Daily Digest | Obama's Sleeping Beast Awakens

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Daily Digest

Daily Digest | Obama's Sleeping Beast Awakens

the editors | July 15, 2009 - 2:03pm | Email This!

Organizing for America, Obama's Sleeping Beast, Starts to Awaken It looks like Organizing for America, President Obama's de facto field organization based at the DNC, is ramping up its efforts to demonstrate support for health care reform, writes Micah. Where last week's online search for upcoming health care canvassing efforts yielded 561 events, now the same search turns up 677, a nominal increase at first glance -- until you realize that the myBO database only shows upcoming actions, and many of the events listed in my search last week were for last weekend, and have thus expired. From what we've been able to glean from various sources, a variety of things are going on inside OFA; for one thing, states with likely Senate swing votes appear to be getting a lot of attention...
A Brand New Gateway into Regulatory Adventure-land Jerry Brito, he of Stimulus Watch, has pulled back the curtain on OpenRegs.com. The new site is meant to be a well-lit portal onto the federal regulatory process where much of government happens, and which -- by design -- is supposed to benefit from citizen feedback. From the site: "The goal of OpenRegs.com is to make the proposed and final regulations published in the Federal Register easy to find and discuss." And, Brito notes, the team behind the official regulations site run by the U.S. government are watching and learning from this project...
Cameras in Court: Oyez or Oh No? Passions flare up about the question of cameras in the courts every few years, often sparked by Senate nomination hearings for potential justices. Several prominent members of Congress have pushed for cameras not only in SCOTUS, but in U.S. appellate and district courts too. But some of the nine Supreme Court justices have been, shall we say, "resistant" to the idea. So where does nominee Sonia Sotomayor come down on the question? There seems to be a trend on the court where justices celebrate the virtues of opening up the court while their sitting before their Senate vetters, only to harden against the issue once they're the ones sitting in the justice's chair. But Sotomayor's dancing around the question might actually spell a more considered opinion than nominees in the past have held...