Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group

1. Don't mean...

   By Bill Allison Mar 17, 2009 8:13 p.m.

   to keep picking on Dodd, but he does seem to be in the center of quite a lot of things lately:

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2. Dodd's tbd fundraising reception

   By Bill Allison Mar 17, 2009 6:31 p.m.

   Facing what looks like a tougher-than-expected reelection effort, Sen. Christopher Dodd has a fundraiser scheduled for tomorrow evening, March 18, at a location "TBD." (click the link to see the invite) Dodd is asking "hosts" to pony up $10,000 (PACs will be the hosts, and they'll be asked to give $5,000 for the primary and $5,000 for the general election, maxing out in March for an election twenty months away. To be a co-host, a PAC can contribute $5,000, while individuals can get in the door (which door?) for a mere $1,000.

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3. Murtha's pass through earmarks

   By Bill Allison Mar 17, 2009 3 p.m.

   Earmark disclosure isn't going to do any good if members can designate a middle man to take funds, then distribute them to private companies. But that's exactly what the Washington Post says Rep. John Murtha has been doing, and they've got documents to back them up:

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4. Grassley seeks lobbyist disclosure for tariff bills

   By Bill Allison Mar 16, 2009 3:56 p.m.
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5. A few questions for Sen. Dodd

   By Bill Allison Mar 16, 2009 2:49 p.m.

   This weekend, the august Sunday Times reported on Sen. Christopher Dodd's Irish "cottage":

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6. CRP: PMA Group, clients donated to 516 members of Congress

   By Bill Allison Mar 13, 2009 12:37 p.m.

   Lindsay Renick Mayer of the Center for Responsive Politics writes on OpenSecrets.org about PMA Group, the lobbying firm that specialized in defense appropriations and that is reportedly under investigation for campaign finance irregularities:

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7. Moran: Whole budget is earmarks

   By Bill Allison Mar 13, 2009 2:37 a.m.

   Rep. Jim Moran, commenting on the controversy over all the earmarks (more than 8,500 of them) in the omnibus spending bill, tells the Washington Post, "The reality is that every dollar in the budget is earmarked. The question is: Who does the earmarking?"

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8. Another hole in financial disclosure

   By Bill Allison Mar 12, 2009 6:55 p.m.

   The New York Times report that Rep. Maxine Waters helped arrange a meeting between Treasury officials and the CEO of a bank that her husband may or may not have owned $250,000 worth of stock in:

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9. Another guilty plea in Abramoff case

   By Bill Allison Mar 10, 2009 6:30 p.m.

   Roll Call's Jennifer Yachnin reports:

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10. Dodd's Dealings Illustrate Holes in Financial Disclosure

    By Bill Allison Mar 9, 2009 6:22 p.m.

    Via InstaPundit comes this commentary from the Hartford Courant by Kevin Rennie, an attorney who writes a weekly column for the paper, on Sen. Chris Dodd's real estate deals. The Senate Ethics Committee is already looking at his mortgage with Countrywide Financial (more details here); Rennie writes that other Dodd properties might be worth looking into:

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11. House kills PMA probe

    By Bill Allison Mar 6, 2009 4:54 a.m.

    Shocking:

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12. Dodd: Brother Geithner, can you spare a dime?

    By Bill Allison Mar 6, 2009 4:15 a.m.

    Last week Lisa Chiu, one of our colleagues at SubsidyScope.com, mentioned to us that the FDIC's deposit insurance fund had dwindled to a mere $19 billion at the end of 2009, down from about $56 billion the year before (see this table for all the numbers). She thought this was pretty significant. Always listen to Lisa: The Wall Street Journal reports that Sen. Chris Dodd has proposed a bill that would let FDIC borrow $500 billion from the Treasury Department.

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13. Visclosky endorses some form of action on PMA Group

    By Bill Allison Mar 5, 2009 10:35 p.m.

    A friend passes on this story:

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14. Credit in the Gilded Age

    By Bill Allison Mar 5, 2009 8:15 p.m.

    I've been reading The Gilded Age, by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner. It's amazing how little the Washington they depict--the lobbyists, the appropriators, the schemes--has changed. This passage, however, put me in mind of our current credit and banking crisis:

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Investigations by Sunlight Foundation reporter Bill Allison