The day of gadget envy reckoning is upon us as Apple unveils their latest iPad and it seems only natural that the Sunlight Foundation watch this media frenzy in regards to our policy proposals. One particularly confounding (and floundering) situation is that the Senate refuses to use the internet and file their campaign finance reports electronically, though a few Senate offices nobly do.

The current process of filing goes something like this: a senator's campaign staff fills out campaign financial disclosure forms as required every quarter, submits those forms to the Secretary of the Senate who prints them out and sends it over to the Federal Election Commission. The FEC then takes this pile of paper and pays an army of data-entry folks to put those forms back into electronic format and then the FEC posts it online. We might be laughing at this scene set to Yakety Sax if it weren't costing taxpayers an estimated $430,000 every single year! This is stupid.

We tried appealing to their environmental concerns. We tried appealing to their government efficiency concerns. We tried appealing to their debt concerns. Turns out those concerns aren't so strong. Now, we appeal to their gadget envy concerns.

The iPad Proposal:

• Most recently cited cost of not filing electronically: $430,000
• Cost of a brand new 16 gb iPad with WiFi and AppleCare Warranty with taxes: $612.68
• Number of iPads that could be purchased with savings: 701
• Every Senate office gets 7 iPads and the extra goes to the Secretary of the Senate.

Maybe this will bait McConnell out from his cave of baffling obstruction?

Note: This proposal is tongue-in-cheek and we think it's much better for senators to just use their existing computers to file, like the House has been doing for years. Maybe they could put the money they would save towards funding other e-government programs?!

Fluid is a compelling Mac-based application that allows you to turn almost any website into its own 'app.'

What does that mean, exactly? Basically, Fluid is a program that allows you to remove a few steps from the process of launching and accessing frequently used web-based tools and services. For example, I use a browser-based, social media service called Cotweet on a daily basis, but I would prefer to not keep it open in a tab in my browser, where it could be easily closed or open me up to Endless Tab Syndrome. Fluid allows me to create a Cotweet application, which means I can have a separate application window open for the tool, allowing me to keep Cotweet on a separate desktop on my Mac or to quickly launch it from the dock as needed.

It's very simple to create your own Fluid application:

Enter the website's URL, provide a name, and optionally choose an icon. Click "Create", and within seconds your chosen website has a permanent home on your Mac as a real Mac application that appears in your Dock.

The service is free to use but for $5 you can access a few more features:

1. Separate cookie storage (usually cookies are shared with Safari)
2. Minimize app to the menu bar instead of the dock
3. Userscripts or Userstyles
4. Lion Full Screen mode

What do you think of Fluid? I understand Chrome for PC has a comparable feature but it doesn't work on Mac yet. Have you found other services like Fluid which you prefer?

It's often the case that your signature is required for various documents, whether paper or PDF, to carry out your work. I would personally prefer to skip the process of printing, signing and then rescanning or faxing documents if it can be helped, and I bet you would, too.

A colleague alerted me to the fact that the Preview app in Lion, the latest version of Apple's OS X, was catered to folks like us: Using the built-in iSight program, Preview makes it easy to capture your signature and apply it to a PDF form. This allows you to skip the printing, scanning and faxing of anything requiring your signature, so long as you already have a PDF of the form you need.

TUAW -- a.k.a. "The Unofficial Apple Weblog" -- does a great job of breaking down how this feature works:

Lion's version of Preview comes with a built-in signature scanner that makes signing documents far simpler. In the Annotations toolbar you now have an option to create a signature from your Mac's built-in iSight camera. All you need to do is use black ink to sign a piece of white paper, align your signature toward the camera using the onscreen guides, and take a snapshot of the signature.

As TUAW notes, it's solid step in the direction of a truly paperless office.

(h/t from our own Joshua Hatch)

An article on the front page of the New York Times yesterday reported on the pressure some major corporations—such as Microsoft— put on Congress and the administration to have a tax break implemented to make it cheaper for them to bring their money back to the states.

What the corporations and their lobbyists are asking for is known as a repatriation holiday, which would bring the tax rate on profits returned to the states down to about 5 percent from 35 percent for one year.

Here's a look at the influence efforts behind the names and corporations mentioned in the piece:

• Apple made $165,848 in campaign contributions for the 2009-10 election cycle. The technology giant reported spending just over $3 million in lobbying money between the years 2009 and 2010 with $560,00 of that money going to Capital Tax Partners. Capital Tax Partners regularly lobbies on tax related issues. For the first quarter of 2011, the company has reported paying Capital Tax Partners $80,000.
• Microsoft made $4.4 million in campaign contributions during the 2009-2010 cycle and reported spending $13.6 million on lobbying for those same years.
• Google made $1.4 million in campaign contributions in 2009-10 and reported spending $9.1 million lobbying Congress.
• Kevin Brady, a R-Texas, received just over $1 million in campaign contributions for the 2009-10 election cycle.

An article published in Business Insider reports on a lower-profile corporation that also lobbies and make contributions to influence Washington. The article details Celanese Corporation's appointment of a new vice president. Here's a look at the global chemical producer's influence profile:

• Celanese Corporation made $31,562 in campaign contributions during the 2009-10 election cycle and spent $160,000 lobbying Congress those same years.

‘Influence Explored’ takes an article from the day’s headlines and exposes the influential ways of entities mentioned in the article. Names and corporations are run through Sunlight’s influence tracking tools such as Influence Explorer and Transparency Data to remind readers of the money that powers Washington.

Federal Computer Week has an encouraging article about how the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Weather Service are now providing useful information via mobile handheld devices. They have stripped down information from their Web sites, emphasizing text, so that cell phones and other mobile devices can easily upload it. The agencies are able to reach more people with “potentially life-saving content" in the case of an environmental alert or, in the case of the NWS, a storm warning. The technology managers orchestrating this hope they are taking the first step toward two-way communications between government agencies and cell phone users.

The designers of EPA's Mobile Web site realized that they would have to keep the content simple and basic because of the wide range of mobile devices out there, from the 3G devices like Apple’s iPhone, to the cell phones running on slower cellular networks. The article quotes the EPA’s designer, “With a typical cell phone, you’re basically back to the Gopher world,” the text-based Internet interface that preceded browsers using graphics. So they designed processes that strip graphics and other resource-hogging items from blogs, press releases and the like so that mobile users can upload basic text. The Weather Service’s forecast and other information tends to be quite time sensitive, so they to have build devices that transform their data so that it can be immediately displayed on mobile devices.

This is a great development.