Three lawmakers closely linked to the PMA Group lobbying and earmarks investigation have seen their collective campaign fundraising drop by... View Article
Continue readingHill: No campaign cash for Visclosky from former PMA Group clients
On April 3rd, we noted that Rep. Pete Visclosky, one of the most prolific recipients of campaign cash from and earmarker of federal dollars to PMA Group clients, had requested no earmarks--not a single one--for former clients of the firm for fiscal year FY 2010. Oddly enough, employees and PACs of former PMA Group clients donated nothing to Visclosky's reelection campaign in the first quarter of 2009, according to Roxana Tiron of the Hill.
Let's see...could there be a connection?
Yesterday, Glenn Reynolds linked a Hill story noting that for Rep. John Murtha, it was "business as ...
Continue readingBetter links to earmark requests…
...available here.
Continue readingWeekly Media Roundup – April 13, 2009
Each weekday, Sunlight’s communications team collects all the press mentions of Sunlight and of our grantees. Instead of just keeping... View Article
Continue readingDownload TCS’s earmark request spreadsheet
Our friends at Taxpayers for Common Sense announce that they have a downloadable spreadsheet with what looks to me to be the definitive list of links to earmark request disclosures from House members. The Hill gives some good examples of how hard it is to find the disclosures.
I'm looking at some of the actual requests today instead of playing find the earmark list. One of the things I've always wondered is what percentage of the earmarks that members request are brought to their attention by registered lobbyists.
Continue readingMaking sense of online earmark disclosures
As noted immediately below, House members started disclosing, on their official Web sites, their requests for earmarks (which members use to allocate federal funds for specific projects and recipients) last Friday. Over the weekend, I started looking at the disclosures, more to see what format the disclosures were in rather than whether they were online by a certain time. Since Roll Call first reported the changes, this has been a concern of mine.
If members used the same format for disclosure, it would be a simple matter for us or anyone else to download all the data and put them ...
Continue readingLinks to House earmark disclosures in one database
House members had to post their earmark requests for fiscal year 2010 online this weekend; the original deadline was Friday, but that was extended to Saturday at 5 p.m., according to CNN.
So how many members made the deadline? I can't be sure, but I tried to find out over the weekend. I went through 430-some Web sites (there are a few vacancies right now -- Rahm Emanuel's seat, Hilda Solis' seat, and Kirsten Gillibrand's seat) looking for those disclosures (sometimes it was really interesting, sometimes it was thankless drudgery). On 116 Web pages, I couldn't ...
Continue readingFormer PMA Group Clients Get Defense Earmarks from Murtha for 2010
Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., has requested defense related funding for five companies that hired the PMA Group last year, according to a review of the earmark requests released on the Congressman's website. Murtha has requested a total of $23.8 million to be directed to these companies.
You can search for the clients here (links to the search pages don't work).
And here's a breakdown for each of the five companies.
Advanced Acoustic Concepts - $5,000,000
Argon ST - $8,000,000
MTS Technologies - $5,000,000
Planning Systems Inc. - $2,300,000
QTL Bio Defense Systems ...
Continue readingDicks requests earmark for Concurrent Technologies
Rep. Norm Dicks requested one Defense earmark for one former client of PMA Group:
Enhanced Navy Shore Readiness Integration - $5,000,000Enhanced Navy Shore Readiness Integration targets Commander, Navy Installations Command (CNIC) prioritized opportunities for enhanced mission performance and execution to better enable Navy Fleet, Fighter, and Family readiness. Through this program, prioritized CNIC mission functions are streamlined and standardized on an enterprise scale. During this process, enabling technologies with potential for leap-ahead improvement are identified and demonstrated in real-world environments before being considered for implementation. Additionally, CNICs total force strategy is developed to ensure the right workforce capabilities ...
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Moran requests funds for Samueli Institute
The press release is here. The Washington Post profiled the research facility a while back:
Ask Wayne B. Jonas why the scientific foundation he directs is funding research into the effects of prayer, the use of homeopathy to fight bioterrorism and whether magnetic devices can heal orthopedic injuries, and he offers a straightforward answer: Science is the way to determine whether they work."We're trying to stimulate good-quality research," said Jonas, a former chief of the Office of Alternative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) who directs the nonprofit Samueli Institute for Information Biology (SIIB) in Alexandria ...
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