Finding your government online, Newt-watching, and political fun and games.
Michael Swaine
You are hacking through the Internet underbrush, looking for government services you were told had gone online. It's not easy. It's a jungle out there.
Starting at the Jefferson Project -- which bills itself as the most complete archive of political resources in existence today -- at http://www.stardot.com/jefferson/, you then sift through its government and political links as though you were sailing down the coast of a continent, guessing at secrets hidden in every port. Jefferson leads you to an archive of current federal legislation at Thomas (http://thomas.loc.gov/), where you can also find everything your representative has added to the Congressional record (whew!), everything imaginable about the federal budget (gopher://sunny.stat-usa.gov/11/BudgetFY96), and Al Gore's personal cartoon collection at http://www.whitehous .gov/White_House/EOP/OVP/html/Cartoon.html.
Jefferson is a great place to explore, but if you're seeking a particular government entity or bit of info, make tracks for Yahoo at http://www.yahoo.com/Government/. Yahoo shows you the UN's home page at http: //www.un.org/, and it's Yahoo that leads you to IRS tax forms in PDF format at http://www.ustreas.gov/treasury/bureaus/irs/irs.html and Cornell's database of Supreme Court decisions at http://www.law.cornel .edu/supct/. But there's more to government than the feds.
It's All Local. Pushing deeper into this jungle, you pause briefly at Oregon Online (http://www.or.gov/) and the Oregon State Archives Public Information Server at http://159.121.28.251/, where a huge collection of state and county records includes everything from aerial photography to zoning, birth records to death notices.
The Texas and California state sites (you can find both at http://www.yahoo.com/Government/States/) are also very rich. You forge ahead into California government. You finally reach the stylish home page that belongs to the city of Palo Alto at http://www.city.palo-alto.c .us/. You come to a placeholder for a system that lets you check the status of your building permit electronically. But it's not implemented yet! In passing, you notice that Palo Alto's site lets you search a database of city employees by name or by face. That could be handy.
Party on the Web. Now that you're out here, you find yourself drawn, by an urge you prefer not to examine, to press on into the dark heart of party politics. The menu-bar clock ticks with a tropical languor as your screen redraws the gaudy graphics of the GOPAC site (http://www.gopac.com/) or the baby blue of the Democratic Party home page (http://www.webcom.com/~digitals/). Meanwhile, United We Stand's eagle wings spread at http://www.uwsa.org/.
As you are drawn deeper into the interior, the trail grows thin. Greens spring up at http://www.rahul.net:80/greens/, Libertarians run wild at http://www.lp.org/lp/.
Humor Break. Rounding a bend, you suddenly come upon an incongruously cheery site. It belongs to the Capitol Steps, that band of Congressional ex-staffers turned songwriters. At http://pfm.het.brown.edu/people/mende/steps/index.html, the band delivers political satire in RealAudio format. Other political-humor sites pop up -- DeMOCKracy, a clever comic strip at http://www.clark.net/pub/theme/demockracy/, and also the inimitable Newt Watch, which watches the inimitable Newt at http://www.cais.com/newtwatch/. By the time you get to what purports to be the Bob Dole for President site at http://www.dole96.org:80/dole/, with its background art of Dole pineapples and slogan "The ripe man for the job," you begin to suspect that not all of these sites are necessarily to be taken at face value. Dirty tricks have come to the Net.
Tip of the Month
Online-search engines such as the Oregon-legislature engine at http://159.121.28.251/minutes.html can help you find information by keyword. One hint: When you see references to wildcard matching, you can use an asterisk (*) as a wildcard in search strings. For example, you can type travel* to find all documents containing travel, traveler, traveling, or travelogue.
Don't Know .gov from GOP?
MacUser maintains a list of frequently asked questions (FAQs) about the Internet, MacUser itself, and this column specifically. Send mail to faq@macuser.com. MacUser's address on the World Wide Web is http://www.macuser.ziff.com/~macuser/. You can reach me at traveler@macuser.com.
