As Ellen wrote previously here, former Bush administration Justice Department official Hans Von Spakovsky's nomination to the Federal Election Commission was highly controversial due to concerns about stands he took on voting rights while in the Justice Department. These concerns led some Democrats to block his nomination. The President and congressional Republicans refused to hold a vote on any other commissioners without support for Von Spakosky, effectively freezing the Commission. The Commission is currently short on commissioners and is unable to issue rulings on a variety of issues including the filing of disclosure reports for bundled contributions from lobbyists. Moments ago, Von Spakovsky pulled his name from nomination all but clearing the way to a fully operational Federal Election Commission. His letter to President Bush is below the fold:
Continue readingLocal Sunlight
This week I have highlights from Pennsylvania, Mississippi, Hawaii and Louisiana.
CRP Tracks Fundraising by Committee
The same distinctions that exist in research, advocacy, and legislation exist in the realms of political influence. Since committees are the real seat of specialized congressional knowledge and power, it's exciting to see CRP sort fundraising information by congressional committee, as currently highlighted on their Capital Eye blog.
Since this is often the way tht fundraisers are advertised (For $1500, see the chair of the ____ Committee, who controls ____ issue!!!!), public scutiny of this money should be organized in the same way. Advertising committee positions for fundraising seems only a few steps from the wanton corruption of Duke Cunningham's bribery menu; tracking fundraising by committee is a small step toward dispelling monied interests' undue policy influence.
Continue readingShadow Government
Last week, The Center for Public Integrity (CPI) released The Shadow Government, another of their eye-popping reports that they are so known for. The report is the result of an investigation of federal advisory committees, the secret, multi-layered and unaccountable bureaucracy that influences much of the federal government with precious little oversight and largely no record of their activities. There are over 900 committees, boards, commissions, councils and panels that advise the various agencies of the Executive Branch and the White House, meant to offer government expert opinions on various topics.
Continue readingCorker’s Aide Proves our Point about Financial Disclosures
Herman Wang reports in the Chattanooga Times Free Press that Todd Womack, an aide to Sen. Bob Corker, disputes the numbers we reported from Corker's personal financial disclosure form in our recently released project, Fortune 535. Womack argues that Sunlight didn't include in Corker's net worth the millions he made from selling properties, which he reported as transactions. Our question back is why doesn't that money turn up in Corker's assets? According to the Senate Ethics Manual, members are supposed to report as assets "Any property held by the filer, his/her spouse, and/or dependent children for investment or the production of income (e.g. real estate, stocks, bonds, accounts, and business income)." Unless Corker never deposited the check, the money from the sale of his buildings should show up as an asset (or assets) somewhere on his form. Womack said that the Sunlight Foundation made a "strange assertion" about Corker's net worth, but all we did was add up what he reported and filed with the Senate Ethics Committee. The only strange assertion is the form that Corker filed. As we noted when we released Fortune 535, "Take what follows with a boulder-sized grain of salt: It's all based on information from the seriously flawed disclosure system used by members of Congress." Maybe someone should add a surgeon general-like warning label on congressional financial disclosure forms: "Warning: Relying on disclosures from members of Congress may impair your accuracy."
Continue readingLegislation Languishes in Congress as Miners Fight for their Benefits
Glen Charles, who had been a miner in West Virginia for 42 years, was diagnosed as having black lung, for which he received benefits under the Black Lung Act up to the time of his death in August 2005. Under federal law, surviving spouses of miners who die from the disease are eligible to continue receiving those benefits. But soon after Charles died, his checks stopped arriving, leaving Emma Charles, his 75-year-old widow, financially unstable.
She had to file a claim to continue receiving his benefits, which the Labor Department's Office of Administrative Law Judges denied.
Under current law ...
Continue readingHappy 25th Birthday!
The Center for Responsive Politics is celebrating its 25th birthday today. As its Executive Director for its first decade and a half, I couldn't be more proud of its breathtaking accomplishments over the years.
As a birthday present for all of us, their Web site -- OpenSecrets.org -- has undergone a dramatic transformation.
I've been playing around on the site for a few days and there are some fabulous improvements. According to CRP, here are some of the new features:
- The money-and-politics articles that we've published for years on CapitalEye.org are now front-and-center on OpenSecrets.org as part of our new blog. We'll continue to produce in-depth reports using our data, but we'll also be posting "quick hits" most every day in the blog. If you're an RSS user, make sure you sign up for our blog's feed.
- We've reorganized the site. You'll still navigate OpenSecrets.org using file tabs that run across the top of the page (along with more tabs on the interior pages, and options in the left navigation bars), but we've changed the site's main "buckets" to better accommodate the variety of data we track now.
- OpenSecrets.org is not just a campaign finance site, you know; in recent years we've expanded to also track federal lobbying, Washington's "revolving door," privately sponsored congressional travel and the personal finances of Congress, the president and top executive branch officials. OpenSecrets.org's old "Who Gives"/"Who Gets" tabs just didn't suit everything we do today. On the new site you'll find our data options split between "Politicians & Elections" and "Influence & Lobbying." It'll take some getting used to, even for us, but it makes much more sense given all that CRP does now. Continue reading
Hyperconnectivity Not Just Personal
Ars Technica has an article up about the "hyperconnected"--defined by the Interactive Data Corporation as those people for whom the line between work and personal has been blurred to the point that they're "willing to communicate with work on vacation, in restaurants, from bed, and even in places of worship."
The article offers some criticism of the purportedly overworked, suggesting offhandly that the hyperconnected will pose new challenges for IT departments, and possibly have questionable effects on workers' personal lives.
While these concerns over productivity and relaxation are certainly valid, there's another side of merging personal and workplace that's ignored by the commentary: the same breakdown that leads to work email being written in bed also leads to the breakdown of the limitations on the role of the "professional". Just as communications technology leads to more work being done at home, the Internet allows for the intellectual entrepeneurship of the online volunteer researcher, the blog-based organizer, the midnight advocate. As Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody makes clear, individuals who can organize without centralized leadershp form a new, powerful, agile force, harnessing what has been dubbed the "cognigitive surplus" to redefine the way we organize our ideas and ultimately ourselves.
While this may have some effect on the modes of our relaxation, the effects on business, government, and society will more than make up for them.
(full disclosure: I often work in the middle of the night.)
Continue readingGOOD Magazine Illustrates Transparency
If you haven't discovered GOOD magazine yet, do yourself a favor and check it out. It bills itself as a venue "for people who give a damn." It's also a lot of fun. In the past couple of weeks, the magazine has published four political visualizations in its TRANSPARENCY section.
The first is an amazing graph illustrating the amount of work accomplished and time spent by the U.S. Senate over each of the last 20 years.
Another is a very cool three-minute video on where John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have received their campaign cash.
They have a fascinating graph titled "The Cost of Nation (Re) Building" illustrating the value of U.S. government contracts awarded in Iraq and Afghanistan from October 2003 through September 2006.
Continue readingCorporate Access at the Democratic Convention
Monday's edition of the Rocky Mountain News, Kevin Vaughan has a detailed article about the 56 national corporations, from Allstate to Xerox, that are sponsoring/funding this summer's Democratic National Convention in Denver. And as Vaughan writes, they all either do business with the federal government or they have pending legislation in Congress or regulation issues with the federal bureaucracy. (Of course, the same situation exists for the Republican National Convention to be held in Minneapolis as well. Expect to see a story about that soon from someplace.) What the corporations get for their sponsorship of the conventions is access to party leaders, members of Congress and their staff, and to possibly the soon to be occupants of the West Wing of the White House.
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