You have won the 2007 Big Dick of the year award and are well on your way to repeating your win in 2008!

Seriously though, you are kinda sharp and a bit funny.

But, as with most things it is most savored in moderation…

All the Best to you my friend.

On of the myths was that innovation is always good such as:

Better Living through Chemistry in the 60s
Eugenics in the 30 (The Immortalists is also a good book)
Air Planes would end war…(The Wright brothers had a theory that air observation would make surprise attacks impossible and that Brazilian airplane “inventor” even committed suicide after seeing his countrymen use airplanes to kill each other)
Railroads would end war…
The Internet would …

I think a larger effect would be to feed ammunition to left-wing business haters, such as Ralph Nader (speaking of unintended consequences Nader->Bush), but good point about right wing extremeists such as Ron Paul using the information – not to mention anyone just looking for “dirt.”

Sen Clinton worked for Wal-Mart.
Mayor Giuliani worked for …..

“make former politicians more honest I hope.”

likely just poor wording, but who cares about what FORMER politicians do, since they are out of office. The problem is what ACTING politicians do. But this does illuistrate a time-consistency problem of sunlight, since much of the sunlight is on former politicians when it’s too late.

It’s similar to having your lawyer write your divorce agreement today while he is planning to work for your ex-husband tomorrow.

And if your ex-husband is going pay excessively, it might be a bribe, not an honest-day’s-work with a conflict-of-interest.

There are obvious tradeoffs between freedom-to-work and avoiding conflicts of interest. This is a complex issue, not a simple identification. For example, your lawyer later working for your ex-husband may or may not be a conflict of interest or outright taking a bribe depending on the time frame, any expectation of working for him in the future while he was working for you and so on.

Just what do we expect them to do with their lives? They’ve just spent years obtaining political expertise. So now society would like them to transfer to an industry that they’re unskilled in and start their careers over from the bottom?

If there’s a problem, its not with the lobbyists. The problem is with the current Congresscritters. If they’re so prone to influence by their former colleagues then they’re going to be influenced by their golf buddies or their families. Power in every field relies on connections. While I don’t deny that connections can get one in the door, it typically cannot cause the person in power make an irresponsible decision. If Congresscritters are only getting information from lobbyists and not getting all sides of the story before they vote on legislation that’s their fault — they are the unprofessional ones.

I would suggest that there are better ways to show potential dangers of the revolving door being used to improperly influence legislation than second or third-rate research – which might even be counterproductive from a publicity angle as a “publicity stunt” in addition to useless research.

@Steve – Bringing people’s attention to the data is the real purpose, the site actually appears to link to other sites with most of this research already done, so one would assume the goal is to get people digging into it themselves. As far as there being the possibility for slant.. that’s true of the media, new media or old. The key here is that the data being collected is pretty much neutral ‘did they lobby’ not ‘did they bribe’ It appears to be a good way to educate people on the so called “revolving door” and see if anything pernicious pops up.