Thanksgiving 2008

The Thanksgiving holiday is a week away, and, just like I did for Halloween, I thought I’d check out the kinds of information that government agencies are providing on their web sites.  There’s a variety of information, from food preparation tips to traffic alerts!  Here’s a sampling:

• USA.gov has an entire page devoted to Thanksgiving
• The Library of Congress’ Teacher Resources page has a Thanksgiving in American Memory feature
• The Bureau of Labor Statistics provides some Thanksgiving data, including the average price of turkey, per month, for the years 2004-2008, how Americans spend our time over the Thanksgiving holiday, and (my favorite) Spectator Sports Employment by Metropolitan Area. (Unfortunately, Alabama is not well-represented in this last data set!)
• The White House has a portion of its web site devoted to Thanksgiving – including photos and video of the Presidential pardon. They also provide links to the coverage of previous White House Thanksgivings during President George W. Bush’s tenure, as well as a photo essay, “The Annual Pardoning of the Thanksgiving Turkey”.
• The USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service provides a factsheet on food safety for the holiday season, which gives you all of the information you need to select and properly prepare a turkey. They also provide additional information on alternative ways to prepare poultry – including how to properly deep fat fry your turkey. And for you hunters, the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources gives you tips on how to clean and cook a wild turkey.
• NASA gives you an ‘Out of This World’ Thanksgiving, so that you can read about what Thanksgiving in space is like.
• The U.S. Mint has their take on Thanksgiving – including a brief history of Thanksgiving and some commemorative coins related to the holiday.
• If you’ll be traveling over the holiday, you might want to check out the TSA web site for flight information and delays, or the Federal Highway Administration site for road closures and traffic information.

President-Elect Activities

As you know by now, Barack Obama is President-Elect of the United States. He will be inaugurated on Tuesday, January 20th, 2009. Information on the inauguration itself, including a history and events calendar, is available from the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies. There is also an Armed Forces Inaugural Committee “coordinates military ceremonial support to inaugural activities.”

The President-Elect isn’t waiting until January, and has jumped right into the transition. His team quickly launched the transition site Change.gov, which includes a blog, the agenda for an Obama Administration, and information on applying for jobs with the new administration; and an accompanying YouTube site, which includes transition videos and speeches – including his first weekly address, dated November 15th.

Numerous resources have been developed to track the transition, and here are just a few:

• Congresspedia has an extensive list of laws, CRS reports, articles, and more detailing the progress of the transition – including several transition recommendations.
• Tracking the Presidential Transition from the Government Information Division of the Special Libraries’ Association
• GSA has developed a Presidential Transition Portal, which includes a round-up of laws and regulations, as well as information for appointees.
• While it is rather sparse at the moment, GSA and NARA have added some content to presidentialtransition.gov – including Recordkeeping Guidance for federal employees (as you might expect from a recordkeeping agency!).

Just in case you don’t know what to do with yourself now that the election is over, there’s plenty of information about the upcoming Administration to tide you over to January!

Yet Another Election Post

I don’t know about you, but I’m very excited about today’s election. I love to watch the returns come in! And once the results are all in, I am fascinated with the votes broken down by precinct – I like to see whether or not there are enclaves of people voter a similar way, or if they’re all over the political spectrum.  Having lived primarily in Southern university towns, the results can be quite interesting!

The Secretary of State’s Office provides files of election results for download – so I was able to check out how my precinct voted in the 2004 General Election. Precinct data is available for all general elections from 1992 forward. Additional results are available from some races – for instance, results of elections for Governor go back to 1946.

This is the first General Election that I’ll be spending in Alabama since 2000, so I’m not sure how soon election results will be available online.  Unfortunately, not all counties provide election results on their web sites (or even have election-related web sites!) In some cases the local newspaper or television station will have the most up-to-date information online – for instance, al.com’s Elections page currently has primary election data available by county and by Congressional district.

The most important thing to do today is get out and vote!