Rep. Jo Bonner attached his name to an earmark originally requested by Sen. Richard Shelby for $1,372,000 for the City of Mobile's Transit System, known as the Wave Transit System.
The City of Mobile employed the firm Miller, Hamilton, Snider & Odom who lobbied on "appropriations issues." Their employees have contributed $6,500 to Bonner between 2002 and 2006. Nothing from 2007, when the earmark was included in the Transportation and Housing & Urban Development bill.
Continue readingBonner Earmark #5
Rep. Jo Bonner earmarked $245,000 in the Transportation, Housing & Urban Development appropriations bill to the "City of Jackson for construction of a building in conjunction with a 240-acre industrial development park."
I came up empty looking for this one -- the City of Jackson employed the Bloom Group (already encountered in this post), but doesn't seem to have hired a lobbyist since then. I wasn't able to find out much about the industrial development park, but through the magic of Nexis found a December 18, 2007 article from the Birmingham (Alabama) News by Mary Orndorff, which noted,
The ...Continue reading
Bonner earmark #4
Rep. Jo Bonner earmarked $245,000 for the Bay Area Food Bank for construction of a commercial-size kitchen. Bay Area Food Bank, which distributes food donated by grocery stores, restaurants and the like to soup kitchens and homeless shelters, doesn't have a federal lobbyist, according to the Senate Office of Public Records. To double check, I looked the organization up in Guidestar, a great resource for finding out about nonprofits--their forms 990 show no payments for lobbying. I also ran the names of the organization's executives and board members through OpenSecrets.org looking for campaign contributions, and found ...
Continue readingBonner earmark #3
I thought this one would be harder.
Rep. Jo Bonner, the newest member of the Appropriations Committee, secured $245,000 for "Atmore road improvement" in the Transportation and Housing & Urban Development Appropriations bill for fiscal year 2008. (Sen. Richard Shelby requested the same in the Senate.)
The City of Atmore spent $80,000 on a pair of lobbying firms in 2007, the Bloom Group Inc. and Bradley, Arant, Rose & White LP. The Bloom Group's year-end report says, on page 2, that the firm was lobbying on, among other things, "Transportation HUD Appropriations bill, seeking federal funding for city projects ...
Continue readingAnother Bonner Earmark, another lobbying link
Going for the low hanging fruit first (earmarks in EarmarkWatch.org). So let's look at the $141,000 that the Alabama School of Math and Science in Mobile, Ala., got in the Labor, Health and Human Services and Education Appropriations Act.
The school--a public, residential school for sophomores through seniors who are gifted in science and math--employed Capitol Link, a lobbying firm, from 2004 through 2007. During that time, there was no six-month period in which the school paid the firm more than $10,000, so it's impossible to tell from the disclosures how much the school spent ...
Continue readingSecrecy for Government Documents Is Not Good
Leave it to the GuardianUK to reveal secrets contained in a secret US report, and to Digg for bringing our attention to it.
Update: Another one is uncovered by our friends at the Center for Public Integrity.
Continue readingAderholt’s bio: record levels, responsibility
I'm still looking mostly at the earmarks that Rep. Jo Bonner, R-Ala., has sponsored, but while I was looking at them, I came across the official biography that Rep. Robert B. Aderholt, another Alabama Republican, has on his Web site. The language is instructive:
Congressman Aderholt serves on the powerful House Appropriations Committee, as a member of the Homeland Security Subcommittee, the Transportation, Housing and Urban Development Subcommittee and the Commerce Justice, Science and Related Agencies Subcommittee....Congressman Aderholt has continued to work toward bringing record levels of funding to Alabama for transportation projects. Congressman Aderholt campaigned on a ...
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Following Bonner’s earmarks
Let's start with this earmark, because it's already in EarmarkWatch.org, and hence easy to research. A few interesting notes...
Providence Hospital is the beneficiary of the earmark (the final amount of the Earmark was $1.2 million, not the $1.5 million that EarmarkWatch, which draws on older data, shows). One of their two lobbying firms is Cassidy & Associates. In the midyear 2007 lobbying disclosure filing, the firm disclosed that the specific issue on which they lobbied was "National Defense Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2008-healthcare." (See page two of the form).
I hopped over to OpenSecrets ...
Continue readingThe Beating Heart of the Internet
Earlier this month, the Pew Internet & American Life Project released its report "A Portrait of Early Internet Adopters: Why People First Went Online -- And Why They Stayed." No great surprises in this study but still worthy of a mention here.
The researchers found that social networking on the 'Net has always been a draw for online users. Back in the days before the Web, BBSs, Usenet, chat rooms and threaded discussions were the precursors of Facebook, Friendster, Myspace and the numerous other social networking sites of today. Pew's survey of several hundred longtime Internet users said social networking was the most appealing initial online draw for them. The report quotes one respondent as saying their first-time online experience was with a time-shared mainframe computer in 1972, and by 1976 they were social networking on it. The report's writer quotes another earlier Pew report: "...the beating heart of the Internet has always been its ability to leverage our social connections."
Continue readingDon Young Doesn’t Know
Rep. Don Young has been on the hot seat ever since he sponsored the infamous Bridge to Nowhere earmark. Since then he has come under investigation for more things than any other sitting member of Congress. Young faces an FBI investigation into his participation in fishing and golfing events with VECO oil executives; he is receiving scruting for the hiring of his former aide Mark Zachares, who has pled guilty, by Jack Abramoff; and fellow Republicans are seeking an investigation into his inclusion of an earmark for Coconut Road in Florida - which happens to be a long ways from Alaska. In the face of all these difficulties Young sat down with reporters to discuss his reelection campaign, but reporters wanted to talk about something else. If you want to see what an arrogant stone wall looks like, you should follow the link and watch this interview. It's a doozy.
Don Young's KTVA Interview Video.
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