President Barack Obama

Sen.-John-McCain-at-US-Capitol

CAPITOL HILL: Chairmen of the House and Senate Armed Services committees take pride in the fact their panels have gotten 53 annual defense bills in a row through the often tortuous negotiations required to clear Congress. And Sen. John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has often made known his view that the… Keep reading →

President Barack Obama did not just win reelection Tuesday night. His victory signaled the irreversible triumph of a new, 21st-century America: multiracial, multi-ethnic, global in outlook and moving beyond centuries of racial, sexual, marital and religious tradition.

Howard Fineman is editorial director of the Huffington Post Media Group, where this article originally appeared. Keep reading →

The federal digital strategy released today is the next step in President Barack Obama’s effort to streamline and improve government services through mobile and web-based technologies and solidifies many efforts already under way.

Analysts mostly applauded the strategy, saying it provides specific, measurable goals, demonstrates a commitment to transforming the use of technology to better serve citizens, requires the use of analytics to enable more responsive government and builds security into to the federal digital architecture. Keep reading →


Last week, President Barack Obama kicked off his first Twitter town hall with – what else? – a tweet.


“At 1:53 PM Today (July 12), from the White House: I am going to make history here as the first President to live tweet,” he wrote.

And then he sent another tweet to get the conversation really going: “Today 2:07 PM Obama says: in order to reduce the deficit, what costs would you cut and what investments would you keep – both.”

Before it ended about an hour later, a number of well-known tweeters (e.g. House Speaker John Boehner) and lots of lesser known folks had tweeted hoping to catch the President’s attention and get a personal response to their question or comment.


While lots of commentary has already and will be written about this historic event, I thought I could provide something different (wearing my data scientist/data journalist hat) and parse his tweets, and those of previous town halls, if I could just recover the tweet steam. I used Searchtastic to retrieved 346 Tweets for visualization. Keep reading →