House Ways and Means Chairman Charles B. Rangel predicted, on C-SPAN's Newsmakers program that aired Sunday, Feb. 1, 2009, that his multitude of ethics woes would soon disappear. "I think that next Tuesday you will see a break in this and as soon as the Ethics Committee organizes they ought to be able to dismiss this," National Journal's CongressDaily quoted the Rangel as saying.
If so, it's hard to imagine that the Select Committee on Ethics will have devoted anything more than a cursory glance at the various issues raised. Consider just one aspect, for which documents ...
Continue readingUpdate on Earmark Disclosure
Just spoke to Kirstin Brost, the press contact of the House Appropriations Committee, who was kind enough to tell me that while not all of the details of the new earmark rules have been worked out, when members disclose their earmark requests, they will include the name of the beneficiaries. (Our friends at Taxpayers for Common Sense told us they had heard the same thing).
Still under discussion is whether requests will be disclosed in a standardized format or however members choose to release it.
Continue readingNY Times: Clinton Foundation Donor got help from Hillary
Digging down deep into the list of Clinton Foundation donors, the New York Times finds that a donor had gotten considerable help from Sen. Hillary Clinton:
An upstate New York developer donated $100,000 to former President Bill Clinton's foundation in November 2004, around the same time that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton helped secure millions of dollars in federal assistance for the businessman's mall project.Mrs. Clinton helped enact legislation allowing the developer, Robert J. Congel, to use tax-exempt bonds to help finance the construction of the Destiny USA entertainment and shopping complex, an expansion of the Carousel ...
Continue reading
Updates to Clinton donors
Just a running commentary on what I'm finding.
Cool -- Muckety already has some of this data entered.
I wonder how many of these donors have lobbyists. Alltel certainly does, although skimming their reports (here's one) it doesn't seem that they have international issues. Also, wonder how many turn up in FARA filings...
Continue readingWall Street Journal profiles donors…
Clinton Foundation releases donor list;
...and, thanks to my Sunlight colleague Larry Makinson and DabbleDB.com, we've got it available in a database format. The source material is here, but I couldn't get into the first page (glad that Larry could).
It would be interesting to see what issues the donors are interested in, where they come from, what their own economic interests are, and whether these could potentially create conflicts of interest for Sen. Hillary Clinton, our next Secretary of State.
Contributors to the foundation include governments of Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Norway, Jamaica, Oman and Brunei have contributed, as have government ...
Continue readingMadoff’s firm lobbied for earmarks
Yesterday I was talking to some folks about whether, given the trillions potentially committed to bailouts, there's any sense in continuing to probe earmarks. I say of course there is.
Our friends at the Center for Responsive Politics put together a handy guide to the political influence wielded by Bernard L. Madoff, who was arrested and charged with running a hedge fund that allegedly operated as a giant ponzi scheme. Among the information CRP flagged was a lobbying disclosure from 2005 from the firm of Lent, Scrivner & Roth, LLC, which shows, on page three, that Bernard L. Madoff Investment ...
Continue readingBlagojevich indictment visualized
I found it at the Chicago Tribune. Here's the text of it in Many Eyes, as a word tree. Interesting words to search in addition to Intercepted: Senate seat, Tribune Editorial Board, Campaign and Rezko.
Continue reading
Feds: Illinois Governor put Obama’s Senate seat up for sale
Here's the summary from Congress Daily (subscription only):
Federal prosecutors say Illinois Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich engaged in a "staggering" conspiracy to sell or trade the Senate seat vacated by President-elect Obama in return for jobs and other personal benefits for himself and his wife, Patti. Blogojevich and Chief of Staff John Harris were arrested this morning. A 76-page FBI affidavit said the 51-year-old Democratic governor was intercepted on court-authorized wiretaps over the last month conspiring to sell or trade the vacant Senate seat. "I want to make money," the affidavit quotes the governor as saying. U.S. Attorney ...Continue reading
Financial Bailout: Do Interests of Automakers and Members Diverge?
Reading the restructuring plan that General Motors put together makes me wonder whether, in a broad sense, there isn't an insuperable conflict of interest between members of Congress and the automakers. Consider just one aspect of the plan:
...the number of GM retailers is expected to decline to 4,700 by 2012. This will occur primarily in metropolitan and suburban areas where GM has too many dealers to serve the market. In the Plan, it is projected these dealers will be reduced by 35%, increasing annual throughput for the remaining outlets to a more competitive level with other high-volume ...Continue reading
59063
