This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Thursday, March 18, 2010.

I'm Kila Brown.

It's Sunshine Week, a celebration of government transparency, but you wouldn't know it if you were

watching health care negotiations in recent weeks.

The U.S. House seems poised to vote on a health care bill before letting the public get a good

look at it.

President Obama seems ready to once again break his sunlight before signing pledge.

Jim Harper, Director of Information Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, says all things considered,

Obama's is perhaps the most transparent administration thus far.

This week a new transparency project that myself and a variety of transparency advocates have put together rolled out. It's called earmark data.org. advocacy to produce earmark data in good format. It's also an organizing site for the

developers, the coders, the people who would use earmark data to do public

reporting on the earmark process. Good evidence that transparency produces change is happening right now in the earmark area.

In January, President Obama asked Congress to produce earmark data, a White House fact sheet that came out, he mentioned it in the State of the

Union and a White House fact sheet that came out, said that they wanted to see a database

out of Congress. That pressure started some political calculators rolling.

And last week we saw the result of that.

Early in the week, House Democrats

announced that they would no longer allow their members

to ask for earmarks that benefit for-profit entities.

Non-profits could still be subject to earmarks but not for-profits.

They'd have to go through competitive betting and traditional processes if they want taxpayer money.

The next day, Republicans came back over the top on that bet and announced that they would not

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