John Bracken

When I posted my thoughts last week on the Sunlight Foundation’s exposing earmarks project, I refrained from delving into the details of what I found when looking at the Philly and Chicago allotments. Mark Tapscott–blogger, journalist and race car driver– subtly called me out for my failure in a comment I excerpt here:

what if you were to dig a little deeper and find that the price of the hospital equipment being “purchased” with federal money via an anonymous earmark is made by a company owned by one of the earmark-sponsoring congressman’s biggest campaign donors or former college buddy?…The problem is not the purpose of the spending, it is the anonymity of the process for authorizing the spending.

Indeed.

Others, of course, have done fairly extensive digging on such questions. Prompted by Tapscott, I’m going to briefly examine some of the social service earmarks I perused on Wednesday. Because I share a roof with someone who spent several years in Philly providing such services, and she doesn’t mind aiding me in this venture, I will start with the city of brotherly love.

• The Educational Advancement Alliance, $400,000, “for a college preparation initiative.” Neither of us had ever heard of this organization, whose stated mission is to “provide educational information and opportunities to members of underrepresented groups. EAA works with individuals to map out goals and objectives for higher educational attainment and foster the development of self-esteem, self-confidence, leadership skills, academic achievement, team work and social responsibility.”

EAA lists several programs– as Advanced College Academy Program, an After School Enrichment Program, and the (hmmm) Chaka Fattah Learning Lab.

Fattah, who represents Pennsylvania’s Second District– the Fightin’ Second– is in his sixth term, is a leading candidate to be the city’s next mayor and is married to local TV news reader Renee Chenault-Fattah. As the Inquirer pointed out last month (via A Smoke Filled Room), Fattah maintains good relations with local philanthropists

Fattah credited his work on education issues, most notably the creation of the GEAR UP program, which educates kids about college opportunities, for prompting the Weiss donation.

And just what does the Fattah Learning Lab do? An EAA newsletter calls it:

a high-tech “state-of-the-art” science lab on wheels visiting Philadelphia public elementary schools… an innovative resource to coordinate programs and school projects and to share with students the fun and mystery of science in the parking lot of their neighborhood school.

[It] is a former 47-passenger bus that has been converted into an exciting science center on wheels complete with science equipment, comfortable seating, and up-to-date video and audio equipment. The Learning Lab provides students in grades 4-6 with the opportunity to experience hands-on science experiments in a unique setting outside the traditional classroom.

And from the EAA site:

• The Fattah Learning Lab is designed to provide a hands-on learning experience to schools, recreations centers and libraries
• Designed to promote a foundation and improved knowledge base in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM)
• Accommodates 20 students
• Target audience is grades 4 -6…
• A total of 125 teachers / classrooms have visited the Learning Lab.
• Over 4,500 students have experienced hands-on learning since January 31, 2005.

I find no reason to question the Lab’s legitimacy. The Philly schools are, of course, underserved and under-financed. I am sure the mobile Lab comes in handy and have no basis for questioning its efficacy or that of the staff of the EAA– if they are like other folks I know in their business, they are underpaid, overworked and dedicated. But Tapscott’s point stands– “the problem is not the purpose of the spending, it is the anonymity of the process for authorizing the spending.” Plus, I always find it kind of hinky when buildings, or vehicles, are named for living people.

I’ve been excited by anyone by the efforts of both NZ Bear’s Porkbusters and the Sunlight Foundation to root out government waste. Plenty of web luminaries are chatting up today’s rollout of the Exposing Earmarks project; I found Jay Rosen’s summary of the movement (which includes Josh Marshall and Glenn Reynolds) particularly helpful. I set aside some time to play around with the G maps mash-up of HHS appropriations earmarks, starting with two my two most recent homes, Chicago and Philadelphia. Living in Chicago, where some official or other always seems to be on trial or under investigation, I have no lack of enthusiasm for identifying waste. Despite this skepticism, Chicago’s cut of the federal pie seems pretty legit: funding for hospitals, housing assistance for homeless families, and education. The map for Philly lists a couple of projects that raise  questions, but overall, I can’t complain about well regarded workforce training programs and health care.  So, pork pickings are slim in two of the cities with with worst reputations for waste. Coincidence– or is there less pork than was feared?

I have been trying to be a more responsible Wikipedian by editing the occasional entry. As a result, I find myself wanting to correct poorly written professional journalism sites. Besides Michael Kinsley's brief and failed experiment at a "wikitorial" for the LA Times, has any traditional media outfit given wikis a try for news? Here's my guess as to who might.

The AV Club interviews the Beasties about their new concert doc, Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That! and hears about plans for their new album:

The group gave video cameras to 50 concertgoers dispersed around Madison Square Garden, then created an "authorized bootleg" from the footage. The result mixes the grit of amateur filmmaking with the precision of professional post-production.

AVC: So maybe some reggaeton on the new one?

AH: A lot of reggaeton. Grunge is back, so we're doing the new grunge-reggaeton.

MD: Grunge-reggaeton hybrid, because we figured that will really cross over.

Upon reading of today’s riots in Dublin, I was curious to see what sort of citizen journalism I could find. Nothing on the BBC, but I did find detailed photos at Flickr. Indy Media also has better photos than I saw at the Post.

Christina shares her story– she’s canceled plans to celebrate her 18th birthday tonight:

Today i was walkin from work to the busstop [about 30/40 minutes walk] and I got to pearse st. and was walking down it.. A guy grabs me from behind and shoves me against a wall saying in a very dublin accent ‘Get out of the fuckin way!’ so that kinda hurt, then i saw him from behind and he had a white jersey with blood all down the left of it and it wasn’t his own because he had no gash on his head.. So i get to my bus stop only to see Gardí [police] and rioters clashing….50feet away.

They had glass bottles, iron bars, homemade petrol bombs, and anything else they could get their hands on….

I was gonna be going into town tonight to celebrate being 18, but i’m going next weekend instead because the atmosphere there is awfull……

*sigh*….Today was the First time i have ever been scared in my own city…

Daragh at Dublin Metroblogging adds some reports.

The Guardian reports on the news that Thad Anderson, the Outraged Moderate, broke this week:

Hours after a commercial plane struck the Pentagon on September 11 2001 the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, was issuing rapid orders to his aides to look for evidence of Iraqi involvement, according to notes taken by one of them.

“Hard to get good case. Need to move swiftly,” the notes say. “Near term target needs - go massive - sweep it all up, things related and not.”

The handwritten notes, with some parts blanked out, were declassified this month in response to a request by a law student and blogger, Thad Anderson, under the US Freedom of Information Act. Anderson has posted them on his blog at outragedmoderates.org.

As Anderson tells it,

On July 23, 2005, I submitted an electronic Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of Defense seeking DoD staffer Stephen Cambone’s notes from meetings with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on the afternoon of September 11, 2001. Cambone’s notes were cited heavily in the 9/11 Commission Report’s reconstruction of the day’s events. On February 10, 2006, I received a response from the DoD which includes partially-redacted copies of Cambone’s notes. The documents can be viewed as a photo set on Flickr.