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.
Where the Money Comes from Matters
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.
Continue readingNew FOIA Law Signed
In all the festivities surrounding the New Year's holiday, you might have missed President Bush signing the Open Government Act of 2007 on Monday without comment, the first reform of the Freedom of Information Act in a decade. David Ardia, director of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the Center for Citizen Media, hails the act for expanding the definition of who is representative of the news media. "This change would significantly benefit bloggers and non-traditional journalists by making them eligible for reduced processing and duplication fees that are available (to members of the media)."
The Associated Press reports that the new law "is aimed at reversing an order by former Attorney General John Ashcroft in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, in which he instructed agencies to lean against releasing information when there was uncertainty about how doing so would affect national security."
(Updated: The Associated Press reported on the new law; the First Amendment Center did not issue a statement as previously reported.)
Continue readingBundle Up
Earlier today, the Campaign Finance Institute (CFI) and Public Citizen released an extensive study that found the majority of the bundlers and other fundraisers raising cash for the various 2008 presidential campaigns, over 2,000 individuals, come from only three segments of the U.S. economy: lawyers and law firms, three finance industries, and real estate. Among those industries, Republicans hold an edge in raising money from the real estate and lobbying industries. Democrats are receiving more funds from lawyers and law firms, as well as the entertainment industries. Democratic and Republican fundraisers appear to be doing a comparable job of raising cash from the securities and investment industry.
Continue readingPublic Accountability Is Going Down
File this under "Two steps forward, one step back."
Secrecy News highlights a change in disclosure policy by several federal defense intelligence agencies in anticipation of last week's launching of USAspending.gov. Claiming that online disclosure of their unclassified contracts would compromise security, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), and the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) asked the Department of Defense for and received permission to keep the documents secret. "I appreciate your concerns that reporting these actions to the publicly accessible website could provide unacceptable risk of insight to your individual missions and budgets," wrote Shay D. Assad of the Under Secretary of Defense in a December 7 memorandum (pdf). "But when it comes to intelligence spending, there will actually be a net loss of public information because categories of intelligence contracting data that were previously disclosed will now be withheld," writes Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News editor.
Continue readingPut Me In Touch with Democracy!
Boing Boing highlights CommitteeCaller.com, a new app that allows people to easily call an entire congressional committee to express their views. Consider it speed dial for congressional committee members. The site was built by Fred Benenson, a master's degree student at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, as a final project for a class he was taking this fall. "The web application utilizes the open source Asterisk PBX system to connect you to every senator or house member on a particular committee," Benenson writes in the Boing Boing post. "No more digging around the 'net entering zip-codes to retrieve phone numbers of representatives," he writes. He is working on a state legislature version as well.
Benenson says he created the site out of frustration after spending hours dialing every member of a particular congressional committee. He realized that calling individual committee members should not have to be so laborious, and the process ought to be able to be automated. "I was able to aggregate a database for myself containing all 540 110 th Congress representatives and their committee affiliations," Benenson writes. He created a secondary database containing all 5,000 specific affiliations. And he states he'd be happy to share both databases with anyone who is interested in developing a similar application.
Continue readingMajor Victory for Transparency
This afternoon, our friends at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) got a major victory for all who care for openness and transparency.
A federal judge ruled that the logs kept by the Secret Service of visitors to the White House and the Vice President's residence are public records and subject to Freedom of Information Act requests. The Bush White House had been fighting the release of the documents in an effort to hide evidence and details of visits from disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff and prominent religious conservative leaders. The White House insists that the logs are presidential records and should not be public, and wants the Secret Service to destroy its copies of the logs once they are turned over to the White House. They were wrong.
In sum, according to CREW: "As a result of today's ruling, records of visits to both the White House complex and the residency of the vice president are now publicly available through the FOIA."
Continue readingHidden in Plain Sight
Last week, the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) and OMB Watch, both Sunlight Foundation grantees, released a report highlighting how many federal agencies' databases and websites contain flaws making them hard to search with commonly used search engines. The report, "Hiding in Plain Sight: Why Important Government Information Cannot Be Found through Commercial Search Engines," shows how vital government information appears "invisible" to ordinary Americans using the Internet. Congress passed the E-Government Act of 2002 to promote the public's access to government information and services. Based on this report, there a whole lot of work that still needs to be done.
The report not only points out the flaws in current government databases that make it hard, if not impossible, for ordinary citizens to find the data they are looking for, but it also provides fixes that would encourage greater accessibility of information by making it more searchable.
Continue readingThe Washington Independent
The Center for Independent Media (CIM) is poised to launch its new Washington outpost -- The Washington Independent. Allison Silver, a former editor for The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times, will be news editor. Laura McGann, formerly with TPMmuckraker, is on board as managing editor. They are attracting some significant talent.
The Center was launched in 2006 to support talented bloggers with journalism and internet training, as well as to provide logistical support. The brains behind it are David Bennahum, founding writer for Wired magazine, and Ali Savino, a former Microsoft programmer. Thus far the group has fostered four state-based news sites, Colorado Confidential, Iowa Independent, Michigan Messenger, and Minnesota Monitor. Each site operates independently, and as CIM's website states, "the sites' contributors do more reporting than most bloggers and are more opinionated on key local issues than most daily news reporters."
Continue readingUSASpending.gov Launches
The launch of OMB's USASpending.gov, based on the Sunlight funded FedSpending.org, is a huge accomplishment worth celebrating. The Washington Post's story talks about the strange bedfellows that made it happen:
Robert Shea is a Republican insider with a head for business and a yen for federal program performance standards. Gary Bass is a government watchdog with a mean bite who wants openness and knows how to get it.
Official antagonists, political opposites, brought together by a wild, crazy idea: federal budget transparency. Online and searchable. Free for the asking....
Official antagonists, political opposites, brought together by a wild, crazy idea: federal budget transparency. Online and searchable. Free for the asking.
We're pleased to have been ahead of this curve -- and one of the prime catalysts for it. At the recent celebration of the one year successes of FedSpending.org (hosted by its creator OMB Watch), it was noted that over 5 million searches of the data occured in the last 12 months. That's not visits or hits, that's actual searches for the data! Now that's some success. At that event, Robert Shea of OMB also promised that the government data would be made available with programming interfaces to make it easy for developers and technologically sophisticated citizens to use the data in ways yet to be imagined. How nice that this government agency really gets what transparency is all about.
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