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5,000 earmark requests databased
By Bill Allison Jul 27, 2009 2:39 p.m.Our friends at Washington Watch have had some success in their effort to turn messy, un-formatted member earmark requests into usable, analyzable data:
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Washington Watch Releases Earmark Request Entry Form
By Bill Allison Jul 20, 2009 7:43 p.m.For the first time in 2009, members of Congress had to release their earmark requests to the public. As we've documented before, this information is scattered over 535 Web sites in all kinds of different formats. Jim Harper and Washington Watch have now released a tool that allows volunteers to capture that earmark information for posterity, centralize it in a single location, and allow for all kinds of additional analysis and investigation. And, if you participate, you can win a Kindle!
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Better links to earmark requests...
By Bill Allison Apr 15, 2009 9:48 p.m....available here.
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Cities seeking a Piece of the Action?
By Bill Allison Feb 26, 2009 1:43 p.m.From the A Piece of the Action? database, here's a list of cities that have hired lobbyists who have reported that the bailout or the stimulus is a specific lobbying issue, complete with links (if any) to project requests on the excellent StimulusWatch.org page for those cities:
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Who's seeking A Piece of the Action?
By Bill Allison Feb 23, 2009 5:48 p.m.The bailout (the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, TARP, etc.) and the stimulus (the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act) are massive pieces of legislation with lots of moving parts. Thus, the more eyeballs on them and what's around them, the better.
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Lobbying for a Piece of the Bailout and Stimulus Action?
By Bill Allison Feb 23, 2009 4:46 p.m.First a word of caution: when the title of a database ends with a question mark (in this case, A Piece of the Action?, approach it with some caution.
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Genealogy of the Stimulus Bill
By Bill Allison Feb 9, 2009 9:11 p.m.The current economic crisis does seem to present a combination of circumstances (the housing crisis, a credit crisis, declining international trade, rising unemployment), some of which are causes, some of which are symptoms, none of which--of course--are particularly pleasant for those going through them. So how does Congress, legislatively, address new circumstances? Do members and their staffs (and the lobbyists whispering in their ears) craft bills to solve the problems at hand? Or do they go through their archives and relabel old bills as solutions to new problems?
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NY Times: Clinton Foundation Donor got help from Hillary
By Bill Allison Jan 5, 2009 2:32 a.m.Digging down deep into the list of Clinton Foundation donors, the New York Times finds that a donor had gotten considerable help from Sen. Hillary Clinton:
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Wall Street Journal profiles donors...
By Bill Allison Dec 18, 2008 9:21 p.m....here
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Clinton Foundation releases donor list;
By Bill Allison Dec 18, 2008 8:12 p.m....and, thanks to my Sunlight colleague Larry Makinson and DabbleDB.com, we've got it available in a database format. The source material is here, but I couldn't get into the first page (glad that Larry could).
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Financial Bailout: Who does Dodd see at his fundraisers?
By Bill Allison Sep 24, 2008 2 a.m.Among Sen. Christopher Dodd's top career donors are employees, their family members and PACs of the following players in the nation's financial meltdown: Citigroup ("written off and lost $53.6 billion through the credit crunch so far, which is more than any other bank or broker,") Bear Stearns ("Bear Stearns's mortgage business, a big driver of profits, has been eviscerated,"), SAC Capital Partners (vehemently denies charge that they helped bring down Bear Stearns), American International Group (saved by an emergency $85 billion rescue), Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley (each of which are morphing into bank holding companies), Greenwich Capital Markets ("a top issuer of mortgage-backed securities in the subprime market, Royal Bank of Scotland (which owns Greenwich Capital Markets), Credit Suisse Group (which misled some investors about its auction rate securities), Merrill Lynch (which needed Bank of America to rescue it), J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. (which bought Bear Stearns) and Lehman Brothers (which failed).
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Tracking earmarks from Obama and Biden
By Bill Allison Sep 13, 2008 1:29 p.m.Taxpayers for Commons Sense rolled out a pair of new databases on earmarks of presidential candidates, this time covering Sen. Barack Obama's requests from 2006 to 2008, and his funded earmarks for 2008. The databases are online here.
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Due diligence in the Biden family lawsuit
By Bill Allison Sep 2, 2008 2:37 a.m.In a comment to this post pointing to some resources for getting acquainted with the Republican vice presidential pick, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, I noted this Washington Post story on a lawsuit involving Robert Hunter Biden, the son of the Democratic vice presidential nominee, Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, James Biden, the Senator's brother, and plaintiff Anthony Lotito, who is the former business partner of the two non-elected Bidens in a deal that didn't work out. Both sides charge one another with cheating; hence the lawsuit. It turns out the New York State Supreme Court (where the case is filed) puts most of its documents online (here's the home page for searching).
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Tracking Gov. Palin
By Bill Allison Aug 30, 2008 3:07 p.m.Apparently, Republican presidential nominee John McCain has selected Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be his running mate. For those looking for more information, her 2007 state personal financial disclosure form is online here (via the Center for Public Integrity). Via the excellent National Institute on Money in State Politics, here's campaign finance information from her unsuccessful 2002 race for Lieutenant Governor, her 2006 primary campaign for governor, and her 2006 general election campaign for governor. I'll update with more links as I come across them. I'm not going to dig into these myself today, but others should feel free to have at them.
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