-
Open Notebook: Health care
By Bill Allison Sep 22, 2009 10:22 p.m.Transparency-related provisions in the summary of the chairman's mark that Sen. Max Baucus and the Senate Finance Committee released last week: Lots of new disclosure requirements for physicians who refer patients to hospitals in which they or their family members have a financial interest, for nursing homes, for hospitals, for medical device manufacturers, suppliers, and pharmaceutical companies. Little oversight of government (there's a few requirements for new entities created by the bill to act in a transparent manner). Still, what's more interesting is what's not transparent -- updates on that coming later. Here's the descriptions of the provisions.
Read all about it -
Defense contractors join Turkish lobbying effort in pursuit of arms deals
By Luke Rosiak Sep 17, 2009 2:13 p.m.The Defense Department's request last week for congressional approval of the sale of $8 billion worth of PAC-3 missiles to Turkey was the latest victory for a disparate group of interests including defense contractors, finance and energy corporations, trade groups, the Turkish government and a well-financed network of domestic advocacy nonprofits. Intersecting interests have led them to join forces and lobby on a number of issues, including the characterization of distant historical events.
Read all about it -
Turkey's influence over lawmakers surfaces in Ohio hearing
By Luke Rosiak Sep 10, 2009 10:28 p.m.Labeling the killing of 1.5 million Armenians between 1915 and 1923, many at the hands of Ottoman government, an act of genocide has been a controversial issue in Turkey, among some historians, in the U.S. Congress, and now in the unlikely venue of the Ohio Board of Elections, where recent hearings indirectly considered the government of Turkeys connection, if any, to Turkish advocacy groups in Washington.
Read all about it -
Lobbying disclosure upheld
By Bill Allison Sep 8, 2009 10:14 p.m.Details available from Legal Times blog here:
Read all about it -
In 1983, Congress changed Medicare payment system with little scrutiny
By Bill Allison Sep 8, 2009 8:50 p.m.This 1984 paper, which summarizes a number of academic publications that raised questions about a 1983 reform to the Medicare payment system, suggests that whether things have gotten better or worse, they certainly have changed. It's hard to imagine Congress moving so quickly on a health care measure developed behind closed doors.
Read all about it -
ClinicalTrials.gov missing basic data
By Nancy Watzman Sep 8, 2009 8:35 p.m.Fewer than half of medical clinical trials published in the last year in leading medical journals are reported on the government site ClinicalTrials.gov, according to a new study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
Read all about it -
Open Notebook: Tax Havens
By Bill Allison Sep 8, 2009 7:22 p.m.Just a few odds, ends and bits of reporting that didn't make it into this post that relies on data from the Foreign Lobbying Influence Tracker that we collaborated on with our friends from ProPublica:
Read all about it -
Bush Era Visitor Logs Show Visits from Evangelicals, Conservatives and a Foreign Lobbyist
By Luke Rosiak Sep 4, 2009 10:06 p.m.In addition to promising to release most White House visitor logs to the public, the Obama administration released nine pages of logs of former Vice President Dick Cheney's visitors and some 250 pages from George W. Bush's. The retroactive disclosures came in response to a lawsuit from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which sought records of meetings with evangelical leaders and Stephen Payne, a lobbyist who allegedly sold a foreign leader access to Cheney in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars in "donations" to Bush's presidential library.
Read all about it -
Downloadable table of all earmark requests
By Luke Rosiak Sep 4, 2009 5:13 p.m.Sunlight has compiled a list of House earmark requests--available here--for fiscal year 2010 which were disclosed this year for the first time under new rules, but scattered across hundreds of Web sites and in nearly unusable formats.
Read all about it -
MSNBC: Obama administration visitor disclosure policy exempts its first eight months
By Bill Allison Sep 4, 2009 4:50 p.m.Bill Dedman, and investigative reporter at MSNBC.com, points out some limitations in the new policy announced by the White House today on providing open records:
Read all about it -
After massive US lobbying press, Turkey open to direct talks with Armenia
By Luke Rosiak Sep 2, 2009 5:08 p.m.A diplomatic breakthrough in the longstanding feud between Turkey and Armenia puts a renewed focus on the United States' role in that dispute last year. Turkey mounted the largest foreign lobbying effort of 2008 in order to deter the U.S. Congress from declaring events in that part of the world 85 years prior as a genocide. The lobbying onslaught appeared to have worked, we've written on our Foreign Lobbyist Influence Tracker, but under an agreement floated this week, the Wall Street Journal reports today, the countries have taken steps to open relations while agreeing to mount a joint historical investigation into the deaths, which numbered as high as 1.5 million.
Read all about it -
Informant in tiny nation toppled decades of banking secrecy
By Luke Rosiak Aug 31, 2009 12:35 p.m.Swiss mega-bank UBS has dominated recent headlines with its reluctant release of a subset of the list of Americans using the accounts, long shrouded in secrecy, to avoid paying taxes to the US.
Read all about it -
How well do popular drugs work?
By Nancy Watzman Aug 27, 2009 3:27 p.m.Here at Real Time we are beginning to dig into examples of secret data--data the government collects, that could affect our health and safety, but we, the public, can't see.
Read all about it -
"Man without a country" peddles international influence through tangled ties
By Luke Rosiak Aug 26, 2009 5 p.m.None of the former officials who have signed up to lobby the U.S. government for foreign interests--a list that includes presidential nominees (Bob Dole) and congressional leaders (Richard Gephardt, Dick Armey)--has a resume as offbeat as that of Ari Ben-Menashe, a former Israeli spy who later tried to implicate the opponent of the president of Zimbabwe in an assassination attempt and now considers himself a "man without a country." He also had one of the richest contracts to lobby for a foreign client--though he apparently had no contacts with U.S. government officials whatsoever.
Read all about it
Search the Blog
Real Time Ticker
Recent Posts
- Crossroads GPS pushes Congress to pass immigration overhaul in web video
- Americans for Prosperity takes aim at farm bill
- California billionaire pumps $1 million more into Mass. senate race
- Stealthy super PAC avoids disclosing donors before Mass. special election
- Pesticide industry would benefit from farm bill provisions
Reporting we're watching
- OpenSecrets: Millionaire Freshmen Make Congress Even Wealthier
- Sunlight Foundation: What does California have against transparency in local government?
- OpenSecrets: Election 2012: The Big Picture Shows Record Cost of Winning a Seat in Congress
- Sunlight Foundation: 2Day in #OpenGov 6/19/2013
- Sunlight Foundation: New G8 Open Data Charter
