It’s probably not necessary to remind you what semi-national holiday is today. From heart shaped donuts at the Krispy Kreme to special couples’ menu at the restaurants to the plethora of sweets and candied hearts in the office, today is indeed National Heart Health Day! Okay, maybe that was two weeks ago (National Wear Red Day) and all those sweets would probably be terrible for your heart. I won’t sugar coat it anymore (*wince) but it is indeed Valentine’s Day. A day dedicated to the celebration of your loved one(s) and to supporting the flowers/confectionery/greeting card industry.

But in the midst of all that love, can you spare some for Sunlight?

Sure we aren’t your significant other, or even casually dating, but we have been there for you when you needed us most…

Remember that time you thought your ‘loved’ one was cheating on you and found all that weird campaign finance and lobbying spending on Influence Explorer?

Or when you weren’t sure if you were ready to commit because of all the stuff you were reading in the news media? We helped you run a Poligraft on that.

And whenever there was a break in your social calendar, we helped you fill it up with the hottest parties in town with Party Time. Speaking of which, did you make it to the V-Day breakfast this morning?

And when your friend Kevin was freaking you out by putting together a compilation of scary political ads about China, you were able to look at the influence for yourself with the Foreign Lobbying Influence Tracker.

And lastly, when you were sick of being nagged to ‘take out the trash - we got you the proof of every time you have been told to do it in Capitol Words (apparently only a handful of times, so stop being so sensitive!)

They say a functional relationship is one where there is a healthy give and take… and after all that we have given you, we only ask for one thing. Scientific research shows that people are more prone to respond positively to favors and request if presented in poetry, so here we go:

Roses are red,

Violets are blue,

Do you love Sunlight?

Vote for us for a Shorty Award!

We even made it easy for you, just click here:  Tweet #opengov

Watch out Buddy Roemer, we are coming for you, even if your #superPACvalentine is pretty awesome. Voting closes on the 17th, so please tweet your vote today!

Totally non-transparency/opengov related Valentine’s Day fun: http://awkwardfamilyphotos.com/2012/02/13/afp-valentines-slideshow/

Bill Clinton famously tried to claim he hadn’t lied about his relationship Monica Lewinsky by saying, "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is.” Newt Gingrich similarly contorts the English language by claiming “I was never a lobbyist.” Perhaps Gingrich’s claim depends on what the meaning of the word “lobbyist” is. If it is the loophole ridden, easily evaded legal definition in the Lobbying Disclosure Act that allows power brokers to avoid registering as lobbyists if they spend less than 20 percent of their time lobbying, then maybe, maybe, Gingrich can claim with a straight face that he was not a lobbyist. But if common sense and Miriam Webster are applied, to lobby means, “to conduct activities aimed at influencing public officials and especially members of a legislative body on legislation.” Under that definition, there can be no doubt that Gingrich was a lobbyist, even if he didn’t fill out the paperwork.

The New York Times today correctly notes that people of Gingrich’s stature never register as lobbyists. It’s time to change that. Former members of Congress who trade their political connections for paychecks must be required register and report as lobbyists so that the public knows who is paying them and what positions they are advocating. Sunlight has long supported legislation that would strengthen the definition of lobbyist by eliminating the 20 percent loophole. The law should be clear. Former members of Congress should not be able to call themselves “consultants,” “strategic advisors,” or “historians,” while taking money from corporate clients to advance their causes on Capitol Hill. They are lobbyists.

Anti-lobbyist barbs will continue to fly this election season because they win easy political points. But instead of accusations and denials, name calling and obfuscation, it’s time for real reform that will capture all who lobby and impose much needed accountability on the system.

In July, I wrote about a recently launched service called "If This Then That", IFTTT.com. This services helps you automate certain aspects of online life, like sending you emails based on Twitter interactions or posting links to your Facebook wall from your LinkedIn account.

Recently, IFTTT added a new feature called Recipes, which allows you to share your automations with everyone else. You can sort the recipes by type as well as by popularity -- how new or how 'hot' it is.

I have added ten Sunlight Foundation related recipes to IFTTT to help you automate and share Sunlight-related content and events. You can see them below:

• Sunlight Foundation news updated to your email
• Get Sunlight Foundation news added as a link to your Facebook wall
• Get Sunlight Foundation news shared to your LinkedIn wall
• Send an IM when there is now Sunlight Foundation news
• New Sunlight Scribd documents will send to your email account
• New Sunlight Foundation Tumblr posts update to your Facebook wall
• Get Political Party Time events added to your Google Calendar
• Get Sunlight Foundation blogposts on Readability
• Get Sunlight Foundation Reporting news on Readability
• Retweet anything from the Sunlight Foundation Twitter account

I don't want to inundate you with Sunlight recipes, so I'll stop at 10. Let me know how these work for you and if you have other ideas for recipes I could create. If you have your own you would like to share, please the recipe with a link in the comments.

In case you missed it, I wanted to share this message that Ellen Miller, our Executive Director, sent out this morning:

I wanted to take the time to thank you for your support of our work this year. This has been a big year for Sunlight, but an even bigger year for transparency. This year, Americans awakened to the realities of money, power and politics, and we’re proud of the work we’ve done to promote transparency as a fundamental value of the movement to restore democracy.

Rather than rattling off all the projects we’ve worked on this year, I’d like to share a video with you that highlights some of the amazing work being done by Sunlighters -- not just our staff, but also the amazing transparency activists we work with throughout the country and the world.

We’ve only come this far because of your support -- and I hope you’ll contribute today to help us continue shining sunlight to new horizons: sunlightfoundation.com/donate/2011

Thanks for all of your support, and from all of the Sunlight team, happy holidays!

Ellen S. Miller Executive Director Sunlight Foundation

P.S. -- In the spirit of some holiday fun, Sunlight Labs has created an interactive holiday game that I'd like to share with you. Play it here: http://sunlightfoundation.com/happyholidays/

Here’s a riddle: What do you call it when someone earns millions of dollars from corporate clients, uses his relationships with the most influential officials in government to pursue those clients’ interests, and even has offices on K Street?

Answer: If you are Newt Gingrich, not a lobbyist.

The Washington Post reports that corporate clients paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to the current leader in the Republican primary in exchange for him providing “access to top transformational leadership across industry and government” through his for-profit “think tank.” Apparently they got what they paid for. According to the Post, “Gingrich also bragged about his success in pushing conservative policies and legislation in Washington during his political exile.”

We’ve written many times before about stealth lobbyists, often former Members of Congress who crawl around Capitol Hill and the White House advocating on behalf of fat cat clients, but who skirt disclosure under the lobby laws by claiming they only provide “strategic advice” or spend less than 20% of their time lobbying.

And we’ve advocated—dare I say lobbied—to change all of that.

The specter of Newt Gingrich, former non-lobbyist lobbyist, occupying the White House should galvanize calls for lobbying reform. It’s problematic enough when a former Member of Congress provides his clients with access to his friends and colleagues in the House or the Senate. But if Washington’s revolving door should swing that person into the White House, corporate interests who once paid handsomely for strategic advice will have a direct line to the leader of the country.

The Gingrich example is at the top of the list of why we need a new approach to lobbying disclosure. The most influential people in Washington can easily skirt the rules currently in place. Everyone who is not in that top tier of influence peddlers—including all of the registered lobbyists who follow the rules—should recognize the failure of the current system and work to change it by ensuring that if someone is paid to lobby, they register and report as a lobbyist.

Representatives Loebsack (D-IA), Quigley (D-IL) and Renacci (R-OH) introduced the Deficit Committee Transparency Act today, an important bill that would shine a light on efforts by outside interests to sway the twelve members of the Committee on Deficit Reduction, whether by lobbying them or donating to their campaigns. The bill would also require the committee’s report to be made public for 72 hours before it is voted on, and mandate the creation of a web site so all disclosure information and hearings will be publicly available online in a central location. Sunlight strongly supports this effort and applauds the bill’s cosponsors for recognizing the critical need to shine a light on avenues of access and influence to Super Committee members.

Unfortunately, as the Super Committee holds its first official meeting on Thursday, the chances of this bill being enacted before then are, to put it mildly, slim. But members of the Super Committee are in the process of establishing rules for the committee and this bill should be a blueprint to guide them.

The bill’s authors recognize that the unprecedented powers granted to Super Committee members should be paired with full transparency of their work. There already has been direct pressure from lobbyists and other interested parties asking the committee members to salvage some programs or cut others. Under this bill, the public, as well as the members of Congress whose clout has been diminished because they weren’t granted a spot on the Super Committee, should know, in real time, who is asking for what.

The transparency provisions in the bill are not unprecedented and members of Congress have no legitimate reason to resist them. For example, the Obama administration required meetings to be disclosed when special interests lobbied the executive branch on the implementation of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

Likewise, real time disclosure of campaign contributions is also standard. Under current law, if a contribution is given within 20 days of an election, it must be reported within 48 hours. Given the short life of the Super Committee, whose work must be wrapped up before the end of the year, failure to require reporting of contributions in 48 hours means campaign contributions to Super Committee members will be hidden until after the committee’s work is complete.

If these proposals are enacted, they will help to begin to rebuild the public’s trust in the budget process. If time constraints or other pressures prevent this common sense bill from becoming law, we would hope the bill’s provisions are contained in committee rules. On the other hand, if transparency measures are ignored and the work of the Super Committee is hidden behind a veil of secrecy, it will reinforce the public’s mistrust of the process and will delegitimize the committee’s work.

Need some help getting to the point? Topicsmarks is a summarizing service that analyzes large amounts of text and draws out the main points in a coherent format.  According to Techcrunch, the service "uses semantic text extraction and personalization technologies" to draw information from links, documents and other content types.  It currently works with desktop files, urls and your Evernote or Google Reader accounts.

I ran Sunlight reporter Ryan Sibley's post from last week (HAMP helps few homeowners, but program continues) through Topicmarks, and asked her to comment on how well it did on summarizing her piece. This is the Topicmarks summary:

Sibley's thoughts on the summarization:

The Topicsmarks service summarized the main points of the article, but it also misinterpreted some facts presented in the original piece. By moving sentences around after summarizing them, it incorrectly presented a contrast between facts that were not supposed to be considered that way. In short, the context for what I wrote was removed and the results it produced are misleading and just plain wrong. I'd suggest reading an original piece over using this service.

We haven't tested very many posts and wonder whether the piece is too complicated for the service or if Topicmarks has a hard time parsing the writing style.  Have any of you tried this service? What are your thoughts?

The Hill’s Congress Blog last week featured an item by Howard Marlowe, president of the American League of Lobbyists, in which Mr. Marlowe called on lobbyists to “break our code of silence and show our true determination to solve the critical problems that are tying the federal government in knots.”

I’m not privy to this code, despite being a registered lobbyist myself. Apparently, Mr. Marlowe’s concern centers on lobbyists acting “as though there was no choice but to silently take the abuse to ourselves and our profession.” Poor us.

But if Marlowe is concerned about the image of lobbyists, rather than dismiss proposals to make the profession more transparent, he should embrace them. Sunlight strongly supports the H.R. 2339, the Lobbyist Disclosure Enhancement Act introduced by Rep. Quigley. The bill would require lobbyists to disclose the names of the covered executive branch officials or Members of Congress lobbied (or the name of the employer if the lobbyist meets with staff), closing a meaningless provision in current law in which lobbyists merely have to report whether they have lobbied the House, the Senate or the Executive branch.

But where is the American League of Lobbyists on this? Firmly opposed. It’s “not realistic” says Marlowe. At the same time, he claims that it was ALL who led the effort two decades ago to enact lobbyist disclosure, noting, “Today anyone can turn to a database on the Internet that tells who is lobbying, what they are lobbying for, and how much they are getting paid to lobby.” Why wouldn’t ALL then want to complete the circle of disclosure and add to that database the names of the people actually being lobbied?

Mr. Marlowe goes on to complain that President Obama’s staff uses a nearby coffee shop to meet with lobbyists, so that their presence isn’t disclosed when White House visitor logs are released. The visitor logs are a security system retooled as a disclosure system, and aren't a replacement for a complete overhaul of the lobbying laws. If lobbyists were required to report their meetings, it would be irrelevant whether the meetings took place in the West Wing or Starbucks. Again, if Mr. Marlow is so concerned that the White House is skirting its own disclosure rules, he should be endorsing greater transparency measures.

As disappointing as Mr. Marlowe’s stance on stronger lobbyist reporting is, we agree that the 20 percent loophole should be closed so that anyone who is paid to lobby must register and report. This is another component of the LDEA.

Lobbyists engage in constitutionally protected activities and should have nothing to hide. The profession would go a long way in assuaging negative assumptions about it if lobbyists break their code silence and loudly cheer greater disclosure.

The Sunlight Foundation and a dozen other bipartisan organizations are seeking Senators who are willing to be among the first to embrace the most modern of trends in the upper chamber—voluntary electronic filing of their campaign finance reports.

Senators Boxer, Cochran, Cornyn, Feinstein, Leahy, Lugar, and Sanders electronically filed their campaign finance reports with the FEC during the last reporting period. Senator Gillibrand recently announced that she too will begin filing electronically on July 15, the next deadline for filing FEC reports. Any senator who supports transparency should join this small group and commit to filing their campaign finance reports electronically starting in July and continuing to do so for every reporting period thereafter.

Failing to file electronically is inexcusable. The FEC makes voluntary electronic filing easy. Senators, or their campaigns, can simply download the agency’s free filing software and contact the agency for an ID and password. In fact, senators who served in the House prior to coming to the Senate are likely to have already filed electronically. Electronic filing has been mandatory in the House for years.

Voluntary filing will never obviate the need for a change in the law. For that reason, the letter also asks senators to cosponsor S. 219, the Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act, introduced by Senators Tester and Cochran. The law would modernize the archaic system in which candidates for the Senate file their FEC reports with the Secretary of the Senate, who then prints them out and delivers them to the FEC, only to have the FEC re-enter the information into its own computer databases. The system costs hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars each year and denies the public timely access to information. Unfortunately, efforts to mandate electronic filing have been stymied since the bill was first introduced in 2003. It is imperative that the legislation is enacted to ensure that all Senate candidates file electronically.

Until the law passes, we urge senators to demonstrate their leadership as well as their support for transparency and openness in Congress by embracing voluntary electronic filing.

The following groups have joined Sunlight calling for voluntary electronic filing and support of the Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act: The Campaign Finance Institute, The Campaign Legal Center, The Center for Responsive Politics, Common Cause, Fix Congress First, Judicial Watch, MAPLight.org, OMB Watch, OpentheGovernment.org, Public Campaign, Public Citizen and US PIRG.

Group Letter to Senators on Electronic Filing