Last week, we learned from the Washington Post that the Jeannemarie Devolites Davis, the wife of Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., the chairman of the House Committee on Government Reform, works for a firm, ICG Government, which the paper describes as "a consulting company for technology firms seeking government contracts." The firm itself says,
The essence of what we do is simple: we help people better understand today's government information technology market. To whom we cater is twofold, both to government executives and industry leaders. How we do it is through education — through training seminars, executive forums, consulting, and legislative analysis.Continue reading
When does a contribution go bad?
This year has seen a whole sale rejection of campaign contributions provided by certain undesirables to campaign committees. Last December it was Mitchell Wade and Brent Wilkes, in January it was Jack Abramoff, Mike Scanlon, and the various Indian tribes they swindled, and then came Abramoff associates Neil Volz and Tony Rudy. The guilty pleas and investigations into these top donors was the equivalent of a political tsunami forcing congressmen and Senators to donate the dirty money to charity. The past few weeks, however, have brought some different stories about giving back campaign contributions. It isn’t always clear when a campaign should reject a contribution or by what measures it should take to ensure the political safety of said contribution.
Continue readingHouse Leaders Promise to Implement Earmark Reform
The House Republican Leadership--Speaker and Rep. J. Dennis Hastert, Majority Leader and Rep. John Boehner and Rules Committee Chairman and Rep. David Dreier --issued a joint statement promising to implement reforms in the earmark process, "independent of the ongoing lobbying and ethics reform discussions to ensure these new rules apply to all spending and tax measures that will go to the President’s desk this fall." (emphasis in original). The statement also tells us,
The House-passed lobbying and ethics reform bill includes a series of significant reforms meant to bring greater transparency and accountability to the congressional earmarking practice. Continue reading
Off and Running: US Chamber Fires First Salvo
And we’re off... The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is advancing its political and business plan for the 2006 elections by firing an opening $10 million salvo of election ads in the districts of more than 30 of their allies in Congress. Allies that they’d like to see safely reelected, whatever the national mood toward Congress. The ads are slated to run in August, with another wave to follow after Labor Day.
This opening salvo – the biggest in the Chamber’s history – is as sure a barometric reading as you’re likely to find this election year that the nation’s business community is growing nervous about a potential shift in the balance of power in Congress.
Continue readingMeanwhile, Congress Makes Some Moves
Lots of activity in Congress about issues that Sunlight cares about.
First, the bill sponsored by Senator Tom Coburn and Senator Barack Obama that would create an online searchable database for government grants and contracts is scheduled for mark-up today. According to CQ Reports, Sen. Tom Coburn said that the bottom line is: "Why shouldn't Americans know where their money is being spent?"
We couldn't agree more. We're particularly excited about this bipartisan legislative initiative because we have had a sneak preview at the grants and contracts database that OMB Watch is preparing to release in the early fall. It's a wow -- an information powerhouse. (Yes, I feel badly about mentioning it here and not giving you a link to it, but I guess it's OK to tease our readers once in a while.) When I saw it, I thought of a hundred ways to find out more about who's getting how much money from government, and for what projects, than I ever thought was possible. OMB Watch's team has done an amazing job in putting it together. They are looking for some citizen beta-testers, so if you're interested let me know and I will pass your name along to them. This database will be live in six weeks or so.
Continue readingCrunched. Boinged. Digged.
We're delighted that so many sites have been picking up the news of our Popup Politicians' widget. You can find it on Boing Boing and TechCrunch, Open Source News, The Left Coaster and a host of others. A number of excellent suggestions have already been made. Some folks want us to expand us to include state and local politicians, some want to see other information in the profile such as positions on environmental issues, or links to criminal records. Keep your ideas coming on how to improve on it.
Citizens and Wild Dogs
let me know if you run into any citizens
I instant messaged my friend JC today, telling him how I'd like to start exploring the citizen responsibilities in opening up government, and he replied, in that William Carlos Williams way that is so popular these days:
ok if i see any ill try to catch but you know its like looking for wild dogs in africa not many left [long pause] though they're a sight to behold when you find them!
But I walked through the main streets of Burlington at lunch, confident that there were sights to behold.
Continue readingBlogs on Blogs v. Newspapers
Bill posted earlier about the exciting new journalism project that Jay Rosen, associate prof at the journalism school of my alma mater NYU, is undertaking. There are many perspectives out there in the blogs and in the traditional media about Rosen’s efforts to bridge the gap between citizen journalism and professional journalism and about the role of blogs versus the traditional newspaper. Daniel Schorr recently told a USA Today reporter that he finds bloggers “scary” because “there is no publisher, no editor, no anything. It's just you and a little machine and you can make history.” To some that may be scary, for others it’s the future.
Continue readingAdapting Journalism to the Internet Age
There are some exciting new experiments being launched to improve the quality of journalism, and not a moment too soon. As many others have noted, the economics of the traditional news businesses aren't especially good. Producing high quality enterprise and investigative journalism--real, in-depth, original reporting--is a fairly labor intensive undertaking, and that in many ways isn't financially rewarding: If I spend two years unearthing something and publish it, the news itself can be picked up by the Associated Press and other wire services, published in other newspapers, broadcast on television and radio, and linked by and excerpted onto multiple blogs. If the Philadelphia Inquirer (where I once worked) devotes countless man hours, salary and expenses to breaking a story, readers don't have to buy that paper (let alone subscribe to it) to get the news -- the economic awards, such as they are, are as often as not realized elsewhere. It's a great system for the public, but the for-profit media companies that pay the salaries of reporters, editors and photographers who do the grunt work digging out the story have shown themselves to be less and less willing to foot the bill.
Continue readingPolicy Wiki
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer ran an Op-Ed this weekend about the prospects of using the Internet for more deliberative public reasoning, discussing one of the projects we are considering for a minigrant -- MorePerfect.org. More Perfect is a new wiki-forum for collaborative law and policy development:
Will a Web-based, wiki-democracy work? I don't know. I'm skeptical of the open platform because it can be manipulated by a special interest. Continue reading
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