Press Articles & Mentions Archives
August 2009
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Des Moines Register - Grassley: Campaign Contributions Hold No Sway
Sen. Charles Grassley last week called lobbyists for the American Hospital Association "economic parasites," accusing them of failing to consult Iowa hospitals before agreeing to proposed Medicare cuts that could hurt them.
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The Buffalo News - LittleSis Keeps Big Brother in His Place
Last month, President Obama nominated Robert Hormats, a top executive with Goldman Sachs, to a high-ranking position in the State Department. Within days, a number of blogs and news Web sites carried criticism of Hormats’ role in a $3 billion initial public offering for a company with close ties to the Sudanese government.
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Sunday Mail (South Australia) - Register of lobbyists is long overdue
Travel can often be relied on to provide a fresh perspective of home. Distance can produce a clarity that petty domestics otherwise obscure.
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McClatchy - Health Care Industry Contributes Heavily to Blue Dogs
As the Obama administration and Democrats wrangled over the timing, shape and cost of health care overhaul efforts during the first half of the year, more than half the $1.1 million in campaign contributions the Democratic Party's Blue Dog Coalition received came from the pharmaceutical, health care and health insurance industries, according to watchdog organizations.
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Russia Today - Russia Today: Bill Allison explores the new Foreign Lobbyist Tracker
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Russia Today - U.S. Lobbyists Scrutinized
Senior fellow Bill Allison sits down with Russia Today to discuss FARA, Sunlight's and ProPublica's new foreign lobbyist tracker.
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The Wall Street Journal - Opinion: Transparency Chic
Newborn babies have their own blogs and grandmothers are on Facebook. We Google potential dates. Privacy is dead. But one kind of information is still cozily locked away, safe from prying eyes: the law. President Obama may have come to Washington promising greater transparency, but progress has been less than impressive.
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The Washington Post - Who's Lobbying Whom, Cross-Border Edition
The Foreign Agents Registration Act, passed in 1938 to track Nazi propaganda, requires lobbyists to disclose their clients, precisely whom they've lobbied on the Hill or in the administration, and what was discussed during those contacts.
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POLITICO - Axelrod's ties targeted in health fight
Critics of President Obama’s health-care overhaul are zeroing in on his senior adviser David Axelrod, whose former partners at a Chicago-based firm are the beneficiaries of huge ad buys—now at $24 million and counting—by White House allies in the reform fight.
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ABC News - ABC News: Bill Allison Discusses Health Care Lobbying
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ABC News - The Lowdown on Lobby's Health Reform Pull
ABC News' David Wright reports on the health care debate and includes a quote from Senior fellow Bill Allison about the special interests attempts to influence the health care debate. Bill explained who's working for who: "Insurance companies battling providers. Drug companies battling insurance companies. Hospitals going to war against nursing homes. All kinds of institutions are looking to protect their interests.
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Colorado Springs Gazette - OUR VIEW: Campaign rhetoric meets D.C. reality
It should hardly come as a surprise that once in office elected politicians forget about, abandon, or fudge on promises made to get elected. President Barack Obama’s record on transparency and openness, however, is more disappointing than most such instances.
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CSPAN - Discussion on Gov't Transparency Through the Internet
Sunlight Executive Director Ellen Miller discusses with CSPAN's Communicators how the Internet is being used to provide transparency in the workings of government.
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The Washington Post - Ideas Pouring In To Fix Md. Budget
To save money, Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley could crank up state thermostats by 2 degrees. He could fire his press staff. Or he could furlough his father-in-law, former attorney general J. Joseph Curran (D), who works at a state agency that administers workers' compensation insurance.
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PC World - Companies Offer Services to Crunch Gov't Raw Data
What if a U.S. president called for a bunch of government data to be released, but the raw numbers were difficult to make sense of?
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Forbes - Gov 2.0: The Promise Of Innovation
Over the past 15 years, the World Wide Web has created remarkable new business models reshaping our economy. As the Web has undermined old media and software companies, it has demonstrated the enormous power of a new model, often referred to as Web 2.0.
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CNN - Lobbying Flip Flop
Sunlight Foundation's Policy Director John Wonderlich discusses the lifting communications ban on lobbyists for stimulus projects.
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CNN - John Wonderlich interviewed about stimulus lobbying
Sunlight Foundation's Policy Director John Wonderlich discusses the lifting communications ban on lobbyists for stimulus projects.
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Politico - Washington tees off a little less
Lobbyists and top donors have long enjoyed weekend getaways at exclusive courses, where a donation can buy several uninterrupted hours with a key lawmaker on an open green. But D.C. duffers say they are receiving fewer golf invitations than usual this year — and the number of destination golf weekends with lawmakers at hot spots like California’s Pebble Beach and Georgia’s Sea Island is dipping.
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Brattleboro Reformer - Dogging democracy
A group of conservative House Democrats from the South and Midwest who call themselves the Blue Dogs are doing their best to stall and obstruct efforts to get a health care reform bill through Congress.
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Journal Star - Not too much to ask from Congress
Call us naive, but requesting members of Congress to read the bills they pass doesn't seem like too much to ask. That's why the Journal Star editorial board is jumping on the bandwagon of a new movement that has drawn adherents from across the political spectrum.
