"As the public boils with anger over millions of dollars in retention bonuses for American Insurance Group employees, financial interests quietly continue to woo lawmakers with fundraising parties this month.
Actually, I think that members are still wooing the financial industry by offering dinners, breakfasts and events geared to their industry. While members may be publicly throwing AIG under the bus, in private they're only too happy to cozy up with contributors, offering preferred access and insights in exchange for campaign cash.
One of the first rules of following Washington: Watch what they do, not what they say.
National ...
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In the back-and-forth regarding who inserted the retroactive bonus immunity provision into the stimulus bill, we were repeatedly treated to... View Article
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Continue readingThe Rise of Recovery.gov and the Virtuous Cycle of Transparency Innovation
In the short 30 days since the President signed the Recovery Act (aka Stimulus Bill) into law and Recovery.gov launched:
- 26 of 28 federal agencies currently handling stimulus dollars have launched websites at identical "/recovery" URLs (example: http://hhs.gov/recovery)
- 83 identically formatted .xls weekly reports were filed by agencies and are downloadable by reporting agency (generally 3 per agency)
- 42 states have launched their own recovery-related web sites with several adopting the "/recovery" meme (for example: http://www.maine.gov/recovery)
- 3,900 hits-per-second loads have been reported for Recovery.gov
Read the Bill: Tap the Brakes Already
Congress is like the Beltway. Sometimes it’s impassible gridlock; so slow that nothing seems to move at all. Other times... View Article
Continue readingRead the Bill: Stimulus Bill and Bonus Loopholes
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Continue readingusgovxml.gov – Directory of Government XML
Alex Madrigal (who put together Wired's wiki on government data) pointed me to usgovxml.com's wonderful gem of a reference of XML resources in the Federal government. Might hide some great ideas and data for use in Apps for America entries. "This site is an attempt to document, in one place and in a uniform manner, the web services and XML data sources that are provided by the US government."
Dodd did it
Senate channels “Not Me”
Maybe we should make members pass a quiz on the contents of bills before they're allowed to vote. Case in point: the bonus exemption in the Stimulus Bill that AIG executives took advantage of. Where it came from and how it got into the bill is a mystery:
In an interview with CNN, Dodd denied inserting that exemption at the 11th hour, and insisted he doesn't know how it got there."When I wrote the language there was no such language like that," Dodd told CNN Tuesday.
Multiple Senate Democratic leadership sources also deny knowing how the exemption ...
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