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In his State of the Union address, President Obama said about health care:
"The longer it was debated, the more skeptical people became. ... With all the lobbying and horse-trading, this process left most Americans wondering what's in it for them."
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Another aspect of the health-care debate in the wake of the Massachusetts special election is how health-care negotiations were handled. Following are excerpts from the nonprofit Sunlight Foundation about the process:
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RALEIGH -- Towns around Wake County, and the county itself, are putting more information online. This is good news for taxpayers and advocates of open government. It is also good news for government employees who will have more time and better tools to do their work. The John Locke Foundation created NCTransparency.com to encourage governments in this effort.
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Bipartisanship on job creation
DEMOCRATIC LEADERS should be bringing Republicans in now for talks about how to shape a jobs bill that is widely expected to come before the House next month, Rep. Bill Pascrell says.
“Let’s have an inventory of their ideas, our ideas, our bills, their bills and come up with a bipartisan package that we pay for,” Pascrell, D-Paterson, said in a recent interview. “I’m committed to taking $75 million to $100 million from TARP.”
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Imagine you recently moved and are taking your child to a new dentist. You look up directions on Google Maps or Mapquest on how to get there. You pull up the map and think you’re set. But, after you’ve picked your kid up from school, loaded her into the car and started driving, you immediately get lost. It turns out that the map has completely outdated information — all the roads have changed, and it’s simply inaccurate. Last week, hundreds of computer geeks, government workers and nonprofit advocates gathered in town to talk about what “Gov 2.0” means to them. With Internet technology changing by the minute, there’s much discussion about how it can help the government become a platform that engages and empowers citizens to improve how government works. Crucial to this concept, however, is that government supply people information online and in real time. You can have the best map program in the world, but if the information that underlies it is outdated, you still lose your way.
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On his official House Web site, Rep. Harold Rogers, R-Ky., writes about economic development and job creation.
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IF YOU do the math, you quickly see why a senator from Missouri can't personally answer phone calls from each of her 5.9 million constituents.
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Federal election law requires candidates for the House of Representatives and the presidency to electronically file lists of their donors and their expenses. Unwilling to change with the times, senators continue to follow the practice they adopted in the 1970s. They file paper reports of their campaign disclosures with the Senate Office of Public Records, which in turn has them shipped to the Federal Election Commission, which must then spend about $250,000 and untold hours having the records typed in, line by line, to the Federal Election Commission's databases.
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How powerful is the Internet in getting crucial safety information out to the public? In one case, that information went out 707 times per minute. That's how often, on average, people seeking information about salmonella-tainted peanut butter clicked on a website and widget sponsored by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) over a six-week period a total of nearly 44 million hits.
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Here's an opportunity for Alabama's U.S. senators, Jeff Sessions and Richard Shelby, to increase government transparency while saving taxpayer money, paper and time, to boot. They should sponsor the Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act (SB482), which would require senators to do like members of Alabama's House delegation already do - file their campaign finance reports in electronic format.
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With millions of people losing their jobs, their health insurance and their homes to foreclosure, it seems that few people, whatever their political persuasion, are arguing that government shouldn't take swift action. So Congress is rushing on an $800 billion-plus, who-knows-how-many-pages stimulus bill.