Sen. John Ensign faces a Senate Ethics Committee investigation and a preliminary probe by the Justice Department. The Ethics Committee... View Article
Continue readingFederal Register XML Release
According to the Washington Post and BoingBoing, the Government Printing Office will today release, for the first time, the XML... View Article
Continue readingSen. Ensign’s Untangling Web
Earlier this year, Sen. John Ensign, a rising star in the Republican party, revealed that he had had an affair... View Article
Continue readingRepost: Ensign Tried to Stymie Ethics Committee, Calls Come for Committee to Investigate
In light of revelations in the New York Times regarding Sen. John Ensign’s apparent law and Senate rule breaking I... View Article
Continue readingLocal Spotlight
Three bloggers have some interesting stories about their Freedom of Information (FOIA) escapades. In Kentucky, Page One has a post... View Article
Continue readingShining a Bright New Light on an Old Game
Local Sunlight
Every week I climb into the depths of the local political blogosphere to find the Sunlight. I use this series... View Article
Continue readingAnnals of Legislative Silliness
Just as a counterpoint to the argument for legislative — as opposed to conceptual — language is this one example... View Article
Continue readingTracking Lobbyists’ Real Influence
It's important we know lobbyists' REAL influence on the people we elect to represent us - and before today, that's not something we could really do. While yesterday you may have looked up a lobbyist online and seen only that the individual had contributed a couple hundred dollars to a senator, you can now see the entire 'bundle' of contributions around that lobbyist or company which can total in the tens of thousands.
Continue readingTake 5 Minutes to Help the Fifty State Project
Early this year we began our Fifty State Project, a project to scrape and organize data from all fifty state legislative websites. We have also started to run into cases where despite the best efforts of the developers on the project we can't get the full range of information we need to make this legislative data useful.
We have just posted a new TransparencyCorps task to help digitize this information, starting with the results from the Kentucky Legislature.
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