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
The Sunlight Foundation Blog
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Help Wanted
The good folks over at Talking Points Memo need some help in making a Pentagon’s military analyst’s documents more transparent. Pitch in.
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Good bye Chairman Mason
We’ve written fairly often about unbelievable situation over the Federal Election Commission. Always regarded as a toothless watchdog even in the best of days, since there’s been a partisan stalemate over new appointments, it’s been totally neutered.
Now, Paul Kiel reports that the Bush Administration has offered a so-called compromise. The most controverisal nominee — Spakovsky – remains a nominee, and an administration spokesperson told the The New York Times that they would accept a separate vote on him. In the meantime, the administration has submitted a new nominee to replace FEC Chair David Mason, one of the two setting commissioners.
But here’s the rub: Mason has opposed a move by Sen. John McCain to pull his presidential campaign out of the public finance system. McCain had earlier joined the system and accepted the $54 million spending limit. Mason’s position is that the FEC would have to approve his request to leave the system, and that he couldn’t just opt out. Meanwhile, the McCain campaign is spending away and has long surpassed the spending limit. Bush’s solution…Good bye Chairman Mason.
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Golden Duke Awards
Our good friends over at Talking Points Memo have announced the first annual Golden Duke Awards, an end of the year, reader-nominated, scandal contest. We want to urge you to send in your nominations,!
TPM named the contest for former congressman and now federal inmate Randy "Duke" Cunningham, the center of what Josh Marshall called the "iconic modern political scandal: you’ve got bribery, sex, national security, and just cartoonish ridiculousness writ large." His team is inviting readers to nominate their favorite political crook or bamboozler in six categories: best testimonial train wreck, outstanding achievement for improbable forgetfulness, outstanding achievement in corruption-based chutzpa, best local scandal, best scandal – sex or carnality related, and best scandal, general interest. Send in your nominations by December 14.
TPM has compiled an impressive panel of judges, including Susie Bright, John Dean, Hendrik Hertzberg, Dahlia Lithwick and Matthew Yglesias. On December 18, TPM will announce the nominees and the winners on December 31.
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Corruption Round Up
Josh Marshall’s intrepid pursuit of truth and justice (and yeah, of corruption in high places too) is really unparalleled in the blogosphere. Today he provides a nifty summary of the all the corruption scandals in Congress this year. Read it and keep digging.
And we thought that the last Congress was the most corrupt in recent memory!
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SOTU and the Web
It was interesting to see how various bloggers and organizations used the Web last night to engage their networks around the President's State of the Union Speech, beyond their usual blogging. Here are few that showed up on my radar screen — some of them more Web 2.0 in their approach than others. I must have missed a lot because this list isn't very large nor, frankly, for the most part, very innovative.
Josh Marshall's effort — calling for video responses to the SOTU — was the most interesting effort that I saw. Pretty innovative and he got some very fun responses.
Campaign for America's Future created a State of the Union Score Card, using past Bush speeches that compared his past statements about the state of the union to reality. CAF also asked their activists to write a letter to the editor of their local newspaper refuting the points that Bush makes using their research.
The Center for Responsive Politics provided some reports to help readers digest the interested money behind some of Bush proposals, along with a money and vote analysis on Congress' vote last week to raise taxes on the oil and gas industry, (Highlight: those who voted against taxing oil and gas companies typically received about five times more in campaign contributions from the industry than those who voted for the bill.)
The bloggers at Center for American Progress's Think Progress blog were responding in real time to the president's speech and their radio station MicCheckRadio, was live from their own radio studio.
Drinking Liberally — an informal progressive social group with chapters all around the country — was promoting their State of the Union Bingo Game. That certainly looked like a lot of fun though it wasn't very techie. Turns out this was a pretty popular approach. Here's another take on it.
Let me know of good stuff you found.
Update: See Social Media's report on Plggd's SOTU Smackdown.Here you can search the speech for specific phrases and words. Pretty cool.
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Digging It Up
We’re delighted to be noticed by some of the folks on the cutting edge of online citizen journalism and old fashioned investigative muckraking. As we were getting our act together we followed, in particular, the development of Josh Marshall’s TPM Muckraker site. In fact one our initial "projects" – which has become our daily feature "In Broad Daylight" – was actually hatched before the Daily Muck. But he got out the door faster than we did! We don’t mind the competition and I doubt he does either. Others, like David Sirota, have a similar feature, and we all have a slightly different take on the news we glean.
And we’re intrigued by groups like Muckraked! that turn up some really good stuff. I mentioned this morning to our staff that I’d like to develop a list of investigative bloggers and organizations (like Center for Public Integrity and the Center for Investigative Reporting) that do this kind of shoe-leather reporting. When we have it, we’ll be glad to share it. In the meantime, check out Bill Allison’s blog roll for the places he checks into every day.
We’re also hearing from people doing lots of interesting work, for example, the folks over at E Pluribus Media and GovTrack.us and ThisWeekInCongress.com. There are a lot of bloggers and organizations out there who, like us, are concerned about the lack of transparency of government. That’s very good news.
