nisha thompson's blog

The Onion really knows how to get to the heart of an issue

2008-05-21T20:50:32+00:00

In The Know: Are Politicians Failing Our Lobbyists?

Local Sunlight

2008-05-16T16:06:29+00:00

This week I have highlights from Pennsylvania, Mississippi, Hawaii and Louisiana.

In Pennsylvania, Above Average Jane has a great post summarizing what bills passed State Legislature during the week.

In Mississippi, Y'all Politics posts about ethics reform legislation that passed the state legislature and is on its way to be signed by the governor. This bill would increase the number of persons who must file economic interest disclosure forms, would create more enforcement of open-meeting laws and would make public-record law improvements.

In Hawaii, Poinography has a follow-up to a previous post about how citizens cannot find voting information sorted by legislator. In response, he wrote a "script to download all of the bill status pages and to pull out the voting information for each legislator." Inquirers can find a link in the fifth paragraph of the above post to download the data. This is great work. Thanks Poinography!

In Louisiana, The Daily Kingfish has a great post highlighting the useful features of GovTrack and how it allows citizens keep track of their Congressional delegations.

Local Sunlight

2008-05-08T19:42:53+00:00

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 Hawaii, New York, Tennessee, New Hampshire, and Florida.

In Hawaii, iLind.net goes through the state ethics commission’s failure to act when the Hawaii Superferry, Inc didn’t fully disclose their lobbying efforts. iLind.net makes a good case for why the ethics commission should be more forceful when these types of violations occur.

In New York, Politics on the Hudson has created a database that shows what earmarks Albany legislators brought to their districts.

TerryFrank.net in Tennessee highlights, an editorial in Tennessean, on the status of an open records bill in the state legislature. The bill has been passed out of committee but with amendments to make it more difficult to gain access to public records. A provision would lenghthen the time requests can be complied with and would give different access to documents for in state and out of state citizens.

GraniteGrok of New Hampshire has a great post about the movement to put more local government information online by the citizens of Gilford, New Hampshire. There has been a move to look at what improvements could be made to the local government’s Web site. It also highlights the work of SunshineReview.org, who have a very handy ten point government website transparency checklist.

I have been meaning to highlight Florida Politics for their weekly roundup on the bills that having been going through the Florida state legislature.

Local Sunlight

2008-05-01T21:42:28+00:00

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)

2008-04-25T16:16:00+00:00

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.”

Knight Foundation Seek to Find Out What People Want to Know

2008-04-23T19:34:03+00:00

Via PJNet.org, last week the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and Aspen Institute announced that they are funding a $2.3 million study to see if citizens are being provided the information they need in order to participate in a democracy. The goal is to find out is the information needs of communities is being met and to recommend solutions if they are not. According to the Knight Foundation press release:

“The business models we’ve relied on to provide news and information to our communities are stressed and changing. New platforms offer an astounding array of choices, creating the most connected world we have ever known with the greatest volume of available data,” said (Alberto) Ibargüen (Knight Foundation president and CEO), a longtime newspaper executive and former PBS chairman who also chairs the Newseum board. “But as those choices proliferate and as those virtual communities connect us globally, the need for local, reliable, contextual civic information remains and, I believe, is being met less and less effectively.”

I think this is long overdue. The need for transparency in government isn’t just about getting the powers that be to open up, but to also make that information readily available to citizens so they can use it to keep tabs on their representatives. It will be interesting to see what information people feel they need and how they are receiving it. Needless to say, I look forward to the results of this study.

Oregon Copyrights Laws Tells Public You Can't Have Them!

2008-04-22T16:00:06+00:00

Last week John Wonderlich posted about the ongoing story of the GAO giving exclusive rights to digitalize legislative histories to Thomson West on the Open House Project blog. The government entering a deal with a private company and giving them exclusive rights to public documents creates a situation where the whole point of digitalization is lost. When large amounts of documents are available on the internet in easy to download formats it’s supposed to increase public access but this situation has the opposite effect. Unfortunately this problem isn’t exclusive to the federal government.

Via Boing Boing and Carl Malamud,

“The State of Oregon is sending out cease and desist letters to sites like Justia and Public.Resource.Org that have been posting copies of Oregon laws, known as the Oregon Revised Statutes.

We've sent Oregon back two letters. The first reviews the law and explains to the Legislative Counsel why their assertion of copyright over the state statutes is particularly weak, from both a common law perspective and from their own enabling legislation.”

Malamud goes on to state that Thomson West has also made copies of these statutes but haven’t received cease and desist letters from Oregon yet (it was stated that West will be receiving letters). Apparently many states have laws that are copyrighted and this begs the question of how appropriate this kind of copyrighting in an internet age is. How can a law that was written for the purpose of serving the general public not be available to them to reproduce?

Illinois is now an OpenBook

2008-04-17T20:31:47+00:00

(Hat tip to State Agency Database Highlights)

Illinois has a new database for state contracts and campaign contributions. OpenBook is a great new site where you can search by contract holder or contributor. When you search for either the results will show you two columns. The first shows if the company or person has any state contracts and the second is what campaign contributions they have made. This site allows people to see if a relationship could exist between contracts and campaign contributions. It is simple to use and the easy to understand, which is pretty impressive for a government database. Kudos Illinois!

Local Sunlight

2008-04-17T18:02:14+00:00

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.

New Site gives Maine some Transparency

2008-04-09T15:22:10+00:00

There is a new Web site that is consolidating documents from the state government of Maine. GovRake now has session records from 1999 to 2008, bills from the current session, and hearing schedules. The site also features a public hearings calendar, a blog for the latest updates, and a list of state data sources . You can also listen or watch live sessions or hearings from the site.

This is a great new resource for the citizens of Maine. The tagline says it all “Keep raking, the needle is in there somewhere.”

Local Sunlight

2008-04-08T18:21:39+00:00

This week I have highlights from South Dakota, Tennessee, New York, Pennsylvania, and Delaware.

South Dakota War College reported that the South Dakotans for Open and Clean Government ballot committee has gathered enough signatures to place the South Dakota Open and Clean Government Act on the November ballot. This legislation contains the following provisions:

Taxpayer funds could not be used to lobby or campaign for partisan political agendas, including increased taxes.

Legislators and their staff would be unable to use their legislative positions to secure a “golden-parachute”, state-contracted job.

The “pay to play” system — where state contracts are traded for campaign donations — would be outlawed.

A simple, searchable website with information on all state contracts over $500 (excluding employment contracts), would be launched so citizens can know how their money is being spent.

War College also highlights some of the features of Legistorm including a map of the travel that Sen. Johnson and his staff have taken.

South Dakota Watch has a great post about how much openness in government is too much and what should be considered bad transparency. This is in response to a article in the Argus Leader about the crimes that Sioux City Council candidates some of which are just traffic violations.

BillHobbs.com, in Tennessee, wrote a great post about his efforts to get the state of Tennessee to respect his Open Records request regarding a tape of construction being done at the governor's mansion. Even though the tape is state property and should be available under open records laws, the governor’s office wouldn’t let Mr. Hobbs obtain a copy of the tape unless he pays $200 for a DVD.

In New York, Room Eight reports that City Council Speaker Christine Quinn has formed fake organizations, that she can report to the council during budget enactment, that receive state money. Then for next year use the money given to the fake organizations to do political favors.

In Pennsylvania, Policy Blog, is responding to an interest discussion on whether the budget process is legitimate if legislators list programs to be funded and then let the governor decide which ones get the money.

In Delaware, Down with Absolutes goes through the process of winning a state contract.

Local Sunlight

2008-03-26T19:27:09+00:00

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 Su nshine 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.

End of Sunshine Week Thoughts

2008-03-21T21:18:52+00:00

If you could treat information about your work the way information about Congress is treated, it would be the equivalent of going into a job interview with a nearly blank resume. A resume is information that a potential employer uses to hire you for a job. And because members of Congress work for us, how can we evaluate their job performance if we don't have meaningful access to information about what they do and who they do it for?

Congress should put information, which relates to the business of lawmaking, online in real time. All their required filings (such as reports about their personal financial investments and their campaign finance reports) should be posted on the Internet in real time and in a way that people can easily search them. The legislation that lawmakers are going to vote on should be posted online three days before the vote so ordinary people can read and evaluate it. The correspondence between Congress and the executive branch should be put online. Congressional earmarks in both the Senate and the House should be fully disclosed with the who, what, where, and why before they are decided on. (For more information click here.)

These measures - and there are no doubt others -- can help create a more open and accountable Congress. The purpose of Sunshine Week is to partake in dialogue about what it means to have an open government and how we can achieve it. The events of the past week are a call to lawmakers to be more transparent and accountable. The image that this week provides is of a united citizenry asking government to be more open so we can trust them again. Let us in because we can help each other run a great nation.

Local Sunlight

2008-03-06T19:26:52+00:00

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

2008-02-28T20:57:35+00:00

This week I have highlights from Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, Louisiana, Kentucky, Florida and Minnesota.

Oregon’s Earmark Blog posts a CRS report about the Executive Order restricting state agencies from considering earmarks not found in the historical texts of bills. Another example of how useful and informative CRS reports are.

S.D. Watch posted a press release from South Dakota’s Secretary of State Chris Nelson. The press release states that the secretary of state has updated their website to include a free, searchable database of corporate records.

South Texas Chisme posted about how the Harris County government is looking into closing a loophole that allows high ranking officials to not include personal financial information that could cause a conflict of interest.

In Louisiana, Between the Lines, has a post on new ethics reform legislation going through the state senate. The legislation would limit gifts and meals from lobbyists and is being opposed by many lawmakers because it was cause hardship to their legislative life.

KentuckyPolitics.org highlights the Kentucky Senate passing legislation that would require Section 527 groups to disclose their contributions.

Florida’s The Buzz, highlights how the Florida House is now wireless. “Anyone with a wireless-capable computer can pick up a signal now in committee rooms, public areas, etc. No registration is necessary, says Jill Chamberlin, spokeswoman for House Speaker Marco Rubio.” Kudos to you Florida House.

In Minnesota, MinnPost, is using Sunlight’s new Lawmaker Profiler. The Profiler allows you to find campaign contributions, earmarks, federal contracts, and lobbyist expenditures that are associated with a member of Congress. It is a great tool for any blogger or news organization who wants a new innovative way to see congressional data.

State FOIA Fighters

2008-02-27T16:10:45+00:00

The National Freedom of Information Coalition (NFOIC)is an organization that “protects the public's right to oversee its government.” The NFOIC is made up of member organzations, that advocate for state level open records and first amendment laws. They have members in forty four states.

These organizations are all different some of them are run out of journalism schools while others are non profits that are coalitions of concerned citizens and journalists. They either focus on first amendment rights or open records. They tend to be places where people can find what should by available, host seminars, litigate when necessary, and educate the public on what they have a right to know.

It’s great to see so many organizations working toward more openness in government at all levels.

State Transparency Roundup

2008-02-25T21:58:16+00:00

While we work on more transparency for Congress it's important to note that federal efforts for openness can have a positive effect on state government. On the flip side the states can take the lead on disclosure or they can be less open this makes them great places to see how transparency is valued. Let’s see what the states are up to:

Pennsylvania passed the Right to Know law that makes most government records public. There are 30 exemptions that would keep records sealed these mostly deal with safety and private information. People can request documents by mail, e-mail, fax or any other electronic means as provided by the agency. Response to requests shall be made within five business days.

Mississippi is in the dog house with a slew of new legislation that would close the door to the public by giving various groups exemption to the open meeting or public information laws. This includes exempting airlines from open meetings, judicial nomination advisory committee, also law enforcement.

The Washington senate approved legislation, senate bill 6818, that would require the state have a state expenditure website set up by January 2009

New York City has a Citywide Performance Reporting (CPR) online tool performance tracking tool that will help make City agency performance transparent and accountable. From this database you can find out how state agency’s performance is based on themes. Themes are groups of related government services.

Salary Database’s on a state level have become more prevalent. 15 states have databases that are maintained by local newspapers. Iowa, Georgia, and Oklahoma have state sponsored databases. WikiFoia has a great list of them all and where you can find them.

Local Sunlight

2008-02-19T19:29:50+00:00

This week I have highlights from New York, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Maryland, Delaware, Hawaii, Alabama, and Iowa.

In New York, the Fighting 29 th, gives us an update on last week’s story about Rep. Kuhl’s trip to Brazil. The story produced by WHAM-13 notes that after the original story Rep. Kuhl’s office sent the news station a list of the expenses except for how much the air travel was. Apparently the government does not disclose how much military travel costs. After Rep. Kuhl’s office sent them an itinerary with flight hours they figured the airfare cost $28,000. I wonder why they wouldn’t disclose that?

Keystone Politics in Pennsylvania highlights the open records legislation that has been approved unanimously by the state house and is being sent to the governor to sign. This right to know law makes all government records public unless the document's custodian can prove that they are classified.

Lowell at BadLand Blues highlights an interview with the governor about a bill regarding open government. The governor feels that open disclosure could violate privacy rights of citizens. The interview also gives the sponsor of the bill a chance to respond to the Governor’s accusations.

The Howard County Maryland Blog highlights the Maryland Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2008. This bill is being sponsored by Howard County delegates and will allow citizens to see how the state of Maryland spends tax money.

DelawarePolitics.net talks about the nepotism in Delaware. He would like to know how many family members of elected officials are being employeed by Delaware. Fair question maybe its time for people to investigate these links like we did in Congress is a family business.

ILind.net of Hawaii talks about his involvement the Sunshine Blogger Project. The goal of the project is to find out whether America's governors archive the e-mail correspondences that go into and out of their offices. More importantly can they provide copies of those e-mails when members of the public request them. ILind request covered all governmental emails sent or received by the governor’s office during the four day period of February 1-4, 2008. Hopefully the bloggers participating in this project can get some positive disclosure.

In Alabama, Doc’s Political Parlor, talks about the new state senate bill that will ban PAC to PAC contributions. It does not, however, ban PACs from giving to political parties which could create a loophole. The loophole is being actively discussed and will be PACs contributing to parties, who will then, contribute to another PAC. Two steps forward one step back.

In Iowa Cyclone Conservatives points people to the Facebook and MySpace pages of Reps. Steve King and Tom Latham and Sen. Chuck Grassly. It’s great to see elected officials taking advantage of a new medium to connect with constituents.

Local Sunlight

2008-02-07T18:42:24+00:00

This week I have highlights from New York, Mississippi, Kentucky, Oregon, and Missouri.

In New York, The Fighting 29th, highlights a great local news story about trying to find information about Rep. Kuhl’s trip to Brazil. The story details the ridiculous steps the reporter had to go through to get basic information about the trip and how the procedure for trip disclosure is incredibly difficult to track. This is why OpenSecrets.org's travel database is so essential to find this information.

In Mississippi, Cotton Mouth highlights that on Monday the Mississippi Senate was broadcasted live over the internet for the first time ever.

In Missouri, the Turner Report announced its hall of shame which features the ten Missouri senators who received over $1,000 worth of gifts from lobbyists last year.

Oregon’s Open Government News and Issues blog highlights a CRS Report that covers Congressional Salaries and Allowances and also asks if Oregon lawmakers have an equivalent. It’s great to see CRS reports highlighted when they are available to the public. OpenCrs.com is a great resource to find more CRS reports that can give people more information that they should know.

Kentucky’s the Rural Democrat reports that Gov Steve Beshear’s ethics reform bill has been passed the Kentucky House of Representatives. The bill includes more whistle-blower protection and changes to giving personal gifts to public servants. The bill also would be prohibit state employees from seeking employment from individuals that the state workers were directly involved with on the job.

Local Sunlight

2008-01-29T16:39:42+00:00

This week I have highlights from Idaho, Louisiana, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, and Washington.

In Idaho, IdaBlue, has a new blog roll category, “legiblogs”, this lists all the state legislators that have blogs (or blogislators). There are four blogs currently listed and they all seemed to be updated regularly. It’s great to see elected officials considering blogging as a way to communicate with their constituents.

In Louisiana, Blagueur, highlights a Washington Post article talking about Rep. Richard H. Baker who is in talks to become president of a hedge fund lobby. Also in Louisiana, In the Loop highlights the historic state house organizational session. This included a day long briefing on Louisiana’s Code of Governmental Ethics. This was meant to lead the State Reps through the ethics code and educated them about the requirements for financial disclosure and lobbyist regulation. This was a great opportunity to learn Louisiana’s Ethics Code before the special sessions in February on ethics reform.

In Missouri, the Turner Report, talks about how State Rep. Dwight Scharnhorst introduced bill HB 1548, which, he admitted was written by a lobbyist. This bill would exempt sales tax on purchases of “equipment, machinery, materials, supplies, fixtures, and shoes used in the sport of bowling.” A little more research shows that this bill was previously submitted last year by Rep. Ron Richard, the House Speaker-elect, who happens to own a chain of bowling alleys. How convenient.

In Nebraska, Smith Watch, has a very interesting summary of Rep. Adrian Smith’s first year in Congress. Complete with voting summary and some analysis of who gave him money and how often he voted in their favor.

In New Mexico, LP at New Mexico FBIHOP, highlights the very cool The Santa Fe Reporter's Muckraker’s Guide to New Mexico. The guide has links to campaign finance, earmark, crime, and various other information any good muckraker would want.

In Washington, Olympia Time, highlights how the state legislature now has RSS feeds for bills which will allow people to subscribe to bills and track changes.

Earmark Corner

The usual ruckus around earmarks has slowed to a disgruntled murmur with people mostly focusing on the election. I did want to highlight a great summary done by Smith Watch on Rep. Adrian’s Smith earmark requests and his opinion on the status of earmarking.