Why I'm Happy with my U.S. Senators

Visualization of complex or even just large data is one of the real strengths of computers. The Sunlight Foundation's Sunlight Lab brings visualization to bear on how your (tax) money is allocated.

If you want your senator to be corrupt as long as he or she gets a hog-sized share of pork aka "earmarks" then I hope you live in Alaska, Montana, Hawaii, West Virginia or Mississippi.

In Illinois, our senators go for so few earmarks, we are hardly on the chart at all.

Of the various hopeful trends in journalism as a watchdog for democracy, the trend toward just locating and displaying public information -- NEWS we can use, I'd say -- so that even concrete thinkers can separate facts of spending from rhetoric or polemic.

More about this group later.