Participatory Projects: Accountability for the votes on the Mukasey confirmation and SCHIP
Our previous project was to record on each representative's "permanent record" — their Congresspedia profile — their votes on the S-CHIP bills. We've still got plenty of members left to do, but we're also now diving into the Senate vote on the Michael Mukasey attorney general confirmation. Mukasey was highly controversial—he was lauded by the White House for his decisions upholding administration policies on the War on Terror and the PATRIOT Act and castigated by many Democratic senators for refusing to call waterboarding "torture" (and thus illegal). Complete instructions for recording where your senators stood on the 53-40 vote to confirm Mukasey (and the names of the seven senators who didn't bother to show up for the vote) can be found on Congresspedia:
<http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Mukasey_project>
If you'd like to help us keep Congress accountable, please consider posting this on your blog. And, if you haven't yet added a description of your blog to the blogrolls in the various state portals, please consider doing so - we want our readers to find you! The state portals can be found here:
<http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=State_portals>
________________________________________________________
Know any congressional candidates? We've got profiles
As part of Congresspedia's "Wiki the Vote" project, we've built basic profiles on every candidate we could find running for Congress in 2008. If you know something about a candidate or know someone who does, point them towards the candidate lists that can be found on the state portals:
<http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=State_portals>
Congresspedia's high traffic and Google rankings mean that many of these pages are already popping to the top of searches for candidate names. There's no restrictions on candidates or campaigns adding information about themselves or their opponents, and it's a lot easier than organizing a Google bomb campaign.
________________________________________________________
Call it “Google Ear(th)mark”Mashing up Google Earth with the recipients of earmarks in the House Defense Appropriations bill, you can now get a bird's eye view of where members of Congress are shipping our defense dollars, and zoom in close on recipients. Each plotted earmark links to a corresponding page on EarmarkWatch.org, so you can investigate the earmark to determine whether it addresses pressing needs, favors political contributors or is simply pure pork. You can search for earmarks by city, state or zip code. To start navigating earmarks, download Google Earth
Exciting new FOIA toolCitizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) are providing a fantastic resource for reporters, bloggers, citizens and government document junkies –
________________________________________________________
Reminder: Applications for mini-grants
The Sunlight Foundation/Network is offering grants of $1,000 to $5,000 for local bloggers that dedicate some of their blogging time to covering their member of Congress. Applications will be judged on how your blog tries to keep your readers informed about your member of Congress. The focus should be on shedding more light on what Congress does and how to improve the communication between citizens and Congress.
As a rule we do not award money for salaries but do for technology upgrades. If you are interested in applying, please fill out the provided application, it is available on the Sunlight Foundation grants
page (http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/grants). Please describe your project with a detailed description of how it fits in with Sunlight's mission and your goals for your project, an itemized budget (including the amount requested from Sunlight) and contact information. Mini grant applications are due by January 1st 2008.
No comments:
Post a Comment