Political upstart Teddy Turner bankrolls himself as corporate bigs bankroll disgraced ex-Gov. Mark Sanford in a lively special election for a South Carolina House seat.
Continue readingCruz gears up fundraising machine
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who has managed to upend the adage about freshmen being seen and not heard in the less-than 10 weeks since he took his seat as the Lone Star State's junior senator, likes to portray himself as a political maverick. But when it comes to fundraising, he's playing like a classic insider.
The brash Texas Republican, who this week is trying to defund President Barack Obama's signature health care law, earlier this month registered the Cruz Victory Committee, a joint fundraising arm. By creating the group, Cruz eases the way for big givers to ...
Continue readingConyers deletes Rand Paul shoutout
(Updated 12:15 p.m. 3/11)
When Sen. Rand Paul tied the Senate up in knots for a day last week to make a point about the Obama administration's controversial use of drones to assassinate enemies of the U.S., the libertarian Kentucky Republican was hitting on one of those rare issues that unites activists on the political left and right.
Evidence came when veteran Rep. John Conyers, who ranks as one of the most liberal Democrats in the House, tweeted out a "you go" about the Paul filibuster. The 83-year-old Detroit lawmaker was sufficiently hip to use ...
Continue readingKoch brother among donors to Mark Sanford redemption run
Updated 1:44 p.m. 3/8
David Koch, one of the nation's most generous underwriters of conservative causes, is among more than 250 donors chipping in to help disgraced former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford get his political career on track. So is Foster Friess, a conservative millionaire who bet heavily last year on former Sen. Rick Santorum's failed bid for the Republican nomination and made headlines with his unorthodox views on contraception.
Both gave $2,500 each to Sanford's campaign to win back the House seat that that he held in the 1990s, according to ...
Continue readingPresidential campaign 2016 off and running
A group based in his home state is airing ads against Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell in Iowa and New Hampshire to preempt a potential 2016 presidential campaign by the term-limited Republican.
Continue readingObama visits GOP givers to make a point about sequestration
When President Barack Obama travels Tuesday to the historic Newport News Shipbuilding facility to make a point about the potential damage from the looming sequestration axe, he'll be making a political point in more ways than one.
In a sense, he's reminding Republican budget hawks that they could be biting a hand that feeds them. The employees and political action committee of Newport News Shipbuilding have given more generously to Republican politicians than to Democrats over the years, the company's profile on Sunlight's Influence Explorer shows.
A search for contributions to the president's campaigns by ...
Continue readingPlanned Parenthood targets Mitch McConnell
Planned Parenthood has become the latest big-spending political group to try to erode the political base of Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., more than a year before his next election.
A new ad that surfaced this morning in Ad Hawk, Sunlight's searchable database of political advertising, paints the five-term Republican as opposing the interests of women. Because the ad does not explicitly call for a vote for or against McConnell, Planned Parenthood's expenditure does not have to be reported to the Federal Election Commission, but a contract on file in Political Ad Sleuth, Sunlight's database for ...
Continue readingSenior status: Three members of Congress are older than the pope
The Catholic Church may be one of the few institutions on the planet where news of an employee's retirement at age 85 is considered "shocking."
The other is the U.S. Congress.
Pope Benedict's announcement today that he will be stepping down, ceding to the infirmities of old age, got us wondering how many members of Congress are older than the pontiff, who was born April 16, 1927.
Sunlight developer Eric Mill, using an API he recently produced, came up with a quick answer: Three ...
Continue readingDatafest: ‘Amazing things can happen in a very short time’
The weekend's bicoastal datafest focused a dazzling array of talent on the challenge of bringing more transparency in politics. In addition to journalists, teams included PhD candidates in marketing and finance, a business professor from Iowa, a master's candidate in biostatistics, and an energy researcher from MIT. Participants were exuberant about the cross-disciplinary cooperation and the results it achieved. "I never would have found a PhD in math if I hadn't come here," exulted one.
Continue readingLooking for coders, data-visualizers, ‘someone who writes English’
More than 50 people braved the winter cold and dark to spend Friday night on the campus of Columbia University brainstorming for a bicoastal datafest that gets underway there and on the campus of Stanford University today.
Participants came from as nearby as down the hall -- some Columbia journalism students were in the room -- and as far away as London, home of Chris Taggart, who is here to show off and recruit assistance for is work at Open Corporates. Also mingling in the crowd, Sunlight Labs director Tom Lee, Jeremy Merrill of Pro Publica, Dante Chinni, founder of Patchwork Nation ...
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