This past week was an active one in both the House and Senate, as a number of legislative proposals were taken up on the floor. For a summary of the issues which were debated and considered, we at Congresspedia will again turn to TheWeekInCongress, a project by Robert McElroy. His site is a great resource for citizens wishing to keep track of what their members are up to on Capitol Hill, and we urge you to check it out.
"We just find it maddening that Hill & Knowlton, which has an $8 million account with the nuclear industry, should have such an easy time working the press," concluded the Columbia Journalism Review in an editorial in its July / August 2006 issue.
Corporate front groups can cause a "boomerang effect" to their sponsors, damaging the reputations of companies like ExxonMobil, Merck, and PepsiCo, when the sponsor's role in misrepresenting issues is widely revealed.
The Center for Media and Democracy and Free Press today issued the following letter to members of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet. All five FCC Commissioners will appear before the subcommittee tomorrow, as part of a hearing on "Oversight of the Federal Communications Commission."
This past week was a busy one on Capitol Hill, as both the House and Senate were in session all five days. To summarize the items which were debated and considered on the floor, we will turn to TheWeekInCongress.
Our friends at the Sunlight Network are still working on their Punch Clock Campaign, which is aimed at getting members of Congress to post their daily schedule online so their constituents can see what they're up to in Washington. Thus far, Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Sen.
The nation's capital has been in an uproar this week over the U.S. attorney firings controversy. Both the House and Senate Judiciary Committees held hearings Tuesday on the matter, where six of eight former U.S. attorneys (all fired in late 2006) testified that they had been the target of complaints, telephone calls and threats from either a high-ranking Justice Department official or members of Congress in the days and weeks preceding their abrupt dismissals. The replacements for the attorneys are rumored to be political appointees with little prosecutorial experience.
The story dates back to March 2006, when President Bush signed the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act. The bill included a provision (inserted by a staffer to Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) at the request of the Justice Department) allowing the DOJ to appoint U.S. attorneys indefinitely without a presidential nomination or Senate confirmation (previously, this type of appointment could last only a maximum of 120 days). In late 2006, the administration fired eight U.S. attorneys, insisting each dismissal was motivated by performance.
Starting this week, we at Congresspedia will be cross-posting from TheWeekInCongress.com. The site is a project of Sunlight friend and grantee Robert H. McElroy, and provides a rundown of the past week’s legislative activity in Congress (on weeks when one or both houses of Congress are in session).
I'm at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, DC representing Congresspedia and the Sunlight Foundation. So far it's been a great opportunity to tap into the conservative community's zeitgeist and find out what upcoming issues in Congress they are most interested in. I've had particularly interesting conversations with the folks from the National Rifle Association, American Foreign Policy Council, National Center for Public Policy Research and the Heritage Foundation about what they're working on. As Congresspedia expands to increasingly cover legislation and issues, the staff here will stay in touch with these organizations and help them and our citizen editors maintain the relevant articles on the wiki. We may even get some interesting (and hopefully productive) dialogues going between editors of opposing ideologies. Because, while people from different ends of the political spectrum may have different opinions, we should all have the same facts. Creating a common, collaborative knowledge base that all people can use to inform their opinions is one of the central – and most exciting – purposes of this project.
So, to kick things off, here are five "stub" pages we've created based on the topics Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) outlined today as important to conservatives in the coming year. If any of them interest you, please jump in and help us expand them into full and rich articles:
In December 2006, I interviewed author Michele Simon about her book, "Appetite for Profit: How the Food Industry Undermines our Health and How to Fight Back." The excerpts below are from that original interview, which took place on WORT, community radio in Madison, Wisconsin. For more information on Michele and her work, please visit her website.
Judith Siers-Poisson (JSP): How did you personally become so involved and interested in food politics?
Michele Simon (MS): It started about 10 years ago when I was struggling with my own weight and turned to a vegetarian diet and, lo and behold, I lost the weight I was struggling with. And then, from there, I started to learn all of the other ways our diet impacts our own health, in addition to the environment, animal welfare, and labor, and so many aspects of society -- I was just amazed at how much was impacted by those food choices.
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