Yesterday, Hot Air's Ed Morrissey wrote that two conservative groups are charging that Andrew Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, should have registered (or re-registered) as a lobbyist. They're citing White House visitor logs (Stern was the most frequent visitor in the fist batch of records released) and his own tweets as evidence.

The same day, Washington Post reported that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is trying to raise $50,000 to commission an economist to find fault with current health care reform proposals working their way through the Senate.

In a dispute on strategy over proposed medical device taxes in current health care legislation, St. Jude Medical Inc. has quit AdvaMed, the major medical device trade association in Washington.

The group played a key role in lobbying Congress to keep certain clinical trial data secret, as detailed in Sunlight's recent "Heart of the Matter" multi-media investigation. The investigation tells the story of Bray Patrick-Lake, 39, who participated in a clinical trial sponsored by St. Jude Medical, and later found out she could not access the data collected.

Two out of three of the panel participants at today's Food and Drug Administration (FDA) transparency hearing discussing whether data for unapproved drugs and medical devices should be made available to the public were pharmaceutical industry representatives.

As we reported in our investigation, Heart of the Matter, drug and medical device companies lobbied Congress to keep data secret for government-regulated clinical trials for products that don't make it to market.

Now the issue is before the agencies. An audience of about 75 people listened as the panel members discussed detailed case studies about whether and when the FDA or companies should make data available to the public. (The hearings were available via livestream here.)  For the most part, drug industry representatives stuck to the same arguments they made to Congress--that such data are proprietary and should remain secret.