What's at the site? Read on for 13 examples (contracts with KBR/Halliburton, VECO, and General Atomics, Tom Delay's pork and Duke Cunningham's backers, no bid contracts with defense contractors, contracts with shadowy Blackwater subsidiaries, declining support for homeless veterans with increasing support for abstinence programs, spending on guided missiles, maintenance of dams, and stranger things including flags, perfumes, hand tools, and boll weevil eradication).
I also talk about how this fits into Sen. Obama's broader plans to make government transparent.
I've posted a substantially revised version of this diary HERE.
Today witnessed the launch of USAspending.gov, which was created by the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act by Tom Coburn and Barack Obama. The site enables tracking of $1 trillion in federal spending on contracts, grants, earmarks, and loans. The bill faced serious opposition, including anonymous holds by some of the biggest porkbarrel spenders (including Ted Stevens), but in the end, Coburn and Obama prevailed.
Influential Democratic blogger Matt Stoller, an early front-pager at MyDD and one of the co-founders of Open Left, has not exactly been supportive of Senator Obama's candidacy. He appeared in a Bill Richardson web ad which castigated Obama and other candidates for not matching Richardson's impossible promise to immediately withdraw all troops from Iraq upon taking office. Stoller has put up a lot of extremely critical posts about Barack recently:
"Obama isn't one of us, and in his political career he has shown himself entirely unequipped to lead in a time of extremism. It doesn't much matter than he worked as a community organizer in his twenties. At crunch time, Obama is almost always absent, or even on the other side."
"Obama will not lead on Iraq, but worse than that, he will not even address it...He's just avoiding the subject. And why should I pick Obama if I want someone who avoids the subject? I can get a better version of that in the form of Hillary Clinton."
