Super PACs have been a hot topic in the news recently as reporters, advocacy groups, and the public try to follow the money flowing into the political system as the 2012 elections approach.

On January 31st MSNBC reported that Stephen Colbert's super PAC, Americans for A Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow, was the first to submit its end-of-year report to the Federal Election Commission. The deadline for these reports was January 31st.

Colbert included his super PAC's filing on his super PAC's website, ColbertSuperPac.com, but this is not required. This kind of information can generally be found on the FEC website under Campaign Finance Reports and Data, but you have to know exactly what you are looking for.

The FEC portal includes a variety of search tools, including a searchable database of disclosure reports, downloadable copies of electronic filings, images of all financial reports, and other campaign finance data. However, these search tools suffer from a lack of a user-friendly interface. Several organizations, including the Sunlight Foundation, ProPublica, and the New York Times, have taken FEC data and put it in more user-friendly formats while focusing on information most relevant to the upcoming presidential election.

A search for Colbert's super PAC using the FEC's Disclosure Database search tool returns 13 filings, including the Year-End report displayed on Colbert's super PAC website. This report indicates that the super PAC has raised $825,475.46 since July 2011 and spent $151,521.01 as of December 31, 2011.

TPM published an article as the FEC deadline approached as well that focused on Newt Gingrich's campaign filing. The article cited several specifics regarding Gingrich's campaign spending, all of which are publicly available using the same online FEC portal. A search for "Newt 2012," the official name of Gingrich's presidential election campaign, under the "View Images of All Financial Reports" tab returns a list of documents filed. Viewing the PDF of the Year-End report shows all the numbers used in the article mentioned above.

It is necessary to emphasize again that these tools can be extremely hard to use, and you have to be very precise in your search terms. For example, a search for "Gingrich" using either search tool will return many results for other organizations related to Gingrich, such as "Friends of Newt Gingrich," but it will not return other better options.

The TPM article stated that the campaign had $2.1 million at the end of 2011 and owed over a million dollars in debt. The top level summary on page two of the Year-End report shows the $2.1 million the campaign has in cash and the $1.2 million it currently owes.

The article specified that the campaign's debt includes $1,666.66 to Rick Tyler - a former Gingrich aide who currently manages a super PAC in support of his candidacy. A search for "Rick Tyler" shows the $1,666.66 the campaign owes this former Gingrich aide on page 5166.

The debt also includes $350,000 for private jet flights. A search for "Moby Dick Airways," the private jet company that it has been reported Newt Gingrich uses, shows that the campaign began the quarter owing $451,946, incurred an additional $33,008 in charges this quarter, then made a payment of $133,008 to conclude 2011 with an outstanding balance of $351,946.

Lastly, the article says that the campaign paid $47,005 to Gingrich to buy a mailing list. A search for "Newt Gingrich" shows the campaign's $47,005 disbursement to the candidate for the express purpose of "list purchase" on page 4954.

Policy Fellow Matt Rumsey helped with the research for this post.

"The News Without Transparency" shows you what the news would look like without public access to information. Laws and regulations that force the government to make the data it has publicly available are absolutely vital, along with services that take that raw data and make it easy for reporters to write sentences like the ones we've redacted in the piece above. If you have an article you'd like us to put through the redaction machine, please send us an email at mbuck@sunlightfoundation.com.

The FEC’s decision on Stephen Colbert’s request to form a PAC garnered a lot of publicity today, but a second, less noticed decision has potentially far more devastating consequences. The FEC unanimously decided that federal officeholders and candidates may solicit contributions for independent expenditure-only PACS, also known as Super PACs. Candidates and elected officials may only ask for contributions of $5,000 or less from individuals, but the Super PACs are free to take unlimited contributions from individuals, corporations and labor unions.

This decision takes us perilously close to the days of soft money—those unlimited contributions candidates would solicit for the national parties in order to skirt limits on how much could be directly given to their campaigns. Soft money contributions to the national parties dried up after limits were put in place by the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002.

But now they are back. Almost. The FEC’s decision today opened the door for elected officials to ask corporate CEOs or union leaders for personal contributions of no more than $5,000. That is a limit in name only. There is nothing preventing those donors from writing a check for far more than that amount, not only from their personal pocketbook but from their corporate or union treasuries as well. The nudge-nudge-wink-wink fundraiser is fully operational.

Moreover, the Super PACs for which Members of Congress will be dialing for dollars are legally known as “Independent Expenditure Only Political Committees,” begging the question: Can a PAC act independently from a candidate or elected official who is raising money for it?

The campaign finance system is in tatters. Despite niceties that place “limits” on how much candidates and elected officials can ask for, the fact is that unlimited contributions from individuals, corporations and unions now have multiple avenues to reach the center of our electoral process. Transparency is the thread that may hold accountability in the democratic process in place. A version of the DISCLOSE Act, the Lobbyist Disclosure Enhancement Act and the Shareholder Protection Act are important tools to ensure that as unlimited money takes over our elections, we can at least see where it is coming from.

Stephen Colbert, host of The Colbert Report, is in Washington today to register his new Super PAC with the FEC. As he has said on the show, it’s his intention to have the Colbert Super PAC raise unlimited funds to buy political ads.

But do we really need another shadowy organization out there influencing our politicians? We don’t think so, and we bet you agree with us. We believe that Colbert, and any other Super PAC, must disclose their donors. Our democracy depends on it.

If you love democracy, then you should join us as we demand the information we need to follow the money in politics.

Mr. Colbert, have you no sense of decency? Bears are not the number one threat to America. Undisclosed political spending is.

Last year, the Supreme Court ruled that outside groups that take unlimited political donations from any source, commonly known as Super PACs, can now spend unlimited amounts of money in political campaigns. The Federal Election Commission has yet to set up rules to track this flood of money into the political system, so we’ve made it easy for you to do it yourself. Click here to learn more.

Although we're rounding up our sleuth of transbearency bears to meet Colbert at the FEC and demand disclosure today, we've got more up our sleeves. Stay with us to learn what you can do to help.

Don’t let Big Colbert push around your vote this year. Join Sunlight, follow the money, and take a stand for transparency.

Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., recently got into a bit of trouble when he falsely stated on the floor of the Senate that, "If you want an abortion you go to Planned Parenthood and that's well over 90% of what Planned Parenthood does." Only about 3% of business at Planned Parenthood is actually abortion services. A spokesman for Kyl later corrected Kyl's statement by stating, "...his remark was not intended to be a factual statement."

Kyl was pilloried for days on Twitter and television after Stephen Colbert began a Twitter hashtag #notintendedtobeafactualstatement matched with outrageous false statements about Kyl.

As it happens, Kyl didn't just intend for the 90% number to not be a "factual statement," he also doesn't intend for it to be a statement at all. Kyl has revised his remarks from the Senate floor in the official Congressional Record and removed the 90% line altogether.

This episode exposes an oft-overlooked peculiarity of Congress' "official" Congressional Record: members of Congress can revise and insert remarks into the Record, altering the historical record.

The Sunlight Foundation's Open House Project included an entire chapter devoted to changing the rules that allow Congress to change their statements after the fact. The Open House Project report stated, "The Congressional Record serves to inform people of the actual spoken comments by their elected officials. Citizens should be able to determine if their elected representatives, after seeing the votes of their colleagues, went back to the Congressional Record and edited what they said about a proposed legislation. The public should also be able to determine whether or not their elected members participated in a given debate."

A 2007 report from Reason Magazine detailed many instances of absurd abuses of the Congressional Record revision authority given to lawmakers. Aside from the insertion of speeches made by a dead congressman, perhaps the most famous incident of Congressional Record revision was an imagined colloquy between Sen. Lindsey Graham and Sen. Kyl:

...look at Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the military commissions established to try the Guantanamo detainees violate the Geneva Conventions. During the runup to the decision, Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) filed a brief arguing that the court shouldn't be able to judge the plaintiff's complaints, since the "text, history, and purpose of the Detainee Treatment Act confirm that Congress intended to withdraw federal-court jurisdiction to review the detention-related claims of Guantanamo detainees." This intent, they argued, was "confirmed" by the legislative history of the act, which featured an "extensive colloquy" between Sens. Graham and Kyl on the subject. Alas, the colloquy was ... fictional ... It was inserted into the Record after the fact but was written to give the impression that it wasn't, complete with lines like "I have just been handed a memorandum on this subject" and even an imaginary interruption by Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.).

In the age of YouTube, Twitter, and second-by-second news updates, the ability to revise one's remarks in the Congressional Record appears to be a vanity exercise. The removals of "ums" and stutters may be acceptable, but lawmakers should not be able to falsify the record by removing their controversial and inaccurate statements. Congressmen and the public should look to the Open House Report recommendations for further guidance.

For now, we'll just use the new official record of Congress:

If you follow Sunlight in any capacity, you may have noticed a seemingly innocuous typo slip into our writing of late, a little something called “transbearency.” Today, I am proud to announce that “transbearency” is no accident. It’s a movement.

Allow me to explain...as best I can. It started when the folks at Sunlight heard that the infamous faux-pundit Stephen Colbert decided to take his message of Politics As Usual to Washington, DC on October 30th. His mission? A march to Keep Fear Alive. Colbert claimed that such a march was a necessity:

There are dark, optimistic forces trying to take away our Fear [and] they want to replace our Fear with reason. But never forget — “Reason” is just one letter away from “Treason.” Coincidence? Reasonable people would say it is, but America can’t afford to take that chance.

Maybe we were being sensitive, but this call to action offended us. Reasonable solutions to unreasonable problems in government mark the foundation of the transparency movement. Reason is the...reason that Sunlight builds technology platforms and advocates for policies that make our elected representatives accountable to the folks who elected them.

Rather than feed into his fear-mongering, Sunlight decided it was time to stand up to Colbert by hitting him where it hurts: his fear of bears.

Stephen Colbert is terrified of bears and all their hairy complexity, and we want to send a powerful message his way. So, if you believe that there is nothing to fear about a more accountable government, then I ask you to join Operation Transbearency for the month of October. A few ways you can take part:

• Be a bear online: Change your avatar(s) (like we did) to a bear to show your inner watchbeardog.
• Spread the honey: When you see something delicious, like stories about open data, lobbying reform and campaign ethics, tell your friends and make sure to post about it with a tag for #transbearency (or #opengov) so that your fellow bears can find it.
• Bear with us: Text BEAR to 224866 (“ACTION”) if you’re planning on attending the rally in Washington, DC on October 30th to get info on how to meet up with us (and directions to our post-rally happy hour).
• Really brave? Show up to the rally dressed as a bear. Seriously. The Colbert/Stewart folks have already asked that ralliers come in costume -- it will be Halloween, after all -- we're just asking that you choose a costume that will make a difference. I promise you, we'll be out there in full bear regalia with special swag and surprises for anyone ferocious enough to stand in solidarity.
You may think this is silly, but bears are not silly. They are serious, and so are we. We hope you'll join us on the 30th.