Sunlight Foundation

"The Sunlight Foundation is committed to helping citizens, bloggers and journalists be their own best congressional watchdogs, by improving access to existing information and digitizing new information, and by creating new tools and Web sites to enable all of us to collaborate in fostering greater transparency."

This looks to be an amazing website.

Bush War on Science Continues

GW Bush has vetoed a bill that would give NIH an additional $1 billion per year, raising the budget from $29 billion to $30 billion; saying that Congress is on a "spending spree." Yet he continues to fund a war of idiocy to the tune a over a billion a week.

The bill, which was passed by Congress last week, sought to increase NIH funding by about $1 billion from a 2007 budget of about $29 billion to a 2008 budget of about $30 billion.
In a statement released by the White House after Bush vetoed the bill, the president decried the Democrat-led Congress for engaging in what he called a "spending spree," and said that the legislative majority was "acting like a teenager with a new credit card."
The bill, H.R.3043, also sought to bolster the budgets of the departments of Labor and Education, and carried a request for a total of $150.7 billion. Since its introduction in July, Bush has said he would veto the bill because it overshot his own budget recommendations.
"We were hoping that [Bush's veto] wouldn't be the case," Carrie Wolinetz, Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) spokesperson, told The Scientist. "But the threat had been there."
The NIH budget has been stagnant over the past few years, with government funding increasing by only about $1.4 billion between 2003 and 2006.
The vetoed bill also included a provision requiring
NIH-funded researchers to post the full text of their research papers on the National Library of Medicine's publicly accessible PubMed Central website within a year of publication. This provision survived an attack by Republican Senator James Inhofe in October to remain intact in the final version of the bill sent to the president.
The bill cleared the House of Representatives only three votes shy of the two-thirds majority it would have needed to avoid Bush's veto. As H.R.3043 returns to Capitol Hill, where legislators will hold a veto override vote, Wolinetz said that FASEB will continue encouraging its 80,000-strong membership to urge their legislators to support the bill and overturn the presidential veto.

White House scrubs site in attempt to make office 'exempt'

Nick Juliano
Published: Tuesday September 4, 2007

The White House has scrubbed its Web site of evidence it has reversed its policies on allowing public access to information to which it is legally entitled. However, a source told Raw Story that the scrub would have no legal implications.

Sometime over the weekend, White House computer technicians removed from government Web sites any references to the Office of Administration or its previous compliance with Freedom of Information Act requests.

Where visitors once just found information about how to file public records requests or view annual reports on the Office of Administration's FOIA compliance, the White House has appended the following admonition:

"The Office of Administration, whose sole function is to advise and assist the President, and which has no substantial independent authority, is not subject to FOIA and related authorities. However, these pages have been maintained due to the Presidential Records Act."

Two other sites that previously listed the OA as subject to FOIA regulations have since been updated to reflect the opposite position, with similar stark denials of public accessibility at the top of each page.

...The office previously had a set of FOIA protocols and handled FOIA requests...

... the Bush administration is trying to subvert long-standing open-government policies...

The White House's attempt to erase the policies was discovered on the same day Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington submitted a new brief in its FOIA lawsuit seeking information on five million missing e-mails sent by the president's advisers on Republican Party-owned accounts.

CREW first documented the White House efforts Tuesday,...

This is the prior inforomation dated from October 6, 2005, which for some reason is the latest date available via the Wayback Machine.

The Office of Administration's Electronic Reading Room

The Electronic Reading Room contains documents specifically identified for inclusion by the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), as well as documents for which we have received multiple FOIA requests.

GILS Information

Purchase Cardholders

Annual FOIA Reports

2004
2003
2002
2001
2000
1999
1998
1997
1996

Index and Descri

Unclaimed Territory - by Glenn Greenwald: John Boehner = Denny Hastert, at least -- Plus, key questions for Tom Reynolds

Unclaimed Territory - by Glenn Greenwald: John Boehner = Denny Hastert, at least -- Plus, key questions for Tom Reynolds

...now there seems to be still another Boehner version, as The Palm Beach Post reports this morning: "Boehner told the Dayton Daily News he was '99 percent' sure he talked to Hastert about the matter, but also said he did not recall their conversation."

So: (a) Boehner told Hastert about Foley and Hastert assured him they were "taking care of it"; (b) Boehner does not remember whether he ever talked to Hastert about Foley; (c) Boehner affirmatively claims that it "is not true" that he spoke with Hastert; and now, (d) Boehner is "99 percent" sure he talked to Hastert about Foley but remembers nothing about the converstaion. Does that sound like someone qualified to be Majority Leader of the U.S. House of Representatives, let alone Denny Hastert's replacement for Speaker of the House?

And this event has gone under-noticed because it happened late afternoon last Friday. Nancy Pelosi introduced a Motion on the House floor to mandate that the House Ethics Committee investigate how Foley was able to engage in such inappropriate conduct with Congressional pages and whether the House leadership failed in its duties. Boehner blocked the motion by claiming that they only learned of it that day, and therefore introduced a motion of his own -- which the GOP majority quickly approved -- to have the question of whether there will even be an investigation decided by the House Ethics Committee, the majority 5-member GOP contingent of which (out of 10 Committee members) is composed of the most subservient GOP backbenchers selected exactly for that reason. Predictably, they still have not decided whether they will even "investigate" at all.

The GOP-controlled House is a legislative body which routinely passes the most monumental legislation within days or even hours of its being completed, without there being anywhere near sufficient time for representatives even to read the bill, let alone contemplate its merits or deliberate in any meaningful way. Just this past week, Boehner's House Republican caucus voted to legalize torture, indefinite detention powers and warrantless eavesdropping before the ink on the final drafts was even dry.

They routinely shove legislation down the throats of House members as quickly as they can. Yet Boehner claimed that more time was needed to contemplate a very short and straightforward Motion directing the House Ethics Committee to investigate the Foley matter. The duplicity and obstructionism is hard to fathom, but that is how Congressional Republicans operate. Boehner not only helped conceal Mark Foley's behavior with pages, but he then actively obstructed an attempt to have the House investigate this matter by invoking the flimsiest and most transparently deceitful rationale to do so.

(2) Following up on what I really believe is the most incriminating fact yet -- that it was Tom Reynolds' current Chief of Staff, Kirk Fordham, who negotiated on behalf of Mark Foley to try to persuade ABC not to release the sexually explicit IMs -- last night I e-mailed the post I wrote about the Fordham-ABC negotiations to Brian Crowley, The Palm Beach Post reporter who first reported that Fordham was working to help Foley manage the crisis. I asked Crowley if he knew whether it was Fordham who negotiated with ABC (this was before Aravosis reported that he confirmed that it was). Crowley did not answer, but he did include this in his article this morning: