Some are calling it "salary porn," and apparently the desire to peek is so strong that this site crashed on its first day of operation, yesterday. But something like Legistorm, which bills itself as "the Web's only source for congressional staff salaries," was definitely bound to happen. By culling publicly available information, the site has made it incredibly easy to discover how much every one of the thousands of Hill staff made in the past budget year.

The site was built by Jock Friedly, a former reporter for The Hill who now runs a suite of sites that collect and disseminate government information, like Storming Media (which specializes in Pentagon reports) and Energy Storm (science citations).

"I think this will add a healthy amount of transparency to how Congress spends taxpayer dollars," said Friedly. "Most salaries are paid to highly educated aides who perform long hours of service to their country," he said. "But occasionally, members of Congress illegally pack their official payroll with ghost employees or campaign workers. In one famous case, a powerful member of Congress even met his political demise by hiring a secretary whose true talents were in the bedroom, not at the typewriter."

... the Spanish American War that is. Thats right, that 3 percent "Federal Excise Tax" on your monthly cell phone bill goes to support Roosevelt and his Rough Riders and a war that happened over a 108 years ago!

According to the Non-for profit consumer advocacy group MyWireless.org, the tax originated as a luxury tax imposed by President William McKinley on a new invention called "the telephone." Back then only wealthy Americans had phones. While the Spanish American war only lasted 4 months the so called luxury "Tax on Talk" is still around 100 years later and unlike other excise taxes, the money raised through this 3% tax is not "earmarked" toward any specific purpose, (most likely because the reason behind the tax ended 100 years ago) not even to improve service or support for the telecom services that are being singled out for the tax.

Nine federal courts have ruled that the tax is illegal. U.S. Representative Gary Miller has made a proposal, H.R. 1898, and Senator Rick Santorum has introduced a bill, S. 1321, both of which would repeal the Federal Excise Tax. Other law makers, as well, are demanding that the wireless networks stop collecting the tax and refund consumers at least 3 years of fees. Most networks support getting rid of the ban but wireless networks are required to collect the tax until the IRS tells them to stop. "Its taxes like these," says Erin Mcgee, a spokeswoman for MyWireless.org, "that makes access to wireless (and other telecom) services less affordable for many Americans." Confronting issues such as these, and allowing consumers to take action about it, is exactly what MyWireless.org is all about.

When Microsoft was being subjected to antitrust scrutiny by the US Department of Justice, the companies deep, accumulated e-mail archives proved to be an achilles heel, yielding one incriminating message after another, despite protests by Microsoft lawyers that the email messages were being taken out of context, or represented jokes, or constituted off-hand comments and not policy statements.

Now, with the Abramoff plea-bargain striking fear into congressfolks and staffers on the Hill (and perhaps some of their equivalents in the executive branch as well), Jack Abramoff's legendary fondness for putting all of his thoughts into the form of uncensored e-mail messages may prove to take down some of his former allies.

Andrew Hoppin announced the launch of GoodStorm.com with a big party in San Francisco last week. GoodStorm is built on the CivicSpace platform and incorporates a number of newly developed e-commerce modules. The goal of GoodStorm is to provide merchandising services for advocacy organizations.

A number of people have pointed out that the real Choicepoint scandal isn't that they were robbed in a way that allowed identity theft, but that their robbers obtained the information by posing as legitimate customers, raising questions about just what Choicepoint ordinarily does with all that information about us.

Hint: It's not just used for marketing.

Quoting from Mary Hodder's Napsterization (Choicepoint Scandal Unspun):

Tara Wheatland over at bIPlog has the definitive post on Choicepoint, their culpability over the cracking of their systems and people's data, and what's really going on. Many of the news stories were apparently inaccurate, and she dissects the spin Choicepoint put out to minimize their responsibility and some of the activities they engage in that are very unsettling. Check it out!

Also, check out EPIC's pages on Choicepoint. There's lots more background on this company that has been, for example, providing data to government agencies that those agencies would be barred by law from collecting on their own because of privacy laws that came out of Watergate. Well worth knowing what is happening with the company that stores all the information it can aggregate on you.

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In a post called Ethics, Kos addresses the recent Zephyr / Dean / WSJ / Armstrong-Williams-equivalency flap:

So to recap, if I write about something in which I hold a financial stake, I will disclose it. If I don't, then it's nobody's business. If other bloggers follow that rule, then great. If they don't, then great. If they have their own rules, then great. I could care less. This talk about ethics bores me, so I'm done discussing it.

As for the academic weenies -- I've told them to go to hell, I've given them a middle finger... that should do the trick. For now.

According to Daily Caucus, Senator-elect John Thune of South Dakota paid two bloggers, Jon Lauck and Jason Van Beek, $35,000 over a five month period:

Nowhere on [the] "Daschle v. Thune" [weblog] was there a disclaimer that he was being paid $5,200 per month by a candidate.... These guys spent every day attacking Daschle and promoting the "Rock Star" Thune. They had perfect timing on issues like the last minute Daschle lawsuit. How could they have known? Because Dick Wadhams had hired them! Lauck admitted that he had access to information he wouldn't have otherwise.

There are two tiers of blog advertising for liberal blogs - the big boys and everyone else. Atrios, Daily Kos, and Talking Points Memo are still doing ok, although their revenue has tumbled. Everyone else is nearly dry, as marketers try to figure out what kind of political content will still sell.

The most popular political weblogs have been able to support their publishers through an intermediary called Blogads. As this election season heated up, most of the top sites saw extreme traffic spikes and have been able to set lucrative- but- competitive prices for ad views (not clickthrough) on their sites.