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Open Notebook: Flaws in Lobbying Disclosure 3
By Bill Allison Nov 20, 2009 4:30 p.m.In the half hour since we posted on Service Employee International Union's 2008 political activity and lobbying expenditure numbers, the U.S. Postal Service delivered the copy of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's form 990 that we requested yesterday.
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Open Notebook: Flaws in Lobbying Disclosure 2
By Bill Allison Nov 20, 2009 4:15 p.m.In 2008, according to a federal disclosure form that's available online from the Labor Department, the national headquarters of the Service Employees International Union spent $67 million on political activities and lobbying. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce files an annual report with the Internal Revenue Service that requires it to disclose spending on lobbying activities; the IRS does not post those disclosures online. We requested a copy from the Chamber, which they are sending to us in the mail.
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Duty suspended, contributions tendered
By Bill Allison Nov 18, 2009 3:39 p.m.Dave Maass reports on the latest round of tariff suspensions in San Diego City Beat, doing a nice job of following the money between beneficiaries of these measures that reduce taxes for a small number of beneficiaries (usually one) and the members of Congress who propose them.
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Open Notebook: Flaws in Lobbying Disclosure
By Bill Allison Nov 17, 2009 4:10 p.m.Yesterday, Hot Air's Ed Morrissey wrote that two conservative groups are charging that Andrew Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, should have registered (or re-registered) as a lobbyist. They're citing White House visitor logs (Stern was the most frequent visitor in the fist batch of records released) and his own tweets as evidence. The same day, Washington Post reported that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is trying to raise $50,000 to commission an economist to find fault with current health care reform proposals working their way through the Senate.
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St. Jude Medical Quits AdvaMed
By Nancy Watzman Nov 10, 2009 4:08 p.m.In a dispute on strategy over proposed medical device taxes in current health care legislation, St. Jude Medical Inc. has quit AdvaMed, the major medical device trade association in Washington. The group played a key role in lobbying Congress to keep certain clinical trial data secret, as detailed in Sunlight's recent "Heart of the Matter" multi-media investigation. The investigation tells the story of Bray Patrick-Lake, 39, who participated in a clinical trial sponsored by St. Jude Medical, and later found out she could not access the data collected.
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How many stimulus jobs does it take to change a light bulb?
By Bill Allison Nov 7, 2009 4 p.m.Pointing out flaws in Recovery.gov data is getting to be like shooting fish in a barrel (see here, here, here, here, here and here for examples). While reporters had to dig out those examples, a handful of records do the work for you.
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Support for Baucus Healthcare Plan Brings in Donations
By Anupama Narayanswamy Nov 6, 2009 3:55 p.m.Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., the key architect of one of several competing health care reform bills under consideration in Congress, isn't up for re-election until 2014, yet his campaign committee has enjoyed an influx of contributions. In the third quarter of 2009, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee added more than $136,000 of campaign cash to his coffers, bringing his total for the year to more than $448,000. Overall, Baucus has more than $2.2 million in his campaign account, the majority of which is left over from his 2008 re-election bid.
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Drug Co Reps Say Clinical Trial Data Should Remain Secret
By Nancy Watzman Nov 3, 2009 3:34 p.m.Two out of three of the panel participants at today's Food and Drug Administration (FDA) transparency hearing discussing whether data for unapproved drugs and medical devices should be made available to the public were pharmaceutical industry representatives. As we reported in our investigation, Heart of the Matter, drug and medical device companies lobbied Congress to keep data secret for government-regulated clinical trials for products that don't make it to market. Now the issue is before the agencies. An audience of about 75 people listened as the panel members discussed detailed case studies about whether and when the FDA or companies should make data available to the public. (The hearings were available via livestream here.) For the most part, drug industry representatives stuck to the same arguments they made to Congress--that such data are proprietary and should remain secret.
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FDA hearing to highlight secret clinical trial data
By Nancy Watzman Oct 28, 2009 3:26 p.m.Next week the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) transparency taskforce will be holding a hearing asking for people to comment on the issue at the core of the multi-media investigation we released today, "Heart of the Matter: How Congress and Special Interests Kept Clinical Trial Data Secret": The topics to be covered are: (1) early communication about emerging safety issues concerning FDA-regulated products, (2) disclosure of information about product applications that are abandoned (which means that no work is being done or will be undertaken to have the application approved) or withdrawn by the applicant before approval, and (emph. added) (3) communication of agency decisions about pending product applications.
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How data-dependent is health care reform?
By Bill Allison Oct 26, 2009 2:33 p.m.If the visualization of America's Healthy Future Act (also known as the Baucus Bill) -- immediately below is any indication, data is pretty important to health care reform plans. The word occurs 275 times in the text -- there are new data banks, data collected, data submitted and data shared.
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CAR Training - visualizations
By Bill Allison Oct 23, 2009 7:02 p.m.Sign up for a many eyes account by clicking here: Many Eyes Registration.
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Entering digital age an expensive proposition for GOP
By Luke Rosiak Oct 23, 2009 6:54 p.m.The Republican National Committee shelled out $1.4 million dollars over the last six months for Web sites and services, much of which was spent on GOP.com, the party's major Web presence that was unveiled this month, new Federal Election Commission expense reports show.
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Correction: Fees for Livingston Group corrected in FLIT
By Bill Allison Oct 23, 2009 3:26 p.m.Due to a data entry error, the Foreign Lobbying Influence Tracker contained duplicate entries for fees paid to the Livingston Group by some its clients. We have eliminated the duplicate records. Some of the totals we reported in the two main stories that accompanied the release of the database have changed:
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Fighting net neutrality, telecom companies, outside lobbyists, cluster contributions to members of Congress
By Bill Allison Oct 22, 2009 10:45 p.m.While the Federal Communications Commission considers the first steps toward ensuring net neutrality--making certain that broadband providers do not discriminate against high traffic sites--the telecom firms that would be affected by the rules and their trade groups have been swamping Congress with a one-two punch of campaign contributions from the companies and their registered lobbyists. Some 244 members of Congress were the beneficiaries of these contribution clusters--totaling more than $9.4 million--from January 2007 to June 2009, an investigative collaboration of the Sunlight Foundation and the Center for Responsive Politics has found. Telecom interests and their lobbyists engaged in more clustered giving than any industry save pharmaceuticals.
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