Thanks to Craig Newmark, we now know where two more former staffers of resigned, retired or defeated members of Congress are now. Wayne Palmer, the former chief of staff to Sen. Rick Santorum, now lobbies for Astrazeneca Pharmaceuticals LP, while Tim Berry, the former chief of staff for Rep. Tom DeLay lobbies for Time Warner.

We now have four lobbyists verified, only 44 to go!

Wow, that was fast. In less than a day, 21 citizen researchers completed the first part of the Where Are They Now?" distributed research project. They investigated 268 congressional staff members whose bosses resigned, retired or were voted out of office in 2006, and found 48 who have potentially gone through the revolving door to work for K Street. Thank you to all who participated--including the 30 researchers who signed up but didn't get a chance to participate in the first part, but remember: There's still more to be done.

So far, only one of these potential revolvers has been verified. Here's your chance to do some old fashioned, person-to-person reporting: Call up a lobbying firm and verify that we have indeed identified a former congressional insider who's moved on to K Street. We give you a really simple script, and an easy way to record your efforts. Just click here to get started.

Rep. Mike Oxley, the former chair of the powerful House Financial Services Committee, retired. So did Sen. Paul Sarbanes, the ranking minority member of the Senate Banking Committee. Rep. Harold Ford lost his bid for an open Senate seat, while Sen. Rick Santorum lost his bid for his own. Criminal investigations cost both Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham and Rep. Bob Ney their seats.

When they left office, what happened to their former staffers? Did they go through Washington's Revolving Door? Using the Sunlight Foundation's new Where are they now? distributed research tool, you can find out who's gone from Congress to K Street. The 109th Congress closed up shop nearly one year ago. For the top staff members whose bosses resigned, retired or were voted out of office, the one year "cooling off period" -- during which they are not allowed to lobby their former colleagues on Capitol Hill -- is coming to an end. Lower level staffers have been able to lobby their old colleagues on the Hill all year.

Now you can find out what former aides are now lobbying on everything from S-Chip expansion to bridges to nowhere. Where are they now? also extends the distributed research model by allowing users, in addition to doing the preliminary research on potential revolvers, to verify information, resulting in a 100 percent-citizen-powered project. Where are they now? will thus take our experiments in citizen journalism to a new level—producing high quality, fact-checked facts that any citizen or journalist can quote and rely on.

Using the tool is simple. Pick a lawmaker you want to research from the project's home page, choose one their former aides from the the list taken from the September 2006 edition of the Congressional Directory, and look for any matches in the Senate Office of Public Records online database of lobbyist disclosures. If you do find a match, enter the firm's name and contact info from the SOPR database, and you're done with step one. If you want to verify the data, use the tool to keep track of your phone calls to the lobbying firm. And that's it. A fun little diversion for the holiday season. (P.S. -- For those curious, our friends at the Center for Responsive Politics maintain a pretty good list of former members of Congress who've gone through the revolving door--including those who left during the 109th Congress.)

Our friends at CREW are providing a fantastic resource for reporters, bloggers, citizens and government document junkies--GovernmentDocs.org: An online compendium of scanned images of documents acquired from government agencies through the Freedom of Information Act by (right now) a handful of nonprofit groups (including the correspondence logs that Anu's been acquiring for our RealTime project). Documents that once would have been filed away can have second and third lives online, where they can be read, annotated, tagged, and otherwise scrutinized by anyone who signs up to create an account.

CREW also uses OCR technology to make the images word-searchable; the results aren't always perfect but they do make the documents easier to navigate.

CREW's release is online here, and, full disclosure: Sunlight Foundation supported the creation of the site.

In the week since we launched EarmarkWatch.org, more than 400 citizen researchers have dug into earmarks, answering hundreds of questions, making dozens of comments, and shedding light on everything from what in the world is a naturally occurring retirement community (it's considered to be a low-cost approach to facilitating healthy aging) to finding a potential family connection in a New Jersey museum earmark (the museum is housed in a mansion that was once the residence of the sponsoring member's father). They've asked why Congress needs to earmark $1,000,000 to buy wool socks for the Marines and how exactly New York City's American Museum of Natural History is going to spend $1,000,000 on Advanced Research to Further National Security Goals.

We had 25,000 page views last week (the aforementioned sock earmark was the most-looked-at), more than 100 posted comments or additional research (it looks like the $3,000,000 for a Flat-Rack for the Marine Corps was the most commented on, and no, I didn't know what one was either), and one last factoid that makes me feel there are lots of kindred souls out there: The bulk of our intrepid earmark researchers are doing most of their digging at night. So am I -- EarmarkWatch.org is exciting, educational, and endlessly entertaining.

Wondering who's getting all the earmarks? Who's giving them and why? Do earmarks meet pressing needs or pay off political favors? And which are pure pork? EarmarkWatch.org, an innovative new tool from the Sunlight Foundation and Taxpyers for Common Sense, lets you find out for yourself. Using EarmarkWatch.org, you can exercise citizen oversight of Congress. Dig into the 47 earmarks worth $166,500,000 that Rep. John Murtha inserted (and figure out which benefit campaign contributors). Or take a close look at the $100,000 earmark that Sen. David Vitter secured for an organization that promotes creationism in Louisiana schools. Or the $37 million in earmarks that include defense giant Northrop Grumman as a beneficiary. Right now, you can investigate earmarks from the House Defense Appropriations Bill and the House and Senate versions of the Labor, Health and Human Services Appropriations bills. Using a host of online resources, you can find out whether recipients of earmarks hired lobbyists, made campaign contributions to members of Congress, or won federal contracts and grants. You can also add information to eamarks others have researched, or comment on what others have found. EarmarkWatch.org provides you with powerful tools to scrutinize and evaluate thousands of earmarks. To get started, create an account and pick an earmark.

While much of D.C. is all atwitter about the D.C. Madam scandal and the subsequent revelations about Sen. David Vitter's appetite for prostitutes, we've been pretty silent here at Sunlight about the whole thing. That's because scandals about the personal failings of someone's private life are of no consequence to us. The Mark Foley scandal was an exception because that highlighted the institutional failings, and possible rule-breaking, of the congressional leadership at the time. Duke Cunningham's prostitutes were also an exception because they were used as bribes for earmarks. The Hill, however, reported today on an angle of the D.C. Madam case that is of interest to Sunlight. After Deborah Jean Palfrey, the D.C. Madam, posted her phone list on her personal Web site four Boston-based Brandeis alumni used that data to create a searchable database of all the phone numbers used to call Palfrey and secure her "services".

Got some spare time? Want to get involved in a little open source watchdogging project? Our friends at the Center for Responsive Politics are asking users to research a list of "mystery PACs," or leadership political action committees that appear to be affiliated with a member of Congress but do not explicitly say so. Leadership PACs do not have to disclose the identity of an affiliated member of Congress. There's a bill in Congress, HR 347, sponsored by Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC), that would end this secretive process. While we wait for this bill to get a hearing in the House you can research these PACs yourself. If you need a little help in getting started, Bill Allison, at the Real Time Investigations blog, writes up a good summary of how he researched one of mystery PACs. And if you're feeling in a good mood and want to contribute your findings to another resource, Congresspedia has a great page on political action committees that lists many of the leadership PACs currently active. Feel free to add your findings to the list. Definitely go and help out CRP uncover the members of Congress behind these mystery PACs.

When the House Judiciary Committee put all of the Justice Department e-mails relating to the Attorney purge they received online they started an immense distributed research project that led hundreds of citizens to pour over documents hoping to find the needle in the haystack that would become a story the next day. The only problem with these online document dumps was that they were just that, dumps, as in the pouring of documents online in no particular order and without a search function. Those days are over thanks to a cadre of committed online researchers at Daily Kos. DKos poster drational posted today about the DOJ Documents database created by 20 kossacks and spearheaded by nuketeacher. Check out the database here.