Though the party conventions are long over, the special interests that paid for them were only revealed to the public yesterday. It’s not a surprise that, despite a self-imposed ban on corporate cash to fund their Charlotte convention, the Democrats relied on plenty of it.
For their bash in Tampa, Republicans brought in donations from super PAC donors, an oil industry trade group that's running its own political ads, and some of the same corporate donors who underwrote the Democrats' convention.
MORE: See the largest donors to the Democratic and Republican host committees below
The Charlotte host committee ...
Continue readingDavis deletes 13 consecutive tweets following debate
Republican Rodney Davis, in a tight race with Democrat David Gill for Illinois' 13th Congressional District, deleted 13 consecutive posts from his Twitter account Thursday, hours after they were posted to his account during the congressional candidates' only debate of the campaign.
The debate highlighted many of the candidates' differences and provided insight into many of their positions including...their stance on Twitter? Both candidates' teams were actively tweeting during the debate; however Team Davis, which posted 17 tweets during the course of the debate, deleted 13 consecutive posts less than a day later. Politwoops, the Sunlight Foundation's database ...
Continue readingThe News Without Transparency – Mobile Phone Surveillance by Police Targets Millions Annually
Earlier this year, Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA) released information that his Congressional Privacy Caucus received from mobile carriers indicating that they had responded to 1.3 million requests from law enforcement for subscriber data in 2011. Wired Magazine’s Threat Level blog covered the release in detail, relying on information that may have never come to light without Markey’s efforts.
Continue readingStealthy Wealthy: Franklin Haney built real estate empire with government help
Longtime Democratic donor Franklin L. Haney, who with his wife Emeline has poured $1.1 million into the effort to reelect President Barack Obama, has built his business around developing government-supported real estate projects and acting as a government landlord.
He survived investigations in the 1990s by the Justice Department on campaign finance violations and by Congress for using his monied influence to secure a lucrative government lease. During the latter, he was nearly found in contempt of Congress for failing to supply requested documents.
The onetime champion Bible seller and would-be governor of his home state of Tennessee has ...
Continue readingWho leases office space to the feds remains a mystery
After deciding to profile Franklin L. Haney as part of our Stealthy Wealthy series, an obvious question soon posed itself: Exactly how much have Haney's companies collected over the years in leasing office space to the federal government?
The answer -- or rather non-answer -- to the question says less about Haney than it does about the limits on what the public can know about how its tax dollars are being spent.
News reports stated that his company, through a variety of limited liability corporations and real estate partnerships, had leases for office space worth many millions of dollars dating back ...
Continue readingHaney campaign contributions hard to follow
Franklin L. Haney is a case study on how hard it can be to get a comprehensive picture of the campaign contribution clout of a particular individual or company given the limits of state and local level disclosure.
The influential developer, who bid unsuccessfully to become the owner of the Washington Nationals baseball team and helped bankroll the political career of fellow Tennessean Al Gore, has long been known as a major Democratic donor. But he leaves a surprisingly small footprint on Sunlight's Influence Explorer. The totals show $1.2 million since 1989 to federal candidates and parties and ...
Continue readingRepublican groups swamping Democrats in outside spending
As the campaign heads into its final weeks, Republican outside interest groups are outspending their Democratic counterparts two-to-one, Federal Election Commission reports tracked this week by Sunlight's Follow the Unlimited Money show. 
As Sunlight reported last week, outside spending has accelerated since Sept. 7, when federal law requires that all outside groups making political expenditures disclose them to the FEC. Expenditures hit $102 million between Oct. 5 and Oct 11, with House races getting the most attention from the outside spenders, and GOP candidates only having a slight advantage.
But so far this week, Republican groups have outmatched Democratic ...
Continue reading2Day in #OpenGov 10/18/2012
NEWS ROUNDUP: Government
- SEC records mismanagement? A new report from the SECs Inspector General reveals that the agencies records management practices are in disorder. The agency disputed the finding, claiming that they had made improvements, including the appointment of their first archivist in 2007, that were not noted in the report. (Federal Computer Week)
- GPO and Treasury team up: The US Government Printing Office is teaming up with the Treasury department for a pilot program that would put historic information from the Treasury Library on the GPO's online document depository FDsys. (FDLP)
NAM authorized $1 million in undisclosed spending
The National Association of Manufacturers authorized close to $1 million on ads in Ohio over a two-week period, according to files uncovered with Sunlight's Political Ad Sleuth.
Update 10/18/2012, 10:15 a.m.: NAM seems to have focused its firepower on the Cincinnati market. An analysis of the ad buys by Sunlight turned up 161 spots on Cincinnati stations, compared to 96 in Cleveland and 40 in Columbus. This only includes stations that are required to file their ad buys with the Federal Communications Commission's online database. Only 11 of Ohio's 40 television stations are ...
Continue readingFall cleaning: DC’s Eleanor Holmes Norton deletes tweets
It looks like the office of Eleanor Holmes Norton just discovered that she has been tweeting to the wrong account, typically when publishing personal and partisan reactions in real time.
Politwoops, a Sunlight Foundation tool that aggregates the deleted tweets of politicians, was flooded with deletions from the Washington, D.C. delegate's congressional account this morning. She deleted 17 tweets so far today, some of which were days, even months, old.
While some of the tweets were mere typos, other tweets were not as insignificant. For example, Norton deleted a post that said “Paul Ryan is the affable face ...
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