What we’re watching
Sunlight Labs has made the document dump from the State of Alaska easier to search. Sarah’s Inbox is available to search. Sunlight’s Reporting Group checks out the email accounts Palin used.
The Center for Public Integrity’s iWatch News tracks bundlers to President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, finding “nearly 200 of his biggest donors have landed plum government jobs and advisory posts, won federal contracts worth millions of dollars for their business interests or attended numerous elite White House meetings and social events, an investigation by iWatch News has found.” Fred Schulte, John Aloysius Farrell and Jeremy Borden, the report’s authors, add, “Overall, 184 of 556, or about one-third, of Obama bundlers or their spouses joined the administration in some role. But the percentages are much higher for the big-dollar bundlers. Nearly 80 percent of those who collected more than $500,000 for Obama took “key administration posts,” as defined by the White House. More than half the ambassador nominees who were bundlers raised more than half a million.”
Citizens United, the nonprofit whose court battle with the Federal Election Commission over a “documentary” attacking then-presdiential candidate Hillary Clinton led court decisions that changed the landscape of campaign finance laws, has formed a Super PAC.
Check out Sunlight Live’s coverage of a Clean Air Act hearing from the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee. Details here.
Center for Responsive Politics reports that 60 Senators, Representatives and their spouses have investments in 19 media companies, with some stakes worth as much as $2.5 million. Congress makes their members’ and staffers’ personal financial disclosure reports available today; the House posts them online here; the Senate does not post them online. Check Open Secrets and Legistorm, both of which make the forms available to the public online.