Center for Responsive Politics announces new open data tools
The Center for Responsive Politics has announced two...
...valuable tools that will make it easier for data-users to work with CRP's information: the identification numbers that we apply to candidates for federal office and the codes we apply to the more than 400 sectors, industries and categories whose political influence CRP tracks. We're making this information available to facilitate the sharing of the quality, improved data that the Center for Responsive Politics works hard to provide to the public. -- 2009: The Year of Open Data, by Massie Ritsch, OpenSecrets.org, January 8, 2009.They also offer "easy-to-use widgets that you can paste onto your website or blog to incorporate our analysis of election financing and industry influence." Continue reading
NY Times Announces the Congress API
Announcing the Congress API, By Andrei Scheinkman and Derek Willis, New York Times, January 8, 2009.
The initial release exposes four types of data: a list of members for a given Congress and chamber, details of a specific roll-call vote, biographical and role information about a specific member of Congress, and a member’s most recent positions on roll-call votes. The four work together, so you can start by retrieving a list of members, find the one(s) you’re interested in and then fetch additional details through other calls. We built this service to work with other publicly available data sources, so you can identify members of Congress with a seven-character code from the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. For individual member responses, we included the numeric ID assigned by GovTrack, a free and open-source service that monitors legislative activity. Our data comes directly from the U.S. House and Senate Web sites, and is updated throughout the day while Congress is in session....You have to register for an api-key to use the system, but it is free (for now). Check it out here! (Note that this an API and returns XML so that you can build live data applications. You agree not to "archive any of the API content for access by users at any future date after you have finished using the service...." It is for building interactive applications.) Continue reading
Latest Archive Web Publication from the National Security Archive
Yesterday, the National Security Archive (NSA) released documents that recounted the abuses committed by the Colombian Army. According to the NSA article, these documents describe how the Colombian military officers collaborated with the drug-trafficking paramilitary groups and used death squad tactics to tackle guerrillas. Continue reading
Bush Signing Statements Will Retire With Their Author
Bush Signing Statements Will Retire With Their Author, by Christopher Weaver, ProPublica, January 7, 2009.
"They will mean nothing" once Bush leaves office, said Stephen Saltzburg, a law professor at George Washington University and member of an American Bar Association task force that studied, and ultimately condemned, the practice of using signing statements to reject statutes. Presidents should veto laws they believe are unconstitutional, the task force said.Continue reading
Presidential Records Reform Act is the First Bill Passed by the New House
The National Coalition for History has the story: Presidential Records Reform Act is the First Bill Passed by the New House.
The end may finally be in sight to the seven-year battle historians and archivists have waged to overturn President Bush’s Executive Order 13233 of November 2001 that restricted access to presidential records. On January 7, 2009, the House of Representatives approved H.R. 35, the “Presidential Records Act Amendments of 2009,” by an overwhelmingly bi-partisan vote of 359-58. H.R. 35 was chosen by the House leadership as the first piece of substantive legislation passed in 2009 as a symbol of government transparency.Continue reading