A group of lawmakers is urging Obama administration officials to oppose a multinational U.S. company's efforts to sue Peru in a mining dispute, citing the company's environmental and health record.
The request, made in a letter last month to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, pits the lawmakers against a secretive billionaire and big U.S. political donor—and, in some cases, against themselves.
Four of the letter-signers—Reps. Bobby Rush, D-Ill., Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif., Ed Towns, D-N.Y., and Danny K. Davis, D-Ill.—have switched sides in a controversy involving Doe Run ...
Continue readingThe STOCK Act in Plain Language
The STOCK Act, recently enacted to address allegations in a 60 Minutes report on Congressional insider trading, isn’t the easiest bill... View Article
Continue readingDemocrat, Republican political collectors ask FEC to OK texted contributions
The economy may be largely lackluster but the political sector is so flush with cash it appears on the verge of creating a whole new profession: Campaign contribution brokers.
That would be the result if the Federal Election Commission approves a bipartisan request that it made public late Wednesday afternoon. Filing on behalf of two campaign consulting groups, one Democrat and one Republican, the blue-chip Washington law firm Arendt Fox urges the FEC to approve a system for texting small contributions to political campaigns that would allow middlemen to collect as much as 50 cents on every donated dollar.
The ...
Continue reading2Day in #OpenGov 4/11/2012
NEWS ROUNDUP Campaign Finance Big Donors for Romney: Foster Friess, one of the biggest backers of Rick Santorum’s presidential campaign,... View Article
Continue readingThe News Without Transparency: $10 Million Fine on Red Cross Highlights its Troubled History of Blood Services
News Without Transparency-10 Million Fine on Red Cross Highlights Its Troubled History of Blood Services Policy Intern Cassandra LaRussa researched... View Article
Continue readingBiggest loser in Pennsylvania primary isn’t Santorum
That sniffling sound you hear is not Rick Santorum's supporters bemoaning his decision Tuesday to pull the plug on his presidential campaign but the managers of the Keystone State's television stations counting the ad dollars they have lost. There are 46 of them, according to the Community Media Database created and maintained by Rob McCausland.
So far this year, the race for the Republican presidential nomination has brought a bonanza of ad dollars to broadcasters in states that have played host to early contests, the more so because of the rise of super PACs, political action committees that ...
Continue reading2Day in #OpenGov 4/10/2012
NEWS ROUNDUP Government Feds fully embrace social media: Every major federal agency is now on Twitter and YouTube. The Nuclear Regulatory... View Article
Continue readingData for Better Bill Searching
I've put up a dataset on Github that maps popular search terms to bills in Congress. It's a simple, 5-column CSV designed to help people create better search engines that take in user input to search for bills. The idea is that this will be useful to, and get contributions from, the community of people out there working with legislation and building tools around them.
It's humble - I started it out with a mere 7 rows, assigning the keywords "Obamacare", "SOPA", "PIPA", and "PPACA" to the appropriate bills. There are certainly more good candidates than that, so please contribute via pull request, or if you don't know how to do that, open an issue and talk about it with words.
Continue readingImprove Public Access to Legislative Information
Today 30 organizations from across the political spectrum joined together to ask Congress to improve public access to legislative information.... View Article
Continue readingBrazil-U.S. trip part of larger PR strategy
Warming up for a summit of hemispheric leaders in Colombia later this week, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff today wraps up a brief visit to the United States, where she met President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and leaders of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Despite the high-profile dance card, Reuters quoted some Brazilian officials as complaining that their president didn't get quite the reception she and her country deserves. "There's a feeling that most people in Washington don't appreciate what's happening in Brazil," the news agency reported one official close to Rousseff as saying ...
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