This Sunday is the 40th anniversary of the break-in that led to President Richard Nixon's downfall. The commemorations this week will mostly focus on the investigative reporting that unravelled the story -- and that now is in danger. That's a concern that we at the Sunlight Foundation share and try to address in the tools we make available to help journalists and citizens be better civic watchdogs.
But it's also important to remember Watergate's other legacy: Two years after the burglary of the Democratic National Committee offices -- by a group of so-called plumbers who were paid by ...
Continue readingAmericans for Prosperity campaigns without leaving a paper trail in Wisconsin
Much has been written about what Tuesday's Wisconsin recall race says about the influence of big money on politics, but the real story may be the influence of the money we don't know about.
Less than three hours after Democrat Tom Barrett conceded the $63 million-and-counting contest to Gov. Scott Walker, Americans for Prosperity, the big spending conservative group, sent an email to supporters hailing Walker's win and including a video highlight reel about "how AFP educated Wisconsin residents about Governor Walker's budget reforms."
The video shows footage of the customized AFP bus that rolled through ...
Continue readingDid Sunlight silence Jeff Miller’s tweets?
Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., took his Twitter account private on Wednesday shortly after the Sunlight Foundation reported that he had deleted a tweet including a link to a poll about President Obama's birthplace.
Miller's last public tweet -- "Florida set to toughen ID theft" -- came at 1:33 p.m., less than an hour after Sunlight revealed his online erasure in a blog post. Slate writer Jeremy Stahl appears to have been the first to notice the sudden disappearance of the five-term Pensacola congressman's Twitter acount, @CongJeffMiller.
Sunlight phoned and emailed the congressman's communications director, Dan McFaul ...
Continue readingMost Memorial Day mentions in Congress come from non-veterans
Memorial Day routinely brings beach traffic and barbecues and, in Congress, a spike in mentions of the holiday established to honor America's fallen fighters, as you can see above in the illustration from Capitol Words.
But of the lawmakers who have mentioned Memorial Day most during the last 16 years, according to the Sunlight Foundation's tool for tracking the frequency of terms in the Congressional Record, none are active-duty veterans. Only one of the top ten, Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, has logged any time in the military. The East Texas congressman served six years in the Air Force ...
Continue readingSpaceX blasts off literally and politically
The private rocket that made history early this morning when it blasted the first commercially-launched payload for the international space station into orbit also was fuelled by a decade-long, multi-million-dollar political effort to pry funding from a sometimes skeptical Congress.
Since its inception in 2002, SpaceX, the company behind Tuesday's successful launch, has spent more than $4 million lobbying Congress and given more than $800,000 in political contributions, according to data compiled from Sunlight's Influence Explorer. Many of the company's campaign donations went to key members of Congress in charge of the budget for NASA, which ...
Continue readingSuper PAC profile: Ending Spending aids Palin-endorsed Senate hopeful in Nebraska
A Florida-based super PAC that made more than $1 million in contributions in 2010, almost all of it underwritten by the former CEO of online brokerage TD Ameritrade, is emerging as a factor in Tuesday's Republican Senate primary in Nebraska.
In the three days before the election, the Ending Spending Action Fund has dumped almost $255,000 into the race to help Deb Fischer, a state senator who has suddenly turned an already-heated contest for the GOP Senate nomination into a three-way race. The group has not yet disclosed any donors this year, but in the 2010 campaign cycle ...
Continue readingMomma’s boy: Santorum holds congressional record for ‘mother’
When it comes to their mothers, are the nation's lawmakers getting forgetful?
With Mother's Day coming up, Sunlight decided to use our Capitol Words tool to see who in Congress talks about mom the most. Our database, which searches the Congressional Record back to 1996, indicates that talk of "mother" and "mom" has been tailing off in more recent years. Several of Congress' top mother- and mom-mentioners are no longer in the nation's top debating society.
Rick Santorum, who recently retired from the Republican presidential field, holds the all-time record for using the word "mother," even though ...
Continue readingFact checking group accuses Romney super PAC of spending $20 million on deceptive ads
Restore Our Future, the super PAC backing presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, spent more than $20 million on deceptive ads in early primary and caucus states, according to a just-released study by the Annenberg Public Policy Center. That figure includes more than $9 million in ads distorting the record of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who is set to endorse Romney on Wednesday.
Relying on the spending estimates of commercial ad-tracking company Kantar Media CMAG and the content analysis of Annenberg's own FactCheck.org, the center calculates that outside groups spent a total of $41.1 million through ...
Continue readingGingrich super PAC backers pulled the plug before he did?
The latest news reports say that Newt Gingrich plans to drop his roller coaster of a presidential bid next week but Sunlight's Follow the Unlimited Money tracker suggests that the former House speaker's biggest money backers may already have pulled the plug.
Winning Our Future, the pro-Gingrich group that has been almost entirely funded by the family of gambling mogul Sheldon Adelson, made it's last independent expenditure almost a month ago in the Wisconsin primary, the tracker shows. That means the committee didn't play in Delaware, the state where Gingrich vowed to make his last stand ...
Continue readingKent State student journalists have tough time prying open TV political ad files
Trying to get FCC records at Cleveland TV Stations from Karl Idsvoog on Vimeo.
Days before the Federal Communication Commission's closely-watched Friday vote on requiring local television stations to put political advertising information online, a group of Ohio college students made a powerful argument for why the commissioners should buck the pressure from the broadcasting industry and vote aye. Just look at the above video.
At issue is whether the stations should post online detailed information on political ad buys. Such information is currently available only in paper files that must be accessed in person and under supervision from ...
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