Last evening, the Firedoglake hosted another installment of their Sunday Book Salons, where John Anderson took questions online about his new book Follow the Money: How George W. Bush and the Texas Republicans Hog-Tied America, released earlier this fall. In the book Anderson gives an overview of the connections between elite Houston law firms, Karl Rove, Grover Norquist, Tom DeLay and his K Street Project to Jack Abramoff. I haven't read the book yet, but last night's discussions makes me want to.
As an Austin American-Statesman review states, Anderson used previously reported or exposed facts to retell this story. By following Deep Throat's advice, Anderson shows the overarching network that put George W. Bush in the White House, DeLay out of a job, Abramoff in prison, and the GOP in the minority.
Continue readingWindfalls of War
Yesterday, the Center for Public Integrity released their new report Windfalls of War II, exposing how contractors over the past three years made a mint off the spoils of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. An earlier 2003 report, Windfalls of War (heavily researched by our Sunlight colleague, Larry Makinson) looked at Uncle Sam's spending on private contractors from 2001 through much of 2003.
In this new report, the Center says that the federal contract system for the two war zones is "marred by missing contracts, unidentified companies, a lack of competitive bidding and the absence of minority-owned companies as primary contractors." By the end of 2006, CPI reports, U.S. contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan have grown to $25 billion, while oversight has seriously deteriorated.
Continue readingWhat You See Is What You Get
Money and politics, united completely.
More Widgets!
Yesterday, I highlighted a new interactive and customizable widget that lets the citizen be the journalist, AskYourLawmaker.org. Here's another really interesting one.
Besides his day job at the Cato Institute, Jim Harper is the creative force behind WashingtonWatch.com, which places a value on changes to future federal spending, taxes, or regulation. The goal of the site is to convey the significance to average Americans -- in dollars and cents -- of proposed changes to the nation's policies. Jim's new widget allows bloggers to show the current state on pending legislation. It allows individuals to comment on the bill, and to even vote yea or nay on the legislation. It's very cool.
Continue readingBundlers
Lisa Zagaroli, writing for McClatchy Newspapers, reports on the growing importance of bundlers in presidential campaign fundraising. These "mega-fundraisers" are very skilled at using their business and personal contacts to raise large amounts of campaign cash for a specific candidate. Only a few presidential candidates have released any information on who is doing the bundling but we know that the bundlers usually have super access to the candidates. No presidential campaign has released both the names of their bundlers and the amount each individual fundraiser has raised. Each campaign has adopted varying degrees of disclosure on who is raising their big bucks.
On October 30, Congressional Quarterly reported that Federal Election Commission is working on new bundling rules. One proposal, which came out of the Congress, is to only disclose the bundlers who are federal lobbyists. The McClatchy report indicates that the FEC is interested in going beyond this.
Continue readingAsk Your Lawmaker
We're very pleased to announce that Sunlight grantee Capitol News Connection is launching today a new interactive and customizable widget that lets YOU be the journalist -- and hold power to account! You decide what you want to ask members of Congress and presidential candidates, see what other people are asking about, and vote on the questions you think are most important. CNC's award-winning public radio journalists will track down lawmakers and candidates on the campaign trail -- and get the answers you demand. Then, you can listen, comment, share and even embed the audio on your site. This is very cool.
Those using the widget include CNC public radio stations, public television sites, bloggers and social networking sites. To get the widget just go to www.askyourlawmaker.org/widget. Select the customization options you want -- you can display questions or answers -- by topic or state. You can listen and vote within the widget. Try it out -- and help spread the word! We want to get as many questions as possible, and aggregate as many voices as possible around each question: It's hard for a lawmaker to dodge a question asked by, say, 13,952 people in 17 states!
Update: Apparently NPR has taken down the widget from its site, for what may be technical fixes. We trust that will only be temporary.
Continue readingRead The Bill
If Rep. John Boehner hates that bills are getting pushed through without a chance to thoughtfully consider them, maybe he should support House Resolution 504, an effort to require that all bills be posted online for 72 hours before they are voted on. We do.
Continue readingTransparency Thwarted
Today's edition of the New York Times has an op-ed highlighting a provision that's buried within the newly enacted Honest Leadership and Open Government Act that compromises the intended transparency.
As we know, members of conference committees often secretly inserted earmarks and other items into already finalized bills. To combat this, the Senate instituted new rules saying that any individual senator can object to such provisions, threatening the whole bill. In the category of giving with one hand and taking away another, the Senate also said that they could vote to waive all objections to any bill. If 60 senators agree, all the provisions are approved.
No great surprise that this gives new power to the majority party especially if the majority has close to 60 votes. A dissenting senator would have to muster 41 votes to stop the process. In the very bill meant to open up the bill writing process , we have a new technique to thwart openness and transparency. Harumph.
Continue readingProgrammableGov
ProgrammableWeb recently launched a new central resource of over a dozen government-related mashups and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to improve access to legislative, civic and political information.
ProgrammableWeb is already a major hub for the Web 2.0 technology community around its directories of mashups and Web service APIs. The new site is now listing Web applications that help citizens examine and remix government data to shed more light on the work of the federal government.
ProgrammableGov's APIs and Mashup Dashboard currently offers government information APIs and mashups developed by government agencies and those developed independently by citizens and transparency advocate organizations, including several created or supported by the Sunlight Foundation.
Continue readingLarry Lessig on Obama
Larry Lessig blogs today about why he's supporting Barack Obama for President. There are a number of reasons, including this one:
... a commitment to making data about the government (as well as government data) publicly available in standard machine readable formats. The promise isn't just the naive promise that government websites will work better and reveal more. It is the really powerful promise to feed the data necessary for the Sunlights and the Maplights of the world to make government work better. Atomize (or RSS-ify) government data (votes, contributions, Members of Congress's calendars) and you enable the rest of us to make clear the economy of influence that is Washington.
Here's a link to the entire policy statement by Obama, and another report.
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