Last night’s vote by the Senate to end the debate on S. 3217, Restoring American Financial Stability, failed 57-42 with two majority party senators voting no; we'll be following the proceedings as events warrant on Sunlight Live.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev, planned to end the debate yesterday, preventing any more amendments from being added to the bill, and moving forward with final debate and a vote on the bill itself. Reid will instead have to attempt cloture once again--most likely later today.
Among the Democrats who dissented were Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., and Sen. Russ Feingold ...
Medicare data reveals nursing home abuse and neglect
Resident #208 was found by inspectors at Capital Healthcare Center in Tallahassee, Fla., in a pool of urine. On July 16, 2009, inspectors found that the the resident -- who was incontinent -- hadn't been changed for five hours.
Other residents complained of ill treatment; one told inspectors he or she had fallen several times recently, and was then accused of faking those falls "to get staff in trouble." (The reports hide the identities of those making allegations.)
The reports go on. The facility was cited on multiple occasions for allowing pressure sores to develop on immobile patients, giving unnecessary catheters ...
Most Drug Trial Results Analyzed by FDA Hidden From View
Before a new drug finds its place on pharmacy shelves or a new device lands in the hands of a surgeon, it goes through a long and complex approval process by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
A new drug, for instance, goes through laboratory testing and animal studies before the drugmaker submits an application to FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. If it gets the agency’s green light, then the human clinical trials begin, starting with a small number of participants at initial phases and growing to hundreds if not thousands of participants in the ...
Senate expenditures go online at OpenSecrets.org
The Center for Responsive Politics' OpenSecrets site just added expenditures by Senate campaigns to their site. The data was released by the Federal Election Commission for the first time last week. CRP has a detailed listing of all the expenses incurred by the committees, the recipients and the dates of the expenditures. For instance, we know that in the 2010 cycle Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., spent more than $31,000 for catering at the Charlie Palmer Steakhouse.
And a quick search on our Party Time data shows that at least four fundraisers for Reid were held at the venue and ...
The Fed’s growing again, overseas
Earlier this week, the Federal Reserve reopened one of the special lending windows it created in January 2009 to ease the failing global economy. The move comes amid a weakening euro and after Greece, Spain and Portugal have all created austerity packages to help fix their struggling economies.
These currency swaps are a sign that the global economy is still far from stable two years after the financial meltdown of 2008.
The Fed has already infused five foreign central banks with $1.3 billion through a process called central bank liquidity swaps in order to reduce the possibility of any ...
Lobbying data is public but not reliably searchable
The 1995 Lobbying Disclosure Act, requires all lobbyists to file reports with the Clerk of the House of Representatives and Secretary of the Senate and that those two offices “maximize public access” to the documents through “computerized systems.” But the searchable database of every filing by registered federal lobbyists, made available through the Senate’s Office of Public Records, has a major problem: its search engine doesn’t work correctly.
One issue is reliability — searches by a wide array of Center reporters have frequently yielded false negatives or been stymied by system outages. In fact, a registrant search for “American ...
Moran requests funds for alternative medicine center
Rep. Jim Moran, D-Va., a member of the House Appropriations Committee, has requested a $1.5 million earmark
to fund an alternative medicine center in Washington D.C. run by a
doctor with an alternative past. The request is for the FY 2011
Department of Defense budget and will go to the Center for Mind-Body
Medicine, run by Dr. James Gordon.
The money would fund a
program that is aimed at helping health professionals in the military
maintain their mental and physical abilities in order for them to
effectively and continually help troops suffering from post traumatic
stress disorder, depression ...
Financial reform fundraising: Are lobbyists for Wall St. firms hosting hundreds of events for lawmakers?
Sam Geduldig, a lobbyist for high profile financial firms, banks and credit card companies who has the ability to "kill legislative threats to his clients," is listed as a host on 18 invitations to fundraisers for Republican members of Congress and their leadership committees, a Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group review of Party Time data from January 2009 to the present has found.
Geduldig's name appears on both fundraising invitations in Party Time and the
Center for Responsive Politics' lobbying database; Sunlight is also releasing a spreadsheet listing all matches of names hosts to names of lobbyist with links to ...
Earmark Transparency Act will finally bring transparency to earmarks
The Earmark Transparency Act of 2010, a bipartisan bill introduced today by Sens. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., John McCain, R-Ariz., Russ Feingold, D-Wisc., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., vastly improves the way in which information about earmarks is disclosed. The bill requires a centralized, detailed, downloadable database that would track every earmark requested.
While Congress has greatly improved the amount of information available about earmarks, it has not provided that information in user friendly formats. A single point of access to machine readable, standardized earmark data has been needed since the House and Senate Appropriations Committees announced that they would require ...
More transparency sought from White House’s OMB in regulation reviews
Under President Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s, the White House Office of Management and Budget became known as the place where promising new regulations died behind closed doors. So opaque was the OMB review process that a research and advocacy group called OMB Watch materialized in 1983 to “lift the veil of secrecy.”
Ten years later, unhappy with the lack of transparency, President Bill Clinton signed Executive Order 12866, which sought to “restore the integrity and legitimacy of regulatory review and oversight [and] make the process more accessible and open to the public.”
Seventeen years after that, the question ...
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