Former VECO CEO Bill Allen was on the stand today in the trial of Alaska state Rep. Vic Kohring and testified that his own cousin attempted to blackmail him over VECO's work on Sen. Ted Stevens' Girdwood, Alaska home. The Alaska Daily News is covering the trial:
Kohring Lawyer John Henry Browne asked Veco founder Bill Allen about something that came up at the corruption trial last month of former state Rep. Pete Kott. It was regarding Allen’s nephew, Dave Anderson.
Anderson was blackmailing you and you threatened to kill him? Browne asked.
“I was not going to kill him, no,” Allen responded
But that’s the information the government had, wasn’t it? Browne asked.
Allen went back to a point he made a number of times during cross examination.
That’s just part of the story, Allen said. “You have to do the whole thing.”
Anyway, what was Anderson blackmailing him about? Browne asked.
“Ted Stevens’ house,” Allen anwered.
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Local Sunlight
Pennsylvania Polling Transparency Update
It looks like Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell has decided that the Department of State's recently announced policy to hide the locations of public polling places is a bad idea. Rendell rescinded the order to hide the polling place locations over the weekend.
Continue readingThis is Not Transparency
At first I thought this was a joke, but it's not. From the Keystone State we hear that Pennsylvanian officials have decided not to publish the locations of its polling places. What?
The spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Department of State said that they made the decision after considering the bombings in Spain days before the 2004 national elections. (Did anyone tell the folks up in Pennsylvania that the bombings in Spain were of trains, not polling places? Wouldn't it be more logical to beef up security around train stations and rail lines rather than hide the location of polling places?)
Besides running afoul of the state's open records law and making coordinated statewide voter-mobilization strategies more difficult, Pennsylvania's action will make it that much more difficult for citizens to vote. America has enough trouble with its elections without playing hide and seek with the voters. This is beyond ridiculous.
Continue readingFollow The Money
Earlier this week, the Senate passed the FY2008 Labor, HHS and Education Appropriations Bill (S.1710). Besides including $150 billion for the various departments, the bill also includes a public access mandate requiring all research funded by the National Institutes of Health be made available to other researchers and the public. The provision has been the Holy Grail of the Open Access Movement, a wide collection of scientists, researchers, universities, libraries, and organizations advocating for the funding of specific medical research. The coalition wants peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature to be made available online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. This, they believe, will be a big step in removing barriers to serious research. After all, this is research done with public dollars.
Sen. James Inhofe tried his best to sabotage the open access provision in the bill with two amendments, one eliminating it entirely and the other gutting it, as Andrew Leonard reports in Salon. Why, you might ask? Leonard says it's no coincidence that in this election cycle the senator has received over $13,000 from one of the largest for-profit publishers of scientific research in the world. The company, Reed-Elsevier, spent a total of $3,380,000 on lobbying in the United States in 2006. Inhofe was the largest recipient of Reed-Elsevier PAC money in 2006.
Continue readingBali Hai!
Out of all the congressional corruption scandals that have engulfed Washington since 2005 my personal favorite was and still is the Duke Cunningham bribery case. This scandal had it all, a bribery menu, a yacht named "Buoy Toy" illegally gifted to a member of Congress, quid pro quos of hookers for earmarks, and of course a cartoonishly corrupt contractor who liked to randomly yell "Boom shaka laka!" That contractor, Brent Wilkes, pled "not guilty" to the bribery charges that both his underling Mitchell Wade and the bribed Cunningham have admitted to, leading to the only trial in the sprawling corruption investigation. The trial has led to some terrific moments including testimony from the hookers hired by Wilkes for Cunningham and the ludicrous argument by the defense that all Wilkes was engaged in was aggressive lobbying. Now we get treated to this hilarious video of Wilkes and his team hosting Cunningham for a scuba diving trip. Wilkes is seen at the end doing his random shouting thing. Bali Hai!
The best places to follow the Cunningham case and the trial are TPM Muckraker, Seth Hettena's blog, and the San Diego Union Tribune. Hettena and the writers from the Union Tribune have both written their own books about Duke's corruption.
Continue readingYoung Donors Max Out, Need Diapers Changed
Competition among bundlers is getting so competitive that fundraisers are getting their children to chip in. These aren’t grown children by the way; these are toddlers, babies, and prepubescent children without incomes - unless of course they’re working as cockney bootblacks (“Straight shine’s a nickel; super buff’s a dime!”). The Washington Post reported yesterday on this effort by bundling donors using their children and nieces and nephews as ways of funneling ever more money into the coffers of their favored candidate.
Continue readingSuch campaign donations from young children would almost certainly run afoul of campaign finance regulations, several campaign lawyers said. But as bundlers seek to raise higher and higher sums for presidential contenders this year, the number who are turning to checks from underage givers appears to be on the rise.
"It's not difficult for a banker or a trial lawyer or a hedge fund manager to come up with $2,300, and they're often left wanting to do more," said Massie Ritsch, a spokesman for the Center for Responsive Politics. "That's when they look across the dinner table at their children and see an opportunity."
Why Tuesday?
Why Tuesday?, a cool new non-profit founded by New York attorney and civil rights activist Bill Wachtel, is using the capabilities of the Web 2.0 evolution to strengthen America's democratic process through increased voter participation. Founded in 2005, the group works to make election reform an issue politicians can't dodge. In an interview published this week by the LAist, Why Tuesday? executive director Jacob Soboroff says that their goal is to be the "woodpecker on the conscience of America", and advocate for making voting more secure, accessible and reliable. He says that they don't have the all the answers, but want to make sure election reform is an issue politicians, opinion leaders and ordinary citizens are talking about.
One way they do this is to encourage individuals to become correspondents...interview and video tape politicians on what they believe should be done to strengthen democracy and voting. They then ask the correspondent to post the video on their YouTube group.
Continue readingHouse Accepts Votes Design Input
I recently learned that the House is actively considering a redesign/upgrade of their public vote posting procedures, in terms of the format and functionality of the Clerk's House floor votes area.
I'd like to hear what sort of ideas and priorities everyone has about how one can interact with votes data. This is important from two perspectives, the data perspective and the citizen perspective.
Tranparency in the Election Spotlight
From OMB Watch:
Popular thinking tells us that for any trend, fad or heavily pursued activity, the pendulum will eventually swing back the other way. As we approach the 2008 elections, this may well be the case for government transparency, which, after years of increasing government secrecy, appears to be getting greater attention than ever before.
Elections often seem driven by the hottest or "sexiest" issues of the moment, too often involving more rhetoric and sensationalism than substantive issues of government policy. Most years, government transparency is considered far too dull an issue about the mundane day-to-day operations of government to attract much attention from candidates or voters. But as the presidential primaries approach, there are several indications that this year could include a much higher profile for government transparency as an issue. Continue reading
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