The Obama administration routinely touts its 91 percent disclosure rate for responses under the Freedom of Information Act. But is that figure revealing the whole truth?
Continue readingOpengov leaders: President Obama, use your bully pulpit to promote democracy reforms in the State of the Union
We asked a diverse set of leaders on the forefront of advocating for civic engagement, civic technology, government accountability and open government to weigh in on what President Obama should say in tonight’s State of the Union.
Continue readingCourting donors in the dark: Mapping Obama’s closed door fundraisers
Although President Barack Obama’s administration touts its support of transparency, there’s been a glaring exception: opening up political fundraisers to White House reporters who trail the president.
Continue readingTransparency fail: Obama committee provides donor list but prohibits publication
Organizing for Action released a list of top donors Friday, and while the group made a step in the direction of better disclosure, it promptly took two steps back.
Continue reading12 Days of Open Data to Get You Through the New Year
Agencies are still inventorying their data holdings but it's already clear that President Barack Obama’s open data executive order is cluing the public into lots of information that wasn’t previously available or easily accessible. In the holiday spirit, Sunlight has put together 12 days of data sets. When you're not skiiing, try (data) diving!
Continue readingOpen Data Executive Order Compliance: The Bad and The Good.
The first major deadline for agency compliance with President Obama's open data Executive Order arrived this past Saturday. Agencies were required to, among other things, provide the Office of Management and Budget with an "Enterprise Data Inventory" and release a list of all their public data via a /data page on their websites.
We had hopes that some agencies might choose to publicly release their entire Enterprise Data Inventories, providing a full picture of their data holdings. Unfortunately, so far, that does not seem to have happened. Until the full inventories are available, the public will still be stuck in the dark, not knowing what we don’t know about government data holdings.
Nonetheless, most cabinet level agencies, as well as a number of independent agencies that were not required to comply, have taken steps to publicly fulfill the other aspects of the Executive Order. Levels of compliance have been varied, but we will try to highlight some of the worst and best examples below.
Continue readingChange (and a lot more) you won’t believe: Obama for America’s encore
President Barack Obama has made history in a lot of ways and now he's got another bullet point to add to the list: Since the Federal Election Commission was established in the late 1970s and started keeping records of such things, he's the first second-term president to continue fundraising after the last ballot of his political career has been counted.
Unless Obama wants to imitate John Quincy Adams and return to Congress after leaving the White House -- or run for local school board, as former President Bill Clinton once jokingly suggested he might do -- it seems pretty safe ...
Continue readingObama campaign falls short of billion dollar goal–by $1.8 million
In the presidential fundraising race, President Obama came out on top, raking in $998.2 million to Mitt Romney's $834.5 million, an advantage of $163.7 million. But the president may need every last penny. Since Friday, outside groups gave $37.5 million to support Romney. The figure for Obama: $2.9 million.
Continue readingObama September surge leaves Romney in a $360 million hole
Unless Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney persuaded donors to cough up $360 million in September, President Barack Obama will remain the all-time king of political fundraising.
The Obama campaign released preliminary figures showing their candidate's dollar domination in September, when he raised $181 million, the bulk of it--some 98 percent--in chunks of $250 or less. That brings Obama's overall total to a staggering $925 million in the current election cycle, including money raised by his joint fundraising committees, the Obama Victory Fund and the Swing State Victory Fund, and the Democratic National Committee.
Romney and his surrogates have ...
Continue readingKing of fundraising: Obama leads Romney by $242 million
While the most recent Gallup poll shows registered voters equally split, at 47 percent a piece, in the money race President Barack Obama has an unassailable lead.
In the 2012 campaign cycle, Obama's campaign, the Democratic National Committee and two joint fundraising committees supporting them have collectively raised $743.5 million. The campaign of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, his joint fundraising committee and the Republican National Committee have raised $500.6 million. Because the joint fundraising committee, Romney Victory Inc., files quarterly, its total had to be estimated from media accounts of the campaign's August fundraising totals ...
Continue reading
59063
