The Whistling Waitress

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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 home to Silver City this weekend to attend funeral services. Since she was diagnosed with leukemia in December, my thoughts have often turned to her. Her passing has only amplified that effect.

I’ve remarked before that the only hard part of leaving Silver City to move to Washington/Baltimore was leaving my grandmothers behind. Both of these women had an inexplicable impact on my life: My grandma Flora helped raise my sister and I when we were young. In what I could call my more formative years, I forged a relationship with my grandma Marie, a friendship I’d never known I could have.

I don’t know if her passing is just pressing on my mind or what, but I’m noticing things, remembering things that make me think of her. In the supermarket on Monday, Meredith and I saw a family who were checking out using a government check. They were marking off the items that their fixed income check would provide, and I couldn’t help but think of the many times in her life that my grandmother struggled to feed her family. She was never what one could consider wealthy, but she stretched every bit of income the family generated. She told me stories of her youth, of washing the laundry of richer families and lugging it around her neighborhood and the city of Bernalillo. She told me the precious value that a penny could hold for a child in those times, and why a dime could mean so much to her family.

It’s easy in our modern society to lose sight of the truly important matters in our lives. You needn’t look further than the Story of Stuff or the nightly news to understand how that happens. But watching that family check out with their $15 worth of groceries really jolted me. I recalled my grandma Marie and her mantra of always having something to eat in the kitchen: often a pot of frijoles and a pile of tortillas (though, if you ever ate either, you wouldn’t say ‘only’). But it was there. She fed my father, sister and I after church every Sunday, and she also welcomed my high-school buddies for lunch every few weeks with open arms and a friendly smile. And, as if she didn’t have enough grandchildren already, many of my friends were often in her thoughts and prayers. My grandma last year rejoiced when Harmony was married and at the news that she was expecting a baby.

Grandma Marie was a pious woman, selfless and humble. If anybody could demonstrate how to live without regard to their material lives, it was her. She enjoyed the simplest of pleasures: a long phone call from a friend; her novellas (and certain American soaps as well); a Cowboys victory on Sunday afternoon. She was the one who taught me the value of shopping with coupons, of finding the bargains. Grandma Marie was also the woman who taught me that family comes first. Continue reading…

Transparency in New Mexico: The 2010 Legislature

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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 expand the presence of webcams in its proceedings. It was an early sign during the 2010 legislative session that New Mexico’s lawmakers are beginning to take open government seriously. It was a also welcome sign, but when the session ended last week it was clear that open-government advocates will remain busy in the 2011 session.

The state has been plagued by corruption and ethics investigations in recent years, and while the Sunlight Foundation doesn’t have a dog in that particular fight we do recognize (and support) the role transparency can play in helping citizens hold their elected officials accountable. From Sunlight’s perspective, there are a number of interesting questions raised by New Mexico’s legislature and the “state of transparency” there—some unique to the Land of Enchantment and some that will be applicable in other locales as well. For starters, the state legislature is part time and they just completed a 30-day session (every other year it’s 60 days). That’s true for many states, but in New Mexico legislators aren’t paid for their time in Santa Fe. It also means lawmakers have precious little time to consider legislation. As you’re aware, the Sunlight Foundation has long called on Congress to post legislation online for 72 hours prior to a vote. How would such a rule be feasible in a short legislative session like the one underway in New Mexico? Continue reading…

‘Minibus’ Budget Bill Passes the House

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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 would leave major portions of the federal government without funding.

There are six budget bills remaining this year: (Commerce, Defense, Financial Services, Labor/HHS/Education, Military Construction/Veterans Affairs, State/Foreign Operations, Transportation/HUD). While many predicted they would all be combined into one omnibus bill, it looks like Congress will consider the Defense spending bill separately. The other five bills were combined in a “minibus” package, filed as a conference report, and posted online yesterday.

As regular readers know, we’re big advocates of transparency and openness at the Sunlight Foundation and OpenCongress. We’ve been advocating for a 72-hour rule for a long time, and I was planning to use this post to show that the bill was not going to be available online for 72 hours before a vote. Before I could do that, it was approved in the House (by a vote of 221-202, full roll call coming soon). We don’t even have a page on the bill here on OpenCongress yet.

That the bill wasn’t online for 72 hours is, in itself, not the biggest consideration: it is a 1,000+ page piece of legislation that contains more than a trillion dollars in spending for five of the largest federal agencies in the country, plus Medicare and Medicaid. Each one of the appropriations bills that was combined have constituencies: members of the public, organizations, groups, companies, foreign policy, all are impacted by these individual bills. Each individual bill should have been debated out in the open, where stakeholders could participate in the process and members could vote on the separate pieces.

Instead, the incentives for supporting (or opposing) such a large piece of legislation change, often drastically.

The situation with the Defense spending bill will be similar—and likely much more difficult. In addition to the normal Defense budget, expect funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (including money for the troop increase recently announced by President Obama), an extension of the Emergency Unemployment Compensation program and COBRA subsidies (which I blogged about earlier this week), and according to some reports, legislation to raise the debt ceiling (which Donny touched on today). On top of all that, there’s literally no telling what else might get added at the last minute.

We’ll do our best to keep you apprised of the situation, but OpenCongress can only do so much: we need Congress to step up and do a better job of making information available to citizens.

Weeks Before Deadline, Congress Moves to Extend Unemployment Benefits

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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 for the buck–the most economic activity per federal dollar spent–is the extension of unemployment insurance benefits.”

Those stimulus benefits (also called Emergency Unemployment Compensation) have been the source of intense political wrangling during the past 18 months: House Democrats initially sought to include them in legislation in 2008, but President Bush threatened to veto any bill that contained a benefits provision. In November, Bush relented, and signed H.R. 6867. The program was then expanded in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (a.k.a. the stimulus bill) that was passed in February. More recently, Congress approved an expansion of EUC of between 14-20 weeks (depending on the level of unemployment in a particular state), but only after weeks of bickering in the Senate.

The time spent legislating that expansion is now catching up on millions of unemployed Americans, because the EUC program wasn’t extended when it was expanded. Therefore, the EUC plan enacted as part of the stimulus bill will expire on December 31. According to NELP, more than 1 million Americans will see their benefits dropped in January, and more than 3 million by March, if Congress doesn’t pass a bill extending EUC.

In addition to the EUC program, the NELP/CAP study recommended renewing additional ARRA provisions: federal funding for Extended Benefits, an $25-per-week benefit for the unemployed, a subsidy for COBRA, and tax exemptions on unemployment benefits.

Two bills have been introduced to extend the ARRA provisions: H.R. 4183 in the House, and S.2831 in the Senate. OpenCongress.org should have the text online for those bills this evening, so be sure to start tracking them.