Room 8 has a new post up asking for New Yorkers to try to figure out if any of their earmarks (and they have quite a few, 157 items in the Labor HHS bill) is pork. This seems like perhaps the most productive way to dig into the 1800 plus earmarks -- local groups getting at local representatives when they are at home. Call their offices while your members of Congress are home on recess. Let them know that this matters to you, that you deserve to know, and that while equipment for a new hospital may be a good idea, any decisions made in secrecy like this are not.
Continue readingMore Exposing Earmarks Links
There are a bunch of great blogposts this morning on what we're calling the Exposing Earmarks project. Here are just a few... You must visit NZ Bear's great Porkbusters webpage on the earmarks. It has visual views of state-by-state earmarks, dollars per capita, and even dollars per keyword. Brilliant. (NZ also gave extremely helpful advice on the design of our google map of earmarks). Captain Ed writes:
Continue readingWe Need Help Exposing Earmarks!
Whether you're a blogger, a curious citizen, a citizen journalist, a muckraker, or a journalist, we need your help. There are more than 1,800 earmarks in the 2007 appropriations bill for the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education (see the map). That's over 1,800 appropriations that have never been publicly debated -- and probably never will be -- and we don't even know where they came from. An earmark is a line-item that is inserted into a bill to direct funds to a specific project or recipient without any public hearing or review. (Read the Earmarks FAQ.)
Continue readingMoney with Zero Maturity
The Washington Post reports today that the two leading officials of the Counter Intelligence Field Agency (CIFA) resigned, apparently in the pork-cloud kicked up after fairly strong evidence (a guilty plea of attempted bribery is already involved) that CIFA may have provided counter intelligence contracts to subcontractor MZM, Inc. because of money and favors to Duke Cunningham from MZM’s President Mitchell Wade.
Continue readingLuddites in the Massachussetts Attorney General’s Office
"Transparency is not an option but a requirement these days," Steve Bailey argues in the Boston Globe today. He examines the website of MA Attorney General Tom Reilly and finds it comes up short. When one might imagine that a search would take place on a website, the Attorney General's office requires him to take the green line, an escalator, an elevator and a pass through a metal detector on the way to some three ring binders and two old computers. "In the year 2006 in a state that considers itself a technology leader this is beyond a bad joke."
Continue readingSunlight Foundation Funds Metavid and More Perfect
We are thrilled to announce that the Sunlight Foundation has decided to fund two new projects, Metavid and More Perfect. Metavid, created by two UCSC grad students, captures video footage of the House and Senate in action, and is searchable by keyword. Look up "uranium," "peanut butter," or "minimum wage" and watch, on video, what has been said about that subject on the House and Senate floors. When I showed an old colleague the Metavid site, he immediately started looking up words for clients of his who are running for federal office, to see what their opponents had said. But the implications are much broader for the public, which typically has the choice of watching hours of C-SPAN in hopes of catching something, or watching no law-making at all.
Continue readingUSA Today: Government Accounting Irresponsible and Inscrutable
In demonology, apparently, GAAP is “a mighty Prince and Great President of Hell, commanding sixty-six legions of demons... [H]e can cause love or hate and make men insensible and invisible. . . . According to a few authors he can make men ignorant.” In business, GAAP is Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. According to a USA Today story today, these principles are not followed by the US Government, which is more inclined to stick with methods that make men ignorant:
The federal government keeps two sets of books. Continue reading
Citizens and Wild Dogs
let me know if you run into any citizens
I instant messaged my friend JC today, telling him how I'd like to start exploring the citizen responsibilities in opening up government, and he replied, in that William Carlos Williams way that is so popular these days:
ok if i see any ill try to catch but you know its like looking for wild dogs in africa not many left [long pause] though they're a sight to behold when you find them!
But I walked through the main streets of Burlington at lunch, confident that there were sights to behold.
Continue readingPolicy Wiki
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer ran an Op-Ed this weekend about the prospects of using the Internet for more deliberative public reasoning, discussing one of the projects we are considering for a minigrant -- MorePerfect.org. More Perfect is a new wiki-forum for collaborative law and policy development:
Will a Web-based, wiki-democracy work? I don't know. I'm skeptical of the open platform because it can be manipulated by a special interest. Continue reading
Question on C-SPAN and Copyright of Legislative Proceedings
We've gotten a few dozen fascinating applications for mini-grants, including one for Metavid, a project to archive, make shareable and make reusable federal legislative hearings. Sounds like a good project, sounds like something C-SPAN would try to shut down immediately, no? Here's Metavid's explanation of how to get around the C-SPAN blockade on the public debate. In brief, they argue that "the use of artificial scarcity should not be applicable to public domain source content. These restrictions and licensing agreements transform public assets into consumable objects. These consumable objects cannot be reworked, reused and mediated."
Continue reading
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