The Federal Communications Commission held a much noted and anticipated hearing in Massachusetts on Monday on the issue of net neutrality. Seating was limited but the hearing was open to the public. Comcast, a foe of net neutrality, decided to take advantage of the limited seating by paying people to sleep in the seats so that net neutrality supporters and others who wanted to watch the hearing would be left outside in the cold. Nice.
In relation to my previous post on coal industry shenanigans, we also need to require disclosure of these types of deceptive practices.
Continue readingNew York Times Opens Archives Online
Update: For some reason it appears the Times has pulled this awesome research tool. I'll try to find out why.
The New York Times launched an amazing research tool, creating a great online browser for all their content from 1851-1922. The Times is also offering the data in API so that, if you can, you can create your own browser. The Times blog says:
"As part of eliminating TimeSelect, The New York Times has decided to make all the public domain articles from 1851-1922 available free of charge. These articles are all in the form of images scanned from the original paper. In fact from 1851-1980, all 11 million articles are available as images in PDF format. To generate a PDF version of the article takes quite a bit of work — each article is actually composed of numerous smaller TIFF images that need to be scaled and glued together in a coherent fashion."
If you do research - or are in any way in need of scanning the 1855 adverts for local New York haberdashers - this is not to be missed. Check out the TimesMachine. (There might be some kind of server problems right now.)
The article to the left references a large scale congressional investigation into lobbyist actions in an attempt to block President Woodrow Wilson's tariff bill, a key element of his New Freedom agenda. The investigation sought to discover if Senators had been bribed or received undue influence from these lobbyists and ultimately required every sitting Senator to testify to their personal finances, campaign contritbutions, and relationships with lobbyists and other company agents. This amounted to the first full disclosure by members of Congress in regards to the personal finances, their campaign contributors, and the nature of the lobby. A first for transparency in Congress.
A Picture is Worth….
Here's a great story about Washington lobbyist lawmaker connections and a fabulous graphic. One picture is worth a 1,000 words.
Continue reading
So Much For the New FOIA Laws
When President Bush signed the Open Government Act of 2007 on New Years Eve, the first reform of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in a decade, one might have been tempted to believe the administration was reevaluating its embrace of hyper secrecy and warming to more openness and transparency. No such luck.
Over the weekend, Think Progress reported how the administration is now attempting to "neuter" the new law, which Congress wrote to open up government to more accountability. The law sets up the Office of Government Information Services (OGIS), designed as an ombudsman to provide independent oversight and settle disputes over FOIA requests. The law authorized funds to address backlogs in the requests and resolve the requests in a timely manner.
Continue readingThe Face of Corruption
Matt Stoller at Open Left reveals what the face of corruption looks like: an invitation to a fundraising dinner. (They better be standing while they eat.) It's truly amazing that Verizon has a Good Government Committee. That goes above and beyond all the necessary trappings of traditional Orwellian naming conventions.
Finish Finding Out Who’s Gone from Congress to K Street
Wow, that was fast. In less than a day, 21 citizen researchers completed the first part of the Where Are They Now?" distributed research project. They investigated 268 congressional staff members whose bosses resigned, retired or were voted out of office in 2006, and found 48 who have potentially gone through the revolving door to work for K Street. Thank you to all who participated--including the 30 researchers who signed up but didn't get a chance to participate in the first part, but remember: There's still more to be done.
So far, only one of these potential revolvers has been verified. Here's your chance to do some old fashioned, person-to-person reporting: Call up a lobbying firm and verify that we have indeed identified a former congressional insider who's moved on to K Street. We give you a really simple script, and an easy way to record your efforts. Just click here to get started.
Continue readingFind Out Who’s Gone from Congress to K Street
Rep. Mike Oxley, the former chair of the powerful House Financial Services Committee, retired. So did Sen. Paul Sarbanes, the ranking minority member of the Senate Banking Committee. Rep. Harold Ford lost his bid for an open Senate seat, while Sen. Rick Santorum lost his bid for his own. Criminal investigations cost both Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham and Rep. Bob Ney their seats.
When they left office, what happened to their former staffers? Did they go through Washington's Revolving Door? Using the Sunlight Foundation's new Where are they now? distributed research tool, you can find out who's gone from Congress to K Street. The 109th Congress closed up shop nearly one year ago. For the top staff members whose bosses resigned, retired or were voted out of office, the one year "cooling off period" -- during which they are not allowed to lobby their former colleagues on Capitol Hill -- is coming to an end. Lower level staffers have been able to lobby their old colleagues on the Hill all year.
Now you can find out what former aides are now lobbying on everything from S-Chip expansion to bridges to nowhere. Where are they now? also extends the distributed research model by allowing users, in addition to doing the preliminary research on potential revolvers, to verify information, resulting in a 100 percent-citizen-powered project. Where are they now? will thus take our experiments in citizen journalism to a new level—producing high quality, fact-checked facts that any citizen or journalist can quote and rely on.
Using the tool is simple. Pick a lawmaker you want to research from the project's home page, choose one their former aides from the the list taken from the September 2006 edition of the Congressional Directory, and look for any matches in the Senate Office of Public Records online database of lobbyist disclosures. If you do find a match, enter the firm's name and contact info from the SOPR database, and you're done with step one. If you want to verify the data, use the tool to keep track of your phone calls to the lobbying firm. And that's it. A fun little diversion for the holiday season. (P.S. -- For those curious, our friends at the Center for Responsive Politics maintain a pretty good list of former members of Congress who've gone through the revolving door--including those who left during the 109th Congress.)
Continue readingThe GAO’s Unheeded Mandate
I recently came across a mandate that the GAO perform periodic reviews of financial disclosure practices across the government, which appears to be unenforced and unimplemented. (more)
Continue readingThe Washington Independent
The Center for Independent Media (CIM) is poised to launch its new Washington outpost -- The Washington Independent. Allison Silver, a former editor for The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times, will be news editor. Laura McGann, formerly with TPMmuckraker, is on board as managing editor. They are attracting some significant talent.
The Center was launched in 2006 to support talented bloggers with journalism and internet training, as well as to provide logistical support. The brains behind it are David Bennahum, founding writer for Wired magazine, and Ali Savino, a former Microsoft programmer. Thus far the group has fostered four state-based news sites, Colorado Confidential, Iowa Independent, Michigan Messenger, and Minnesota Monitor. Each site operates independently, and as CIM's website states, "the sites' contributors do more reporting than most bloggers and are more opinionated on key local issues than most daily news reporters."
Continue readingHeathyToys.org
The massive and numerous recalls of Chinese-made toys because of lead-based paint and other toxins naturally have parents worried, especially this time of year. There was another recall announced just yesterday, this time of toddler potty training seats tainted with lead paint. This latest recall makes 99 recalls for 2007 totaling more than 16 million products, according to OMB Watch. The so-called federal watchdog, the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), is underfunded and largely toothless. Maybe this is part of the problem?
Then there is the issue of the former and acting chiefs of the CPSC, and their close relationship with industries they were responsible for regulating. Last month, The Washington Post reported that the agency's acting chairman, Nancy Nord, and the previous chairman, Hal Stratton, had "taken dozens of trips at the expense of the toy, appliance and children's furniture industries and others they regulate." In May, Bush's nominee to head the CPSC, Michael Baroody, was forced to withdraw his nomination when it became clear that he would not win confirmation in the Senate Commerce Committee because he was a senior lobbyist with the National Association of Manufacturers.
In the face of the feds' dereliction of its duty, activist groups are jumping into the breach.
Continue reading
59063
