Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group

1. The Gilded Age on congressional investigations

   By Bill Allison Mar 25, 2009 3:25 a.m.

   How little things change. In The Gilded Age, by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, a member of the Senate, Abner Dilworthy, is caught bribing a state legislator to ensure his reelection. Dilworthy knows how to respond:

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2. Give a dollar to a pol, get $18,195 back

   By Bill Allison Mar 25, 2009 3:13 a.m.

   Glenn Reynolds asks whether employees in the financial industry, always a big donor to political campaigns, will contribute to other candidates or curtail their giving. He cites the AIG bonus flap, and Congress' reaction to it (including the outrage of members and the House passing a bill that would tax 90 percent of those bonuses away) as evidence of the fickleness of Congressional favor. Reynolds writes,

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3. Rangel: No accusations coming from Congress

   By Bill Allison Mar 24, 2009 7:36 p.m.

   Roll Call's Lauren W. Whittington reports that Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., once again, is saying that the ethics committee has nothing on him:

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4. Dodd's family business?

   By Bill Allison Mar 24, 2009 2:58 p.m.

   Kevin Rennie notes another connection of Sen. Christopher Dodd to the financial industry, at one remove from AIG:

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5. PMA Group investigation, Pacific Northwest edition

   By Bill Allison Mar 23, 2009 12:54 p.m.

   David Heath of the Seattle Times reports on PMA Group's contributions to Rep. Norm Dicks and the earmarks he secured for their clients (there's a database for all of Congress here, and Dicks' earmarks are here.)

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6. Dodd controversies continue to swirl

   By Bill Allison Mar 23, 2009 12:35 p.m.

   Sen. Christopher Dodd is getting criticism from out-of-state ">papers (but note the all the Connecticut residents quoted) over the AIG bonus bungle, but the Hartford Courant ran what might be the most significant story (hat tip: Instapundit, who has a lot more on Dodd):

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7. Dodd did it update

   By Bill Allison Mar 20, 2009 8:53 p.m.

   Apparently, Geithner did it too. (Previous Dodd did it post here.) As this episode illustrates, there ought to be a better way of tracking whose fingerprints--those of members of Congress, administration officials, lobbyists--are on which parts of what bills.

8. Financial crisis doesn't disrupt financial fundraisers

   By Bill Allison Mar 20, 2009 3:10 p.m.

   "As the public boils with anger over millions of dollars in retention bonuses for American Insurance Group employees, financial interests quietly continue to woo lawmakers with fundraising parties this month.

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9. Dodd did it

   By Bill Allison Mar 19, 2009 3:11 a.m.

   Sen. Christopher Dodd tells CNN that he was responsible for the bailouts for bonuses provision in the stimulus bill that allowed AIG executives to bring home $165 million...after telling CNN the day before that, "When I wrote the language there was no such language like that."

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10. Senate channels "Not Me"

    By Bill Allison Mar 18, 2009 5:05 p.m.

    Maybe we should make members pass a quiz on the contents of bills before they're allowed to vote. Case in point: the bonus exemption in the Stimulus Bill that AIG executives took advantage of. Where it came from and how it got into the bill is a mystery:

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11. World Bank says protection on the rise

    By Bill Allison Mar 18, 2009 12:36 p.m.
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12. Sleuthing the Stimulus' bonus provision

    By Bill Allison Mar 18, 2009 3:20 a.m.

    So maybe Dodd's not to blame for the AIG bonus furor. Jane Hamsher uses OpenCongress.org to compare versions of the bill -- Donnie Shaw explains how here. Hamsher concludes:

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13. BankTracker debuts at Investigative Reporting Workshop

    By Bill Allison Mar 18, 2009 1:47 a.m.

    I've been doing some Webinars over the past few days for reporters to show off some features of SubsidyScope.com for looking at bailout data from Treasury and the FDIC. One of the things I keep telling them is that lots of groups are looking at this data, building tools for parsing and analyzing it, and they should stay tuned.

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14. Muckety maps PMA Group giving

    By Bill Allison Mar 18, 2009 1:13 a.m.

    There have been lots of different ways of slicing PMA Group contributions from Congressional Quarterly and the Center for Responsive Politics (see here too). Now Muckety looks at the web of connections of top PMA Group lobbyist Paul Magliocchetti. From CQ's analysis, Muckety begins by noting:

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Investigations by Sunlight Foundation reporter Bill Allison