Help with Congresspedia’s new SuperDelegate Project
Congresspedia has just teamed up with LiteraryOutpost.com, OpenLeft and DemConWatch to shed light on to the presidential nominating process with the new SuperDelegate Transparency Project. This project gives citizens the power -- via the Congresspedia wiki -- to collectively compile primary and caucus results -- congressional district by congressional district. The aim of this project is to compare where the elected delegates stand versus the pledges that the SuperDelegates have made. This is the only project currently tracking this kind of information at the district level.
But this project is really your project and it won't be successful without your help. Come collaborate and help compile the district-by-district results of the popular vote and pledged delegates. Add what you know about the SuperDelegates' position too.
This is a great opportunity for you to help bring transparency and accountability to the Democratic National Convention by providing citizens with information on how the SuperDelegates could affect the outcome of the nomination. Sign up here to get started.
Let's shine some light on the process!
Environmental Activists Using the Web
The Politico reports on a campaign by Friends of the Earth (FOE) in opposition to the America's Climate Security Act S.2191, commonly referred to on the Hill as the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act. (There's a split within the environmental movement whether this bill is the best way to address climate change legislatively but FOE thinks it does not go far enough and would be a windfall to the fossil fuel and nuclear industries.)
Politico says that FOE adopted the by-the-book strategy of taking out ads in Capitol Hill newspapers to try to influence the public. But then they also bought ads on liberal blogs and environmental Web sites hoping that they would generate buzz for their side on this divisive issue. FOE made a two-week buy on Daily Kos, MyDD.com, openleft.com and Tapped, among others. The hope was that the campaign would get the issue to bubble up in the debates on the blogs, knowing that these blog sites' readers include many engaged political activists. It worked...At least at generating buzz. The issue's prominence rose on Daily Kos after the ads went up, and the issue became a front page item there. No doubt they recruited hundreds, if not thousands to their cause.
Continue readingThe SuperDelegate Plot Thickens
We've been wondering ourselves about possible money connections between the SuperDelegates and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. And from the fast flying computers at the Center for Responsive Politics we learn some pretty interesting new facts about the money connections between Clinton and Obama and those SuperDelegates. Here are a few of their findings:
Elected officials who are SuperDelegates have received at least $890,000 from Obama and Clinton in campaign contributions over the last three years. Obama has given more than $694,000 to SuperDelegates from his political action committee, Hope Fund, or campaign committee since 2005. Of the 81 elected officials who had announced as of Feb. 12 that their SuperDelegate votes would go to Obama, 34 of them(40 percent) got money from from him in the 2006 or 2008 election cycles.
Clinton's PAC, HILLPAC, and campaign committee appear to have distributed $195,500 to SuperDelegates. Only 12 percent of her elected SuperDelegates -- 13 total -- have said they will back her.
Continue readingEarmark Season Opens
The floodgates are open in Congress as members are ready to begin work on a new season of appropriations bills. That can only mean one thing: more earmarks. This season, being an election year, will be frought with perils and politics for many members of Congress. Today, the House Republican conference released a new Web site to fight for earmark reform, and, of course, to put Democrats in politically precarious districts on the defensive on reform and spending. Many of these Democrats are freshmen, including Pennsylvania Rep. Joe Sestak. In CongressDaily, Sestak explains how earmarks are used to help support these targeted freshmen:
But he acknowledged that his requests for add-ons were not always given the same priority as those of more vulnerable freshmen. "I do know this," Sestak said. "Because I wasn't on Frontline. I was not on the Tier One list for earmarks."
Continue reading
Taxpayers for Common Sense Releases ‘Encyclopedia’ of 2008 Earmarks
Taxpayers for Common Sense has released the ultimate compendium of 2008 earmarks available for download, accompanied by an authoritative report on the 110th Congress' earmarking practices and proclivities. I found this bit particularly noteworthy:
Lawmakers in the 73 House districts deemed “competitive” by the Cook Political Report took credit for $1.9 billion in earmarks, an average of $26 million each--about 14 percent higher than the average for non-appropriations committee members. Democrats in competitive races fared much better than their Republican counterparts, averaging $29.4 million to $23.4 million for Republicans.The Washington Post's take on the study is here, while the New York Times weighs in here, complete with links to congressional earmark request forms. TCS' study won't be the last word on 2008 earmarks, I suspect -- just looking at the list of them, in a file aptly named bigkahuna.xls, raises all kinds of questions -- but it's definitely the can't-do-without research tool for digging into them. Continue reading
Our Mini-Grantees Rock!
Today, Sunlight is announcing new Mini-Grants as part of its commitment to support original ideas, tools, Web sites, and bloggers that further our mission of using the Internet to foster a more open government.
These new projects (scroll down for our Mini-Grantees) demonstrate the creativity of citizens in using the Internet to give the public the power to learn more about their elected representatives and to engage as communities in monitoring, conversing and connecting over the work of Congress. Each of the work of these new Sunlight grantees creates greater transparency for our elected officials. Their work will strengthen citizen participation in the democratic process.
Check out the work of Geocoder.us that provides free address look-up information based on the U.S. Census, so that users can enter any address or intersection and learn the longitude and latitude coordinates for that location, or the work of Knowledge As Power which will develop a legislator email management and constituent relations communications system to increase transparency between legislators and their constituents. Speechology.org will host a Web site that will archive video of key political speeches-including debates, State of the Union addresses, convention speeches congressional testimony and campaign advertisements-and facilitate online public critical analysis. And three additional grants -- Pacific Northwest Topic Hotlist, Richmond Sunlight and the Utah News Aggregator -- have developed innovative ways to create more transparency for their legislators closer to home.
Continue readingWhat Economic Indicators?
The Bush Administration is getting quite good at death by budget, knocking off two federal open government programs in the last couple of weeks. Tony Soprano would be impressed.
Late last month, the administration submitted their 2009 budget, where it was revealed they eliminated the key provision of the Open Government Act of 2007 - the ombudsman whose job it is to oversee all Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. They pulled it off by moving the office from the National Archives and Records Administration to the Department of Justice where it is doomed to ineffectual exile. The second hit was on EconomicIndicators.gov, an award-winning web site full of current economic data at the U.S. Department of Commerce. The site will be put in mothballs effective March 1st. The administration said it was a budget cutting decision. The Web site has gotten a lot of attention for how easily it allows citizens to access the daily releases of key economic indicators and to cross reference the data among various bureaus and would send out e-mails to registered users whenever new economic data was released. Sure, Think Progress writes, the data will still be available but much harder - much much harder to access. Most of us wouldn't have the time to go and look at the individual sites and even know where to look for it.
Continue readingNewsTrust Focuses on Congress
NewsTrust.net - an online social news rating site - is focusing in on Congress this week and is looking for users, new and current, to contribute stories that exemplify quality reporting on Congress. Over at the NewsTrust blog they've singled out some of the stories submitted so far, including a number of articles and blog posts on the Senate fight over telecom immunity in the FISA reauthorization bill. They are hosting this Congress feature through Sunday, so get over there and review some articles. Feel free to submit blog posts or articles, I just submitted this great Alaska Daily News article about Sen. Ted Stevens' use of the earmarking process to help enrich a former staffer and fisheries industry lobbyist.
(NewsTrust is a Sunlight grantee.)
Continue readingLegal and Academic Open Access
For far too long, getting access to important documents has meant having a very expensive subscription to an exclusive service. This has held true across disciplines, including politics, law, and academia. The Internet is starting to change this, lowering the cost of storing and transferring information to nearly nothing. With the help of pioneers like Carl Malamud and Lawrence Lessig, essential information -- whether governmental, academic, legal, or scientific -- is being freed from the boundaries set by traditional publishers, whose role as information stewards has too often ignored the interests of the general public, and served the needs of paying specialists.
(Disclosure: I'm happy to say that Professor Lessig is on Sunlight's Advisory Board, and Public.Resource.org is a Sunlight grantee.) (more)
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