Sunlight and the Asian American Journalists Association is offering one of the last chances to get hands-on, in-person training on a whole host of new and improved money-in-politics tracking tools before the 2014 elections.
Continue readingAbout last night: State of the Union includes nods to special interests
Yesterday, we posted an item asking if influence data--campaign contributions and lobbying reports--could offer a useful prediction to the content of President Barack Obama's fourth State of the Union address. Did Obama include items on their lobbying agendas? How well did we do?
Reasonably well, we think. Of the ten areas we made predictions, we were right or partially right on eight of them. And in our two misses, we knew we were pretty far out on a limb when we suggested that Obama would suggest bolstering the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act to tweak Sheldon Adelson, who along with ...
Continue readingStephen Colbert, the time has come: Help Sunlight follow the money
Stephen Colbert, host of The Colbert Report, is in Washington today to register his new Super PAC with the FEC.... View Article
Continue readingIntroducing Operation Transbearency: Follow the Honey
If you follow Sunlight in any capacity, you may have noticed a seemingly innocuous typo slip into our writing of... View Article
Continue readingCrowdsourcing Your Way to a More Open Election
Crowdsourcing makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Think about it: tapping into the ingenuity of your peers to... View Article
Continue readingBecome a Sunlight Campaign Ad Monitor
In January, I noted that the Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizens United v. FEC case would open the “floodgates... View Article
Continue readingFollow the Money: What kind of wave will 2010 bring ashore?
Opinion polls and prognosticators alike suggest that Republicans are poised to make a major comeback in this year’s midterm elections. The comparison du jour is the 1994 “wave” that swept 54 Democrats in the House of Representatives out of office and the Republicans into power for the first time since 1956. A more accurate comparison, based on a Sunlight Foundation analysis of campaign finance disclosure information, would be the 2006 elections when Democrats won 31 seats and a bare majority in the House.
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This week I have highlights from
Follow The Money
Last evening, the Firedoglake hosted another installment of their Sunday Book Salons, where John Anderson took questions online about his new book Follow the Money: How George W. Bush and the Texas Republicans Hog-Tied America, released earlier this fall. In the book Anderson gives an overview of the connections between elite Houston law firms, Karl Rove, Grover Norquist, Tom DeLay and his K Street Project to Jack Abramoff. I haven't read the book yet, but last night's discussions makes me want to.
As an Austin American-Statesman review states, Anderson used previously reported or exposed facts to retell this story. By following Deep Throat's advice, Anderson shows the overarching network that put George W. Bush in the White House, DeLay out of a job, Abramoff in prison, and the GOP in the minority.
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