As stated in the note from the Sunlight Foundation′s Board Chair, as of September 2020 the Sunlight Foundation is no longer active. This site is maintained as a static archive only.

Sunlight Foundation

Follow Us

Turkey Sandwiches, Ron Paul, and Internet Democracy

by

In July 2003 Vice President Dick Cheney was in Columbia, South Carolina for a fancy sit-down lunch with 150 big-money donors willing to kick in the maximum $2,000 to the reelection campaign of Cheney and President George W. Bush. Dick Cheney was to raise $250,000 from this exclusive group of black-tie diners in one afternoon. This would be an ordinary event for any campaign and lost in the pages of history, but this fundraiser is remembered for another reason. And that reason can best be symbolized in the form of a turkey sandwich.

Prior to the Cheney fundraiser, supporters of Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean were gathered online at the Dean’s Blog for America trying to figure out ways that the campaign could continue its small donor driven campaign fundraising success. One idea floated about was for the campaign to try and match the Cheney fundraiser dollar-for-dollar in online donations. The day of Cheney’s fundraiser the campaign posted a picture of Dean, eating a turkey sandwich while blogging, on their site asking supporters to chip in what they could to match the black-tie Cheney event. By 12:30 the next day the campaign had raised over $500,000, or twice as much as the Cheney event netted.

Continue reading

Political Web Innovations

by

The political Web continues to grow as new databases are established every week regularly using new technologies to present important information. I came across three new Web sites, one government and two from nonprofits, today and figured I'd pass them along. The first is the Government Printing Office's online guide to members of Congress. The GPO's online guide allows users to search members of Congress by a number of categories, including name, hometown, terms served, and more. The database is fairly rudimentary but it does allow someone to do quick searches for members from a particular state or see how many members have served for 5 terms. This is good step for GPO as it shows that they looking towards using the Web to project information; all they need is to add more search categories and more information for the member profiles. More links to more information makes the data more useful.

Continue reading

Call for Ensign to Stop Obstructing Electronic Filing Bill

by

Going on eight months now the Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act, requiring senators to file their campaign finance reports electronically, has been held up by proceedural maneuvers from the Republican side. After a series of secret holds placed on the bill were thwarted once secret holds were banned (Senators with secret holds must reveal their identity after 72 hours) Sen. John Ensign blocked the bill by offering a poison pill amendment that lacked relevance to the bill. Ensign's amendment, revealed on this blog to have originated from the offices of Mitch McConnell, requires outside organizations filing ethics complaints to reveal their donor list. For months now, this irrelevant, poison pill amendment has blocked a simple change in how Senators file their campaign finance reports that would help make the data more readily accessible to the voting public. Now a coalition of groups, including a number of conservative groups, has formed to ask Ensign to drop his amendment and allow the electronic filing bill to pass. The groups include:

Alliance for Justice
Americans for the Preservation of Liberty
The American Conservative Union
James Bopp Jr., General Counsel James Madison Center for Free Speech
Center for Lobbying in the Public Interest
The Free Speech Coalition
Gun Owners of America,
National Center for Public Policy Research
OMB Watch

The full letter is after the jump.

Continue reading

Walk the Scandal Walk

by

This morning the Washington Post featured a great article and video by Dana Milbank highlighting all the locations in the district that hot spots in the current pantheon of political scandals. From Abramoff's restaurant Signatures to the Capitol Yacht Club, where Sens. Ted Stevens and Larry Craig slept while Duke Cunningham ran amok, this scandal tour has everything. So, I decided to do the Web 2.0 thing and turn this tour into a Google Map. I whittled the list of locations down to congressional scandals. (Make sure to zoom in on the D St. locations. That's a central point of muck.) Check it out and let me know what I missed.


View Larger Map

Continue reading

The Machine is Using Ron Paul

by

A lot of Internet and politics experts have been sitting around waiting for someone in the 2008 presidential race to emerge as the next Net candidate in the mold of Howard Dean. After last night it appears that that candidate has been found. Ron Paul, a backbench 9-term congressman who previously sought the presidency on the Libertarian ticket in 1988, raised over $4 million online yesterday to set the record for most money raised by a presidential candidate online in a 24 hour span. The amazing thing about this haul of money is that it was not organized by the campaign but was instead a supporter generated “cashmob”. (The supporters actually referred to it as a “money-bomb”.) The Paul campaign took advantage of their supporter’s enthusiasm by creating the most transparent campaign finance decision possible: to publish in real-time each online donation as it happens. By making their campaign finance transparent the Paul campaign encouraged their supporters to do their own work by showing them exactly what they were accomplishing. It’s Howard Dean’s bat on crack.

Continue reading

Boom Shaka Laka – Justice

by

The San Diego Union Tribune, without whom this would not have happened, is reporting that corrupt contractor Brent Wilkes was found guilty by a jury on 13 of 13 counts related to his bribery of imprisoned ex-Rep. Duke Cunningham. The story of Brent Wilkes is perhaps one of the more telling tales of political corruption for our time. Here is a man who set up a series of bogus companies, many which appeared to be nothing but a name with similar addresses, and received million dollar contracts for important work including the bottling of water for troops in Iraq and providing “commercial cover for CIA operations,” despite having no background in air cover. This is the story of the atmosphere of corruption, embodied by the wanton abandon to cash in on political connections, which must have permeated Congress in the late-90s and early-00s.

Continue reading

Web Rule #1: Link to other sites on the Web (Updated)

by

Update: Roll Call is reporting that this was an issue with the Internet company hired by dozens of congressmen to run their Web sites:

"Smith’s site started blocking blogspot domains three months ago after GovTrends re-designed it and blocked readers routed from certain sites that could pose security risks, using a “blacklist” generated by Web security company gotroot.com. The blocking snafu seems to have been put to rest, at least temporarily. GovTrends unblocked blogspot from linking to Congressional clients on Tuesday, according to the company’s vice president, Ab Emam. But Emam says they’ll be closely monitoring traffic and if spam increases or there is harm to the sites, they could start blocking again without warning."

The antithesis of this rule would be to block links from other sites on the Web. That’s what Rep. Adrian Smith is doing. Smith is currently blocking all incoming links to his Web site from the .blogspot domain. This is apparently because an anti-Smith blog, Smith Watch, has been heavily criticizing him and attacking his record in Congress. The blogger at Smith Watch was having trouble linking to Smith’s site and asked the tech folks at Blogger to weigh in; this is part of their response:

The problem isn't with your link. It's with THEIR server. It's rejecting (giving a 404) when the link comes from blogspot. … He's blocking requests when it comes from bloggers.

Ok, to explain. Whenever you click on a link, the browser sends off a request to the server...yadda yadda...included in that is the referrer of the page you came from. His Official Government Website, that WE pay for (well I'm guessing on that part), is throwing up a 404 when the referrer heading comes from blogspot.com. I tested from one of my test blogs and it doesn't work either, also uploaded a test page to googlepages (a different domain) and it works. So it really is blogspot they are blocking via the referrer.

… Congressman Adrian Smith is afraid of Bloggers!

I think the key here is that, yes, we do pay for these official government Web sites and Rep. Adrian Smith thinks that he can decide who can link to and discuss his role as an elected representative of the people of the third district of Nebraska. This is a truly terrible example of a congressman miserably failing in his use of the Web and appears to be an attempt to silence an online voice by nullifying their ability to link. As anybody who’s read anything about the Web (David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous springs to mind) will tell you, links are the glue that hold the Web together and allow communication across platforms and channels. Without links there is no Web. I’ll leave it to the reader to determine what this says about Congressman Smith.

Hat tip: Eric Nebraska at Daily Kos.

Continue reading

Global Warming Committee Brings Public into the Committee Room

by

Update: You can watch Markey ask a question from the online community here and here. 

More and more members of Congress are using the Web to reach out to public constituencies to bring them into the processes in Congress. We saw this back in August when Sen. Dick Durbin went to the blog OpenLeft to discuss crafting a national broadband bill with members of the public. Yesterday, Rep. Ed Markey, the chairman of the Select Committee on Global Warming and Energy Independence, posted a diary on the blog Daily Kos soliciting questions and concerns from the community to be used in a committee hearing on the California wild fires today.

By adding a public element to the hearing the committee was able to create buzz in the environmental community and further open committee operations, which are the backbone of legislative activity, to the public. This will hopefully become a more regular activity among committee chairs and other members as they seek to use the Web to bring thoughtful and intelligent members of the general public in to help provide information outside of the normal think tank/lobbyist channels.

Continue reading

Stevens “Blackmail” in VECO Case

by

Former VECO CEO Bill Allen was on the stand today in the trial of Alaska state Rep. Vic Kohring and testified that his own cousin attempted to blackmail him over VECO's work on Sen. Ted Stevens' Girdwood, Alaska home. The Alaska Daily News is covering the trial:

Kohring Lawyer John Henry Browne asked Veco founder Bill Allen about something that came up at the corruption trial last month of former state Rep. Pete Kott. It was regarding Allen’s nephew, Dave Anderson.

Anderson was blackmailing you and you threatened to kill him? Browne asked.

“I was not going to kill him, no,” Allen responded

But that’s the information the government had, wasn’t it? Browne asked.

Allen went back to a point he made a number of times during cross examination.

That’s just part of the story, Allen said. “You have to do the whole thing.”

Anyway, what was Anderson blackmailing him about? Browne asked.

“Ted Stevens’ house,” Allen anwered.

Continue reading

CFC (Combined Federal Campaign) Today 59063

Charity Navigator