Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group

Super PAC profile: American Bridge 21st Century

A matter of trust? Mystery groups write big checks to super PACs

They may not be the biggest givers of this campaign cycle but they could be the shadiest: So far in this campaign cycle,12 trusts have given super PACs a total of $3.2 million.

Following the Chamber of Commerce down the campaign finance rabbit hole

A New York Times report that New York’s Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is subpoenaing records of tax-exempt groups involved in politics underscores the difficulty of tracking campaign spending to its source following the 2010 Citizens United decision, a ruling that the Supreme Court reaffirmed this week. 

Play ball! How MLB teams rank in political giving

It's opening day of Major League Baseball's 2012 season, so Sunlight has decided to take a look at which teams are the heaviest hitters when it comes to political giving.

Health care lobbying groups head to the Supreme Court

If war is politics by other means, so is litigation. While there will be plenty of rhetoric today about President Obama's health care law on the second anniversary of its signing -- including a new op-ed by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who was for the health care reform in Massachusetts before he was against it nationally --  the big battle begins Monday, when the Supreme Court opens an unusual three days of argument over the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Washington Watch Releases Earmark Request Entry Form

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!

Open notebook: Following stimulus contracts

Recovery.gov might not be useful yet for "following every penny" of stimulus spending, but with a telephone, Google, USASpending.gov and some luck it might not be that hard. Pretty much at random, I picked out a bunch of congressional press releases touting stimulus dollars going to local communities, and started making calls. Here's some notes on where one inquiry led me.

An Army of pharma trips?

The Center for Public Integrity has analyzed 22,000 Pentagon travel disclosures -- filed when an outside party pays for a trip taken by Department of Defense personnel. The finding that jumped out at both Anu and me:

Murtha's earmark recipients: How hands off (or on) is he?

Paul Singer reports in Roll Call on a tangled story that apparently involves the undisclosed hand of Rep. John Murtha but certainly involves his brother Kit (a retired lobbyist) and his former lobbying firm, five different companies doing business, directly or indirectly, with Defense (including one under federal indictment and one that allegedly wanted to outsource earmarked defense work to "China or someplace"), an earmark from the pre-disclosure era, some technical corrections added to the Tsunami relief bill that moved the funds for that earmark from one recipient to another (because the original recipient allegedly wanted to do the work in "China or someplace" rather than in Murtha's district), about $8.2 million of taxpayer money, and a whole lot of digging. Oh, and PMA Group makes a cameo appearance. Read the whole thing, but also consider this:

Delving into Rep. Lewis' earmark requests

Ben Goad reports for the Press Enterprise that Rep. Jerry Lewis, former chair and now ranking member of the Appropriations Committee, earmarked $96 million for firms represented by Innovative Federal Strategies, which was once under federal investigation:

Links to Senate earmark disclosure requests in a database

They labeled them as funding priorities, programs and project requests, investments in their states and, in just one case, earmarks. They posted image files that can't be cut and pasted, tables, single files with every item or dozens of files for each individual item. Still, 96 members of the Senate have, for the very first time, posted their earmark requests for appropriations bills online"and you can find all the links to those disclosures here.

You can't go far...

...without running into Chinese dominance in some form of production and Goldman Sachs. It's after midnight, so I'm researching (what else) some earmarks. I came across a company, Molycorp Minerals, that might get $3 million from taxpayers to develop metal separation techniques in the U.S. so that we're not dependent on the Chinese for magnetic ores. The taxpayer money "will be leveraged against more than $20 million in private capital to accelerate the engineering and scale of this work."

Journal-Gazette finds Lugar earmark disclosures

Sylvia A. Smith, finds, to the best of my knowledge, the first online disclosure of earmark requests by a member of the Senate: Sen. Richard Lugar:

Whither stimulus contracts?

The Washington Post's Kimberly Kindy reports that the Dept. of Energy is awarding stimulus funds to companies specializing in nuclear clean-ups that have a mixed track record: