As lawmakers gain seniority in Congress their influence grows and with that growth comes a sort of manifest destiny to... View Article
Continue readingCapitol Words: Representin’
The new and improved Capitol Words provides a lot of opportunities for interesting research. One of the first things that... View Article
Continue readingUpdates to Clinton donors
Just a running commentary on what I'm finding.
Cool -- Muckety already has some of this data entered.
I wonder how many of these donors have lobbyists. Alltel certainly does, although skimming their reports (here's one) it doesn't seem that they have international issues. Also, wonder how many turn up in FARA filings...
Continue readingBunning Foundation May Skirt Ethics Rules
According to the Lexington Herald-Leader, Sen. Jim Bunning has collected $180,000 from the Jim Bunning Foundation since 1996 for doing... View Article
Continue readingFEC Thwarts Transparency
Yesterday, the Federal Election Commission unanimously approved new disclosure rules regarding bundling, the practice of collecting campaign contributions from friends,... View Article
Continue readingReal Times Clinton Foundation Donor Database
Bill Allison and Larry Makinson of Sunlight created a DabbleDB database of the Clinton Foundation donor list released yesterday. This... View Article
Continue readingWelcome to Sunlight Labs 2.0
You may have noticed, we've redesigned our site. Our awesome new designer, Ali made it and we're excited to have her as part of our team. And we're excited about the new website too. Especially those things on the right that allow us to update what we're working on via twitter.
The website isn't the only thing we're redesigning. We're also redesigning how Sunlight Labs works. We're clearly no longer the six-month pilot project we were chartered to be 31 months ago. We're now a team of great developers using technology to change the way our Congress operates and have been for quite some time. So we're long overdue for a gear-shift in the way we think about Sunlight Labs and how we work. We see three fundamental shifts in how we think about ourselves now vs. how the Labs was conceived.
Continue readingWall Street Journal profiles donors…
Clinton Foundation releases donor list;
...and, thanks to my Sunlight colleague Larry Makinson and DabbleDB.com, we've got it available in a database format. The source material is here, but I couldn't get into the first page (glad that Larry could).
It would be interesting to see what issues the donors are interested in, where they come from, what their own economic interests are, and whether these could potentially create conflicts of interest for Sen. Hillary Clinton, our next Secretary of State.
Contributors to the foundation include governments of Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Norway, Jamaica, Oman and Brunei have contributed, as have government ...
Continue readingMadoff’s firm lobbied for earmarks
Yesterday I was talking to some folks about whether, given the trillions potentially committed to bailouts, there's any sense in continuing to probe earmarks. I say of course there is.
Our friends at the Center for Responsive Politics put together a handy guide to the political influence wielded by Bernard L. Madoff, who was arrested and charged with running a hedge fund that allegedly operated as a giant ponzi scheme. Among the information CRP flagged was a lobbying disclosure from 2005 from the firm of Lent, Scrivner & Roth, LLC, which shows, on page three, that Bernard L. Madoff Investment ...
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