office of Personnel Management, the independent agency that oversees the federal workforce, estimates 707,750 federal workers, many of them Baby Boomers, will be eligible to retire. The Partnership for Public Service, a leading government management non-profit, estimates that 530,000 of those employees, many of them in high-level positions, actually will leave government. In 2016, fully a million civil will eligible to retire. Between 2002 and 2006, the number of federal employees retiring annually rose from 30,300 a year to 45,000 a year: that rate could rise to 106,000 people annually.
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If anyone is interested: I am an atheist, I live in Olympia, WA, I voted for Chris Gregoire (twice!) and I'm loving the controversy taking place between Bill O'Reilly and my State Capitol building. Thank goodness the sign was returned. I plan on paying it a visit.
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And I'll end it here with some music as usual.