In celebration of Independence Day, we bring to you PoliQuiz, a new interactive political trivia game that provides a fun way for you to test your knowledge about their elected officials and the legislative process.

To create PoliQuiz, we worked with Publi.us, the team who created the popular Fantasy Congress game. Since we have a reputation for creating serious Web tools to facilitate investigative research by citizen activists, reporters, bloggers and other data geeks, we designed PoliQuiz as a more light-hearted way for you to learn more about Congress. We hope to appeal to the patriotic spirit of political junkies and novices alike, and also encourage teachers to use PoliQuiz as an entertaining way to teach about Congress.

PoliQuiz challenges players to answer multiple-choice questions about lawmakers’ identities and party affiliations; basic congressional procedures; historical government information and more. When players incorrectly answer questions, PoliQuiz directs them to different resources, including OpenCongress.org and Congresspedia.org, so they can learn more. The game also provides tidbits about lawmakers to augment players’ knowledge. Players can also submit their own questions.

PoliQuiz is not just a quiz on a Web site, it is also a widget that you can grab and play on your blog, Facebook page or Web site. The PoliQuiz widget also lets you create teams to play against other blogs and Web sites. Show your patriotic spirit by playing today … and see if you can beat the top score!

Micah Sifry (our strategic consultant and editor of techPresident) highlights another government transparency experiment coming out of the UK. The Power of Information Task Force is a British government agency working to improve the way government shares information with its citizens.  Yesterday, the Task Force launched “Show Us a Better Way,” a contest that asks citizens to identify what they would like to see done with public information. If they like the idea they will help fund it, to the tune of £20,000 to develop the idea to the next level. Here are some examples of ideas they are looking for.

The Task Force itself just launched in March, largely because of the vision and efforts of Sunlight friend, U.K. Cabinet Office Minister and Member of Parliament Tom Watson. As Micah wrote back in April, “Watson is part of a new vanguard of political leaders who understand that the real gains are to be had in enabling people to connect to each other to identify common concerns, come up with solutions, and organize on their own behalf.”

Can you imagine a similar task force in operation in our federal government?  This is such a terrific idea. The whole sentiment is so different from that of the US Government where the burden of getting information from government rests with citizens. I really  like what the contest site says, “Public data is your data.” Congress and the Executive Branch could learn quite a bit from the likes of Minister Watson.

As of July 30 lobbyists will have to report some interesting new information: any campaign contributions, including those from a political action committee controlled by the lobbyist or organization; honorary expenses linked to lawmakers; expenses for meetings involving lawmakers; and donations to presidential libraries. The Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007 required this new disclosure that lobbyists will file twice a year, with the first deadline being July 30th.  The new forms, LD-203, are here. The Center for Responsive Politics says they plan to capture all these reports. Should be some interesting material in these new reports.

But I was struck by the lack of timeliness of these new reports. Being filed only twice a year raises the question: how much transparency will these forms actually provide?  With all the online tools we have access to today, why not have instantaneous disclosure?  Why wait six months, when the money changing hands is affecting legislation being written today?  It seems to me that this new requirement will give us some more information about the role of the power lobbyist, it does little to deal with the most critical problem - the timeliness of reporting.

Hat tip: Amanda Adams at OMB Watch’s Advocacy Blog.

Here’s a great Follow-the-Money story in this morning’s Wall Street Journal about the battle between the car manufacturers and consumer and environmental groups over the new fuel-economy regulations being draft by NHTSA. The agency was given the task of drafting rules that will set industry wide average fuel-mileage standards for cars and trucks to at least 35 miles per gallon.

Wonder who will win? Money is likely to be some indicator. According to CRP numbers, the automotive industry has been nearly $500 million on lobbying in the last 10 years; the environmental community spent approximately r $90 million in the same period. When it comes to campaign contributions, the environmentalists have given some $18 million in political contributions while the automotive industry has given some $128 million.

Let’s all follow-the-money.

Steven Aftergood at Secrecy News reminds us that Friday July 4th is the 42^nd anniversary of Lyndon Johnson signing the Freedom of Information Act into law.  Interesting, but frankly, FOIA hasn’t aged well.  Meant to be “Democracy’s X-Ray,” allowing journalists and other citizens to ferret out waste, fraud, abuse and corruption the reality is that FOIA plays into the notion that government shouldn’t automatically provide information. I think it should.

This spring, I wrote an essay The Merciful Death of the Freedom of Information Act and the Birth of True Government Transparency: A Short History that was published in Rebooting Democracy, a compendium of some 44 essays, was released last month at the Personal Democracy Forum conference.  In the essay I keyed off a Jeff Jarvis blog post where he called for the abolition of FOIA. “Why should we be asking for information about and from our government?” he wrote. “The government should have to ask to keep things from us…Government information-every act of government on our behalf-should be free by default.” Digital technology and web-based tools now allow business transactions to be digitally captured, stored, and opened to search and analysis, he argued. This was not possible when the information was stored on paper in file cabinets.

But to get there, there has to be a sea change in the attitude of government. I think we are moving in the right direction but it will take time. But citizens are getting used to getting more information via the Internet and it makes them want more.

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A little while ago I blogged about Oregon Legislative Counsel claiming copyright over their revised statute laws and asking sites like Public Resource.org and Justia.org to take down copies of those laws. On June 19th the Legislative Counsel held a hearing with activist Carl Malamud from Public.Resource.org and others to discuss the issue.  Check out the testimony here.   In the end the Legislative Counsel voted to not assert copyright over the Oregon Revised Statutes.

This is a great victory for openness and democracy.  The idea of restricting how people see, use, and collect laws is absurd and I am relieved that Oregon made the right decision.

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.
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Over the weekend, Tim Harford at Slate asked an interesting question: “How much do Republican-leaning corporations benefit from Republican political success?” His answer? “A lot!” Harford points to studies conducted by financial economists about the success of corporations with clear Republican and Democratic leanings. (The researchers defined a company’s party preference by whether the board of directors had members who were former members of Congress and/or served in an administration — all from one party.)

After narrowing the group of corporations they were looking at the researchers examined the share price of these politically partisan corporations at two points; the U.S. Supreme Court decision on Dec. 13, 2000 selecting George W. Bush the winner of the presidential race over Al Gore, and the May 2001 power shift in the Senate from GOP to Democratic control created by U.S. Sen. Jim Jeffords’ decision to leave the Republicans and become a Democratic-caucusing independent.

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The American News Project has a nice piece today on the revolving door problem in Congress, using as an example the recently announced retirement of defeated-in-the primaries Rep. Al Wynn.  There are literally thousands — if not tens of thousands –  of such stories buried here in the Center for Responsive Politics Revolving Door Database.

The Center for Responsive Politics has a nice post that digs deeply into that treasure trove known as the Personal Financial Disclosure forms of members of Congress.

Forty-six husbands and wives of Congress members reported owning stock in 2006 in companies that have a vested interest in their spouses’ committees, worth a total of $27.3 million to $46.7 million, the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics has found. The list includes spouses who own stock in Lockheed Martin while the lawmaker sits on the House Armed Services Committee; or are invested in food giant SYSCO while the lawmaker is a member of the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition & Forestry Committee; or own shares of Exxon Mobil while married to a member of the House Energy & Commerce Committee…

In 2006, the most recent year for which CRP has been able to analyze personal financial disclosure data, the spouses of Democratic lawmakers had more invested in companies related to their committees (worth at least $23.2 million) than the lawmakers themselves did (worth at least $5.5 million). The spouses of Republican lawmakers, by contrast, had less money invested in companies related to these committees (worth at least $4.1 million) than the lawmakers themselves (worth at least $39 million).

Overall, 304 congressional husbands and wives whose finances were reported on their spouses’ forms were worth between $698.8 million and $1.3 billion from their stocks, corporate bonds and other investments in 2006. (Assets and liabilities are disclosed in ranges on these forms, making it impossible to calculate net worth precisely.) The most popular spousal assets overall included General Electric, drugmaker Pfizer and Bank of America.

In at least 61 cases, the husbands and wives of Congress had investment portfolios worth significantly more than the lawmaker’s. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, for example, reported assets worth no more than $15,000, while her husband, Paul, an investor, had between $16.2 million and $57.8 million in assets. Spouses also bring with them their mortgages, school loans and other liabilities, however. For Paul Pelosi, this could mean up to $10.3 million in debt, more than any other lawmaker’s spouse.

Really interesting stuff.