Currently, there are two laws that show how important it is for people to pay attention to the rule-making process. The first deals with protecting people's wallets, while the other is intended to protect people's lives.
Continue readingAbortion rights prompts liberal groups to spend big, and early
WIth more than a year to go before the next congressional race, Democratic groups have begun to outspend Republican groups two to one. Much of that money is coming from groups focused on abortion rights.
Continue readingPolitical influence by county: A new way to look at campaign finance data
Over the summer, the Sunlight Foundation partnered with Azavea, a Philadelphia-based firm that specializes in mapping and geo-spatial analysis, to create location-based analyses of the federal campaign finance data we display on InfluenceExplorer.com. The partnership produced new and more accurate ways to identify trends in political spending according to location that were previously hard to complete because of complications in the mapping process. Many of the findings were mapped.
Continue readingStand your ground: More states considering self-defense statute at issue in Trayvon Martin case
More states are considering "shoot first" laws, while a majority of states have varying degrees of laws that allow self-defense.
Continue readingCoding, Not Just for the Boys
Instead of scheduling brunch plans or enjoying a lazy afternoon this weekend, close to 40 women took over the Sunlight conference room this past Saturday for an all-female software training program conducted by GeekChic. Here at Sunlight, we were happy to host the training and help cultivate more developers in the DC community with the hopes of increasing awareness of open data and turning these future developers on to our APIs and databases.
While many our developer colleagues were participating in the National Day of Civic Hacking, a number of us were here writing our first lines of code. In the seven-hour training intensive, we covered the basics of command line, learned to write and execute code in Python, got our style on with some basic CSS and HTML training as well as created our first web app on Django. (Whew, that was exhausting just recounting what we did.) Six Sunlighters, with a range of tech know how, participated in the training and here’s what we learned (and real life testimonials on why you shouldn’t be afraid to learn to code!). If you are interested in partnering with Sunlight to host technology workshops, please contact events@sunlightfoundation.com.
Continue readingThe District’s Campaign Finance Records on Influence Explorer
Just in time for next week's special city council election, Sunlight is sneak-previewing our latest addition to Influence Explorer — DC campaign finance data — as well as our wish list for how it can be made better.
Gun ads in Illinois primary a harbinger of things to come?
The gun debate is already emerging as an issue for the 2014 election cycle. In the weeks since the State of the Union address, which President Barack Obama used to make an emotional appeal for gun control, at least seven groups have either purchased airtime in major markets around the country or posted TV-ready ads to their Youtube accounts.
Continue readingBiden pitches gun control in NRA country
When Vice President Joe Biden travels to Richmond, Va. today to participate in a roundtable about gun violence, he'll be visiting a state where the legislature largely has beaten back proposals to regulate guns, and where politicians have gotten $2.2 million in support from gun rights groups over the past two decades.
Most of that money—$2 million—came from the National Rifle Association, according to Sunlight Foundation's Influence Explorer. By contrast, groups that support stronger restrictions on guns, such as the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, reported spending a mere $183,000 in Virginia over ...
Continue readingGovernor gets hacked, Politwoops gets it all on record
No one is immune from Internet predators looking to hack private accounts and have lots of fun at the account... View Article
Continue readingHouse freshmen: New members find new earmarks?
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More than two dozen first-term House members, part of an enormous freshman class swept into office on an anti-incumbent tide of disgust over Washington insider dealing, have introduced a combined 263 bills designed to benefit the bottom lines of hometown corporations.
An analysis of campaign finance records by the Sunlight Foundation shows that some of the corporations that stand to save money from bills aimed at temporarily suspending tariffs on products that the firms import are also campaign contributors to the members of Congress introducing ...
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