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Open CRS: Free Government Research Reports
securitas writes "Ted Bridis of the Associated Press reports that more than 8000 Congressional Research Service reports produced exclusively for legislators are now available to the public for free. The Center for Democracy & Technology's Open CRS project is a Web-based central clearinghouse that features several collections of government reports. The research service has '... a staff of more than 700 and a nearly $100 million budget ...' but 'CRS Reports do not become public until a member of Congress releases the report.' The Open CRS project wants your help in obtaining and adding reports to the database."
I understand the taxpayers already spent 100 million on this, likely a lot more, but are they really worth anything at all? Isn't it just going to cost the taxpayers more to make 8000 or more reports available for free? Do these reports have any real value at all, or are they just noise and opnions?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
As such we should abolish voting and replace it with something better.
I prefer futarchy, myself.
http://hanson.gmu.edu/futarchy.pdf
Democracies often fail to aggregate information, while speculative markets excel at this
task. We consider a new form of governance, wherein voters would say what we want, but
speculators would say how to get it. Elected representatives would oversee the after-the-fact
measurement of national welfare, while market speculators would say which policies they
expect to raise national welfare. Those who recommend policies that regressions suggest
will raise GDP should be willing to endorse similar market advice. Using a qualitative
engineering-style approach, we present three scenarios, consider thirty design issues, and
then present a more specific design responding to those concerns.
This new glut of public information gave me an idea. Something similar to Distributed Proofreaders but for scrutinising government documents. Volunteer readers would look at a few scanned pages, marking the ones that would be of broad interest, and then the most interesting get compiled into a list.
If only there were 25 hours in a day.
I dont care to worry about the day to day dealings of the government, Reading what congress changes daily (Reading the Full Bill with comprehension) would eat about 79 hours out of each day. When the Patriot Act was passed 98-0 how many of the senators actually read through the THOUSANDS of pages? I cant imagine more than five. The point is that it cant be done, and even if it could it would eat your life up.
I want to be sure that I have a good shot at a good life. I want to have a fair and just government. We have some issues, but the down side is that America as a people tolerate things I find wrong. As long as your in a minority of your belief, you wont be heard.
The Government does care about the people and their sensitivities. The problem is that people will always have some sort of opinion that is outside of what you feel is right.
If people REALLY wanted their vote to count they would join the party opposed to their own, and vote against the primary election frontrunner who has an opinion you dislike. Then you've hedged your bets on issues you care about. You can still vote againt your new party in the general election..
Vote with your wallet, The huge election money has to come from somewhere, make sure that your not spending money to elect the opposition. I'm wondering how many republicans permanantly switched to del-monte ketchup?
It's late, I'm ranting,, I probably should have just popped this junk in a journal.
Storm
This might be a tougher battle, but would it be possible to get Congress to change its own policies, rather than CRS's policies?
Currently, the default is that the reports are effectively secret, unless a congresscritter decides to release it. How about making a congressional policy that effectively inverts that. Congress gets the reports, and they go public automatically after, say 30 days, during which there is the potential for review. Anything truly classified/confidential could be flaggedas staying congressional-eyes-only for a certain finite length of time. Flagging could be done by having a sufficiently large minimum number of congresscritters *explicitly* request it.