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Follow the (Airport) Money
By Bill Allison Oct 7, 2009 6:30 p.m.Over the past five years, the Federal Aviation Administration has handed out nearly $18 billion in grants for almost 19,000 airport projects. In theory, these projects -- funded through the FAA's Airport Improvement Program -- are supposed to enhance safety or protect the environment. In fact, according to a Subsidyscope analysis of FAA data (neatly assembled into a searchable database by Sunlight's Kaitlin Lee), a fair amount of money has gone toward the building of parking lots and other questionable things.
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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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Does Congress think Detroit is a good investment?
By Bill Allison Nov 17, 2008 11:46 p.m.It appears that <a href="http://apnews.myway.com/article/20081117/D94GUIK80.html">the auto bailout</a> is stalled for now, as congressional leadership and the Bush administration have come to loggerheads over providing $25 to $50 billion in loans to General Motors, Ford Motor Company, and Chrysler.
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North Carolina Businessman Pays for Campaign Ads
By Anupama Narayanswamy Oct 14, 2008 2:50 p.m.Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4
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Oversight Committee Seeks for More Blackwater Documents
By Anupama Narayanswamy Oct 19, 2007 9:09 p.m.Rep. Henry Waxman's oversight committee sent out letters today to the Department of Defense, the Department of State and to Blackwater CEO Erik Prince asking for various sets of documents regarding contracts going back to 2003.
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Department of Energy correspondence logs
By Anupama Narayanswamy Sep 10, 2007 7:03 p.m.This article in the Washington Post yesterday on the earmarking process cites letters sent to the Department of Energy written by members of Congress including Rep. Rahm Emanuel in support of projects at the Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago and the Illinois Institute of technology.
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Congressional Correspondence Log update
By Bill Allison May 21, 2007 6:08 p.m.Anupama's on the phone with yet another FOIA officer clarifying the nature of our request for correspondence logs listing letters from and responses to members of Congress, in an electronic format. It's amazing how many responses we've gotten that miss the mark of the request. Agencies send us actual letters rather than logs, or handwritten logs of correspondence, or (in one case) what looks like printouts of some form of spreadsheet scanned into PDF documents (absolutely useless for our attempts to turn what we get from the agencies into a searchable database of correspondence). I'm going to spend the rest of the afternoon looking at one of them--a three-inch thick stack of papers we got from the Department of Labor's Office of Administrative Law Judges. Among other things, I'm going to do the log myself in an excel format as an experiment to see how long it takes (I type pretty slowly).
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