On H.R. 2454, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009.

“WHY ARE MY MESSAGES NOT POSTING?“

I’ve been traveling all this week and haven’t kept up with the regular blogging I try to do here. Sorry to those of you who live for the gems that show up on this blog. (Anyone? Anyone?)

Congress is out this week, so it’s a good time to not pay attention to them and spend time on whatever else it is you like to do.

But I got an interesting request today – for the number of votes on a particular bill. We show the vote percentages, of course. But I don’t have access to a vote count even in our back-end system. (I could get it by paying my database guys to make it available to me.) When I’m curious about the number of votes, I often just vote on a bill myself and see whether/how much the vote percentages change. That gives me a rough idea, anyway.

Once in a while I’m contacted by an outraged visitor who is certain that the site is a fraud because a vote changed dramatically. The vote can change from 33%-67% to 82%-18% with just eight votes in the early-going. But, no, people think I set up this whole site and maintain it at great expense in time and money so I can skew the results on the “Prevention of Shag Carpet and Wood Paneling Act of 2009.” It’s pretty funny, actually (most of the time).

We do give each bill one vote on each side when it’s introduced. Those votes are fraudulent, I guess. Slap the cuffs on, officer.

So, do you care about the number of votes on bills? The one reason I’d be reluctant to publish it is that people who are new to the site and new to public policy might think there’s nothing going on if they look at the long tail of bills that generate no interest. I like people to get a real sense of excitement here on WashingtonWatch.com (Anyone? Anyone?) But we could always suppress the vote count until it reaches a certain number to solve that.

I predict a comment-count here of approximately zero. But maybe you’ll surprise me with your passion.

Congress is well into the process of passing the twelve spending bills that dictate federal government spending for the 2010 fiscal year, which begins October 1, 2009. We’ve produced a table to track the House and Senate bills, their costs, and votes on them, as well as votes on final passage of the compromise bill that becomes law. It started with passage of the congressional budget resolution in late April, which set overall spending targets at about $29,000 per U.S. family. We will update this table as new bills are introduced and votes are taken in the House and Senate.

* Cost per average-sized U.S. family; amounts are approximate; changes in interest rates alter net present value calculation
† Reflects Senate action on House bill
‡ Included continuing resolution funding all other parts of government until their funding bills pass or October 31, 2009, whichever comes first

Here’s a very nice example of an advocate using the wiki function to make his or her case about a bill.

H.R. 1676, the PACT Act, would prevent tobacco smuggling and ensure the collection of all tobacco taxes, according to its authors.

But a WashingtonWatch.com user points out in the wiki article for the bill, “Honest, law-abiding online tobacco companies would suffer financially, and many people would” – well, you can read it for yourself. Go to the page for the bill and click “view article” or “read more.”

Log in yourself (with an account you create here), and you can edit the article further to refine the points there, or offer fair counter-arguments.

A WashingtonWatch.com user wrote in just now simply to say:

Thank you for the great job you do keeping us informed of all the issues going on in DC.

We don’t get a lot of thanks, so any word of praise is mightily appreciated. The one other good deed you can do is tell your friends and get them using WashingtonWatch.com to stay up on what’s happening in Congress. We’re happy to provide this service to people who are happy to use it.

Here at WashingtonWatch.com, we work to simplify the complex process of lawmaking, but it’s still pretty complex. And following the issues that matter to you is hard to do. So here’s a quick primer on how to do that using this site.

Many bills have a list of subjects in the “Learn More” box. Here’s the list of subjects for H.R. 45, the Blair Holt’s Firearm Licensing and Record of Sale Act of 2009. (These are added by the Congressional Research Service.)

If you click on a subject, you can see all the bills that deal with that same subject matter. So if you were to click on “Firearms,” you’d see this list. Bills are listed with the most active ones at the top. These are the bills that other WashingtonWatch.com visitors are looking at and voting and commenting on.

You can also browse subjects. In the left column on every page, follow the link that says, “Click here to see bills organized by subject.” Go ahead and click on the image to the left to see that list.

What you will see is a list of subject groups. Clicking on a subject group gets you to a list of the subjects in that group. Choose one of those subjects to see all the bills that deal with that topic.

So now what do you do? It’s time to learn about the miracle of RSS feeds. RSS feeds are ways to learn when a Web site has been updated – or when one of the subject lists has been updated. Here’s our page discussing RSS feeds. It links to this page with more information and how to get started.

How do you find our RSS feeds? On any page of interest to you, look for the little symbol over on the right. That tells you that there’s a feed available. Sometimes it’s labeled to tell you what the feed is about. If you click on it, you’ll see the feed in your browser. (Some make it easy to read, some don’t.) If you right click on it and copy it, you can paste it into your feed reader and get an update whenever a new bill on the subject matter you’re interested in shows up.

Now let’s say there’s a particular bill that you want to get updates about. Scroll down to the bottom of the bill page. You’ll see a whole stack of RSS feeds. There’s a feed that will tell you when the bill’s status changes (i.e. when it is moving through Congress). There’s a feed that will show you every comment on a bill. There is a feed for revisions to the wiki article about a bill. And there’s a “combined” feed that captures all of these things.

If you prefer, you can at least get some of that information sent to you via email.  Create a WashingtonWatch.com account, go to the bill that you care about, and click the “watch” tab. (That tab appears when you’re logged in and disappears when you’re not, so if you don’t see it, make sure you’re logged in.) You’ll receive an email whenever there is a change to the wiki article about the bill, which includes updates to the status, so you’ll know when the bill is moving.

There you have it! In just about 550 words, we’ve made it 100% simple to follow the issues that you care about. Well, sort of. Hopefully, this makes it a little easier for some of you, at least.

People have looked more than 1,000 times at the wiki article about H.R. 1475, the Federal Prison Work Incentive Act of 2009.

If you know a little more about the bill than the average person, and you want others to know what you know, you should be editing that wiki article. Here’s how.

House Republicans are obviously trying to capitalize on the huge, unparalleled success of WashingtonWatch.com with its new “Washington Watch” feature.

Well, not so obviously.  Watching Washington is something that a lot of people do, and there are a lot of newsletters and publications that have that phrase in them.  But the original, the genuine article, the one and only WashingtonWatch.com is right here at WashingtonWatch.com.

In case it ever comes up, this “Washington Watch” and WashingtonWatch.com do not have any affiliation.

This morning the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform had a hearing entitled “The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009: The Role of State and Local Governments.”

We’re just delighted to see that one of the witnesses, David Robinson, Associate Director of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University, has cited WashingtonWatch.com in his written testimony.

Public attention, he says, can help expose fraud or abuse, and it can build trust and confidence in public actions when the government is working well.

He notes how we use government estimates of proposed spending so that budget proposals “can be accurately compared and debated, leading to more efficient spending choices.” That’s certainly one of the hopes for this site.

It’s a pleasure to be cited for having a productive role in the ongoing debate about our country’s policies.

An enthusiastic welcome to everyone visiting H.R. 1475, the Federal Prison Work Incentive Act of 2009 this week.

By your numbers, you have toppled the equine cruelty issue from the top of the “active bills” list. Bills float to the top of this list based on the number of visits, and the horse people have kept their bills at the top for weeks now as they debate back and forth and back and forth. (And did I mention “back and forth”? 4,000+ comments at this point.)

Let’s hope you have better success with your debate than they have. Their thousands of comments have produced an incredible amount of useful arguments on both sides of their issues, but there have been only four wiki edits and the information they have remains obscure.

The audience that matters – new visitors to the site – will not review hundreds and hundreds of comments to learn about issues. They will review the wiki article for a bill. Advocates on both sides should put their arguments in the wiki articles if they want their side to be heard. (Here’s how to edit the wiki.)

To edit the article about the Federal Prison Work Incentive Act, click here and (once logged in) flesh out the wiki article with solid information about the issue, the bill, and why it should or should not pass.

With your bill at the top of the heap, you’re in a unique position to educate new visitors about it. But you can’t do that (very well) if you don’t edit the wiki!