The American Public Health Administration has begun airing a new TV ad supporting Pres. Obama's nominee for EPA Administrator, Gina McCarthy. It's the first time the nonprofit group has aired an ad backing a specific nominee, according to a spokeswoman.
Continue readingWatch TransparencyCamp ideas grow!
TransparencyCamp has come and gone, but the ideas that sprouted at TCamp are just beginning to come to life.
Steve Spiker from OpenOakland shared his insight about the transparency movement in the TCamp wrap up video below, “We’re saying things need to be different in our country and that’s only going to happen if you care enough to persist on it.”
The transparency community understands that progress starts at TCamp but it doesn’t end when you go home.
Continue readingIntegrating the US’ Documents
A few weeks ago, we integrated the full text of federal bills and regulations into our alert system, [Scout](https://scout.sunlightfoundation.com). Now, if you visit [CISPA](https://scout.sunlightfoundation.com/item/bill/hr624-113) or a fascinating [cotton rule](https://scout.sunlightfoundation.com/item/regulation/2013-10114), you'll see the original document - nicely formatted, but also well-integrated into Scout's layout. There are a lot of good reasons to integrate the text this way: we want you to see why we alerted you to a document without having to jump off-site, and without clunky iframes. As importantly, we wanted to do this in a way that would be easily reusable by other projects and people. So we **built a tool called [us-documents](https://github.com/unitedstates/documents)** that makes it possible for anyone to do this with federal bills and regulations. It's [available as a Ruby gem](https://rubygems.org/gems/us-documents), and comes with a [command line tool](https://github.com/unitedstates/documents#usage) so that you can use it with Python, Node, or any other language. It lives inside the [unitedstates project](https://github.com/unitedstates) at [unitedstates/documents](https://github.com/unitedstates/documents), and is entirely public domain.
Continue reading2Day in #OpenGov 5/21/2013
NEWS:
- Former New Hampshire Senator Judd Gregg (R) locked down a gig in the private sector. He will serve as CEO of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, a major Wall Street trade group. (The Hill)
- Florida released a new smart phone app to coincide with the current session of its legislature. The app, which has been downloaded nearly 3,500 times, allows users to find and share bill summaries, meeting notices, information about their legislators, and more. (Government Technology)
- Former Montana governor Brian Schweitzer (D) is rumored to be considering a Senate run, but he hasn't let that stop him from taking a new job in the mining industry. Schweitzer is going to chair the board of the Stillwater Mining Company. He was first elected to Stillwater's board only three weeks ago. (Washington Post)
- In an effort to investigate information leaks about North Korea the Justice Department delved deeply into the life of Fox News chief Washington correspondent James Rosen. The DoJ obtained his telephone records, tracked his movements through State Department security badge records, obtained a search warrant for his personal email account. (Washington Post)
- An investigation of subsidies given by the DC government to property developments over the past decade shows that more than a third of the $1.7 billion in breaks doled out by the city went to ten developers that donated huge amounts of campaign cash during the period. (WAMU)
- Russia is stepping back from it's 2012 "letter of intent" to join the Open Government Partnership, instead saying that it will pursue open government "on its own terms". Russia's questionable record on corruption, press freedom, and more had made its interest in the OGP slightly quizzical to begin with. (Open Government Partnership)
- State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company is officially jumping into the political arena with a new PAC. While the company has a long history of giving from it's employees, it had previously been one of only nine companies in the Fortune 75 without a federal PAC.(Roll Call)
Apple lobbies on taxes more than any other subject
Ahead of a hearing at the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations tomorrow at which its CEO, Tim Cook, is the star witness, computer, tablet and smartphone manufacturer Apple has preemptively released his prepared remarks defending the company's tax practices, which include pooling $100 billion overseas, away from the grasping hand of the Internal Revenue Service.
The prepared testimony does not mention the more than $14.5 million Apple has spent on lobbying the federal government since 1998, nor that taxes top the list of issues the company has raised, according to data in Influence Explorer. One of the bills ...
Continue readingReflecting on Sunlight
Next Friday will be my last day as Sunlight Foundation’s policy counsel. On June 3rd, I join CREW as policy... View Article
Continue readingAgenda for House’s Legislative Data & Transparency Conference
This Wednesday, the House of Representatives is holding its second annual Legislative Data and Transparency Conference. (RSVP here.) The conference... View Article
Continue readingReporter’s notebook: How we came up with that campaign finance maze
If it makes you all feel any better, campaign finance is hard for us too.
At the Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group, we make a speciality of money in politics reporting, so when the dark money groups that we often cover burst into the headlines -- on reports that the Internal Revenue Service was denying the coveted tax exempt status to Tea Party groups -- we figured it was time to put what we know about the campaign finance ecosystem out there.
The process turned out to be revealing, if painful.
You can see the final product here. But we learned a lot ...
Continue reading2Day in #OpenGov 5/20/2013
NEWS:
- Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) is reintroducing the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act this week. The legislation unanimously passed the House last year only to die in the Senate. (FCW)
- Bipartisan legislation has been introduced to require a court order for federal agencies before the seizure of phone records. (The Hill)
- Hearings started Friday as the House looks into why the IRS targeted certain groups for extra scrutiny. The hearing, in front of the House Ways and Means Committee, was the first of several scheduled on the topic. (Washington Post) Continue reading
Why does the IRS regulate political groups? A look at the complex world of campaign finance
The controversy over the Internal Revenue Service's handling of applications for non-profit status from Tea Party groups has put a spotlight on a subject with which we at the Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group are all too painfully familiar: The migraine-producing complexity of the nation's campaign finance system. To shed some light on the ongoing debate, we've decided to share what we know.
As often is the case with systems worthy of Rube Goldberg, it's easier to draw than to describe.
59063
