Sunlight Foundation

Making Government Transparent and Accountable

The Sunlight Foundation uses cutting-edge technology and ideas to make government transparent and accountable. Underlying all of our efforts is a fundamental belief that increased transparency will improve the public's confidence in government

• 24 Days Of Local Sunlight – Days 8, 9, 10 and 11

  By Nisha Thompson on 12/11/09 @ 5:33 pm | 0 Comments

  Whew!  It has been a busy week but don’t worry Local Sunlight fans I haven’t forgot who I am thankful for. 

  Pennsylvania’s Above Average Jane, Oregon’s Tom Cusak,  South Carolina’s SC6 and Rhode Island’s Twelfth!

  I have highlighted Above Average Jane a few times.  I like her summaries of what is going on in the Pennsylvania State House and how she has looked into FEC data.  This week she had a post highlighting an email about PA health centers that are getting stimulus funds.  I think this is a great way to share information for a busy blogger.  Sometimes all you need to do is repost because sometimes information shouldn’t stay in the inbox.

  Tom Cusak goes above and beyond the call when it comes to blogging about Oregon.  He has three blogs and I have highlighted them all:  Oregon Earmarks Blog, Oregon Housing Blog, and Open Government News and Issues, Oregon.  Tom’s perspective is interesting to me because he used to work for Department of Housing and Urban Development.  It is interesting to see what a former bureaucrat cares about post retirement.  He has done his own research into earmarks and spending as well as discuss open government issues in the state of Oregon.  He is a great asset to Oregon’s blogosphere.

  South Carolina’s SC6 is written by Mike Reino and is a great blog to read for a wide variety of political information; local and federal.  He did a fascinating investigation into campaign donors.  One of my favorite posts of his,  is this post on a seemingly frivolous bill that was considered in the House.  I really enjoy posts about people looking at bills being introduced and finding interesting things or ridiculous legislation.

  Rhode Island’s Twelfth is a great hyper  local blog by a woman named Eileen Spillane.  Dedicated to all things in Rhode Island Senate’s 12th district she covers a wide variety of subjects.  I like when she covers local transparency issues like open records issues and local Web site reviews.  It is always nice to read hyper local blogs because it becomes less about pure politics but about people and how politics effects communities.

  
  

  

• Local Sunlight

  By Nisha Thompson on 12/05/08 @ 2:16 pm | 0 Comments

  Every week I climb into the depths of the local political blogosphere to find the Sunlight. I use this series to highlight local blogs that do a great job of covering local, state, and congressional political news. This week I have highlights from Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Nevada, Alaska and Connecticut.
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• Local Sunlight

  By Nisha Thompson on 05/01/08 @ 5:42 pm | 0 Comments

  I have highlights this week from Delaware, North Dakota, New York and Earmark Corner.

  DelawarePolitics.net reports that the State Senate Minority Leader Charlie Copeland will support the FOIA request for Citizens for Clean Power for documents and expenditures from recent Energy Committee hearings about wind power. “I fully support and have led this General Assembly on the issue of transparency in government,” said Copeland. “I believe that if tax dollars are involved, people have a right to know how those dollars were spent. I fully support the release of these documents.” Excellent point Sen. Copeland, keep honoring those FOIA requests.

  The Say Anything blog, in North Dakota, reports that a new database was created to show the budget and expenses for all the school systems in North Dakota.

  In New York, Room Eight highlights an article in the NY Daily News that shows 40% of City Councilors have a conflict of interest with non profits that receive state money. This story comes at the tail of the controversy surrounding City Council Speaker Christine Quinn creation of fake non profits to funnel city money through. These stories make it obvious that non profits also need some transparency in regards to their relationship to elected officials.

  Earmark Corner has highlights from Florida and South Carolina.

  South Carolina Politics Today reports that the State House has just passed a bill that would require lawmakers to fill out a form when making budget requests so they can be identified with a potential earmark. This is a great transparency measure that will bring the earmark process out into the open.

  The All Florida Blog lists some of the earmarks coming to the Tampa area from the state budget. It is important to see where earmarks are going and how much they are.

  

• Local Sunlight (Update)

  By Nisha Thompson on 04/25/08 @ 12:16 pm | 0 Comments

  

  This week I have highlights from Tennessee, South Carolina, Oregon, New Jersey, Minnesota, Delaware and Hawaii.

  In Tennessee, Knox Views reports that the Knox County has put the campaign financial disclosure reports online for all candidates in Knox County races. The financial disclosure forms are pdfs of the actual paper reports and put on the election commissions’s Web site.

  In South Carolina, SC6 has three very interesting posts investigating the campaign contributions given to Rep. Jim Clyburn. Part one looks into Rep. Clyburn’s campaign donors and where his contributions are coming from and how many of them are coming from constituents versus out of staters. Part two looks at companies that have never contributed to Rep. Clyburn in the past but suddenly started and then received a federal grant. The third part goes into the interesting donations coming from a New York City based corporate law firm that gives barely any money to federal level candidates outside New York but have given to Rep. Clyburn. These posts are interesting and are another reason, for why it’s important, to have campaign donations available on the Federal Election Commision’s Web site and OpenSecrets.org. Good job SC6.

  In Oregon, Orygun has a great post that thoroughly explains the issues happening with the Oregon Revised Statutes that I highlighted earlier this week.

  PolitickerNJ.com has a great March Madness esque competition to find the smartest New Jersey legislator. All you do is vote on which lawmaker you think is intellectually smarter. While I don’t know if someone can really measure someone else’s intelligence without knowing them, it is a fascinating way to see what constituents think about their lawmakers.

  In Minnesota, Bluestem Prairie has a list of federal grants Rep. Tim Walz got (correction: I misunderstood Rep. Walz announced these grants did not get them) for area airports.

  Two bloggers in Delaware want a state spending database and can’t seem to understand what could be causing state legislators to not mandate one. DelawarePolitics.net writes a post about a new law under consideration that would be put the spending for school systems online and also would introduce a state budget spending database. He even goes into details about what other states spent on a database and what it would cost Delaware since FedSpending.org became open source. Kilroy’s Delaware highlights TheNewsJournals state spending database and asks why Delaware can’t get this done.

  In Hawaii, Poinography highlights a post at National Conference of State Legislator’s blog about how legislative voting systems don’t review voting by legislator. He then goes on to say Hawaii also doesn’t and you have to go through thousands of bill status pages to get the information. He might even take the initiative to “write a perl script able to automatically extract the data from those history pages… Which means that one of the (paid!) computer geeks at the Lege should be able to do the same.”

  

• Local Sunlight

  By Nisha Thompson on 03/06/08 @ 2:26 pm | 0 Comments

  

  This week I have highlights from Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, New Jersey and New York.

  In Oregon, Open Government News and Issues, spends some time talking about using Legistorm’s database containing information on privately funded congressional travel. Oregon’s own Senator Smith, and his staff have taken trips totaling $190,000 or more. Rep. Blumenauer has 70 approved trips for a total $156,000.

  Pennsylvania’s KeyStone Politics blog highlights a tentative $400 million contract granted to Unisys for managing the state’s data center. Gov. Rendell’s approval of this contract caused a stir in the state house when lawmakers asking why competitive bidding wasn’t considered.

  South Carolina Politics Today highlights a new state spending database. The new website allows people to find itemized agency spending by month, as well as year-to-date agency spending by several categories. State expenses are broken-down by whether General Fund, an earmark or federal money was the source of the funding. This data can also downloaded by anyone. Good Job South Carolina!

  In New York an interesting conversation is happening between three New York bloggers (Rochester Turning, Fighting 29th, and the Ontario Republican) and the local television station 13WHAM’s blogger about whether bloggers are journalists and traditional media. Read this ongoing conversation about the changing nature of news and media.

  Earmark Corner:

  Pennsyltucky Politics blog talks about Rep. Todd Platts pledge to not request earmarks. Rep. Platts has claimed earmarks have been used to do some good things for the district but the process of getting them needs to be reformed so he won’t be requesting any in the upcoming appropriation bills.

  In South Caronlina, Palmetto State Progressive, reports that Sen. DeMint has supported $30 million in defense department earmarks despite his well known opposition to them.

  In New Jersey, Blog the Fifth, has a series of posts on identifying who the recipents are of the $2.5 million in earmarks that Rep. Garrett sponsored. Some digging revealed that $1.5 million, that is for 2kw Military Tactical Generator Improvements, went to Dewey Electronics. The other million, was for Lightweight Munitions and Surveillance System (LMSS) for Unmanned Air & Ground Vehicles, went to Imperial Machine & Tool, Inc. Good sleuthing Blog the Fifth!

  

• Local Sunlight

  By Nisha Thompson on 10/10/07 @ 5:02 pm | 0 Comments

  Every week I climb into the depths of the local political blogosphere to find the Sunlight. I use this series to highlight local blogs that do a great job of covering local, state, and Congressional political news. This week I have highlights from Ohio, South Carolina, Michigan, Missouri, and New Jersey.

  In Ohio, the Buckeye State Blog asked what the motivation could be behind Rep. Jean Schmidt’s $100,000 earmark to the John P. Parker Historical Society. It seems they should head over to Earmarkwatch.org and do some investigating.
  

  In South Carolina, SC6 analyses House Bill 2693, Popcorn Lung Bill. While his analysis is interesting, what I find more important is that he is taking the time to look at some of the bills Congress spends time on and evaluating their importance and the motivation behind them in a public place.

  In Missouri, The Turner Report wrote a great post about state senators receiving gifts from lobbyists. The report examines documents from the Missouri Ethics Commission to find out what gifts state senators received from lobbyists.

  Politics NJ questioned why Bergen County Prosecutor John Molinelli went on vacation with state Senator Joseph Coniglio even though the senator is a target of a federal criminal probe. I’m pretty sure there is a conflict of interest somewhere in there.

  In Michigan, Media Mouse has been monitoring military contracts and they have a great list of contracts awarded to local companies in west Michigan.

  I would like to also point out David Weller’s blog Allthingsreform.org which covers reform activism and government ethics.

  That’s all I have for this week. If you have any tips for me feel free to contact me here.

  

• Local Sunlight

  By Nisha Thompson on 08/21/07 @ 12:25 pm | 0 Comments

  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.