Transcript for Ovc opengov 20june2009 from 0:16:28 to 0:17:32
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Jake Brewer: This is a crowd-sourced site, more or less; it's not as crowd-sourced as we like. Absolutely, if you guys ever get an invitation to a party from a lobbyist, send it to us and we'll put it up. The whole point is not to say "hey, by the way, it's awful that these guys are having a party," it's "just to let you know that your congressional representative, by the way, is going to a baseball game tomorrow night for $5,000." Or "he got paid $5,000 by a lobbyist." That lobbyist could say—anyone care about the climate or energy in this room?—let's say that you care about climate a whole lot, I come from that kind of clean energy and climate background and advocacy there, so I care a lot about it just as a personal example—if he's going to a baseball game (for $5,000) spending 3 hrs. just chatting about baseball, then also, "by the way, you want to throw us an earmark?" That kind of stuff is happening all the time, and we just try to make it known that it's happening. Then basically we try to work with journalists and other people to pull that out. So that's an example of influence.