Members of Congress have repeatedly called for the Supreme Court to televise its proceedings, an issue to which Solicitor General... View Article
Continue readingMost Drug Trial Results Analyzed by FDA Hidden From View
Before a new drug finds its place on pharmacy shelves or a new device lands in the hands of a surgeon, it goes through a long and complex approval process by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
A new drug, for instance, goes through laboratory testing and animal studies before the drugmaker submits an application to FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. If it gets the agency’s green light, then the human clinical trials begin, starting with a small number of participants at initial phases and growing to hundreds if not thousands of participants in the ...
Senate expenditures go online at OpenSecrets.org
The Center for Responsive Politics' OpenSecrets site just added expenditures by Senate campaigns to their site. The data was released by the Federal Election Commission for the first time last week. CRP has a detailed listing of all the expenses incurred by the committees, the recipients and the dates of the expenditures. For instance, we know that in the 2010 cycle Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., spent more than $31,000 for catering at the Charlie Palmer Steakhouse.
And a quick search on our Party Time data shows that at least four fundraisers for Reid were held at the venue and ...
The Fed’s growing again, overseas
Earlier this week, the Federal Reserve reopened one of the special lending windows it created in January 2009 to ease the failing global economy. The move comes amid a weakening euro and after Greece, Spain and Portugal have all created austerity packages to help fix their struggling economies.
These currency swaps are a sign that the global economy is still far from stable two years after the financial meltdown of 2008.
The Fed has already infused five foreign central banks with $1.3 billion through a process called central bank liquidity swaps in order to reduce the possibility of any ...
Lobbying data is public but not reliably searchable
The 1995 Lobbying Disclosure Act, requires all lobbyists to file reports with the Clerk of the House of Representatives and Secretary of the Senate and that those two offices “maximize public access” to the documents through “computerized systems.” But the searchable database of every filing by registered federal lobbyists, made available through the Senate’s Office of Public Records, has a major problem: its search engine doesn’t work correctly.
One issue is reliability — searches by a wide array of Center reporters have frequently yielded false negatives or been stymied by system outages. In fact, a registrant search for “American ...
Public Data in your Email
I've been playing around a bit with Rapportive lately. It's a web service that lets you see information about the sender of an email based on publicly available social media profiles. It works on top of Gmail. If you're using Rapportive and see an email from me, it'll show you a picture of me alongside my work history from LinkedIn, my recent twitter activity, and a picture of me.
People put a lot of information about themselves online through the use of social media, but they also pop up in databases the government provides, too. So when we heard Rapportive was offering the ability for developers to create third party raplets we decided to throw something together.
Continue readingMoran requests funds for alternative medicine center
Rep. Jim Moran, D-Va., a member of the House Appropriations Committee, has requested a $1.5 million earmark
to fund an alternative medicine center in Washington D.C. run by a
doctor with an alternative past. The request is for the FY 2011
Department of Defense budget and will go to the Center for Mind-Body
Medicine, run by Dr. James Gordon.
The money would fund a
program that is aimed at helping health professionals in the military
maintain their mental and physical abilities in order for them to
effectively and continually help troops suffering from post traumatic
stress disorder, depression ...
Scandal Plagued West Virginia Lawmaker Goes Down
So, Rep. Alan Mollohan was defeated in a Democratic primary yesterday. He was the second incumbent to lose in the... View Article
Continue readingTories and Open Gov
There’s a new government across the pond with Tory leader David Cameron as Prime Minister. Worth noting is that our... View Article
Continue readingLobbying Spending or Social Connections?
The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein nails it on the head in this post on lobbying: …I worry much more about... View Article
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