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First of all, I'm not right wing. Second of all, let's use the internet then:

https://sunlightfoundation.com...

http://fortune.com/2016/12/09/...

https://politics.slashdot.org/...

So no, it's not a falsehood. An example of a falsehood would be if somebody said that you were any smarter than a tic-tac.

If a foreign country is trying to affect our elections, that's something worth considering.

You're right, it is.

At least we have Citizens United though.

And at least the US doesn't try to affect politics in other countries.

Secretary of State Kobach filed a legal challenge to the suit. It states the records are sealed by state statute and that he is not the custodian of the records. It also points out Carlson filed a similar lawsuit for the paper records in 2013 and was denied access to the paper trail. The judge ruled that the records, even though they did not contain personally identifiable information, were still ballots.

From: http://sunlightfoundation.com/...

The request may not be illegal, but fulfilling that request WOULD be illegal due to state laws which are designed to protect the anonymous voter from having their secret ballots exposed. Or, perhaps YOU would want us to publish who voted for who? No? Me neither.

"It's unlawful to release these records because of a FOIA request." No, not illegal just undo burden.

No, illegal.

http://sunlightfoundation.com/...

Secretary of State Kobach filed a legal challenge to the suit. It states the records are sealed by state statute and that he is not the custodian of the records. It also points out Carlson filed a similar lawsuit for the paper records in 2013 and was denied access to the paper trail. The judge ruled that the records, even though they did not contain personally identifiable information, were still ballots.

The Secretary of State cannot legally release this information.

Secretary of State Kobach filed a legal challenge to the suit. It states the records are sealed by state statute and that he is not the custodian of the records. It also points out Carlson filed a similar lawsuit for the paper records in 2013 and was denied access to the paper trail. The judge ruled that the records, even though they did not contain personally identifiable information, were still ballots.

http://sunlightfoundation.com/...

What say you now Dopey?

They don't have to buy the country, just the government. And all that's required to do that is merely to spend enough to influence a sufficient number of the 535 legislators who make its laws.

The same dynamic works at the state and local levels.

All corporations allocate a certain amount to lobby/invest in government. Those investments typically have a very high rate of return. Another more in-depth analysis is here.

Saddam had no Nuclear weapons, and the whole story about yellow cake was fabricated by various intelligence agencies to fit an agenda.

There was lot more to it than just the yellowcake story.

Why do some people that believe politicians are stupid, do things from complete ignorance, and do things without understanding all of the possible outcomes?

Because there is tons of evidence. For example, the fact essentially nobody read the patriot act before voting on it. Or all of the non-oversight by the senate intelligence oversight committee.

These guys spend 5+ hours of their workday begging for re-election money. Of course they don't have time to pay attention to their jobs.

What is batshit crazy is believing that politicians have much of a grasp on anything- peripheral understanding sure, maybe some (one-sided) depth if a lobbyists informs them on a specific topic. But an educated opinion on anything else is rare as hen's teeth.

In a reversal from 2012, liberal billionaires top the list of biggest super PAC donors with a little more than two weeks to go before Election Day. Three of the top five givers lean Democrat, while the king of unlimited money mountain — environmental crusader Tom Steyer of California — is lapping the competition, a Sunlight analysis finds.

also note, neither kochs make the top 10 donor list

Dear Mr. Wheeler, As an American citizen, I wanted to voice my opposition to the FCC's crippling new regulations that would put federal bureaucrats in charge of internet freedom, and urge you to stop these regulations before they're enacted. If the federal government goes through these plans to regulate the internet, I know that the internet will change -- and not for the better. [ INSERT VARIANT PARAGRAPH COMMENT HERE ] Like many Americans, I believe that the internet should remain free of government control and unnecessary regulation -- just as it has for the last twenty years of unprecedented growth. Please stop the FCC's dangerous new regulations, and protect the future of internet freedom here in America. Sincerely, [APPLICANT NAME] [APPLICANT HOME ADDRESS]

As for the "VARIANT PARAGRAPH COMMENT", apparently you were given several selections to choose from, including the following:

The Internet is the biggest economic, intellectual, and artistic success story of the century, and it rose up because of free people, not stifling government. The federal government needs to keep its hands off the Internet. It is not broken, and it does not need to be fixed. It is the federal government, not the Internet, that is broken, and in need of fixing.

One can make an appeal to justice for persecuted cable companies:

Before our government can handcuff a citizen, it must have some reasonable evidence that they have done something wrong. Before the FCC places regulatory handcuffs on Internet providers, shouldn't the government present evidence that they have actually done something wrong?

Or maybe this is your style:

The ideological leader of the angry liberals calling for you to reduce the Internet to a public utility is Robert McChesney, the avowed Marxist founder of the socialist group Free Press. In an interview with SocialistProject.ca, McChesney said: âoeWhat we want to have in the U.S. and in every society is an Internet that is not private property, but a public utility...At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies. We are not at that point yet. But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control.â In a country of over 300 million people, even an extremist like McChesney can find, perhaps, millions of followers. But you should know better than to listen to them.

When billionaires pay thousands of feeble-minded minions to act like millions of the American mainstream, democracy can be subverted:
http://sunlightfoundation.com/...

In this case, can AI as an equalizer between moderately-funded NGOs like the Sunlight Foundation and plutocrats like the Koch brothers.

The question of whether AI kills, saves, or creates jobs thus can be reconsidered in the light of "who gets to choose what it is used for?" Capitalism's extremists will always prefer to maximize return on capital, despite whatever the short-term disruptions or long-term costs may be. AI in their hands is just as bad as any other technology. Those who are more socially, community, and humanity-minded will doubtless find ways to increase the agency of the individuals and groups they care about, just as they have with other technologies.

[citation needed]

I would start with the excellent site by Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism. The writers there are not wild-eyed ideologues, but people who have spent careers in the financial industry, working at pretty high levels. They've been all over this story since the Wikileaks documents broke. Remember, it was Wikileaks that published the secret TPP documents as well, which put the efforts to push that treaty through the tunnel on its heels, at least temporarily. Sunshine can be a great disinfectant.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com...

And in case you need a citation regarding sunlight being a disinfectant, I would give you none other than the great Louis Brandeis:
http://sunlightfoundation.com/...

Voters don't really have any influence on public policy in the US, according to a recent study.

Can we safely assume he has been bought...

No, because you got it backwards: he's a telecom exec and lobbyist who bought his way into a government position to regulate his own industry. And it matters because, no this isn't ignorance and it won't just die off.

The Sunlight Foundation has an investigative series on government workers who go to the lobbying side. I highly recommend it.

I think it's worthwhile to note that the Free File Alliance is the same group of assholes behind the decade-long lobbying campain that is preventing us from having return-free filing done by the IRS itself.

By US company, do you mean companies like IBM, Northrop Grumman, Verizon, Rand Corporation? They did.

http://reporting.sunlightfoundation.com/2013/aca-contractors/

"an examination by the Sunlight Foundation shows the administration turned the task of building its futuristic new health care technology planning and programming over to legacy contractors with deep political pockets .. Sunlight reviewed contract award information from USASpending.gov and FedBizOpps.gov, and found 47 organizations that won contracts from Health and Human Services or the Treasury Department to manage, support or service the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Among them were top contractors like Northrop Grumman, Deloitte LLP, SAIC Inc. General Dynamics and Booz Allen Hamilton." link

Perhaps the developers picked the wrong 2 of: fast, cheap, or good.

Developers don't typically get to decide that. Management makes that sort of decision. If folks are interested, a full list of ACA contractors is also available.

And who's paying them ~$100,000 a year?

http://www.guidestar.org/organizations/26-2171390/alliance-generational-equity.aspx

Their web site www.truslseniors.org is down

Another question is, who the fuck is C. McClain Haddow, the guy who's running Alliance for Generational Equity?
http://reporting.sunlightfoundation.com/lobbying/client/alliance-for-generational-equity

Mother Jones has a hint.

The Artful Codger
Trashing the AARP with Grandma Green.
By Michael Scherer
July/August 2005 Issue
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2005/07/artful-codger

The real pedigree of the group Green represents is hidden under layers of PR and politics. The Seniors Coalition was cofounded in 1989 by conservative activist Dan C. Alexander Jr., three years after he was sent to prison for arranging construction kickbacks as an Alabama school-committee member. Today, its top outside lobbyist is C. McClain Haddow, a former Health and Human Services official who spent time in prison with Alexander for failing to file a timely ethics waiver when he gave his wife a government contract. Haddow has also lobbied for generic-drugs manufacturer Mylan Pharmaceuticals.

The organization’s Washington activities regularly blur the needs of seniors with the agendas of corporate donors. After it took money from Microsoft in 1999, the coalition lobbied on antitrust litigation, and after it took money from Lottery.com in 2000, it lobbied on a bill that would restrict Internet gambling. Money also poured in from the American Petroleum Institute and the American Public Power Association—just as the coalition spoke out against the Kyoto Protocol and lower gas-mileage standards.

The Seniors Coalition is especially tied to the drug industry. PHRMA, the pharmaceutical industry’s trade group, gave the organization $2.2 million between 1999 and 2000 (the only two years for which full financial disclosure is available). Other drug industry sources funneled the group an additional $300,000 during that time. But Tom Moore, the coalition’s chief operating officer, writes in an email that only 22 percent of his organization’s funding comes from industry, and that the group “retains its complete independence in developing [its] legislative agenda.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing

There is some interest group behind this that is going to save a lot of money if they eliminated the Universal Service Fund (which has its pros and cons), and this outfit is crying crocodile tears over the urban poor. Or generational equity. I'd take them more seriously if they were up front with their real agenda.

http://reporting.sunlightfoundation.com/2013/pro-cispa-backers-spend-over-100-times-more-lobbying-opponents/

  Interests supporting a controversial bill aimed at improving cyber security, set for a House vote Thursday, spent 140 times as much lobbying Congress as those on the other side of the debate and have dozens of former Capitol Hill insiders working on their behalf, an analysis by the Sunlight Foundation's Reporting Group shows.

Sunlight's review of lobbying disclosures from the last session of Congress in Influence Explorer shows that backers of the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act had $605 million in lobbying expenditures from 2011 through the third quarter of last year compared to $4.3 million spent by opponents of the bill. While it's impossible to say how many of those dollars were devoted to trying to influence votes on the CISPA bill (many of those entities have multiple interests before Congress), it provides some measure of the lopsidedness of the resources available to each side.

Here are the lobbying totals for supporters: https://data.sunlightlabs.com/dataset/Lobbying-totals-by-CISPA-proponents/5brg-ruk9

and opponents: https://data.sunlightlabs.com/dataset/Lobbying-totals-by-CISPA-opponents/jhe8-cki6

Bleh... my link didn't work. http://reporting.sunlightfoundation.com/2012/spacex-blasts-literally-and-politically/

Thank you for sharing your thoughts about legislation to combat online infringement and digital theft.

Last Congress, the Senate considered, but did not pass, legislation entitled the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA). The aim of this legislation was to assist the Department of Justice in tracking and shutting down "rogue websites." These sites provide unauthorized downloads, streaming, or direct sale of copyrighted material. Similar legislation, entitled the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property (PROTECT IP) Act, was recently introduced in the Senate. The PROTECT IP Act narrows the definition of "rogue website" in an effort to target only the most egregious purveyors of digital theft and counterfeit crime.

In an age of advancing technology, it is critical we have laws that protect internet users from unfair, deceptive, or fraudulent marketplace practices. Too many consumers today purchase goods over the internet that may pose a significant threat to their health and wellbeing. For example, a consumer may unknowingly purchase counterfeit prescription drugs online that contain incorrect amounts of active ingredients, and thus pose a serious risk to ill individuals.

Additionally, illegal file sharing and unauthorized copying of digital material prevents musicians, producers, filmmakers, software designers, and many others from reaping the fruits of their labor. Such activity has the potential to stifle artistic creativity and compromise electronic innovation. Ultimately, intellectual property theft costs our economy billions of dollars and can result in hundreds of thousands of lost jobs.

However, I have also heard from individuals with concerns about the scope of this legislation, as well as its First Amendment implications. I take these concerns seriously.

Should this legislation come before the full Senate for a vote, I will keep your views in mind.

Thank you again for getting in touch with me.

Sincerely,

Sherrod Brown
United States Senator

List of SOPA cosponsors who have received donations from big media, compiled by the Sunlight Foundation: http://reporting.sunlightfoundation.com/2011/legacy-media-bankrolling-campaigns-of-SOPA-consponsors/

BOA is a bunch of angels compared to the rest of the financial community

I haven't read what all the other banks have done, but Federal Reserve recently published how their loan program allowed Bank of America to benefit twice, netting $4.8 billion:

[TALF] loans were non-recourse, meaning that if the investment failed, the borrower would not be held responsible for repayment. The belief at the time was that if financing agencies, such as banks, were able to get assets off their books in exchange for cash, then they would be able to freely lend to consumers once again.

Bank of America was able to take advantage of the program by not only selling its assets through the program, but also to profit from non-recourse loans made to BlackRock, in which BofA has a seven percent ownership interest. BlackRock received $2.7 billion in loans from the TALF program to purchase assets. At the same time, Bank of America was also able to sell assets through the program to various investors that received more than $2 billion in federally-backed loans in order to do so. In total, $4.8 billion in loans benefited BofA.

...it was also able to increase its liquidity by selling its assets to other subsidized borrowers. According to the New York Times, "Federal auditors worried about firms like BlackRock, warning that such firms could use federally guaranteed loans to overpay for assets, creating a potential conflict of interest."

BofA sold their assets to buyers who overpaid because they had non-recourse loans. One of the buyers was partly owned by BofA.

I work at the Sunlight Foundation, where we're pretty familiar with the people and data systems powering USASpending.gov. I've seen a lot of comments here saying that the important thing is that the government is publishing something, and that it's understandable that their first pass might not be perfect.

But this isn't their first pass. The underlying data systems -- FAADS and FPDS -- have existed since the 90s, and have been riddled with errors throughout their existence. Instead of fixing the problems, OMB continues to slap new coats of paint on the same lousy data.

It's nice that we've got a new USASpending.gov, and I agree that it would be a mistake to put too much emphasis on a buggy visualization. But the underlying data is terrible, and so far no one is showing the will to fix it. Just look at USASpending's "data quality" tab -- it talks about the completeness of each row. Well, that's great, but it tells you nothing about the thousands upon thousands of missing rows, nor about the rows that massively under- or over-report their dollar amounts.

At Subsidyscope, the project on which I work, we've delved into these problems in more depth. Those who'd like to learn more about the shortcomings of the data systems powering USASpending can find a discussion of the relevant issues here.

wait... now I'm confused. A July 10th blog entry on the Sunlight foundation website says:

"Jim Harper, Webmaster at WashingtonWatch.com, can use our help this weekend... Sunlight has provided partial support for Jimâ(TM)s project...Just like Sunlightâ(TM)s Transparency Corp, Jim is asking for volunteers to make government transparency a reality."

so... they're different, but they support each other. Are they sharing data?

There is a whole world of using tech skills to improve government transparency and civic engagement. See:

http://wiki.opengovdata.org/index.php/OGosh
http://www.impublished.org/wordpress/helptheman/
http://transparencyjobs.com/jobs/
http://sunlightfoundation.com/

Getting too pedantic about what is and isn't journalism leads the discussion away from focusing on the great tools that are being developed to help the average citizen understand the powers that be (government, corporations, etc..).

The Sunlight Foundation has funded a lot of really great web tools, widgets and applets that show how congress works, track money donated to candidates, expose corporate corruption, and many other areas of coverage that the film noir investigative journalist types might still consider their turf.

Anyone can do good journalism, anyone can do bad journalism. I think talking about who is helping to expose and disseminate new information that is in the public interest (news) is more important that talking about the news industry as such.

Nice to see an interest in computer assisted reporting (CAR), although I'm a little baffled at the article linked calling this an "emerging" practice. I've been at this for about a decade, and there were plenty here when I showed up.

A few observations:

1) Regarding other commenters. anyone who talks about "journalism" as if the field is one homogeneous, cohesive group are maybe not thinking too deeply about media. Kind of like how "Americans" or "humans" covers a lot of folks.

2) All journalism is data mining, in service of storytelling. Talking to people who know things is data mining. Googling is data mining. Crunching public databases, or building your own -- same stuff, but (sometimes) faster and more rigorous.

3) Minus buzzwords, this is just tech saavy reporters trying to pull out interesting facts cheaper, faster, and more accurately than the next girl. Given that much investigative reporting happens in non-traditional media these days, a lot of this is coming from nonprofits.

4) Some projects to check out if you're interested:

Center for Public Integrity (http://www.publicintegrity.org) - disclosure, I worked there back in the day

Sunlight Foundation: http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/

Two very smart people in the field - Aron Pilhofer ( http://www.oldmedianewtricks.com/old-media-interview-aron-pilhofer-interactive-guru-editor-at-the-new-york-times/ )

and Derek Willis ( http://www.thescoop.org/ ), currently both at the New York Times.

You can also check out the National Institute of Computer Assisted Reporting (NICAR).

Closing thought: you can make a smarter database, search algorithm, etc, but ultimately it comes down to a reporter who can interpret the information available to her, understand what stories matter and present that to the public in a form that is interesting and accurate. Technology is a helpful tool, but that's still a very human enterprise.

Sunlight Foundation funds a lot of projects with goals of transparency. Their big thing right now is apparently earmarks but look at the projects they give grants to and you might find what you want.

We've got some more stuff in the works, but in the mean time the Sunlight Foundation, which co-created Congresspedia, is doing some pretty cool stuff, like their version of the government site mentioned above, which, unlike the original, doesn't suck: OpenCongress.org

First- sorry they modded you as troll.

Second- while I agree corporations have basically bought our government. I disagree that it is not about classism.

http://www.mediamouse.org/briefs/061604new_2.php

The wealth of Senators reflects both the Senate's long tradition as a body of elite members of society as well as growing inequality in the United States, especially between those who hold power and those who do not. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the income gap is the widest it has been in 75 years.

http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/06/13/senators .finances/

These "top 40" were worth, collectively, $626 million.

Many senators are worth MORE than the Hilton's who are famous for being wealthy.

http://www.publicintegrity.org/report.aspx?aid=190
Overall, the average net worth of the top 100 members of the Bush administration was somewhere between $3.7 million and nearly $12 million.

http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/taxonomy/term/54 7?page=1
Based on just the minimums the members reported, the Center for Responsive Politics calculated that the average House member had a net worth of $2.4 million.

House members had a median net worth of $385,000. (a fairer number since there are a few extremely wealthy congressmen).
---

Our government is now staffed by the wealthy and run for the wealthy. The laws they pass are expectedly passed to benefit people like themselves. There have been numerous anecdotal stories showing how completely out of touch they are with difficulties and troubles of the typical citizen.

The abuses and illicit activities listed within date from the 1950s to the 1970s.

There are discussions right now about the best ways to update the outdated Congressional IT policies, including the best way to make legislative records more accessible to the public via XML, APIs, etc. The Open House Project is drafting a report that they will be submitting to Congress. The project, incidentally, is supported by the Sunlight Foundation, Speaker Pelosi, and several other groups. There is also a mailing list and wiki for the project.

Yea one of the first instances is the proposed "secrete" meeting proposed by senator Reid. http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/node/1641