Last week, Congress spent $1.1 trillion tax dollars by combining six pieces of appropriations ("spending") legislation into one 1,000+ page "minibus" bill and passing it with almost no public disclosure or debate. In fact, the bill was available to the public online for less than 24 hours.

Some really strange stuff went down when the Sunlight Foundation gave a Congressional bill and a camera to a couple. Totally unexplainable.

There's not much in the way of justification we can think of to explain why the Senate hasn't yet passed S.482, so...

It's now showing up all over the social web and in news reports. The government run website Recovery.gov -- which was set up to help the public hold government accountable for stimulus spending -- lists a stimulus contract awarded to Clougherty Packing LLC for $1.19M for the listed service of...

This is awesome: "a non-partisan, fully-referenced, open-source and crowd-sourced wiki project that lists every candidate running in every U.S. Senate, House and governor's race."

The project, dubbed RaceTracker, was coordinated by the folks at the Swing State Project as they completed a nationwide survey of the candidates in each...

Sometimes the geekiest stuff is the most important. When it comes to creating a more transparent and accountable government, Thursday, May 21, is one of those sometimes.

On this beautiful morning, our nation's citizenry received one of the greatest gifts it could receive from its government: raw, freely and easily...

Occupying the committee room and the halls of Congress while donning green T-shirts and hard hats, young people are on Capitol Hill this week to join hearings on energy and climate change reform.

But these youth aren't just listening idly while their Representatives debate their future.

Instead, these...

"How can people be expected to care if they aren't inspired? This is a movie designed to inspire."

That's they way producer Alastair Fothergill described his highly anticipated new film Earth this week at the film's early screening in DC.

Now I am not, nor claim to be, a...

I'm sitting a couple blocks north of the White House and the buzz around here is intense. Still.

The sense that we are in the middle of a massively-historical moment is palpable, and there's a lot of talk about yesterday's inauguration ushering in new era for our country. To be...

On the morning of the Presidential election I was waiting in line for coffee in a rural west North Carolina cafe when a "clean" coal ad blared from a wall-mounted flat screen tuned to CNN.

A local woman, Connie, I had been chatting with about the clean energy campaign...

On November 12, Tom Brewer received an "URGENT call to action..." along with all other General Motors employees in the United States from GM North American President Troy Clarke. The return email address was "grassroots@gm.com." The urgent task at hand: Call your members of Congress to request that the...

This came in this morning from Power Vote organizers in Pennsylvania.

This video was shot by Bill Sheibler at Penn State University -- University Park, PA 16802.

Almost 1000 students in line to vote by 7am.

Josh Tulkin works in an office down a short hallway from mine. We yell back and forth at each other for questions and answers. Sometimes he has so much energy that he taps his fingers really, really fast on his chair and it kinda freaks me out.

Also, he's...

From Blackberry updates in the middle of the the Clinton Global Initiative to Daily Show rundowns from my home in DC, I've been jarred as much as anyone by the unprecedented economic and political events unfolding in...

Making good things (actually) happen is hard.

On any large scale, trying to make the world a bit better place is messy and complicated and almost always full of the same back-room shenanigans chronicled throughout the political, business, and tech sectors, but with one not-so-small difference:...

I'm a cyclist.

Stick with me here; this is relevant.

One of the things I've always loved about cycling is that if you care enough about the sport you can have access to the exact same equipment or tools that the best riders in the world use. That...

Granted, the answer may very well be as two analysts recently told me: "Of course they would if the purchase means online properties and market share in profitable markets. And also, they're Microsoft. So...yeah."

But what if "yeah" was wrong? What if human energy, organizational memory, the brain power...

Forget Condi Rice, Colin Powell, James A. Baker, and the rest. If you're like most Americans, you already have anyway.

The best diplomats the United States has are citizens who travel abroad and serve in communities as volunteers.

Policy, negotiating, trade, intelligence gathering and the like is of...

"...Our organization offers innovative and competent services to empower communities and organizations aimed at stimulating collaborative initiatives; while simultaneously developing harmonious relations which leverage..."

I can't finish.

Last week I got an email that used that line to describe a company's socially responsible work. This...

They've been talking about it behind the scenes for a few weeks now, but unlike those companies who just talk (and trust me, a lot of companies do), Chad, Steve and all the folks at YouTube have actually delivered.

The YouTube Nonprofit Program - announced in a commitment...