Tag: politics

  • Whip Counts to Authorise Force in Syria

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    Brendan Barry
    in ,

    I was catching up on some news tonight and I came upon an unhelpful graphic that was supposed to be helping me understand the whip count (who is voting yes or no) for authorising the use of force in Syria. Below is the original graphic from Think Progress. I struggled, however, to directly compare the…

  • Ye Olde Boston Mayoral Candidate Map

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    A map? Again? I know. But trust me, this one is interesting. For those of you who do not know, Boston’s Thomas Menino is not running for reelection this year. By the time he leaves office, he will have been the mayor of Boston for over twenty years and so this year is the first…

  • Elections in Mali

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    For those of you who did not know, the country of Mali held elections yesterday and results should be forthcoming. Those of you who regularly read or semi-frequently check my blog, you are likely familiar with the work I did covering the French-led intervention in Mali. I am a bit busy working on some other…

  • Senate Facebook

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    Partisanship in Washington has only grown worse over time. So how better to track that than through Facebook-like network analysis diagrams? If you look at senators who voted with other senators at least 50% of the time and at least 75% of the time, and compare those numbers to numbers over a decade ago, you…

  • Corporate Taxes

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    Corporate taxes are always a fun discussion point. Who pays too much? Too little? Not at all? In May, the New York Times published an interactive piece examining US companies and their effective tax rates from 2007 through 2012. At its core, the piece is a bubble chart along one axis that plots the tax…

  • Extraditing Snowden

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    Edward Snowden is still on the run; he is still in the transit area of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport without a passport to enter Russia. But if ever succeeds in extricating himself from his current predicament, Snowden presumably will seek to land in a country without an extradition treaty with the United States. So in this…

  • Federal Reserve Actions

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    Line charts can be a great way of looking at the impact of event over a metric over a set period of time. But what happens when you want to look at multiple metrics over that same period of time? In this example from the New York Times, we have a series of line charts…

  • Alcohol-related Traffic Fatalities

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    Brendan Barry
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    Earlier this year the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) recommended changes in the current blood alcohol limits to reduce youth drunk driving. The NTSB wants the limit dropped/increased from 0.08 to 0.05. Fun side note, technically, the NTSB needs to have the states enact this on their own accord because such limits are not federal…

  • Gay Acceptance

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    Last week I looked at a piece from the Washington Post about the possible impact of the Supreme Court rulings on gay marriage in the United States. But with the rulings yesterday, we step back and look at globally how the progression of gay rights has taken steps forward or backward. The National Post looked…

  • The Massachusetts Special Election

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    As I have been blogging the past several days, today the Supreme Court will announce its rulings on the two gay marriage cases. But, I have already looked at that twice now. Today I want to look at the results of the Massachusetts special election for the US Senate, necessitated by John Kerry resigning from…