Today, May 8th, marks the 125th birthday of Harry S Truman, our 33rd president. He once said, “Secrecy and a... View Article
Continue readingA Stimulus Lobbying Loophole?
When President Obama issued a memorandum to “ensure the responsible spending of recovery act funds,” he required members of the... View Article
Continue readingLocal Sunlight 5/8/09
Every week I climb into the depths of the local political blogosphere to find the Sunlight. I use this series... View Article
Continue readingOn the new NYSenate.gov
The transparency community is abuzz today with the revelation of the New York Senate website. It is shiny and pretty. There are great new features and even our website, Public Markup gets a shout out. Neat!
What's great about it is uniformity. Every Senator has a website that's the same as every other Senator's, with links to their RSS feeds and even twitter accounts. They've got blogs and interestingly enough calendars. Now, the technology for transparency is there. Sadly, it doesn't look like the Senators are using it yet -- I find it hard to believe, for example, that the Senate President has a clear schedule for the rest of the month.. But the technology is there and the NY Senate technology team ought to be commended for building that in (and making it export in iCal!).
Continue readingDisclosure Calvinball?
Apparently, PACs and the FEC are playing a serious game of Calvinball over disclosure rules. Bill Allison at Real Time... View Article
Continue readingCram down look ups, cont.
Quarters doubled in odd years, halved again in evens
This always makes me thing of Lewis Carroll every time I see it. A PAC tells the FEC it's going to file quarterly reports rather than monthly reports. The FEC approves the request, and writes back:
The Commission has received notification of your request, dated 1/30/2009, to change from a monthly filer to a quarterly filer of receipts and disbursements. Please note that during years that have no scheduled federal election, quarterly filers are required only to file semi-annually.
As for the practical effects: Well, we can be glad that Washington mostly takes odds year off, so ...
Continue readingThe Dawning of Empire State Transparency
Within the past week, the New York State Senate has taken some impressive steps toward conducting its business open and... View Article
Continue readingThe Insufficient Lobbying Disclosure Act
Yesterday, John Wonderlich wrote an important post here about Sunlight’s meeting with the White House (with a bunch of other... View Article
Continue readingLooking up cram down opponents in Party Time
This post is all research and no results -- that'll come later. I wanted to take a look at a vote my colleague Paul Blumenthal referred to with the title (quoting Sen. Richard Durbin) "They own the place." The "they" in question are financial sector firms, the place is Congress; at issue is a bill, the Helping Families Save Their Homes Act of 2009 -- or rather, an amendment to that bill -- that was voted down by a 51-45 margin.
The Durbin amendment, also known as the cram down bill, would have removed the mortgage exemption from bankruptcy proceedings, allowing bankruptcy ...
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