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Comment by mileszs | Hacker News Reader

Instead of joking about it, you might find it interesting to actually go browse the available methods, as well as some of the examples. (Link to the examples page: http://www.gop.gov/aboutapi/documentation) Take an honest look at, say, the Perl example. Then browse a few of the methods (on the right hand side) to see what they return.

Although I don't find myself agreeing with the GOP on many issues, I am able to see that this offers real value beyond fodder for programmers who wish to be comedians. If nothing else, I hope to see it driving the momentum to 'open' government.

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I like HN and the GOP. It’s good to see that there is some civility here to keep me from leaving.

> Take an honest look at, say, the Perl example.

I did. It doesn't even compile :)

(It is mostly correct, but they have a semicolon incorrectly placed between arguments to the LWP request function. I usually test my code before putting it online. Usually.)

I don't see how this is useful as long as it's politicized to GOP-members only...

You can keep tabs on what half the government is doing.

And there are honest-to-god Republican activists out there (check the comments with negative ratings on the bottom of social news sites) who want to know what their party is up to and keep it on task. Much like how others might want to know what the Obama administration or the Democratic caucus is up to.

All in all, I think it's pretty awesome. I hope the Democrats will follow suit, or that Congress will put up a general API. That would be even better.

You can keep tabs on what half the government claims they are doing. Without another, independent source, preferably also with an API, verification will be hard to do.

You obviously didn't look at the API. It's just factual information (comittees, voting history, etc.) about Republican congress members. Failing technical errors, that will be accurate.

I'm anything but a Republican, but I hate when there's a seriously cool effort made by the Republicans that everyone here immediately jumps into a negative tone and tries to find things wrong with it. That's even pettier than the stuff about trying to read policy into a robots.txt file. I'd love to see the parties battling each other out on information openness.

I did look at the API. And government generated "factual information" still should be verified -- thankfully this information is verifiable (in the scientific sense). My observation was not about any party in particular, it was an observation about politics in general. Really, a party of a single branch of government providing its own status and historical information would seem to be less (however slightly) trustworthy than if the Library of Congress provided an API to the data they already collect, or if the Executive branch provided a check on the other branches through providing a service to the people like this.

I mean, election recounts seem to have more cross party and cross branch involvement and checks than the day to day operations of the government.

It is part of the civic duty of every citizen to question the motives and actions of their government, no matter which party is involved.

> I hope the Democrats will follow suit, or that Congress will put up a general API.

The worst thing would be if the Dems followed suit, but using a different API. Yuck.

It'd be hilarious for the two to use the same API, then patent it so that the Libertarians couldn't use it.

Just to piss them off :-)

The great thing about APIs is if you don't like them you can wait two weeks and somebody will put them in a wrapper for you.

gem install acts_as_government anybody?

If the GOP wants its own API, it belongs at http://api.rnc.org/

I understand that many/most are partisan and may only want to keep tabs on "their guys". But the idea of the U.S. gov paying for _any_ partisan site such as this is terrible. I find it hard to understand how its even legal.

The government pays for political campaigns, and I don't think the legality of that is in dispute. This doesn't seem much different from that.

http://www.fec.gov/pages/brochures/pubfund.shtml

Note: I think it's terrible policy, I'm just pointing out the precedent.

Our gov is based on electing people, not parties. I can see how subsidizing individual campaigns can be allowed. Subsidizing parties is contrived from little to no constitutional basis.

The gov subsidizes parties. Campaign subsidies are given only to nominees of major and minor political parties, and party conventions are subsidized directly. From my previous link:

"The Presidential nominee of each major party may become eligible for a public grant..."

"The amount of public funding to which a minor party candidate is entitled is based on the ratio of the party's popular vote in the preceding Presidential election..."

"Each major political party is entitled to $4 million (plus cost-of-living adjustments)8 to finance its national Presidential nominating convention. A qualified minor party may become eligible for partial convention funding..."

As for the constitutional basis, I agree that there is none. Then again, there is little to no constitutional basis for social security, medicare, the war on drug users, the department of education, etc.

I'm just saying that gop.gov isn't anything special or unprecedented.

you are correct, of course. I was writing with my idealist hat on ;).

partisan-ship and two party systems are so base, it rattles my mind how short sighted they can be.

Um, please don't down-vote people you disagree with. This commend spawned a thread, -6 is not appropriate.

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