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Washington Watch Releases Earmark Request Entry Form
By Bill Allison Jul 20, 2009 7:43 p.m.For the first time in 2009, members of Congress had to release their earmark requests to the public. As we've documented before, this information is scattered over 535 Web sites in all kinds of different formats. Jim Harper and Washington Watch have now released a tool that allows volunteers to capture that earmark information for posterity, centralize it in a single location, and allow for all kinds of additional analysis and investigation. And, if you participate, you can win a Kindle!
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Rep. Flake: Campaign contributions are a financial interest in an earmark
By Bill Allison Jun 4, 2009 4:45 p.m.Rep. Jeff Flake has released a letter asking the Ethics Committee asking it to "specifically prohibit members from being able to certify having no financial interest in an earmark when they have received campaign contributions from the entity that would benefit from the earmark or those affiliated with it."
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House Ethics Committee: Investigating PMA Group or not?
By Bill Allison Jun 3, 2009 6:06 p.m.Tory Newmyer reports in Roll Call:
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Murtha's earmark recipients: How hands off (or on) is he?
By Bill Allison Jun 3, 2009 4:17 p.m.Paul Singer reports in Roll Call on a tangled story that apparently involves the undisclosed hand of Rep. John Murtha but certainly involves his brother Kit (a retired lobbyist) and his former lobbying firm, five different companies doing business, directly or indirectly, with Defense (including one under federal indictment and one that allegedly wanted to outsource earmarked defense work to "China or someplace"), an earmark from the pre-disclosure era, some technical corrections added to the Tsunami relief bill that moved the funds for that earmark from one recipient to another (because the original recipient allegedly wanted to do the work in "China or someplace" rather than in Murtha's district), about $8.2 million of taxpayer money, and a whole lot of digging. Oh, and PMA Group makes a cameo appearance. Read the whole thing, but also consider this:
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Visclosky temporarily relinquishes reins of subcommittee
By Bill Allison Jun 2, 2009 9:27 p.m.Rep. Peter Visclosky, whose office has been subpoenaed for documents related to clients of the defunct lobbying firm PMA Group, has temporarily stepped down as chair of the House Energy & Water Appropriations Subcommittee. Lindsay Renick Mayer reports on Visclosky's woes, his top donors, and those of his replacement, Ed Pastor, who has taken less than a tenth as much in contributions from PMA Group and its clients (of course, I'm referring to contributions from their employees, family members and political action committees).
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CREW visualizes Murtha web
By Bill Allison May 29, 2009 5:49 p.m.Here's a picture worth well over a thousand words: Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has assembled an interactive, "You Don't Know Jack" graphic showing the connections between Murtha, a trio of lobbying firms, relatives, staffers and the companies for whom he's gotten earmarks.
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Delving into Rep. Lewis' earmark requests
By Bill Allison May 26, 2009 9:27 p.m.Ben Goad reports for the Press Enterprise that Rep. Jerry Lewis, former chair and now ranking member of the Appropriations Committee, earmarked $96 million for firms represented by Innovative Federal Strategies, which was once under federal investigation:
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Links to Senate earmark disclosure requests in a database
By Bill Allison May 20, 2009 3:13 p.m.They labeled them as funding priorities, programs and project requests, investments in their states and, in just one case, earmarks. They posted image files that can't be cut and pasted, tables, single files with every item or dozens of files for each individual item. Still, 96 members of the Senate have, for the very first time, posted their earmark requests for appropriations bills online"and you can find all the links to those disclosures here.
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You can't go far...
By Bill Allison May 20, 2009 12:32 p.m....without running into Chinese dominance in some form of production and Goldman Sachs. It's after midnight, so I'm researching (what else) some earmarks. I came across a company, Molycorp Minerals, that might get $3 million from taxpayers to develop metal separation techniques in the U.S. so that we're not dependent on the Chinese for magnetic ores. The taxpayer money "will be leveraged against more than $20 million in private capital to accelerate the engineering and scale of this work."
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Updating House transportation reauthorization database...
By Bill Allison May 20, 2009 12:52 a.m....with this requests from Rep. Tom Perriello. Worth taking a look at -- I like the way he uses Google maps along with the requests:
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New Mexico Independent asks for help hunting earmarks
By Bill Allison May 19, 2009 10:09 p.m.The New Mexico Independent is asking readers to delve into the earmark requests of Sens. Jeff Bingaman and Tom Udall, and comment on anything interesting they find. This is what's really important -- while the hide-and-go-seek disclosure methods of Congress make for an amusing diversion, it's the substance of the disclosures should command our attention.
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Pressure building on Murtha?
By Bill Allison May 19, 2009 12:16 p.m.Justin Rood reports on the ABC News Investigative blog on the several different investigations of Rep. John Murtha, the defunct PMA Group which funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars of campaign contributions to Murtha from its PAC, employees and its clients, many of which were the beneficiaries of Murtha earmarks. Rood notes that these investigations are all distinct inquiries:
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Journal-Gazette finds Lugar earmark disclosures
By Bill Allison May 18, 2009 10:09 p.m.Sylvia A. Smith, finds, to the best of my knowledge, the first online disclosure of earmark requests by a member of the Senate: Sen. Richard Lugar:
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More transportation reauthorization earmark requests
By Bill Allison May 18, 2009 4:37 p.m.A couple of staffers have emailed links to postings that their members have put online; I've updated our little Dabble database of earmark requests (I love Dabble, by the way -- fast becoming one of my favorite tools). So I've added requests for Rep. Zack Space and for Rep. Joe Wilson.
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