Last week, Talking Points Memo reported that one of John McCain's top fundraisers, Juan Carlos Benitez, has direct ties to Jack Abramoff, and now works with Cassidy & Associates, a Washington, D.C., lobbying firm. McCain's campaign listed Benitez as having raised between $50,000 to $100,000.
According to the lobbying forms filed with the Senate Office of Public Records Benitez is currently registered to lobby for the Iraqi Red Crescent Organization and lobbied on the Foreign Operations and Related Programs Appropriations Act of 2009 pushing for additional funding for Iraq. In 2008 he is also registered to ...
Continue readingSen. Coburn Talks Transparency
Sen. Tom Coburn, the principal sponsor of the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act, talks here about transparency, technology, and... View Article
Continue readingLobbying Blowback
The food industry’s heavy lobbying over the past few years to reduce regulation and paperwork has turned into a “monkey’s... View Article
Continue readingPimp My Campaign Finance Data
My Google Alerts sucked in this great blog post by Jim at Irregular Times instructing fellow citizen journalists and bloggers... View Article
Continue readingOffice of Congressional Ethics Shocker
Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner announced the members for the new Office of Congressional Ethics and one member is a... View Article
Continue readingAnother Call for Mortgage Disclosure
Last month, after Portfolio revealed that Sens. Chris Dodd and Kent Conrad received favorable loan deals from mortgage giant Countrywide,... View Article
Continue readingNew Platforms for Policy Fights
The Society for Human Resource Management is displeased with a public blog post by Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Stewart Baker... View Article
Continue readingK Street Stalls
While many major K Street firms are still increasing their profits, the total improvement of profits over last year was... View Article
Continue readingChinese Bribery Chart
TRACE International released a report on bribery in China that includes some really interesting charts. While I’m sure that bribery... View Article
Continue readingOpenSecrets.org Citizen Journalism Awards
Our friends at the Center for Responsive Politics are partnering with Helium to hold a contest for citizen journalists who... View Article
Continue reading
