And, to see my favorite photo of the year, see this picture of mother and daughter.

For the past 40 days, at least, this momma dove has been sitting on her next in the dogwood in our front yard. I didn’t see any activity yesterday, but this afternoon I saw these: Only two that I could spy, and it was a small nest, so I guess this is it. But they’re [...]

Meredith told me recently that she misses me blogging about what’s going on in my life. Right now seems like a really good time to rectify that. It’s been a rough couple of weeks in many ways, but above all, there’s this: My grandma Marie passed away just after her 77th birthday. I’ll be heading [...]

This year brings a landmark for the Sunlight Foundation. We’ve been hinting for some time that we’re going to make a serious play in state government, and New Mexico is one of the first where we’ll focus those efforts. As my colleague Noah wrote earlier this month, the state’s House of Representatives has voted to [...]

Full details and more photos below.

A couple of weeks ago we talked about the possibility of Congress rolling the remaining appropriations bills into one package (called an omnibus bill) so lawmakers could approve the legislation before the end-of-year recess. Aside from that deadline, a continuing resolution (the second one this year) is set to expire on Dec. 18, and that [...]

While the country has experienced an almost unprecedented economic downturn this year, one of the most effective forms of stimulus has been unemployment benefits. As reported in a new study (PDF) published by the National Employment Law Project and the Center for American Progress Action Fund, “[t]he part of the stimulus providing the biggest bang [...]

In a new (and welcomed) form of disclosure, House members have released a huge document dump containing office expenditures for all 435 representatives. Sunlight will be doing a distributed research project of some sort to sift through the data, but I wanted to get out the info on New Mexico’s congressional delegation. For the following [...]

So, I’ve been incredibly silent in this space lately, but it’s warranted. Work has been incredibly busy (you can see some of my recent photos from a Capitol Hill event here, for example), but I think I’ll be posting more often in the coming weeks. I have some New Mexico posts swirling around in my [...]

The House today is set to vote on an extension of unemployment benefits. The comment threads on bills related to the issue have long been a valuable resource for people seeking information on unemployment benefits. For example, with huge interest in the House health care reform bill, the legislation generated 1,500 comments. By comparison, the [...]