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Amtrak: Winner by default in high speed rail contest
By Ryan Sibley Feb 11, 2010 12:22 p.m.Last month the Obama Administration announced which high speed rail projects across the country will receive portions of the $8 billion in Recovery act funds dedicated to advancing high speed technology in the country. However, the largest single beneficiary of the spending did not directly receive a dime. Amtrak, the federally funded rail company, will benefit from $4.5 billion worth of improvements to the infrastructure that its trains run on. That's in addition to the $1.3 billion in stimulus money the company received last year for capital improvements. The nearly $6 billion will supplement the annual appropriation it receives from Congress which is scheduled to exceed $1 billion through 2013.
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Senate committee calls for tighter regulations on property, bank accounts of foreign politicians
By Aisha Qidwae Feb 10, 2010 5:36 p.m.The subcommittee's 325-page report found that U.S. bankers, lawyers, real estate agents and escrows overlooked foreign political officials moving millions of dollars into the country. For years, Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, the 40-year-old eldest son of Equatorial Guinea's president was using U.S. banks to move $110 million. Obiang Mangue, also the Minister of Agriculture and Forestry of the oil and timber rich western African country, used U.S. financial institutions, including Wachovia Bank, Citibank, Union Bank of California and Bank of America to move money through five shell companies, attorney-clients and other accounts.
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Potential Murtha successor Norm Dicks knows the favor factory
By Luke Rosiak Feb 10, 2010 3:56 p.m.The abrupt passing of Rep. John Murtha (D-Penn.) left many wondering who would replace the King of Pork as chair of the Defense Appropriations subcommitteebut anyone hoping his replacement might bring relief from a reputation for trading favors, rewarding campaign contributors and steering lucrative contracts to home districts would likely be disappointed by the pool of potential successors.
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Defense appropriations to remain a favor factory?
By Bill Allison Feb 10, 2010 10:26 a.m.Roll Call reports that House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer believes Rep. Norm Dicks will replace the late John Murtha as chair of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. Dicks numbers the now-defunct PMA Group as his second-largest career donor; David Heath, then of the Seattle Times, reported on Dicks' relationship to the firm that closed its doors in the midst of a federal investigation (ongoing) into its campaign contributions to members of Congress who provided earmarks for its clients. In his 2009 report, Heath wrote:
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White House visitor logs are short on descriptions
By Anupama Narayanswamy Feb 3, 2010 3:25 p.m.The White House released their most recent visitor logs yesterday but except for public events or group tours, it sheds little light on why the President or White House officials met with particular individuals. Though the logs include a column for descriptions of the meetings, for most entries it was left blank.
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My dog ate my stimulus: Best of Recovery recipients' excuses
By Luke Rosiak Feb 2, 2010 12:48 p.m.The Obama administration has made an unprecedented effort to use technology to publicly chronicle the flow of massive amounts of stimulus money, but government is slow to adapt, and not all of those who do business with it are so tech-savvy.
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Obama asks Congress for real earmark disclosure
By Bill Allison Jan 28, 2010 4:52 p.m.Right now, three years after Congress began trying to make earmarks transparent, I still have to look in three different places if I want to know how much money Rep. James Moran, D-Va., secured for particular beneficiaries in the Defense appropriations act. I have to read a sideways-posted PDF looking for Moran's requests (like the $1 million for the Ground Combat System Knowledge Center and Technical Inspection Data Capture), and match that project name to one of two enormous PDF files (the bigger is 75 MB) containing earmark disclosure letters from members of Congress (right-side up, but not searchable). The project names in the sideways disclosure don't always match the project names in the unsearchable disclosure, but in this case they did: Portal Dynamics, an Alexandria, Va.-based contractor, was the beneficiary. To find out why Moran thinks this is a good use of taxpayer funds, I have to search on his Web site and hope that his appropriations requests are still online (they are, but lots of members have removed them), to read that "
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OGD: Commerce repackages old data and offers broken links
By Sarah Dorsey Jan 28, 2010 2:34 p.m.To comply with the Open Government Directive, the Commerce Department released four high value datasets that require considerable technical sophistication on the part of users--and patience. Some of the files are so large and cumbersome they're very difficult to open and use; others require a great deal of explanation--and you can currently only find those explanations by digging through the agency's site. Still other entries feature broken links or only contain a fraction of the information described on Data.gov. The Commerce Department says they're working on all of these problems, so hopefully we'll see an improvement in the coming days.
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Must Read: NYT Series on Radiation Poisoning
By Nancy Watzman Jan 28, 2010 9:54 a.m.A fascinating series on new radiation treatments for cancer patients by New York Times reporter Walt Bogdanich caught my eye for two reasons.
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OGD: USAID's missing data
By Aisha Qidwae Jan 27, 2010 4:05 p.m.One of USAID's high value data sets on U.S. economic and military assistance aka the Greenbook cannot be accessed on data.gov/ogd. Unfortunately, the source of the broken link is coming from the USAID website.
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OGD: Transparency for Whom?
By Ryan Sibley Jan 26, 2010 5:38 p.m.Most of the raw data released by the Open Government Directive on Friday was released in an XML format. For those of you who dont know what that is or what to do with it, thats because it most likely isnt for you. Common knowledge about XML is that its a platform only Web developers and programmers use. And thats what it looked like after opening up the datasets in XML on Data.gov. The unfamiliar code can be off-putting and might cause people to not try to figure out whats in these high value datasets. In order to use XML one has to know how to convert it or how to use an XML reader. Its also possible to import XML to Microsoft Excel, and thats only if the file isnt so big it crashes the gentle Microsoft application. (We've had marginal success using Microsoft Access 2007 to look at some of the XML data.)
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OGD: Defense releases what it already releases
By Lisa Chiu Jan 26, 2010 5:17 p.m.To comply with the Open Government Directive, the Defense Department designated three high-value datasets last week, among them a listing of those requesting more transparency from the Pentagon. DoD released details on the 4,000 Freedom of Information requests it has received as well as datasets with information on service members gender and race, U.S. state, and marriage statistics.
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OGD: Department of the Interior
By Aisha Qidwae Jan 26, 2010 3:18 p.m.Two of the other data sets released Friday, probably the ones most useful to the public, the volunteer opportunities and the recreation data sets are already available online here and here in a better and usable format compared to the XML downloads on data.gov.
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OGD: High value...er, never mind
By Ryan Sibley Jan 26, 2010 2:46 p.m.Data.gov has apparently changed its mind about which datasets are high value. When datasets were released on Friday, the 2007-2008 State-to-State Migration Outflow file released by the Department of Treasury was designated high value--an asterisk appeared next to its entry in the raw data catalog on data.gov. Today that asterisk is gone. This would leave treasury one high value data set short of the three required by the Open Government Directive. But dont worry, they've added another. The dataset titled, Tax Year 2007 County Income Data, has been placed in the list and given an asterisk. What isn't shared with the public in this instance is the day it was released. The entry only says January 2010, while all other datasets identify the day as well.
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