Rep. Jo Bonner earmarked $245,000 for the Bay Area Food Bank for construction of a commercial-size kitchen. Bay Area Food Bank, which distributes food donated by grocery stores, restaurants and the like to soup kitchens and homeless shelters, doesn't have a federal lobbyist, according to the Senate Office of Public Records. To double check, I looked the organization up in Guidestar, a great resource for finding out about nonprofits--their forms 990 show no payments for lobbying. I also ran the names of the organization's executives and board members through OpenSecrets.org looking for campaign contributions, and found ...
Continue readingBonner earmark #3
I thought this one would be harder.
Rep. Jo Bonner, the newest member of the Appropriations Committee, secured $245,000 for "Atmore road improvement" in the Transportation and Housing & Urban Development Appropriations bill for fiscal year 2008. (Sen. Richard Shelby requested the same in the Senate.)
The City of Atmore spent $80,000 on a pair of lobbying firms in 2007, the Bloom Group Inc. and Bradley, Arant, Rose & White LP. The Bloom Group's year-end report says, on page 2, that the firm was lobbying on, among other things, "Transportation HUD Appropriations bill, seeking federal funding for city projects ...
Continue readingAnother Bonner Earmark, another lobbying link
Going for the low hanging fruit first (earmarks in EarmarkWatch.org). So let's look at the $141,000 that the Alabama School of Math and Science in Mobile, Ala., got in the Labor, Health and Human Services and Education Appropriations Act.
The school--a public, residential school for sophomores through seniors who are gifted in science and math--employed Capitol Link, a lobbying firm, from 2004 through 2007. During that time, there was no six-month period in which the school paid the firm more than $10,000, so it's impossible to tell from the disclosures how much the school spent ...
Continue readingAderholt’s bio: record levels, responsibility
I'm still looking mostly at the earmarks that Rep. Jo Bonner, R-Ala., has sponsored, but while I was looking at them, I came across the official biography that Rep. Robert B. Aderholt, another Alabama Republican, has on his Web site. The language is instructive:
Congressman Aderholt serves on the powerful House Appropriations Committee, as a member of the Homeland Security Subcommittee, the Transportation, Housing and Urban Development Subcommittee and the Commerce Justice, Science and Related Agencies Subcommittee....Congressman Aderholt has continued to work toward bringing record levels of funding to Alabama for transportation projects. Congressman Aderholt campaigned on a ...
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Following Bonner’s earmarks
Let's start with this earmark, because it's already in EarmarkWatch.org, and hence easy to research. A few interesting notes...
Providence Hospital is the beneficiary of the earmark (the final amount of the Earmark was $1.2 million, not the $1.5 million that EarmarkWatch, which draws on older data, shows). One of their two lobbying firms is Cassidy & Associates. In the midyear 2007 lobbying disclosure filing, the firm disclosed that the specific issue on which they lobbied was "National Defense Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2008-healthcare." (See page two of the form).
I hopped over to OpenSecrets ...
Continue readingBonner & earmarks
Last week, our friends in the Porkbusting movement expressed their dismay that the Republican House leadership chose Rep. Jo Bonner, R-Ala., over Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., for an open slot on the House Appropriations Committee.
I thought I'd do a little open research on Bonner's fiscal year 2008 earmarks, a complete list of which can be downloaded here from our friends at Taxpayers for Common Sense. Bonner was the sole House sponsor of 14 earmarks worth more than $17 million (ten were also sponsored by Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., one by Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., and one by ...
Continue readingInspector General launches probe of Traffic.com contracts
Transportation's Inspector General has launched an investigation of the Transportation Technology Innovation and Demonstration program--at the request of a pair of members of Congress, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y.--to determine whether the program, as administered by the Federal Highway Administration, fulfilled the goals set for it by Congress and whether FHWA met competitive procurement requirements that "intended to expand the number of firms providing surveillance services."
A brief announcement is here and the full release is here.
Congress launched TTID (the original alphabet soup name for the program was ITIP -- the Intelligent Transportation ...
Continue readingWorking the phones for Where Are They Now?
Since we've not had too many volunteers making phone calls to verify if the information collected as part of our distributed research project is accurate, I'm making calls this afternoon.
Here's reviewing a few:
Ric Molen went from working as a Legislative Director in Sen. Conrad Burns' (R-Mt.), office to work as a lobbyist with Lent, Scrivner & Roth in 2005 and his clients include major defense contractors such as Qualcomm and CH2M Hill. Since the time, Molen has made campaign contributions of a total of over $9,000, according to campaign finance records from the Center for ...
Continue readingInvesting in “US Inc.”
Citigroup reportedly is looking to raise additional foreign capital:
Citigroup is putting the final touches to its second big capital-raising effort in as many months, seeking up to $14bn from Chinese, Kuwaiti and public market investors.Under the proposal being discussed, the bulk of the money roughly $9bn would be most likely to come from China, people familiar with the negotiations say. The Kuwait Investment Authority would contribute about $1bn, while $2bn to $4bn would be raised through a public placement of shares.
The article, from the Financial Times, notes that Citigroup's attempt to shore up its finances by ...
Continue readingCongress to meet new patrons?
The New York Times reports that Merrill Lynch and several other big financial firms are seeking foreign investment to offset their losses brought on by their heavy betting on the subprime mortgage market, a development that may be troubling some in Congress:
To shore up its deteriorating finances, Merrill is now in discussions with investors in the United States, Asia and the Middle East, including American private equity firms, to raise about $4 billion in the coming days, these people said.The developments underscore the rising toll that the mortgage crisis is taking on many once-proud Wall Street banks. In ...
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