Your turn to play Big Brother

Audit your representatives’ finances online

They do it to you — now you can do it to them. Thanks to the nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics, you have quick, easy Web access, right now, to detailed information about your elected representatives’ finances. Here are just a few of the things you can find out via the CRP site:
Examine any member of Congress’ personal financial disclosure forms.
Look up representatives’ campaign money profiles.
Find individual contributors to federal candidates, PACs, or party committees — the site lets you look them up by name, ZIP code, employer, or candidate.
Profile the money breakdown of any 1998 House or Senate race.
The CRP maintains databases on everything from White House coffees to Congressional travel to tobacco money — and it’s all online.

All this information is technically available through other channels; the difference is that now it’s practically and simply available, for the taking, to anyone with access to an Internet connection. And that is the information revolution in a nutshell. This Web site isn’t just an important political resource in itself: it’s also a superb example of the still-too-infrequently-realized potential of the Internet for altering the balance of power in favor of the individual.

If you thought the government’s tendency to try to place controls on Internet use was really all about child pornography, think again. It’s certainly not about controlling child porn; I would imagine that it’s not a question of controlling cultural-political content at all — I’ve no doubt the state is perfectly happy to be able to monitor its opponents of all sorts through their activity online. No. It’s all about the flow of information itself.

Through the Web, too much knowledge is being made too easily available to too many people — and I mean little people. Not major PAC contributors; not the various types of bigwigs who can be expected to know how the game is played, know when to make allowances or interpretations, know when to look the other way. I’m talking about access for individual Americans — who just might kick up a depressing fuss, get in the way, become inconvenient, if they can find out what’s really going on in the offices of their elected officials with two clicks of a mouse.

America needs more Web sites like the CRP’s.

Women and the Social Security question

Women tend to depend more heavily on Social Security than men do, because of the dual-entitlement rule and other aspects of the way the system is structured, because the female life expectancy is longer than the male, and because of mens’ and womens’ differing lifetime employment patterns. An interesting article is now available at the Cato Institute’s Web site all about the potential benefits to women of privatizing Social Security. Authors Ekaterina Shirley and Peter Spiegler (both Harvard graduate students from the Kennedy School of Government, yet) find that most women would be significantly better off under a system of individually owned, privately invested accounts than under the current Social Security system. Food for thought.

Area code finder

Fast Area Code Lookup will find you the area code of any town in the US, Canada, or other locales (such as Jamaica) using the same telephone number system. Some information on the codes for other countries and cities, too

Dictionary redux

The dictionary site I described last Tuesday promptly crashed, creating a certain amount of woe and despondency, but I’m glad to report that it’s back from the dead as of this writing. The direct-to-the-dictionary-page URL I gave last week doesn’t work any more, though; instead, try the Merriam-Webster front page. You get more goodies that way anyhow (Word of the Day; puzzles; information on incorporating the dictionary into your intranet).

Elsewhere on the virtual references shelf this week: Roget’s Thesaurus is online here. Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations is here, and Strunk and White’s indispensable handbook of English usage, The Elements of Style, can be found here. And the revised Robert’s Rules of Order can be found online, too.

What’s in a name?

The Baby Name Finder at Parent Soup is a fun given-names resource. Look up your own first name to find out what it means and where it comes from; see where a given name falls in the popularity rankings. Why is this any better than a $5 baby-names paperback book? Because it’s free, of course — and because you can use the database to search for a name for a baby or new pet by initial letter and/or family background. Or, if you prefer, seek more far-flung inspiration amongst the geographical, cultural, historical, and other sorts of lists (mountains, for example — Annapurna? Tomila?), in the Finder Potpourri area.