::::::::

Sunlight Foundation and its director, Ellen Miller, leads the effort to find out what's the deal with the financial bailout legislation. Wired provides an update on their efforts:

When Congress rushes through important legislation such as this upcoming bill, extraneous items of questionable merit are usually thrown in during the final stretch of the haggling process among key staff members behind closed doors.

That's what happened in the process of the reauthorization of the USA PATRIOT Act, for example. After passage of the controversial legislation, lawmakers discovered that they had approved an obscure provision that allowed the Bush Administration to appoint replacements for U.S. attorneys without Senate confirmation. That enabled Alberto Gonzales, then the Attorney General, to install U.S. attorneys whom many Democratic members of Congress charged were political henchmen. 

"What we know is that lobbyists have flooded the offices of Capitol Hill all of last week, and all last weekend after the Paulson bill was announced, and it's a lobbying frenzy," says Ellen Miller, co-founder of the Sunlight Foundation. "Without full transparency for what's in the legislation, we won't find out who got what until after the bill has been passed, and after it's too late for anybody to react to it."

Authors Bio:
Craig Alexander Newmark (born in 1952) is an Internet entrepreneur best known for founding San Francisco-based website craigslist and shaking up the classified advertising business.

Upon graduation he attended college at Case Western Reserve University.
As a senior Web-oriented software engineer, with around twenty-five years of experience (including 18 years at IBM), he has become a leader in online community by virtue of running www.craigslist.org for over 9 years. He's compiled extensive experience evangelizing, leading and building, including work at Bank of America and Charles Schwab.

In 1995, he started craigslist which serves as a non-commercial community bulletin board with classifieds and discussion forums. Using a common sense, down-to-earth approach, craigslist strives to make the 'net more personal and authentic, while advocating social responsibility through the promotion of small, non-profit organizations.