Monday, February 2, 2008

Census Data for 110th Congress by district

This is an ongoing project involving demographic and hopefully other data, broken out by congressional district, for use by the stats geeks of DKos. I used to perform this kind of data migration for a living, and having taken up this project, realize anew why I left this line of work. My intent is to gather demographic and behavioral data (voting records) in future.

Back when I was a wine collector, one salient point was borne in on me: no matter how wonderful the cru, no matter the health of the vines, the weather, etc, if the vintner didn't know how to make quality wine, or wasn't willing or able to spend enough to do the thing right, a quality wine was at best a rare, hit-or-miss proposition. So with politics. Quality candidates, strong and vibrant local organizations and leaders (or simply crooked, machine pols) can lead a majority of the voters whereever they want. Anyone who read David Halberstam's The Powers That Be, in particular, the story of the LA Times, knows exactly what can happen. Therefore demographic data may not reflect the realities on the ground.

Nonetheless, I'm certain that with careful analysis, useful conclusions can be drawn.
Mr. Flom, have at it!

UPDATE - 02/02/08: By request, Districts 04 is a link to the current data file. This is a comma delimited file with double quote (") text qualifiers. The file can be saved and opened in MS Excel or saved and easily imported into MS Access. Field names are included on the first line. I like descriptive names and those field names for this file are here

Any nation is a shared idea...what's ours?

I feel that either a blog or forum do not offer enough structure for this, so I've decided to add at least one other page, quite possibly more.

I know some people who are going to jump all over me for this.

The Sad Republican Legacy in the CNMI

Not a week after blogging about this situation as it was in then, I read an impassioned appeal for help in The Daily Kos: Wendy Doromal; Sat August 11 2007. The current bill aims at bringing the administration of entry to CNMI under Homeland Security and State. Had I written it, the bill would go a lot farther, but it's a step in the right direction.

Ms. Doromal has been before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee before, I believe. Evidently, I am remiss in following up on the story from the 1990's.

Here's the Senate testimony of one such victim, Kayleen Entena.