It's ask and ye shall receive XML, it seems. After years of pushing by open government advocates, it took just a "Dear Colleague" from South Carolina Republican Jim DeMint and a gang of bipartisan senators to finally spur the Senate Rules Committee to, this week, change its longstanding practice and begin publishing votes in a structured data format that makes for easy analysis, visualization, and mashing up by the public. Rules Committee chair Chuck Schumer (D-NY) perhaps saw that, with transparency on the march in Washington, this was an inexpensive, easy win. Almost immediately, the Senate began publishing a comprehensive XML list of roll call votes and details on each bill's vote, also in XML...