LobbyComply Blog

Join the multitudes of people today who are taking part in the 4th Annual Power IT Down Day. Just shut down your computer at the end of the work day today, and over the course of the weekend, the energy saved by the these thousands of computers will save thousands of costly kilowatt hours.

This week’s Highlighted Site Of The Week is supporting the cause of Power IT Down. It is a time of increasing frugality, where everyone is looking at cutting costs and saving money. To show that huge benefits  can be received by this minimal effort, Power IT Down’s sponsors (Citrix, HP, Intel, and GTSI) will donate the sum of money saved–which last year amounted to $60,000–to Wounded Warrior Project. It would be one of the easiest contributions you ever made!

As I’m writing this blog post, 10,000 people have already signed up to Power IT Down and 43,000 kilowatt hours have already been saved.

While turning off one computer doesn’t seem like much, by joining together, much can be accomplished.

To learn more about Power IT Down, you can like them on Facebook, follow them on Twitter, and read this article from GovLoop.

Everyone have a great weekend!

Most innovative ideas that have changed the world as we know it had just as many doubters as supporters. With hindsight it is easy to say the opposition of such innovations such as the telephone and computer must have been short-sighted and unimaginative. While this could be true, there may have been good reasons for their doubt, but without knowing what their reasons were, it is very entertaining to look at the doubtlessly inaccurate predictions people have made in the past.

Today’s Highlighted Site Of The Week is a Timeline of Failed Predictions that is posted on FastCompany.com. The author compiled a chronological list of over 80 predictions that contradict what actually happened beginning in the 1700s all the way up to the 21st century.

These predictions include failed predictions for nearly every topic including politics, technology, “fads” such as the car and radio, and music.

Some of my favorites were:

“This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.” – Western Union, 1878.”

“Four or five frigates will do the business without any military force.” – British Prime Minister Lord North, on dealing with the rebellious American colonies, 1774.”

“Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil? You’re crazy.” -Associates of Edwin L. Drake on his suggestion to drill for oil in 1859.”

“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” Ken Olson, president, chairman, and founder of Digital Equipment Corp, 1977.”

“The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works” – Clifford Stoll, 1995.”

It’s amazing to think of what would have happened if some of these predictions would have been right.

Have a great weekend!

Have you ever found yourself sifting through the intricate world of finances and economics hoping to find a simple solution to your problem, but more often than not only getting lost in the confusing and seemingly infinite information, guidelines, and tips?

This week’s Highlighted Site Of The Week is Visual Economics, which provides a wide selection of infographics on a variety of topics related to finance and economics.

Even if you consider yourself a finance guru, there are representations on VisualEconomics that contain information ranging from How Low Budget Films Get Financed to How Busy Americans Are that you may not have been aware.

To get started, here’s VisualEconomic’s best infographics of 2010.

Have a great weekend!

The U.S. Population has been increasing since the establishment of our nation. Regional populations across the United States have grown and have shrunk for a variety of different reasons ranging from the 1849 gold rush to urbanization that began in the U.S. in the 1900’s.

This week’s Highlighted Site Of The Week is Mapping the 2010 U.S. Census from The New York Times. This site contains 12 interactive maps which use demographic information collected by the 2010 Census.

These maps are divided up by county and show demographics of population, ethnic distribution, and vacant housing units. For their respective topic, each map shows the percent change in 2010 from statistics gathered from the 2000 census.

It’s very interesting and informative to browse through the United States and see the different population and ethnic distributions  compared to what existed in 2000.

Everyone have a great weekend!

When Americans feel that politicians aren’t doing an adequate job, what’s the popular response? To create political cartoons of course!

This week’s Highlighted Site Of The Week is The Association of American Editorial Cartoonists.

AAEC provides cartoons for you no matter what your party affiliation with a balance of cartoons poking fun at Democrats and Republicans alike.

With the current stand off between Republicans and Democrats about the budget and debt ceiling crisis, the political cartoonists of AAEC have taken advantage of the material provided to them. At least something entertaining can be created from the gridlock in the Capitol.

Browse through the numerous political cartoons submitted by day, filtering them by National & International or State & Local.

One of my favorite cartoons was this one.

Enjoy and have a great weekend!

As August 2nd approaches and the federal government gets closer and closer to the possibility of defaulting on its debt, I’m sure there are many people out there who believe they could contribute a few of their own ideas to Congress and President Obama to aid in creating an improved national budget.

This week’s Highlighted Site Of The Week allows you to create your own national budget, giving you complete control over taxes and government spending. BudgetHero gives all the power to the player to decide if spending will be increased or cut on controversial programs such as defense, Social Security, and health care as well as to increase or decrease taxes on a number of different sources.

Each issue is represented by a card that includes a brief description of the policy change, the pros and cons of making the change, the impact on the nation it would have, and the 10 year impact it would have on the budget. Whether you are serious about creating a balanced budget or just experimenting with different possibilities, this game is a fantastic way of breaking the partisan barriers and seeing the difficulties that exist in deciding how the nation’s money should be spent.

I went through the game and created my own custom budget thinking I made enough cuts while keeping what I consider the important programs only to see that the government would still go broke by 2032. I suppose it’s a good thing the fate of the nation doesn’t rest in my hands.

This article from the Washington Post tells more about the game as well as about an upgrade to BudgetHero 2.0. Enjoy!

Everyone have a great weekend!

After governor’s move out of their governor’s mansions, how is all this valuable and beautiful real estate utilized?

This week’s Highlighted Site Of The Week, Homes of Governors, is an article posted on CNBC. It provides pictures and descriptions of the amazing  homes of 10 former heads of state, ranging from the New Jersey mansion that once housed Charles Edison (son of Thomas Edison) to the former home of Arnold Schwarzenegger currently valued at $23.5 million.

When governors move on from their often multi-million dollar residences, these historical buildings are used for a variety of things. Of course some are bought and go on to become homes for other families, but sometimes they are turned into bed and breakfast guest houses, events venues, and historical landmarks.

The houses shown by this slideshow have housed anywhere from 1 up to 17 governors. Homes of Governors provides a great much needed break to the work-day.

Everyone have a great weekend!

Did you know that 13 Presidents of the United States experienced debt problems? It is very easy to believe that once someone ascends to the post of President of the United States that they will never have to worry about their finances ever again, but this is not always the case. Some presidents-such as John F. Kennedy who was worth the equivalent of a billion dollars today-were born into money, but others like Bill Clinton were born poor and earned a modest income before becoming the leader of America.

This week’s Highlighted Site Of The Week, All The Presidents’ Money, shows both the amount of wealth each U.S. President possessed as well as the public debt that existed at the beginning and end of their presidency, each adjusted for inflation.

On this site you can see how the public debt has fluctuated, beginning at the equivalent of $939.8 million at the birth of America under George Washington, hitting its lowest point of the equivalent of $6.3 million under Andrew Jackson, and consistently creeping upward until it surpassed the equivalent of $1 trillion during WWII, and hitting its current mark of a record $14.1 trillion.

It might come as a surprise to some to see the actual worth of each president as opposed to grouping all U.S. Presidents into the category of wealthy elitists (although many would most certainly fit into that category). Nine presidents, including Abraham Lincoln, were worth less than the equivalent of $1 million. This chart also provides some facts relating to the personal finances of the Presidents such that Herbert Hoover donated his presidential salary to charity and that John Tyler inherited a 1,000 acre tobacco plantation, but eventually died in debt because of the Civil War.

With the current budget and national debt debates going on today, its fun to see how the debt has developed throughout American history.

Everyone have a great weekend!

This week’s Highlighted Site Of The Week, American History Fun Facts, provides information on subjects like the American Flag, American Recipes, and Our Founding Fathers.

Did you know:

Grover Cleveland excluded the promise “to obey” from the traditional wedding vows when he married Frances Folsom at the White House on June 2, 1886?

Or:

It wasn’t until 1804 that the first formal Independence Day celebration took place at the White House.

You can learn even more facts if you visit the Fun Fact Back Issues provided by this website which provides a variety of topics that you can learn about.

If you want to know which presidents were nicknamed “His Roundity” or “His Accidency”, you can visit the  Presidential Nicknames page of this website and learn who the holders of those less than flattering nicknames were as well as the nicknames attached to other past presidents and the nicknames that have already been attributed to President Obama.

This site is a fun way to kill a little bit of time while still learning something about the United States of America.

Have a great weekend everyone!

If you want to locate information quickly on just about anything related to United States government, go to this week’s Highlighted Site of the Week, GovSpot.com.

GovSpot.com is a clearing house of information in the old tradition of web directories such as Yahoo. It has a clean interface and is easy to navigate. You will find pages devoted to government contracting online resources and federal election sites. The Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches of federal government have clearly laid-out links.

Need to find information in a hurry about state legislation? There is an interactive map of the states with all kinds of links to state government pages.  You can find local government resources as well!

There are many government news links, government reports, and podcasts, too. Take a look – GovSpot.com may be worth bookmarking.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

Marketing Assistant Leah Hadgis gave me today’s Highlighted Site of the Week. It is Sporcle.com, an online collection of quizzes and brain exercises.

Leah is a fan of quizzes and brain teasers. She gave me a challenge – to try out Sporcle’s “U.S. Presidents quiz” and “the U.S. States geography” quizzes. I will be honest with you. I failed to finish the presidents quiz. All I had to do was fill in all of the names of presidents that I could remember and Sporcle popped them into their proper time slot. Oh yes, and I needed to do it in 10 minutes.

I was able to remember all of the presidents in the 20th century and all of the ones in the 1700s. But I I got lost in the 1800s and found just over half of the presidents from that century. Then all went blank, oh well. But I love geography and I was able to name all of the states in the 10 minutes given to me.

If you like quizzes, then Sporcle is the website for you. You can even download an app for your iPhone or Android. Let me know how you do!

Have a terrific weekend.

Most of us have become accustomed to offering our preferences and opinions on social networks. We have the “like” button on Facebook for the updates our friends share – pictures, news, and videos. On YouTube, you can mark a video as a favorite. You can share it, flag it, add it to a playlist, and leave your comments on it.

This week, YouTube launched YouTube Town Hall, a place where you can watch videos created by members of Congress. They are speaking on topics such as the budget, energy policy, education, health care, the economy, and the war in Afghanistan.

Like everywhere else in social media, you can weigh in your opinion “supporting” a video’s message by clicking the support button. You can also share videos with your friends. YouTube’s Town Hall page opens with the motto: “Watch the debates. Choose your side.”

The videos can be viewed in debate mode, with two videos (offering opposing messages) sitting side-by-side, or by what YouTube calls the “Leaderboard,” which ranks the videos from the ones getting top support down to the least supported.

You can even ask questions on policy. If enough people give your question a “thumbs up,” it may become one of the top-rated and selected each month to be answered by a member of Congress!

I am keenly interested to see whether this will catch on. Is this the town hall of the future? Could it reshape the way we conduct campaign debates? Let’s see!

Have a good weekend.

Baseball season is here and every year, members of the U.S. Congress (Republican and Democrat) face off in a venue other than the Capitol – on the field. The U.S. House Office of the Clerk website has a fun series of pages for the event: The U.S. Congressional Baseball Game. This year, on June 17, the 50th game will be sponsored by CQ/Roll Call.

In 1909 the first game was put together by U.S. Rep. John Tener (R-Penn.), who had been a professional baseball player from 1885 until 1890. The games have been very popular and over the years the proceeds have gone to various charities.

They have been held in different places: American League Park,Griffith Stadium, D.C. Stadium, RFK Stadium, Memorial Stadium, Four Mile Run Park, and Prince George’s County Stadium. Since 2006 they have been held at Nationals Park.

The games were put on hiatus a few years during the Great Depression and World War II. They are said to have gotten in the way of getting legislation passed in Congress a few times!

The Office of the Clerk site can give you a history of the rosters, and a great stats page showing where the games were played, who won, and the final score.

Attendance in the 1926 game was 4,000 as the Republicans held a parade with a live elephant and the Democrats paraded a donkey. (Democrats won that year.) The first game to be covered by radio broadcast was in 1928, and lately the games have been covered on Twitter and Facebook.

The Congressional Baseball games have not been immune to the problems of ethics. This Fox News article reports how Rep. John Ensign had to sit out of the 2009 game because of his admitting to having an affair. Apparently his skills on the field were missed!

Here is a Roll Call video from the 2010 game. Pure fun: 2010 Congressional Baseball Game Music Video.

Let me know if you are going!

As part if its Weekly Historical Highlights, the website of the U.S. House of Representatives Office of the Clerk remembers the very first presidential inauguration at Federal Hall in New York City. On April 30, 1789, the inauguration ceremony for George Washington was held in Federal Hall, where Federal Congress first met before moving to Philadelphia. The Office of the Clerk site gives an account of the event and says Washington was very humbled by the occasion.

The original building was located on Wall Street. It was built in 1700 and originally served as the New York City Hall. From 1785-1789, it served as the capitol where Congress met. According to the U.S. Senate website: “When Congress convened for the first time on March 4, 1789, the old building had been converted into a splendid capitol, optimistically renamed Federal Hall.”

The National Park Service (NPS.gov) gives us a great picture of the landmark events that Federal Hall has witnessed: “After the American Revolution, the Continental Congress met at City Hall and, in 1787, adopted the Northwest Ordinance, establishing procedures for creating new states.When the Constitution was ratified in 1788, New York remained the national capital. Pierre L’Enfant [who designed the city plan for the District of Columbia] was commissioned to remodel the City Hall for the new federal government. The First Congress met in the now Federal Hall and wrote the Bill of Rights.”

The NPS goes on to say that when the nation’s capital was moved to Philadelphia, the building went back to being New York’s city hall. In 1812 the building was torn down and a new one was opened in 1842, functioning first as the Customs House, then as a Treasury, and finally as a national memorial to Federal Hall.

If you are in New York City, there is tour information for Federal Hall here and here. You might wish to follow the New Amsterdam trail that starts at Castle Clinton and ends with Federal Hall.

Have a great weekend!