Brody Mullins had a terrific story yesterday in the Wall Street Journal that raises questions about whether six members of the Paw family, who live in a modest neighborhood in San Francisco and who list their occupation as "gift shop owner," could possibly make $45,000 in political contributions to Sen. Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.
Obviously digging into numerous databases, Mullins discovered that the Paws live in a modest 1,280 square foot house that they recently refinanced for $270,000. The head of the household is a mail carrier earning $49,000 a year. His wife is a homemaker. Mullins also figured out that the Paw family contributions are nearly identical to donations made by a wealthy New Yorker -- Norman Hsu -- who once listed the Paw family home as his own address. Hsu is a big fund raiser for Clinton.
How does this much money come from a family that doesn't appear to have these kinds of financial resources? It raises questions in the minds of many campaign finance experts (including yours truly) as to whether they were illegal contributions.Were the Paws "reimbursed" for their generous contributions to Clinton by Hsu? Hsu and the Paws deny any wrong doing. But it sure makes you wonder.
Given the crush for cash by all the presidential candidates, there are lots of stories like this in these databases.
Update: The Washington Post reports that Hilliary Clinton sees no reason to return the contributions by either Hsu or the Paw Family. Further Update: After reports surfaced in the LA Times today that there is an outstanding warrant out of Hsu, the Clinton campaign returns his money.
Continue readingMAPLight.org and OpenSecrets.org in the News
We were very pleased by David Pogue's column yesterday in the New York Times drawing attention to MAPLight.org and OpenSecrets.org, two of our largest grantees. And Pogue's take on what he found at MAPLight.org:"The first step to solving a problem is recognizing that you have one..." is just what we hope users of MAPLight.org would feel.
So don't go curl up and pull a blanket over your head. Check out MAPLight.org and begin to ask your legislators some questions.
Continue readingMAPLight.org’s New Money and Politics Search Engine
One of Sunlight's signature grantees, MAPLight.org, just launched a revolutionary new revolutionary search engine that reveals the connections between money and politics within Congress by effectively and elegantly presenting data from official voting records archived by Library of Congress with campaign contributions tracked and compiled by Sunlight grantee, the Center for Responsive Politics.
MAPLight.org's work truly embodies how to use Web 2.0 technology to shed light on the power campaign contributions have on federal legislation.
Vote for OpenSecrets.org Today!
One of our grantees -- Center for Responsive Politics' website http://www.opensecrets.org/ -- has been nominated for the "People's Choice" Webby Award as the best politics site on the Internet. Today is the last day you can vote so please do! OpenSecrets.org is responsible for not only the most comprehensive Congressional and presidential campaign finance databases but also databases that cover Congressional Travel, Personal Financial Disclosure, Lobbying, and the Revolving Door. They've created remarkable tools that many other of our grantees are using to do their work (Full disclosure: I was CRP's Director for 12 years.)
Continue readingSOTU and the Web
It was interesting to see how various bloggers and organizations used the Web last night to engage their networks around the President's State of the Union Speech, beyond their usual blogging. Here are few that showed up on my radar screen -- some of them more Web 2.0 in their approach than others. I must have missed a lot because this list isn't very large nor, frankly, for the most part, very innovative.
Josh Marshall's effort -- calling for video responses to the SOTU -- was the most interesting effort that I saw. Pretty innovative and he got some very fun responses.
Continue readingA New Year, A New Database
A new Congress is sworn in today with the promise of significant reform. And as Congress is sworn in, the Center for Responsive Politics is releasing a Revolving Door database that profiles more than 6,400 individuals who have worked in both the federal government and the private sector. The practice of lawmakers and staff leaving the Hill and then plying their contacts with their former colleagues on behalf of private interests is one of the most critiqued practices on the Hill. Now we really have a full, factual picture of what's going on.
Continue readingOpen Secrets is back – cross your fingers!
Well, all it takes it washing your car to make it rain. And it looks like all it took for OpenSecrets to get back on line was writing a blog to say it's off the air. Sort of.
At first it looked like Open Secrets was back online, but the only thing working was the home page. But by 11:40 am ET the website looked to be functioning normally. Congratulations to CRP on getting back in business. Let's hope their computer karma stays healthy between now and Election Day!
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No Open Secrets
Just a week before Election Day, the nation’s biggest archive of information on who’s paying the bills for the 2006 election is closed to the public. A computer glitch knocked the Center for Responsive Politics’ Open Secrets website off the air last Friday. It’s been offline ever since, and is still offline as I write this early Tuesday morning.
I’m not going to suggest that this is some election-eve conspiracy, but if it were it could hardly have come at a more critical time. This is the equivalent of Macy’s closing its doors for four days in the middle of the Christmas shopping season.
Continue readingSo How Are We Doing?
I thought it might be useful to take stock of how much attention the new databases released by Center for Responsive Politics (Congressional Personal Financial Disclosure and Travel) and OMB Watch (Government Grants and Contracts) attracted last week.
From Massie Ritsch at CRP:
In the first six days that the new personal finances and travel databases were online OpenSecrets.org logged nearly 140,000 unique visitors (though some may have visited over multiple days). OS logged more than 1.6 million page views and more than 7 million hits in that time.
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Momentum
Well, we certainly feel some momentum from our experiment in collaborative research over the weekend, and we’re bracing for the huge burst of interest that’s been expressed in the databases that are being released tomorrow by our grantees OMB Watch and Center for Responsive Politics. More than 225 attendees have signed up to join the press conference either in person or on the web. (Here’s the sign up information, join us if you can. (Go to www.ConnectLive.com/events/sunlightfoundation at 9:30 am tomorrow morning.)
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