My husband sent me the coolest link today. If you're a fan of fantasy sports and politics you'll like Fantasy Congress.
Fantasy Congress offers you the power to "play politics." As in other fantasy sports, you - the Citizen - draft a team of real-life legislators from the U.S. Congress and score points for your team's successes. Join a league and compete against other Citizens, or form a league of your own! Play against your friends, family, bloggers, fellow politicos, or even a sitting U.S. Senator (one could be playing incognito, you never know!). On weekends, move Members of Congress into your active line-up or off your team to strategize for the upcoming week of legislation!
If you're interested in starting joining (it's free) and you want to join a league, try joining the one I created. I'm the only member so far but I had to claim the name...search for "Radical Militant Librarians", I'll be happy to have you join :)
Since I'm on the whole politics thing anyway I'll share the list of political links I've been keeping for some time now. Some are nonpartisan, some are not. I wanted to post about politics a long time ago because I realized that there are a lot of great community sites for politics on the internet these days. If this is something you're interested in you should try some of these sites out:
Nonpartisan
There's a variety of nonpartisan information sites for politics. My two favorites are GovTrack.us and citizenJoe. GovTrack is a great if you like to keep track of your representatives, senators, or a specific bill (or both at the same time). You can get email updates when something happens to a bill or if your tracked politicians vote or speak on any issues.
CitizenJoe is more of a no-nonsense issues site. My only complain about CitizenJoe is that you can't track exact bills, it's more of a general conversation on the policies and debates. It is very neutral, however.
Some other nonpartisan info sites of note are:
Public Agenda Online - "A nonpartisan opinion research and civic engagement organization helping Americans explore and understand critical issues since 1975"
FactCheck.org - This was a popular stop for me during the 2004 election. FactCheck is well known for fact checking candidate ads and commercials.
e.thePeople - "E The People is a public forum for democratic and deliberative discussion. The conversations on E The People explore the political issues we see in the news, rejecting the traditional spin and conventional wisdom that tends to fill the airwaves."
essembly.com - "essembly is a fiercely non-partisan social network that allows politically interested individuals to connect with one another, engage in constructive discussion, and organize to take action."
GovSpot.com - From the people who make LibrarySpot and all of those other Spot sites, comes GovSpot. A great collection of government related sites.
Project Vote Smart - "Thousands of candidates and elected officials. Who works for you? Who is seeking your vote? Project Vote Smart, a citizen's organization, has developed a Voter's Self-Defense System to provide you with the necessary tools to self-govern effectively."
Elections: How to Be an Informed Voter - This site is compiled by the University Library at Sonoma State University. There is a great collection of voting sites that cover a wide range of candidates and topics.
Election Information
Other than the local sites that are devoted to various election information there are two great sites for helping the voter get to where they need to go on election day. My favorite is Publius, which integrates candidate information in their interactive ballot. VOTE411.org is another good site for looking up your election information.
Political Parties
Of course, as much as I love nonpartisan sites, I know that everybody has their own opinions. I subscribe to RSS feeds and email lists for both the Democratic Party and the Green Party. Green being my primary party, but on major elections I usually vote Democratic.
Issues
I also subscribe to a variety of issue sites and organizations. Being that I'm very liberal, most of these are going to have a very liberal bias...but a few of non-partisan.
American Civil Liberties Union - If I had money I would give them a lot of it.
IPac - This organization is pretty new but I love it. It is a political organization devoted to monitoring issues regarding technology and information policy. My favorite initiative by this group is their project that sends iPods loaded with tons of public domain content to senators. I've even used this site as a resource for finding public domain content, they list everything they ship on the iPods right on their site.
Campaign For Reader Privacy - Mostly an anti-Patriot Act site.
TV Watch - I'm not sure how I stumbled across this site but if you're in favor of parental involvement and not governmental or FCC control regarding television and media then this is a good site to visit. I'm not a parent but this site has good downloadable materials for parents that I thought was interesting.
MoveOn.org - "The MoveOn family of organizations brings real Americans back into the political process. With over 3.3 million members across America – from carpenters to stay-at-home moms to business leaders – we work together to realize the progressive vision of our country’s founders. MoveOn is a service – a way for busy but concerned citizens to find their political voice in a system dominated by big money and big media."
Moving Ideas Network - A great site for locating current petitions and liberal issues that you can contact your politicians about. I've used this site many times when I want to send a message to my representative and senators.
Care2 - This site is packed full of information on issues and ways to connect to people with the same interests. I've often found some great petitions and information on different issues through this site.
Union of Concerned Scientists - My husband hooked me up on this site since his thing are the scientific issues. UCS is a great site if you're really interested in environmental issues, I have followed several issues with this site, even though I wouldn't consider myself a scientist.
DefCon - If separation of church and state is your thing then DefCon is a good site. I often find that they seem to yell about the issues a lot, but I really don't like the religious right so I do pay attention to a few of their issues.
Tags: politics, issues, policies, politicians
