This week I have highlights from Georgia, Missouri, Michigan, Maryland, and am introducing Earmark Corner.

Georgia’s Tondee’s Tavern, went to a Senate Town Hall meeting and taped the answers. This is a great example of how bloggers are ensuring that local events are covered.

Missouri’s Turner Report, highlights state Senator Kevin Engler (Farmington) bill that would ban public officials from accepting meals, beverages, tickets to sporting events, and other forms of entertainment from lobbyists. This is a big lobbying reform bill, and Local Sunlight will be keeping tabs on its progress.

Right Michigan has an interview with State Representative Brian Cally (Portland). Blogger Nick asks him a few questions, including:

Anything else you’d like to discuss or address with the bloggers at Right Michigan

Open government is good government. Perhaps the biggest weakness in state government today is that much of the decision making process is not open to public scrutiny. Take the budget debate for example. Many of the details on line item spending are kept secret, even from the legislature who is charged with approval of the budgets. I’ll bet the budget would be balanced without tax increases if every single line item of state government spending was published on www.michigan.gov.

Kudos to Rep. Cally for being open to the bloggers and good government.

Maryland’s Annapolis Politics talks about County Executive John R. Leopold. Apparently, Mr. Leopold supported a bill to allow a developer to build a golf course. This developer just happened to hosted a fundraiser for Mr. Leopold and raised tens of thousands of dollars for his campaign four days before Mr. Leopold publicly said he supported the golf course. It makes appreciate MAPLight.org a whole lot more.

Bloggers love/hate earmarks. My travels through the blogosphere have led me to find a lot of attention given to earmarks. So in order to keep Local Sunlight by being swallowed by earmark highlights I am introducing Earmark Corner. Gather the kids around the fire and lets see some earmarking from Kentucky, North Carolina, and New Mexico.

Kentucky’s The Rural Democrat, highlights Rep. Hal Rogers $90 million in federal funds for a proposed highway. This and the drip pans Rep. Rogers is having a pork attack.

Over in North Carolina at BlueNC Drama Queen wrote about how Rep. Patrick McHenry who hates earmarks but didn’t think it was hypocritical to ask for 3.5 million in them.

New Mexico FBIHOP’s LP highlights Sen. Pete Domenici’s 25 billions “gift” to nuclear power companies in the omnibus energy bill.

That’s all I have for this week. Thanks local bloggers. Keep the Sunlight shining!

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Keeping track of congressional information starts at the local level, and blogs do a great job of informing people about what is happening in their own backyard. I have been reading local blogs for quite a while and have been very impressed with the coverage on local ethics issues and congressional information. So I would like to highlight every week some blogs that do a great job covering issues that deal with transparency, ethics, and corruption.

In Alabama, Flashpoint describes a recent earmark that funded buying 20,000 smoke detectors for residents in Madison County, and questions its necessity.

Arizona’s Espresso Pundit and BlogforArizona.com both agree that the best way to make public announcements from government agencies is not through a newspaper but that Arizona should put them online on a searchable government Web site.

Georgia Porkbusters gave a rundown of who in the Georgia delegation requested earmarks in the upcoming defense appropriations package.

South Carolina has a new government watchdog blog, the Palmetto Truth Squad. Their goal is to find “verifiable examples of waste, mismanagement and fraud in South Carolina state and local government.”

New York Rochester Turning is reporting that the New York State Ethics Commission recently released an advisory opinion on the use of state aircraft for political purposes.

In Alaska, Sen. Ted Stevens has taken up quite a bit of blog space recently. The Anchorage Daily News takes some space to talk about the earmark controversies surrounding Alaska’s congressional delegation. Here Sen. Stevens did an interview with the Daily News editorial board. If you go to the bottom you can see his, rather interesting, response when questioned about his legal controversies.

These are just some highlights of what is going on at the state level. Please feel free to contact me (at nthompson at sunlightfoundation dot com) if you have any tips on what is going on locally. I am specifically in search of more local political news blogs in Alaska, so if anyone knows of any, please let me know.

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Georgia lawmakers were inundated with lobbyist money as they considered and rejected a proposal by Gov. Sonny Purdue (R) to limit lobbyist contributions to lawmakers last year. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, lobbyists spent $1.1 million on the legislature in 2005, up by $250,000 from the previous year. The top 15 recipients were all Republicans, a partisan split not seen in years past. Most of the money was spent on wining and dining the lawmakers while tens-of-thousands were spent on tickets to Falcons games, Nascar events, and the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl. The legislature did pass an ethics reform last year that installed new measures for disclosure by lobbyists meeting with regulatory officials.

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