It looks like C-SPAN is now publishing a new index of its House and Senate floor proceedings -- The C-SPAN Congressional Chronicle. According to them the video recordings are matched with the text of the Congressional Record as soon as the Record is available. It only includes members who appeared on the floor to deliver or insert their remarks. The text included is what the member submitted. Each appearance has a video link where users can watch and listen to the actual statements. This is great progress!
We asked our grantee, Metavid, to check it out and tell us how far C-SPAN's new index advances the transparency of what happens on the floor and they reported back that this is a big step, providing a slew of additional timed "metadata" (bill data, index to congressional record) that they can use to enrich their archive. The C-SPAN site is using the Congressional Record with archivists manually syncing up the record with the daily proceeding at per speaker granularity.[1] The closed caption based search which Metavid uses allows people to zero in on matching sections of video quicker but the official record is generally more accurate. Using both should greatly enhance the Metavid search functionality and may help illuminate the revision and extension of remarks that lawmakers are always taking about.
Continue readingNew Database on Bundling
Bundling, that is the practice of one donor gathering donations from many different individuals in an organization or community and presenting the sum to a campaign, is as popular as ever by the major presidential campaigns. The poster child for questionable bundling to 2008 campaign so far goes to the still highly suspect actions of Norman Hsu. Bundling has in past cycles raised concerns too. President Bush's more infamous bundlers were Enron CEO Ken Lay and disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Taylor Lincoln at Public Citizen's Watchdog blog shows how this practice is fraught with potential scandal.
Thanks to Public Citizen and their new 2008 version of its White House for Sale databasee, it's now easier than ever to track the big bundlers for each of the presidential candidates. It also allows you to determine which bundlers are lobbyists. "With bundlers playing a bigger role than ever before in this race, anticipated to cost at least $1 billion," writes Katie Schlieper for Public Campaign. As she said, this is a great tool to use to connect the dots between donors, candidates, and policy priorities.
Continue readingTa Da. John Brothers
Maybe it was the bad head cold last week, or maybe I just wanted to see if he'd stay around(!), but I realized on Friday that I hadn't told everyone about the addition of John Brothers -- our new CTO -- to the Sunlight team. Sunlight is really really lucky to have John.
John has more than 13 years' experience in managing, developing and executing full life-cycle software development. Most recently, he was the Chief Architect at Core Concept, Inc, a technology management consulting firm. Previous to that, John was the Senior Director of R&D at nuBridges, where he managed the entire software development organization for this eBusiness transaction management company. Brothers also founded and was the CTO of Incanta, a broadband-based streaming media software startup.
John's job is to lead Sunlight's technology's team in creating Web applications and managing the daily operations of the Sunlight Labs, our in-house development team. He will also lead Sunlight's long-term strategic and infrastructure IT planning.
As we begin to deploy new Web-based tools, databases and information, John's expertise is going to take us up another notch. In short, fasten your seat belts.
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Just How Effective Is Earmark Reform?
This is a pretty depressing article, if like Sunlight and Taxpayers for Common Sense you think transparency is a good thing when it comes to earmarks. It shows just how tough our job is, and just how crafty members of Congress are. No great surprise on either end, but still...
Continue readingDiggin’ a Little Deeper
Mike McIntire's front page story in the Times this morning put a little more meat on the bones of the Wall Street Journal story that outing Norman Hsu as a problematic political fundraiser (forget, for the moment, the fugitive on the lam piece of this tale.)
Here are some of the telling details:
The records show that Components Ltd., a company controlled by Mr. Hsu that has no obvious business purpose and appears to exist only on paper, has paid a total of more than $100,000 to at least nine people who made campaign contributions to Mrs. Clinton and others through Mr. Hsu....
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Congress vs. Hedge Funds
This Bloomberg story that covered how James Simons, the highest-paid hedge-fund manager in the U.S. last year (and one of the Forbes 500 richest Americans), could pay enough in Medicare taxes to provide health insurance for about 4,800 senior citizens is a good story about a policy fight that is about to be engaged. Rep. Sander Levin has proposed requiring that the earnings of such executives to be classified as compensation and subject them to the 2.9 percent Medicare tax.
But as a policy story, there was more I wanted to know, not the least of which was an understanding of the chances of Levin's proposal becoming law.
Continue readingReporters With Their Own YouTubeChannels
Jose Antonio Vargas, politics and technology reporter from the Washington Post has stepped up to the plate. He's created his own YouTubeChannel and he says he's doing it in part to break down the barriers between reporters and his readers just as the Internet has done for candidates and voters. He's asking for story tips and ideas as well as telling us a little bit about what's on his mind. I watched his first installment and really liked what he had to say about how even he feels like an outsider in lobbyist/lawmaker haunts like The Palm (a well-known hang out for lavish dinners and deals).
What a brave new world this is. Candidates are certainly figuring this out and we're lucky that some reporters, like Vargas are there to help us sort through it all.
Continue readingYour Late Night Reading: CRS reports Courtesy of OpenCRS.com
Poor John. He can't quite get over his late night work habits. (Before he came to Sunlight to direct our Open House Project he worked a day job and indulged his fascination with politics between the hours of 10 PM and 4 AM).
Last night at 2 AM he sent this email:
I just finished reading the latest CRS report from August 26th on Congress and the Internet, linked in the latest Open House Project report, and was delighted to find that Sunlight and the Open House Project are specifically cited by Walter Oleszek (senior government analyst for CRS) for our work in promoting citizen access.
That it was Oleszek's report was particularly satisfying for me, since reading several of his introductory books on Congress (Congressional Procedures and the Policy Process, and Congress and Its Members) is what got me quasi proficient enough to get started.
John has some more extensive thoughts this morning.
Continue reading“I think I’m missing something really big . . .”
It's nice to have company among Foundations in understanding the potential of Web 2.0 for their grantees. The Overbrook Foundation recently undertook a study of its grantees' use of the Internet and founded mixed results, but a lot of interest by their grantees in getting up to speed. Most telling was this comment by one of the participants in the conversation: "I think I'm missing something really big, but I don't know what it is or how to find out what it is."
It's Overbrook's belief that the most effective organizations in the new digital age will be those who recognize these digital opportunities and quickly seize them.
We agree.
And Thompson Says He Supports Disclosure?
In regard to openness and transparency, would be presidential candidate Fred Thompson says he supports more disclosure. But the actions of his nascent campaign have raised serious red flags.
Fred Thompson is finally going to make his race official this Thursday, September 6. Why on that day? Does the that date have some special historical or sentimental significance? Is he avoiding appearing in the Sept. 5 GOP debate in New Hampshire as charged by the state's GOP chair?
It is most likely that Thompson's choice of dates, Sept. 6, allows him to exploit the quirky reporting dates of federal election law so that he can raise money without reporting it until after the key January primaries are finished. If he wins those early primaries, and become the likely nominee, we will not know who financed his campaign, as Jake Tapper has reported.
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