Sirotablog

David Sirota's online magazine of news & commentary
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Monday, June 27, 2005

Searching For The Truth (by Joel Barkin):

The Congressional Research Service (CRS), the nonpartisan research arm for Congress, is one of the best resources out there if you are looking for unbiased information. Trouble is, it’s almost impossible to search for any of their reports. This is not by accident either. Many of their reports expose the lies that members of Congress are trying to put over on the American public.
Since the Republican controlled Congress has given up on its oversight responsibilities, CRS is one of the few places we have left to hold our government accountable. It should come as no surprise that many members of Congress would want to make as difficult as possible to search around CRS.

Center for Democracy and Technology has stepped up and launched a great new website to search CRS reports:

AP:

WASHINGTON -- A new Web site aims to make widely available to the public certain government reports about topics from terrorism to Social Security that congressional researchers prepare and distribute now only to lawmakers.

The site, being announced Monday, is operated by the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington-based civil liberties group. The project is a response to years of rumbling and wrangling by open-government advocates over a lack of direct accessibility to reports from the policy research arm of Congress

- Joel Barkin