I'm going through the version of the bill N.Z. posted, and came across this language on page 68:
(2) that the information in clause (1) has been available on a publicly accessible congressional website in a searchable format at least 48 hours before such vote.
Clause 1 requires all congressionally directed spending in bills -- earmarks, tax breaks, etc. -- be "identified through lists, charts, or other similar means including the name of each Senator who submitted a request to the committee for each item so identified..."
That would seem to contradict point two from the list of objections N ...
Continue readingIs There More Backsliding on Earmark Reform?
Over at Porkbusters, N.Z. Bear relays the latest word on the shape that earmark reforms will take in the new lobbying bill, and offers readers a chance to check for themselves. Rather than clutter the home page up with a million updates, I'll take a closer look myself over on RealTime...
Continue readingCongressional-DoD correspondence visualization
Why should the Sunlight Labs guys get all the fun? I loaded the subject lines of the correspondence logs referenced immediately below into Many Eyes, which our co-conspirator Josh Ruihley used to create our Earmarks Visualizations. So what words turn up most frequently in the subject lines of letters members write most frequently about to the Office of the Secretary of Defense? Al Qaeda? Military contracts? National Guard? Body Armor? See for yourself.
Continue readingDoD correspondence log converted from pix to spreadsheets
I'm posting, in an Excel spread sheet, the congressional correspondence logs covering the first three months of 2007 that we got a while back in a less than user friendly format from the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Here's a sample of what we got in response to our FOIA -- a .tif or tagged image file format -- I picked one at random, but we have a CD-Rom with 189 files just like it.
Anu turned the files over to Scott Wells, our multi-talented office administrator, who used a program called ocrad (it runs on Linux) to convert ...
Continue readingVisualizing Correspondence
Bill wonders what words turn up most frequently in the subject lines of letters members write most frequently about to the Office of the Secretary of Defense? Al Qaeda? Military contracts? National Guard? Body Armor? Not wanting to let our Labs' team have all the fun, he jumps onto the visualization bandwagon.
Continue readingBenefits in Admitting Failures
There was a really interesting article in the New York Times yesterday that had a headline attention grabbing headline of Foundations Find Benefits in Facing Up to Failures. I had two reactions: "how refreshing" and "well, sure."
Sunlight deliberately set out to be experimental - to throw ideas and projects on the wall and see if they stuck and if they didn't, to stop and figure out why. This was key to our grant making strategy as well. When you hope to be on the cutting edge you expect some things not to work. So we figured we'd win some, lose some. That seemed right to us. Fascinating how risk averse some of the truly big foundations have been and unwilling to admit, until recently, that some things just don't work.
Continue readingDebates 2.0
Sunlight's senior strategic consultant, Micah Sifry, has a really nice op ed in the NY Daily News today, that pretty much summarizes my thoughts about CNN's YouTube debate two nights ago. (He has taught me well.) A big step forward BUT....
Imagine if the next time there's a presidential candidates debate on TV, you could go online to vote beforehand on which questions should be asked, and the top choices from the public were included in the mix. Imagine that during the debate you also could grade the candidates' answers, and see how your peers and the rest of the public were grading them, in real time.
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More Observations on Legislation 2.0
When David All and I wrote in an Op-Ed for The Hill that “the time has come to re-imagine the world of the wired elected official,” I did not expect members of Congress to be so quick to pick up and use these new lines of communication. Halfway into the year more members of Congress are using their Web site to disseminate useful information and some, albeit very few, are actually communicating with citizens in meaningful two-way dialogue both on and off their member Web site. Perhaps the most innovative example of this is Sen. Dick Durbin’s effort to craft broadband legislation with the help of citizens online, which Ellen wrote about earlier today.
Continue readingLegislation Web 2.0 Style
Senator Dick Durbin is crafting a bill online this week on universal broadband policy. I don't know if this effort is a first of its kind but I think it might well be.
Today I'm writing to invite you to participate in an experiment -- an interactive approach to drafting legislation on one of the most significant public policy questions today: What should be America's national broadband strategy? . . . There are two reasons I'm asking for your help and participation. The first is because I think we need more public participation and transparency in the way Congress crafts significant legislation. This is an approach to legislation that has never been tried before. If it's successful -- as I believe it will be -- it may become the way lawmakers approach drafting bills on other issues like education, health care, and foreign policy.
Now this is lawmaking in the sunlight!
Continue readingHouse Moves to Limit Family Business
The Washington Post reports on a bipartisan effort in the House to ban a practice that Sunlight and citizen journalists investigated in 2006: How many members of Congress were using campaign contributions to pay their spouses, in essence putting special interest money into the family budget?
In the latest ripple of an ethics spat gripping Congress, the House yesterday passed a bipartisan bill that bans lawmakers from paying their spouses for campaign work. The measure, passed on a voice vote, was sponsored by Reps. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) and Michael N. Castle (R-Del.). It would not bar other family members from working on a lawmaker's campaign but would require disclosure.Currently, spouses can work for campaigns provided that they charge fair market value for their services. The measure still has to passed by the Senate. Continue reading
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