...is what can make crafting a distributed research project, like Teresa DeRoco used to work for Sen. George Allen. However, DeRoco no longer works for Tew Cardenas LLP. Page 13 of this lobbyist disclosure report filed in August 2007 by the National Association of Manufacturers lists a Teresa DeRoco Cupit; this wedding announcement seems to confirm it's the same Teresa DeRoco who worked in Sen. George Allen's office:
[DeRoco] served on the staff of Senator George Allen of Virginia and is currently employed by the National Association of Manufacturers in Washington, DC.Sadly, the boxes we allow one ...
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New, improved Senate lobbying disclosure site is up and running
As I noted here, the Senate Office of Public Records lobbying disclosure site is officially up and running (and had been since New Year's Eve--apparently my browsers kept showing the cached version of the old site--which, for diehard fans of it, is still available here). Pam Gavin, the superintendent of public records, told me that about 90 percent of the 2007 midyear reports in the lobbying database were filed electronically, so much of the year's records will be searchable. And, going forward in 2008, all forms will have to be filed that way, greatly enhancing the value of ...
Continue readingBetter Online Lobbyist Disclosure — update
Last night, I came across an enhanced site for looking up lobbying records posted online by the Senate Office of Public Records. To give an idea of how much better it is, I can tell you that with one search that 22 organizations--including top political donors Citigroup, Deloitte & Touche, Ernst & Young, Exxon Mobil and PricewaterhouseCoopers, explicitly mention S. 681, the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act. (Perhaps it should be expected that the Swiss Bankers Association also has an interest in the legislation, although one thing I learned some years back when I was researching taxes is that Switzerland is no ...
Continue readingSenate Lobbyist Disclosure Enhanced
Okay, I'm a total geek -- looking up lobbying records at 15 minutes to midnight on New Year's Eve. (The nine-year-old made it to about 11:15 this year, then conked out...) But I hope I'm the first to report that the Senate Office of Public Records has introduced a greatly enhanced search interface for lobbying records -- one that allows users to search specific lobbying issues.
Now you can see who's lobbying on tobacco, a specific bill, Iran, or whatever else you might want to check out.
It will be a very happy new year for us ...
Continue readingMcCain & Lobbyists
The Washington Post's Jeffrey H. Birnbaum and John Solomon report on Sen. John McCain's ties to lobbyists--especially the 32 lobbyists who are designated fundraisers (the preferred term is bundlers, but there are more colorful terms available to us) for his campaign.
The story does a good job of identifying who these lobbyists are and what interests their firms represent. The Post references this joint study by Public Citizen and the Campaign Finance Institute, but it looks to me like their numbers are different than the Post's. The study says that McCain has 20 lobbyists among his bundlers ...
Continue readingTidbits for Iowans
DLA Piper, the most generous backer of Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign, lobbies for defense giant Lockheed Martin on environmental issues (perchlorate, and this bill in particular), for First Kuwaiti
General Trading & Contracting Co. (which has been accused of paying kickbacks to a Kellogg Brown & Root manager), and a private citizen who, DLA Piper reports, has paid it $200,000 to, among other things, "urge the Secretary of State to designate the Quds Force, a unit of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, as a foreign terrorist organization."
Blank Rome, the top giver to John McCain's campaign, lobbies ...
Continue readingDIA update
Actually, nothing to report. I called DIA, and they're looking into the anomaly.
Meanwhile, one of the other agencies mentioned in that Secrecy News reported will withhold its contracts apparently hasn't been reporting any; it does appear that there's a $6.9 million anomaly for the Department of Defense Counterintelligence Field Activity...
Continue readingA $471 million anomaly?
The graph above, from FedSpending.org, shows the total value of contracts for which the Defense Intelligence Agency was the funding agency (for a definition, see here) from 2000 through 2007 (for 2007, only partial data is available). In 2005, the total value of contracts is $471 million; every other year, the total ranges from a low of $2.5 million in 2002 to a high of $19 million in 2006. See for yourself, and note that the numbers from the federal government are the same.
The Defense Intelligence Agency is one of the Pentagon agencies that reduced transparency by ...
Continue readingEarmarks Boost Small Kentucky Businesses
After it hired a lobbyist and its employees' contributed to a member of Congress' leadership political action committee, a
Over the last three years, Rep. Harold Rogers, R-Ky., says he has earmarked at least $10.4 million in defense funds for Phoenix Products, Inc., a small company in McKee, Ky., that makes aircraft accessories, including custom V.I.P. interiors for Black Hawk helicopters that offer the finest leather," fabric, naugahyde and carpet, according to the firm's Web site.
In the 2008 Defense Appropriations Act that was signed into ...
Continue readingGovernmentDocs.org Debuts from CREW
Our friends at CREW are providing a fantastic resource for reporters, bloggers, citizens and government document junkies--GovernmentDocs.org: An online compendium of scanned images of documents acquired from government agencies through the Freedom of Information Act by (right now) a handful of nonprofit groups (including the correspondence logs collected through Real Time's FOIA project). Documents that once would have been filed away can have second and third lives online, where they can be read, annotated, tagged, and otherwise scrutinized by anyone who signs up to create an account.CREW also uses OCR technology to make the images word-searchable ...
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