Congress’ family business, John Murtha edition
From the Washington Post:
The headquarters of Murtech, in a low-slung, bland building in a Glen Burnie business park, has its blinds drawn tight and few signs of life. On several days of visits, a handful of cars sit in the parking lot, and no trucks arrive at the 10 loading bays at the back of the building.Continue readingYet last year, Murtech received $4 million in Pentagon work, all of it without competition, for a variety of warehousing and engineering services. With its long corridor of sparsely occupied offices and an unmanned reception area, Murtech's most striking feature is ...
Roll Call makes PMA Group articles available online
In conjunction with the appearance of Paul Singer on C-Span's Washington Journal this morning (his bit starts about 1:03:30 in on the video), Roll Call has put online its amazing body of work tracking the PMA Group, the defunct lobbying firm under federal investigation that, along with its clients, provided oodles of campaign cash to more than 100 members of the House while securing hundreds of millions in earmarks for its clients.
Of all the stories there, this one, from March 17, still strikes me as the most interesting:
...top PMA officials also had financial stakes in ...Continue reading
Congress’ family business, Chris Dodd edition
Edmund H. Mahony and Jon Lender of the the Hartford Courant report on Sen. Christopher Dodd's wife:
Since the low-profile family wedding on a rise above the Connecticut River in 1999, Jackie M. Clegg Dodd's income has quadrupled to the mid-six-figure range. All of the increase is due to her appointment as a highly compensated member of multiple corporate boards of directors.Clegg Dodd, a former legislative aide and senior federal Export-Import Bank officer, was compensated at a rate of about $500,000 a year in 2007 and 2008 from seats on five corporate boards, according to the ...
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Hedge fund manager hosts Dodd fundraiser
Andrew Miga of the Associated Press reports on Sen. Chris Dodd's fundraising efforts for his reelection bid, and his tendency to raise it from interests with business before his committee:
The special interest cash leaves Dodd vulnerable to charges that he's too cozy with the very people he's supposed to regulate, the same crowd many blame for the financial meltdown. It's a problem lawmakers who rely on Wall Street campaign cash face as Congress tackles a sweeping financial regulation overhaul.One of the country's wealthiest hedge fund managers, John Paulson, recently hosted a New York ...
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Hill: 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 readingExaminer calls for more transparency in TARP
They mention Anu's report of how difficult it was just to get the names of the folks manning the TARP desk. The editorial is here. Key passage:
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Download 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 readingPrairie Parkway dead?
So says Chicago Sun-Times columnist Lynn Sweet:
In 2005, former House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) stuffed a $207 million earmark in a federal highway bill to help pay for the road, estimated to cost $1 billion to build. The 37-mile highway would roll through Kane and Kendall Counties, linking I-80 and I-88, the Reagan Memorial Tollway.Rep. Bill Foster (D-Ill.), who replaced Hastert, said Wednesday there is "a near consensus in the area," that "the first priority for money being spent on roads is probably not in that (Prairie Parkway) corridor but rather beefing up the existing north south ...
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Bloomberg: Dodd faces campaign cash shortage
Kristin Jensen and Jonathan D. Salant report that Sen. Christopher Dodd is facing a cash crunch as he gears up for his reelection bid:
The Democrat has less than half the campaign cash he had at a comparable point in his last re-election bid, when he faced far fewer hurdles. Last year, he emptied an account built up largely through financial-company employees' donations to pay for a presidential run; now, he has to replenish his coffers even as the firms his panel regulates struggle with losses and back away from their one-time champion turned critic....Dodd began the year with ...
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