{"id":415,"date":"2008-01-02T16:36:03","date_gmt":"2008-01-02T21:36:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/2008\/01\/02\/transparent-government\/"},"modified":"2008-01-02T16:36:03","modified_gmt":"2008-01-02T21:36:03","slug":"transparent-government","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/2008\/01\/02\/transparent-government\/","title":{"rendered":"Transparent Government"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As has happened in the past, it seems like the election has been reduced to 2 or 3 talking points&#8211;immigration, health care, and Iraq, to name the big ones.<\/p>\n<p>I was brushing up on Obama&#8217;s stance on the issues, and found something that really excited me. Check out his <a href=\"http:\/\/www.barackobama.com\/issues\/ethics\/\">page on ethics<\/a>. It&#8217;s not vague talk about how lobbying is bad. He has an awesome plan:<\/p>\n<ul>\n    <li>A big database and Web frontend containing information on lobbyist activity, what they spend, and what bills are awarded.<\/li>\n    <li>Information on all federal contracts, how much they cost, who lobbied for them, and how the completion of the contracts is going.<\/li>\n    <li>Require that non-emergency bills be posted to the Internet for a few days before signing them, to promote &#8220;open government&#8221;<\/li>\n    <li>Do the same for earmarks, disclosing who added each earmark and why.<\/li>\n    <li>He also wants &#8220;21st Century Fireside Chats,&#8221; where Cabinet officials talk about what they&#8217;ve been doing periodically, streamed over the Internet for all to see.<\/li>\n    <li>Publicize meetings that shouldn&#8217;t be secret, such as &#8220;regulatory agency business.&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>It&#8217;s ambitious, but <em>boy<\/em> would it be awesome! It&#8217;s funny: it almost seems like it&#8217;s somehow wrong that I should be able to see exactly what my elected officials are doing. And yet it&#8217;s really exactly what our government is all about: transparency. Wow-a-wee-wow!<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As has happened in the past, it seems like the election has been reduced to 2 or 3 talking points&#8211;immigration, health care, and Iraq, to name the big ones. I was brushing up on Obama&#8217;s stance on the issues, and &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/2008\/01\/02\/transparent-government\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,12,15,17,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-415","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cool-links","category-interesting","category-living","category-obama","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/415","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=415"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/415\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=415"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=415"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=415"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}