Transparency-related provisions in the summary of the chairman's mark that Sen. Max Baucus and the Senate Finance Committee released last week: Lots of new disclosure requirements for physicians who refer patients to hospitals in which they or their family members have a financial interest, for nursing homes, for hospitals, for medical device manufacturers, suppliers, and pharmaceutical companies. Little oversight of government (there's a few requirements for new entities created by the bill to act in a transparent manner). Still, what's more interesting is what's not transparent -- updates on that coming later. Here's the descriptions of ...
Continue readingDefense contractors join Turkish lobbying effort in pursuit of arms deals
The Defense Department's request last week for congressional approval of the sale of $8 billion worth of PAC-3 missiles to Turkey was the latest victory for a disparate group of interests including defense contractors, finance and energy corporations, trade groups, the Turkish government and a well-financed network of domestic advocacy nonprofits. Intersecting interests have led them to join forces and lobby on a number of issues, including the characterization of distant historical events.
Turkey and the domestic advocacy groups that promote the interests of Turkish-Americans did so to protect the Turkey's image, while U.S. companies sought to ...
Continue readingTurkey’s influence over lawmakers surfaces in Ohio hearing
Labeling the killing of 1.5 million Armenians between 1915 and 1923, many at the hands of Ottoman government, an act of genocide has been a controversial issue in Turkey, among some historians, in the U.S. Congress, and now in the unlikely venue of the Ohio Board of Elections, where recent hearings indirectly considered the government of Turkeys connection, if any, to Turkish advocacy groups in Washington.
Backed by lawyers from the Turkish American Legal Defense Fund, Rep. Jean Schmidt, R-Ohio, filed a false claims complaint against David Krikorian, who ran against her in 2008 as an independent and ...
Continue readingLobbying disclosure upheld
Details available from Legal Times blog here:
In the opening lines of the 48-page opinion, written by Judge Merrick Garland, the court points to a Supreme Court case in 1954 that said the public disclosure of individuals who are trying to influence legislation is "vital" national interest."Because nothing has transpired in the last half century to suggest that the national interest in public disclosure of lobbying information is any less vital than it was when the Supreme Court first considered the issue, we reject that challenge," Garland wrote in today's opinion, which was joined by Judges Douglas Ginsburg ...
Continue reading
In 1983, Congress changed Medicare payment system with little scrutiny
ClinicalTrials.gov missing basic data
Fewer than half of medical clinical trials published in the last year in leading medical journals are reported on the government site ClinicalTrials.gov, according to a new study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
According to the study, despite a 2005 requirement by medical journal editors that researchers register their studies online before acceptance in a major journal, just 147 out of 323 articles published in the past year were properly registered before the end of the trial. To meet the requirement, researchers are supposed to state what outcomes they will measure to figure out ...
Continue readingOpen Notebook: Tax Havens
Just a few odds, ends and bits of reporting that didn't make it into this post that relies on data from the Foreign Lobbying Influence Tracker that we collaborated on with our friends from ProPublica:
Numbers: I really hesitated to use the administration's claims of $210 billion in tax revenue raised (there's a fairly good breakdown of which proposals raise what part of the $210 billion in the New York Times here). Tax havens offer secrecy, so even if the government knows how much money they hold (I doubt that it does) it can't determine who ...
Continue readingBush Era Visitor Logs Show Visits from Evangelicals, Conservatives and a Foreign Lobbyist
Downloadable table of all earmark requests
Sunlight has compiled a list of House earmark requests--available here--for fiscal year 2010 which were disclosed this year for the first time under new rules, but scattered across hundreds of Web sites and in nearly unusable formats.
Sunshine.gop.gov, a new House Republican site, houses a machine-readable version of the database, but the site does not allow viewers to obtain all earmarks at a glance, instead forcing them to search for terms or browse a few at a time and making analysis impossible.
By writing a computer program to automatically access the site thousands of times, the ...
Continue readingMSNBC: Obama administration visitor disclosure policy exempts its first eight months
Bill Dedman, and investigative reporter at MSNBC.com, points out some limitations in the new policy announced by the White House today on providing open records:
...only visits after Sept. 15, 2009, will be revealed. The first wave of records is expected to be posted around Dec. 31.snip
...msnbc.com had sought records on all White House visitors. That request, for all visitors since Inauguration Day, still stands, and msnbc.com has filed an administrative appeal with the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Secret Service.
The new White House policy says it will consider requests for visitor ...
Continue reading
59063
