Lawmakers on the Senate's Banking Committee will discuss Tuesday how to reform the housing market, focusing on smaller banks' access to the secondary mortgage market. This market includes mortgage-backed securities, the complex financial arrangements that helped topple the U.S. Economy a few years ago.
Sunlight Live will provide a video stream of the 10 a.m. hearing and blog during the event to provide more context to this discussion, including insights into the financial connections that could influences the senators on the committee and the witnesses testifying on the topic. Some of the listed witnesses have made campaign ...
Continue readingFEC proposes rule to allow federal officeholders, candidates to appear at Super PAC fundraisers
In response to a request by a pair of Democratic Super PACs, the Federal Election Commission has proposed a new rule that would allow members of Congress, federal candidates and national political party officials to appear and speak at fundraisers for independent expenditure-only committees, or Super PACs, but would bar them from asking corporations, labor unions or individuals for the unlimited contributions that fueled the spending of these outside groups in the 2010 election cycle.
The FEC issued the proposed rule, which will be considered at a commission meeting on June 30, after James Bopp Jr., the conservative lawyer who ...
Continue readingAmerican Crossroads reports contributions of $3.8 million this year
American Crossroads, the Republican group that spent more than any other Super PAC in the 2010 elections, has raised $3.8 million since January for the 2012 election cycle, according to a report submitted to the FEC on Thursday.
The group had to file the report because it spent money in the special election for New York's 26th District House seat. Crossroads spent about $690,000 on independent expenditures there, almost all of it against the opponents of the Republican candidate, Jane Corwin. Democrat Kathleen Hochul won the race. American Crossroads also spent money on Tea Party candidate Jack ...
Continue readingDemocratic Super PAC raises individual, union, corporate and Super PAC contributions
The House Majority PAC, one of the two Democratic Super PACs currently seeking permission from the Federal Election Commission to have federal candidates and party officials solicit funds for them, has disclosed its first batch of donors in the 2012 election cycle. Among the big givers are stalwart Democratic donors, including unions like the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees ($200,000) and the Communications Workers of America ($50,000), individuals like Fred Eychaner ($100,000) and George Soros ($75,000), trial law firm Kazan McClain Lyons Greenwood & Harley ($10,000), tech company Integrated Archive Systems ($25,000 ...
Continue readingPrivate hedge funds win registration delay
Some private hedge funds won't have to register with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) until next year, winning a delay in a requirement set out in the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul law, reports the Wall Street Journal.
The Dodd-Frank financial overhaul law mandated that certain hedge funds that had been exempt from registering as investment advisers with the SEC would have to file their paperwork by July 21, 2011, the anniversary of the law. The SEC is expected to adopt final rules today setting out the requirements for registration, which would include the delay.
The SEC's ...
Continue readingA primer for tonight’s presidential address on Afghanistan
President Obama will unveil his plan tonight for pulling out the roughly 30,000 troops sent to Afghanistan during the December 2009 troop surge. While all kinds of factors go into foreign policy decisions, especially when it comes to putting troops in harm's way, it's worth noting that the Afghanistan operation has been the subject of intensive lobbying, has been prone to fraud, waste and abuse in federal contracting and raises issues of government accountability.
While Obama will cover a number of issues raised by the ongoing war in Afghanistan, the following topics most likely will not make ...
Continue readingAnd then there were eight Palin accounts
How many email accounts did Sarah Palin use as Alaska governor? Last week, the answer, tallied in an earlier story, was “at least six.” This week, it’s “at least eight.”
Long-time Palin watcher Andrée McLeod wrote Sunlight to point out another address hiding in plain sight. Gov.palin@yahoo.com, which Sunlight identified, turns out to be a separate account from govpalin@yahoo.com (note the lack of a dot), which we didn’t. We skipped over that, because some email providers — including Gmail — ignore the dot, treating those as the same account, but a quick test confirmed ...
Continue readingLawmakers neglect to report ties to nonprofits
Two members of Congress left some information in the dark when filling out their personal financial disclosure forms, which were made public last week.
According to ethics rules, if a member of Congress sits on the board of directors at a nonprofit, he or she is supposed to disclose the position. But at least two representatives—Corrine Brown, D-Fla., and Ander Crenshaw, R-Fla.—have failed to do so. The lawmakers' positions were discovered while researching lobbying reports, where lobbyists report honorary gifts to charities tied to members of Congress. There could be many more members of Congress making the same ...
Continue readingInvestment adviser contributions remain secret
Starting in March 2011, investment advisers who have government clients must keep records of campaign contributions made to elected officials or candidates. But these records are kept secret--buried in internal files, out of the public eye, and available for perusal only by certain government officials.
The new rules were established by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) after years of "pay to play" scandals rocked multiple cities and states, in which investment advisers representing large public pension programs used various schemes to funnel campaign contributions to elected officials or candidates. In addition to requiring investment advisers to keep ...
Continue readingPalin used six email accounts as governor
On Friday, reporters in Juneau, Alaska, began to sift through and scan more than 24,000 pages of emails to and from former Governor Sarah Palin, just released in response to requests made when she was governor. But they had full coverage of just two of her email accounts--and perhaps not the most interesting ones--because Palin had at least six accounts: one for public contact, one for internal state business, one for anything confidential and others for a mix of state and personal business.
Palin’s use of private accounts has been previously reported, but the just-released emails--which Sunlight is ...
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