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, Tennessee, New Jersey, Maryland, and Louisiana.
(more…)

1 Comment

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.”

0 Comments

This week I have highlights from Virginia, Maryland, Missouri, New Jersey and Alabama.

In Virginia, Bacon’s Rebellion has a great post on the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority asking people to put up YouTube videos about how miserable their commutes are. The NVTA is hoping that the northern Virgina legislators will see them and will create NVTA taxes and fees and enact a statewide transportation plan. The second half of the post asks, since NVTA is a partial state agency, if it is wrong to use state money to lobby for state funds.

Howard County Maryland Blog has an update on the status of legislation that would create a state spending database, the bill just passed the Maryland House and Senate and is waiting for the governor’s signature. Also the Howard County Council has unanimously approved a measure to have a county level spending database created by 2010.

In Missouri, the Turner Report posts about how Gov. Matt Blunt has two siblings that are registered lobbyists in the state of Missouri. I wonder what Thanksgiving dinner is like?

In New Jersey, the Ruins of Trenton has a post on a bill that would allow municipalities and government entities to satisfy public notice requirements for certain announcements by placing the notices online. The bill just passed assembly and is on its way to the state senate. Assemblyman Cryan said it best "With Internet access and usage continually on the rise, it makes good sense to allow the public to access meeting notices and other government documents electronically." I couldn’t agree more, however, newspapers aren’t too happy. Currently all notices have to be posted in newspapers which means government agencies have to buy a a large protion of ad space.

In Alabama, Doc’s Political Parlor has a great post discussing a statement made in the state senate by State Senator Scott Beason. Sen. Beason asked the body if the legislature was “shirking” their duties by having the people vote on laws. Beason said, “It is up to us to look at the issue, study the issue, debate the issue, come up with the best possible legislation for the people of the state - the best we can do. Then it’s up to the people to decide if what we did was right.” The discourse about what the job of the legislature is and how much citizens should participate is definitely more topical now with more participartory tools and the internet. Sunlight has recently encountered this discussion in response to our latest project PublicMarkup.org.

0 Comments

This week I have highlights from Virginia, New Jersey, Alabama, Hawaii, and Maryland.

In Virginia, Vivian J. Page, highlights the city of Norfolk, VA’s new YouTube channel. The channel has videos about what is going on in the community. This is a great use of available technology to get messages out to the community.

In New Jersey, Blog the Fifth, discusses Rep. Scott Garrett’s new chief of staff, Amy D. Smith. Smith is a Capitol Hill veteran and also a former lobbyist. She lobbied for the firm Bartlett, Bendall, & Kadesh LLC. Makes you wonder about the revolving door and the perception of conflict of interest.

Mooncat at Left in Alabama highlights Follow the Money’s new Legislative Committee Analysis tool. This new tool shows you the top contributors to committee members and who has contributed to the committee as a whole and what industries are giving money.

In Hawaii, Poinography, talks about providing bloggers with legal protection if they grant a source anonymity. Hawaii state house is considering a bill that includes bloggers under shield protections.  However, this bill is not scheduled for a hearing.

Also in Hawaii, iLind.net, got a response from his Sunshine Blogger Request request to Gov. Linda Lingle’s office for emails. Half of the emails requested were provided the other half were withheld under executive privilege. This is a pretty interesting read to see what was learned from this FOI request and to see what the governor considers executive privilege.

Maryland Politics blog has a great post on what Montgomery County’s senators are working on by providing a list of sponsored bills for each state senator. This is a great reminder that people should be checking out their state government sites, as well as, OpenCongress.org to see if the bills their elected officials are championing are being passed and if you agree with them or not.

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!

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.

0 Comments