Something to do this weekend

Want to find out how your neighbors feel towards the candidates?

Want to see how people are contributing towards the political process?

Go to Fundrace 2004 (www.fundrace.org) and you can type in your street address and zip code and click on the search button and it will tell you all the donations to the presidential candidates starting with those closes to the address you entered.

You can also search by name if you want to see if someone in particular has donated money to a presidential campaign.

The information comes from the FEC. The candidates are required to provide the name, address and amount of each donation over $200 (although many feel it is easier to just turn over all the data). Fundrace 2004 takes the data and makes it easier to find and do searches on.

It works and is illuminating. Would it not be better to just have full disclosure and let people donate as much money as they want to? That way everyone will know who is donating money to which candidate and therefore know who the candidate is more likely to favor. It would put a lot of lawyers out of business though because it is simple but would probably be more effective.

SF Gate had the story that pointed me to the site.