The DISCLOSE Act passed the House today by a vote of 219-206. Below is a live-blog of the floor vote... View Article
Continue readingElena’s Inbox: from leaked letters to missing mousepads
When you apply for a job, you always need a resume. Usually, you also need to furnish some examples of... View Article
Continue readingEarmark Transparency Act reaches first Committee
The first Congressional discussion of the Earmark Transparency Act will take place today when the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs debates the bill at a business meeting at 2:30 p.m.
The bill, S.3335, was introduced last month by Sens. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., John McCain, R-Ariz., Russ Feingold, D-Wisc., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and would require a centralized, detailed, downloadable database that would track every earmark that members of Congress requested.
Earmarks are federal funds provided by Congress for projects that circumvent the merit-based or competitive allocation processes or curtail the executive branch from ...
Will the House Stand Up for Disclosure of Campaign Spending?
Today may be a bellwether day for transparency in federal elections. The House is expected to vote on the DISCLOSE... View Article
Continue readingKagan central to Clinton campaign finance reform efforts
Elena Kagan, President Barack Obama's nominee for the Supreme Court, was an active player in the Clinton Administration's efforts on campaign finance reform, a quick search of her emails--easily searchable and available here, thanks to Sunlight Labs--shows. (Click here to see a list of all emails that crossed her desk mentioning the term.)
Campaign finance reform was one of two ideas she gave to her boss, White House Counsel Abner Mikvah, as a topic that would keep her "amused," and make "good use" of her.
After she started work at the White House in 1995 she wrote in ...
Elena’s Inbox: How Not to Release Data
On Friday @BobBrigham tweeted a suggestion: put the just-released Elena Kagan email dump into a GMail-style interface. I thought this was a pretty cool idea, so I started hacking away at it over the weekend. You can see the finished results at elenasinbox.com.
I'm really pleased that people have found the site useful and interesting, but the truth is that a lot of the emails in the system are garbage: they're badly-formatted, duplicative or missing information. For instance, one of the most-visited pages on the site is the thread with the subject "Two G-rated Jewish jokes" -- understandably, given that it's the most potentially-scandalous-sounding subject line on the first page of results. Unfortunately, if you click through you'll see that there's no content in the messages.
The site was admittedly a bit rushed, but in this case it isn't the code that's to blame. If you go through the source PDF, you'll see that the content is missing there, too. It looks like it might have been redacted, but the format of the document is confusing enough that it's difficult to be sure.
But the source documents' problems go beyond ambiguous formatting. A lot of the junky content on the site comes from the junk it was built from -- there's not much we can do about it. To give you some idea of the problem, consider these strings:
Continue readingStates of Transparency: Ohio
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: Ohio
Website: www.transparency.ohio.gov
Ohio's open government site, transparency.ohio.gov, contains links to a few searchable databases; the results of one of them can even be downloaded as an Excel file. Unfortunately, the majority of the data cannot currently be downloaded.
Here's a rundown of what is and isn't available online:
Expenditures: The broad strokes -- how much each agency spent per month -- are downloadable as Excel files ...
Citizens United: Kentucky’s response
The Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizens United v. FEC case has rendered 24 states' election laws unconstitutional. The 5-4 ruling in favor of Citizens United reversed a provision of the McCain-Feingold act that prohibited any electioneering communication—defined as advertising via broadcast, cable or satellite that is paid for by corporations or labor unions. Many states have acted fast to counter corporations’ ability to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections by passing laws that force disclosure of all independent expenditures in near real time. The Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group has decided to report what each of ...
Continue readingThe Fundamentals
I’m pretty excited to be joining the team here at Sunlight. I’m the new Lead Organizer for the Public Equals... View Article
Continue readingWhat Does an Election Cost?
Sunlight feels strongly that Congress needs to respond to the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, and require disclosure for newly... View Article
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