I have been keeping track of local blogs that do a great job of informing people about what is happening in Congress, state level, and local level politics. These blogs provide valuable information and I am taking the time each week to point out some highlights from around the country. As promised, here is this week’s update on Sunlight in the states.
Continue reading“I think I’m missing something really big . . .”
It's nice to have company among Foundations in understanding the potential of Web 2.0 for their grantees. The Overbrook Foundation recently undertook a study of its grantees' use of the Internet and founded mixed results, but a lot of interest by their grantees in getting up to speed. Most telling was this comment by one of the participants in the conversation: "I think I'm missing something really big, but I don't know what it is or how to find out what it is."
It's Overbrook's belief that the most effective organizations in the new digital age will be those who recognize these digital opportunities and quickly seize them.
We agree.
And Thompson Says He Supports Disclosure?
In regard to openness and transparency, would be presidential candidate Fred Thompson says he supports more disclosure. But the actions of his nascent campaign have raised serious red flags.
Fred Thompson is finally going to make his race official this Thursday, September 6. Why on that day? Does the that date have some special historical or sentimental significance? Is he avoiding appearing in the Sept. 5 GOP debate in New Hampshire as charged by the state's GOP chair?
It is most likely that Thompson's choice of dates, Sept. 6, allows him to exploit the quirky reporting dates of federal election law so that he can raise money without reporting it until after the key January primaries are finished. If he wins those early primaries, and become the likely nominee, we will not know who financed his campaign, as Jake Tapper has reported.
Continue readingEarmark Reform: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Taxpayers for Common Sense, a grantee of the Sunlight Foundation, last week released the first of two reports on what can only be described as the good, the bad, and the ugly of earmark reform. Their first analysis gives a roundup of what actions the House took and didn't take.
TCS gives credit to the House for the volume of information now available but takes the House to task for the way it has provided it. The data dumps allowed TCS to get its its excellent databases up before the final vote on almost every bill but frankly they had to work too hard to do it. I mean, if the House and Senate are going to provide this infomation why not just do it in a database form themselves? Why do nonprofits have to take raw data and put the data in a form so real people can actually use it?
Continue readingSunlight in the Garden State
Here's a politician -- New Jersey Assemblyman Jim Whelan - who appears to understand the value of transparency. He recently introduced a bill in the New Jersey state legislature that would require the online disclosure of public records local New Jersey towns, school districts and state agencies.
Continue readingLibrary of Congress Website Upgrade
Via the Library of Congress blog, it looks like the LOC Website will be getting an upgrade in the coming weeks. They make a good point about choosing between providing RSS feeds and email updates, noting that many more people use email than RSS:
While only a fraction of people on the Web use RSS feeds, something like 100 percent of them use email, and this is just another part of our efforts to get information to people in the way that is most useful to them. You can get a sense for how the email updates will function by looking at the FBI’s Web site.
Happily, they’re not choosing between the two, and have a pretty broad set of RSS feeds already on offer on their RSS page.
Continue readingWidgets, Blidgets and Nods
As we recently reported, MAPLight.org and OpenCongress.org recently launched widgets to make it easy for anyone to keep track of the presidential money race, current bills and legislative issues on their site or blog. What good is political information if it's relegated to to just one Web site? As John wrote on the Open House Project blog, widgets and other new forms of data visualization help spread the information further and faster.
There's clear interest in adopting these widgets to surface information about the federal government in new ways and we love some of these early adopters. TechRepublican just recently incorporated the MAPLight.org presidential fundraising widget on its site and NTEN is planning on using
using MAPLight.org's new API.
Corruption Round Up
Josh Marshall's intrepid pursuit of truth and justice (and yeah, of corruption in high places too) is really unparalleled in the blogosphere. Today he provides a nifty summary of the all the corruption scandals in Congress this year. Read it and keep digging.
And we thought that the last Congress was the most corrupt in recent memory!
Continue readingThere’s Gold In Those Databases
Brody Mullins had a terrific story yesterday in the Wall Street Journal that raises questions about whether six members of the Paw family, who live in a modest neighborhood in San Francisco and who list their occupation as "gift shop owner," could possibly make $45,000 in political contributions to Sen. Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.
Obviously digging into numerous databases, Mullins discovered that the Paws live in a modest 1,280 square foot house that they recently refinanced for $270,000. The head of the household is a mail carrier earning $49,000 a year. His wife is a homemaker. Mullins also figured out that the Paw family contributions are nearly identical to donations made by a wealthy New Yorker -- Norman Hsu -- who once listed the Paw family home as his own address. Hsu is a big fund raiser for Clinton.
How does this much money come from a family that doesn't appear to have these kinds of financial resources? It raises questions in the minds of many campaign finance experts (including yours truly) as to whether they were illegal contributions.Were the Paws "reimbursed" for their generous contributions to Clinton by Hsu? Hsu and the Paws deny any wrong doing. But it sure makes you wonder.
Given the crush for cash by all the presidential candidates, there are lots of stories like this in these databases.
Update: The Washington Post reports that Hilliary Clinton sees no reason to return the contributions by either Hsu or the Paw Family. Further Update: After reports surfaced in the LA Times today that there is an outstanding warrant out of Hsu, the Clinton campaign returns his money.
Continue readingFAQ Update
Sunlight is updating our FAQs. I want to make sure we have your questions answered. So, what do you want to know about us beyond our criteria for being considered for a grant and who gives money to us? Leave your questions, and if we haven't thought of them already, we will try to include them in our updated post FAQ section.
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