Sen. Trent Lott's reform induced decision to forgo further representation for the people of Mississippi is creating a hole in the Senate Republican leadership team as Lott is the Minority Whip. Lott's resignation has already caused Republican Conference Chair Jon Kyl to announce his ambitions to be the next Minority Whip and Sen. Lamar Alexander, who lost by one vote to Lott for the position, is also expected to toss his plaid shirt into the race. Seeing as how we have a whole host of resources, many of them Insanely Useful, it seems appropriate to see what these resources have to say about these characters. Let's start with a cursory look at Sen. Jon Kyl.
Continue readingTurkey Sandwiches, Ron Paul, and Internet Democracy
In July 2003 Vice President Dick Cheney was in Columbia, South Carolina for a fancy sit-down lunch with 150 big-money donors willing to kick in the maximum $2,000 to the reelection campaign of Cheney and President George W. Bush. Dick Cheney was to raise $250,000 from this exclusive group of black-tie diners in one afternoon. This would be an ordinary event for any campaign and lost in the pages of history, but this fundraiser is remembered for another reason. And that reason can best be symbolized in the form of a turkey sandwich.
Prior to the Cheney fundraiser, supporters of Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean were gathered online at the Dean’s Blog for America trying to figure out ways that the campaign could continue its small donor driven campaign fundraising success. One idea floated about was for the campaign to try and match the Cheney fundraiser dollar-for-dollar in online donations. The day of Cheney’s fundraiser the campaign posted a picture of Dean, eating a turkey sandwich while blogging, on their site asking supporters to chip in what they could to match the black-tie Cheney event. By 12:30 the next day the campaign had raised over $500,000, or twice as much as the Cheney event netted.
Continue readingCall for Ensign to Stop Obstructing Electronic Filing Bill
Going on eight months now the Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act, requiring senators to file their campaign finance reports electronically, has been held up by proceedural maneuvers from the Republican side. After a series of secret holds placed on the bill were thwarted once secret holds were banned (Senators with secret holds must reveal their identity after 72 hours) Sen. John Ensign blocked the bill by offering a poison pill amendment that lacked relevance to the bill. Ensign's amendment, revealed on this blog to have originated from the offices of Mitch McConnell, requires outside organizations filing ethics complaints to reveal their donor list. For months now, this irrelevant, poison pill amendment has blocked a simple change in how Senators file their campaign finance reports that would help make the data more readily accessible to the voting public. Now a coalition of groups, including a number of conservative groups, has formed to ask Ensign to drop his amendment and allow the electronic filing bill to pass. The groups include:
Alliance for Justice
Americans for the Preservation of Liberty
The American Conservative Union
James Bopp Jr., General Counsel James Madison Center for Free Speech
Center for Lobbying in the Public Interest
The Free Speech Coalition
Gun Owners of America,
National Center for Public Policy Research
OMB Watch
The full letter is after the jump.
Continue readingA Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words
One of Sunlight's resident creative geniuses (yes, there are many of them) have taken all the Defense Appropriations Earmarks and made them available for viewing within Google Earth. (You can only view this using Google Earth which you can download from this page.) The regular Google Maps version is available here.
And as they say: a picture really is worth a 1,000 words. One of our policy wonks loved the flight simulator that allows you to fly over earmark locations. It allows you to fly your choice of two aircraft anywhere around the globe, with custom layers visible from the aircraft. The simulator is hidden within the latest version of the program, and takes some getting used to controlling, but is certainly an entertaining way to experience the Earth's actual geography-and to educate yourself politically at the same time.
Continue readingYoung Donors Max Out, Need Diapers Changed
Competition among bundlers is getting so competitive that fundraisers are getting their children to chip in. These aren’t grown children by the way; these are toddlers, babies, and prepubescent children without incomes - unless of course they’re working as cockney bootblacks (“Straight shine’s a nickel; super buff’s a dime!”). The Washington Post reported yesterday on this effort by bundling donors using their children and nieces and nephews as ways of funneling ever more money into the coffers of their favored candidate.
Continue readingSuch campaign donations from young children would almost certainly run afoul of campaign finance regulations, several campaign lawyers said. But as bundlers seek to raise higher and higher sums for presidential contenders this year, the number who are turning to checks from underage givers appears to be on the rise.
"It's not difficult for a banker or a trial lawyer or a hedge fund manager to come up with $2,300, and they're often left wanting to do more," said Massie Ritsch, a spokesman for the Center for Responsive Politics. "That's when they look across the dinner table at their children and see an opportunity."
Ron Paul and Real Time Transparency
My continuing joke about Ron Paul around the Sunlight office is that he would win in a landslide if all of his supporter’s MMORPG characters were allowed to vote. (That’s massively multiplayer online role playing game for those not hip to the slang.) All jokes aside, it appears that Paul’s supporters can sure raise a lot of money. In the 3rd Quarter of this year Ron Paul raised just over $5 million putting him slightly behind a former frontrunner John McCain, who raised $6 million. Paul has now set a goal of raising $12 million in the 4th Quarter and is using his Web site to show progress in achieving that goal.
Where Howard Dean had his bat Ron Paul has his Statue of Liberty. The Statue measures the amount raised so far, updating in real time, as Paul reaches his goal of $4 million in October. While Dean and others used these kinds of visuals tools to highlight fundraising during a key period this kind of fundraising transparency has never been done in real time over an entire quarter. Paul’s Web site also shows the names and hometowns of the donors. All of this data cries for one thing and one thing only: user generated content!
Paul’s Internet supporters instantly took all of this information and created their own site, RonPaulGraphs.com, which breaks down the fundraising into tons and tons of graphs. Here’s a couple of my favorites:
Continue readingMaking New Connections
I'm excited to be in New York today to attend Jeff Jarvis' Networked Journalism Conference, and I found it fascinating to read the background statements of many of the participants. When we were asked to pick who we most wanted to meet, I simply refused to pick.
But I am interested in having some talk time with Danny Glover from the National Journal and Air Congress. Included in the site are video clips and podcasts from members of Congress themselves, as well as original content that he mostly produces. The site also posts audio and video about what's going on in Washington from bloggers, MSM journalists, trade associations, watchdog groups and even the executive branch. Sounds like a natural partner for Sunlight.
Continue readingGillibrand: Put IG Work Online
The House of Representatives voted on a bill to improve the way Inspectors General perform their work monitoring spending in executive branch agencies. Congresswoman Kirsten Gillibrand thought the bill might be improved by adding a provision on transparency. Sunlight helped her find an amendment—already part of a bill Senator McCaskill has introduced—that would require that each agency provide a link on its homepage to its IG’s homepage. The amendment also requires that IG reports are posted in a searchable, sortable, downloadable format and be available online no more than one day after the reports are made public. Another piece of the amendment provides that the IG’s website have a method by which the public can report waste, fraud or abuse in an agency.
This amendment shines light on the important work of Inspectors General and it has the potential to save taxpayer money by allowing the taxpayers themselves to report when they think an agency is engaged in wasteful or improper spending. By offering this common sense amendment, Rep. Gillibrand, who already posts her schedule, her personal financial disclosures, and her earmark requests online, can put another notch in her transparency belt. The amendment passed by voice vote, which means that her colleagues also recognized how important and non-controversial greater transparency is. Hopefully more Members of Congress will follow Ms. Gillibrand’s lead when it comes to making their own work more transparent. Ms. Gillibrand and a handful of other Members know that greater transparency builds trust with their constituents, fosters accountability, and simply improves the way our democratic institutions work.
Continue readingKML in Google Maps
We came across Rep. Tom Reynolds' (NY-26) google map of his earmarks a little while ago, and it appears that someone really went above and beyond in showing info about the district. Frankly, I’m completely unfamiliar with the issues or politics of this district, and I don’t even know if this is a comprehensive list of directed spending or just a few of their favorites, but this is pretty compelling stuff (keep going, though. it gets better.) :
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Feed Blending: Sunlight and Congress
I enjoy modifying structures responsible for the form our awareness takes, that’s one of the reasons I was initially drawn to examine the availability of public information. In making the transition to working full time on transparency advocacy, I spent a great deal of time restructuring my information consumption habits. Politics and government function through a complex information economy, and one’s profile as an information consumer (and creator) can dictate your relevance. Blogs and the Internet only increase this trend, so the information ecosystems we rely on demand more customization and cultivation.
One of the tools I rely on to stay aware is netvibes. Several similar aggregators work basically the same, and I’m accustomed to this one. Feed aggregators’ usefullness is multiplied by services like yahoo pipes, which allow multiple feeds to be combined, or even transformed with basic operations and filters. My favorite pipe is the blended Sunlight Foundation feed, an option on the left side of sunlightfoundation.com, which lets me follow every post from all of the Sunlight Foundation blogs, along with citations from Paul Blumenthal’s Ethics Watch, featuring links to ethics articles, often from the Hill and Roll Call.
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