The Hartford Courant editorializes today about Connecticut's elections commission's new website that promises significant gains in regard to political transparency for the state. The commission was given the responsibility of designing an electronic campaign reporting system for candidates for state office, PACs and party committees. Now, seeing who has donated money to state candidates will be as simple as online shopping, as The Courant reported last week. "Disclosure is meaningless if the information is not readily accessible, searchable, sortable and easily understood," as the commission's director was quoted. Amen. Their new database enables candidates, PAC and political party committee chairs and treasurers to electronically submit campaign finance statements and other required information.

The Courant called on the commission to take further steps for transparency. The current law requires only statewide candidates who raise more than $250,000 have to file electronically. Those who do not meet that high threshold, which includes most of the members of the state legislature, are required only to file paper reports. And the editors called the General Assembly to amend the state's campaign finance law, passed legislatively in 2005, to require electronic filing by all serious candidates for state office and PACs.

All of us at the Sunlight Foundation want to congratulate our grantee Jim Harper for the success of WashingtonWatch.com, a very useful site for citizens eager to follow and impact federal governmental policy. The web traffic of the site has grown 350% over the past 12 months with a half-million citizens visiting the site in 2007. WashingtonWatch.com gives us a unique way to access and share information about individual bills being considered by the Congress and regulatory changes being considered by the federal bureaucracy. The site uses government predictions on the costs or savings from proposed bills and regulations, and then calculates what that means to individual Americans in dollars and cents. With an increasingly Web-enabled citizenry, Jim's site is a valuable tool to not only keep tabs on our nation's business, but allows each of us to have our say. Over the past year, WashingtonWatch.com has added tools which expand its usefulness, including a wiki function allowing the public to post comments on individual bills and federal policy, and a widget that allows bloggers to post vote totals on bills they care about on their blogs.

Microsoft propoganda targets our most vulnerable citizens - our children!

We are absolutely delighted to have been profiled in the Chronicle of Philanthropy's edition this week (sub. required, but here's a link on our site) and we wanted you to know about it. The article highlights our distributed research projects, as well as other elements of our work and grant making. It also gives a glimpse of some of our esteemed citizen researchers and some of our grantees. We couldn't do it without both of them.

Thanks to Craig Newmark, we now know where two more former staffers of resigned, retired or defeated members of Congress are now. Wayne Palmer, the former chief of staff to Sen. Rick Santorum, now lobbies for Astrazeneca Pharmaceuticals LP, while Tim Berry, the former chief of staff for Rep. Tom DeLay lobbies for Time Warner.

We now have four lobbyists verified, only 44 to go!

The hedge fund industry is courting U.S. Rep. Richard Baker (R-La.) to head their lobbying efforts, according to a report over the weekend from The Washington Post. Baker said he has not decided to take the position as president of the Managed Funds Association (MFA), but did admit that the nearly million-dollar-a-year job did "look very interesting." He informed the House Ethics Committee Friday of his talks with MFA as members of Congress are now required to do as a result of the lobbying law passed last year. Baker is the first member to meet this new requirement.

This is a pretty amusing take on Washington's revolving door. But the truth is often stranger than fiction. If you want all the facts, check out the Center for Responsive Politics' Revolving Door database. In fact, you can start by looking up the names of some of the people mentioned in the cartoon.

(From the Open House Project blog.)

I'm reading Politics in Time by Paul Pierson (link), and am struck by how little academic political science seems to affect government policy and political discussion. I find political and social analysis incredibly stimulating, especially given how tiresome I find the current presidential punditizing.

I'm particularly interested in Pierson's purportedly novel conception of how political institutions develop over time, apparently filling the gaps that other models fail to address. (He sets his conceptions against "historical institutionalism" and "rational choice theory".) His analysis is abstract enough to be rigorous and challenging at first, but takes a broad enough view that he can abstract common elements out of disparate systems in a useful, applicable manner. He seeks to "explicate different ways in which things happen over time in social life, drawing attention to processes that are unlikely to be visible without specifically addressing questions of temporality" (p. 10). (more)

The official voting of the 2008 presidential race begins tonight at the Iowa Caucuses. And next Tuesday, New Hampshire voters will cast votes in the first primary of the election. Before casting a ballot I want to encourage everyone in all states to visit OpenSecrets.org, the website of our colleagues at the Center for Responsive Politics, the "follow the money" folks. CRP's easily accessed Race for the White House database profiles the fund raising and spending of each candidate's campaign. Unfortunately, because of filing rules, CRP only has data through September 30. Fund raising and spending reports for October through December are not due to the Federal Election Commission until the end of this month. Nevertheless, the data CRP has shows the important early period where the various candidates' strengths and weaknesses is gauged largely by the amount of money raised.

CRP breaks down the data to reveal each candidate's contributors by state, metropolitan area and zip code; contribution size; gender and industry the donor is associated with. You can even look up individual donors by candidate, industry or ZIP code. "Before you vote, count the candidates' cash," CRP Executive Director Sheila Krumholz advises Iowa and New Hampshire residents, as well as those in later-voting states. "Just as it's important to know the candidates, it's important to know who got them this far and might hold sway with them in the White House," Sheila adds.

The Senate Office of Public Records launched an enhanced database for lobbying disclosure on New Year's Eve, one that allows users for the first time to search previously unsearchable fields like "specific lobbying issue." What this means is that you can plug in a bill number -- say S. 681, the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act -- and find out that 19 organizations disclosed lobbying on the bill, including top political donors Citigroup, Deloitte & Touche, Ernst & Young, Exxon Mobil and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Perhaps it should be expected that the Swiss Bankers Association also has an interest in the legislation...

Pam Gavin, SOPR's Superintendent of Public Records, says that about 90 percent of the 2007 mid-year lobbying reports are fully searchable, and going forward in 2008, 100 percent of them will be. She also helpfully pointed out that the whole database is now downloadable, year by year--the data is available here.

Note: If you're having trouble seeing the new site, you might want to empty your cache.