This passage is from page 85 of the Labor, HHS, Education portion of the committee report for the big appropriations bill:
Buildings and Facilities
Within the amount provided for Buildings and Facilities, the bill includes $30,000,000 for nationwide repairs and improvements; $71,300,000 for the completion of Building 24 on the Roybal Campus in Atlanta, Georgia; $1,500,000 for facilities and equipment at the CDC laboratory in Ft. Collins, Colorado; and the remaining funds shall be used to begin planning and construction of Buildings 107 . and 108 on the Chamblee Campus in Atlanta, Georgia.
...don't ...
Continue readingWho’s seeking A Piece of the Action?
The bailout (the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, TARP, etc.) and the stimulus (the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act) are massive pieces of legislation with lots of moving parts. Thus, the more eyeballs on them and what's around them, the better.
A Piece of the Action? tracks one aspect of the unfolding age of bailing and stimulating -- interests hiring Washington lobbyists to at the very least monitor and likely to try to influence how the government spends its money.
As noted immediately below, this database is an imperfect resource. But it's what we can do ...
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 ...
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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 readingNotes and Methodology on the Tariff Suspensions
A few words on the tariff suspensions database...
The primary sources of data come from the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Trade (there's an Excel spread sheet available for download here and the U.S. International Trade Commission (their analyses of miscellaneous tariff bills from the last decade are online here).
The Ways and Means spreadsheet listed the bill number and name, its sponsor, a link to the bill text in Thomas, and a link to a file containing any comments the committee received about the bill (there are details on the commenting process here). USITC analyses of ...
Continue readingTime can’t find an outrageous Defense earmark
Time Magazine offers its list of the top ten wasteful earmarks proposed in 2008 (note that many of these were proposed but not funded -- download a complete list of earmarks that were funded by going here.
Surprisingly, there's not a single Defense earmark on the list. While $98,000 earmarks for walking tours to colonial era taverns and race tracks might seem ridiculous, how about the $2 million Rep. Harold Rogers, R-Ky., secured for UH-60 transmission drip pans, which Anu wrote about here (and note that this is a new earmark).
Past examples aren't hard to find --
Continue readingNew database brings transparency to tariff bills
Though they likely won't become law in 2008, more than 800 bills that were introduced by 116 members of the House, that would cut taxes on imports by an estimated $1.1 billion, and that were specifically requested by 120 companies and organizations that would benefit from them, are still pending in the 110th Congress. The bills reduce or eliminate tariffs on everything from unicycles to storage batteries for hybrid cars, from hair fibers of the rare vicua to chemicals for making rodent poison. Of the named beneficiaries, 65 hired in-house or outside lobbyists that listed specific bills or ...
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.
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