Legislative Proletarianization

06:00 PM Sep 13, 2006

We've been looking for a convenient excuse to blog about the Sunlight Foundation since its launch several months ago, and today it obliges with the debut of the Punch Clock Campaign.

Sunlight is all about nonpartisan transparency in government:  using the Internet's ability to abstract, aggregate, and disseminate information to subject government operations to greater public oversight and thence, goes the story, greater virtue.  Their page hosts a cornucopia of government-oversight resources and links.

(The authorities have some contrasting uses in mind for newfangled technology.)

Punch Clock has an interesting angle that may or may not work:  asking members to publish their daily schedules (after the fact) on the Internets.  Result:  you get to see when they're meeting with corporate lobbyist D. Vader and when they're playing solitaire when they should be fighting to stay awake through some insufferable subcommittee testimony.  It might have been inspired by Sunlight's report on the 109th's record-settingly slack work schedule.

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