I love coffee, espeicially when I get to use my smart coffee mug (more on that in this Inc article).... View Article
Continue readingThe Ticking Time Bomb in the Supreme Court’s Doe v. Reed Opinion
A little more light will shine on petitions for referenda because of Thursday’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling. The Court held... View Article
Continue readingWhither Transparency
The New York Times this morning took the Administration to task because White House officials and lobbyists are meeting at... View Article
Continue readingSunlight Labs weighs in on Earmark bill
In yesterday’s Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs meeting, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., said that portions of the bill were far too complex and were not able to be aggregated.
Not so, said Sunlight Foundation’s Web Developer Kaitlin Lee.
“If they’re already taking earmark request digitally, then have a database engineer on staff export the data tables,” Lee said.
“Senator Levin might think it’s a huge data curation process or a manual process. But if it’s already electronic, then a database engineer can write a programming script to do it. It’s a ...
Top 25 Viewed Pages in Elena’s Inbox
The most interesting pages to Elena's Inbox visitors (judged by most viewed and tweeted) are quite telling. Given the diversity of incoming links and the numbers of views over such a short period, these numbers can provide some nice insight into what the public is curious about with Obama's latest Supreme Court nominee.
Continue readingStates of Transparency: Washington
The Open Government
Directive encouraged states to put valuable government data online. In this series we're reviewing each state's efforts in this direction.
This week: Washington
Website: www.fiscal.wa.gov
USPIRG, a public interest group, ranked Washington state second lowest in the country in a recent evaluation of spending websites that track contracts and grants among other expenditures across states.
While the site, fiscal.wa.gov, links to a relatively broad swath of datasets, that data will have to get a lot more granular to be really useful to researchers and journalists.
A transparency website was mandated ...
Another Victory on the DISCLOSE Act
Despite pressure from a number of powerful corporate interests, the House passed the DISCLOSE Act yesterday in a vote of... View Article
Continue readingVictory for Read The Bill: Financial Reform edition
UPDATE [06/25/10 @ 12:00 pm]: I’ve created a word cloud of the merged Dodd – Lincoln language, one of the... View Article
Continue readingLevin and Coburn, toe to toe on Earmark Transparency Bill
A Senate committee’s planned markup of an Earmark Transparency Bill was postponed until July after the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs briefly debated the bill this afternoon.
Though there was not enough committee members present to mark up the bill, that didn’t stop Senator Carl Levin, D-Mich., and Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., from having a back-and-forth on the issue.
Levin said the bill could conflict with existing rules on Senate earmarks and said that aggregating thousands of earmark requests on a website would be burdensome and unworkable.
Coburn introduced the bill, S.3335, last month ...
Kagan’s constitutional thoughts on abortion
Even though Elena Kagan, President Obama's Supreme Court nominee, was just learning to e-mail, she had no trouble expressing rather sophisticated reasoning and legal thought on the constitutional aspects of partial-birth abortion.
In an e-mail exchange with another adviser in the Clinton Administration, Kagan writes strategically about what should be included in a bill that would allow partial-birth abortion:
"It seems to me that the way to go is to recommend that the President reject the bill because (1) it does not include an exception for the health of the mother, and (2) (not stressed as much) because it ...
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