Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group

1. Center for Public Integrity: Coast Guard logs contradict White House Deepwater timeline

   By Bill Allison Jun 3, 2010 6:27 p.m.

   From our colleagues at the Center for Public Integrity:

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2. In House and Senate, appropriators got most contributions from earmark recipients

   By Bill Allison Jun 3, 2010 10:49 a.m.

   The Center for Responsive Politics and Taxpayers for Common Sense -- two of our favorite organizations -- have released their comprehensive earmark and influence database for fiscal year 2010 requests.

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3. Net neutrality: Do campaign contributions tell the whole story?

   By Bill Allison Jun 2, 2010 12:04 p.m.

   After 74 Democratic members of the House of Representatives sent a letter to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski warning that the FCC should not advance net neutrality rules without explicit direction from Congress, Free Press put together a page showing career campaign contributors from PACs, employees and lobbyists of interests that oppose the measure, intended to keep the Internet a level playing field.

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4. Study: Earmarks, federal spending follow political power, inhibit economic growth

   By Bill Allison Jun 1, 2010 9:51 a.m.

   Rep. James Moran takes the gavel

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5. CPI's Jim Morris talks about BP's OSHA violations

   By Bill Allison May 28, 2010 4:42 p.m.

   Our colleague Jim Morris, who runs Data Mine, our joint project with the Center for Public Integrity, talked about his story on BP's pattern of OSHA violations at its refineries on ABC yesterday. Jim appears at 10:10 in the clip; if the player below doesn't work it's available here.

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6. BP blamed in 8,000 spill reports, federal data shows

   By Bill Allison May 27, 2010 1:49 p.m.

   British Petroleum and its subsidiaries have been the subject of roughly 8,000 reported incidents of spills, emissions and leaks of oil, chemicals and gases into the environment, according to a government database. (download them here).

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7. DOE site up to date: President Bush's goals for 2005

   By Bill Allison May 25, 2010 10:42 p.m.

   The Reporting Group spent the day digging through government websites looking for resources for reporters covering the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster. Tonight I started looking for useful data sets on the Department of Energy's website. Put the word "oil" in the site's search interface, and the first result (as of this writing) explains...

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8. Oil spill resources: Local reporting

   By Bill Allison May 25, 2010 2:37 p.m.

   We're pulling together resources for covering and following the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Here's some coverage from local papers in the Gulf region--there's some fantastic local reporting going on. A sampling:

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9. Hedge fund players pump millions into party committees

   By Bill Allison May 24, 2010 1:52 p.m.

   In the 2010 election cycle so far, Hedge Fund executives, managers and investors contributed more than $12.8 million to national and state party committees--the Democratic National Committee, the Republican National Committee, the Democratic Senatorial Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee and so on--in chunks ranging from $10,000 to $30,400, a search of TransparencyData.com reveals.

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10. Data on assaults on federal officers, found in the National Data Catalog

    By Bill Allison May 20, 2010 1:51 p.m.

    The Drug Enforcement Agency, which has an international network of agents that's been involved in high profile arrests of arms smugglers and domestically carries out a number of drug raids, including shutting down meth houses, had just one officer assaulted or killed in the line of duty in all of 2006 and 2007, according to statistics maintained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and accessed through Sunlight's new National Data Catalog.

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11. Earmark Transparency Act will finally bring transparency to earmarks

    By Bill Allison May 11, 2010 9:14 a.m.

    The Earmark Transparency Act of 2010, a bipartisan bill introduced today by Sens. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., John McCain, R-Ariz., Russ Feingold, D-Wisc., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.,  vastly improves the way in which information about earmarks is disclosed. The bill requires a centralized, detailed, downloadable database that would track every earmark requested.

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12. DCCC invokes Murtha to aid Critz

    By Bill Allison May 5, 2010 2:57 p.m.

    A friend and colleague passes along the following email the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is sending out, signed by the widow of the late Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., Joyce Murtha: DCCC email

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13. Bad dates: ProPublica notes lack of accuracy in campaign finance data

    By Bill Allison May 3, 2010 12:09 p.m.

    ProPublica's Sebastian Jones notes what for us has been one of the most maddening features of campaign finance data: the dates don't mean very much at all. Campaigns report when they receive money, and political action committees report when they donate it. In theory, those dates should match, but as Jones points out, they don't:

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14. Grab a shovel and help Data Mine dig

    By Bill Allison Apr 30, 2010 2:16 p.m.

    From my colleagues at the Center for Public Integrity:

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Investigations by Sunlight Foundation reporter Bill Allison