5/13/2011 - The Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill Triangle has gained a new distinction: Biggest gas guzzling metro area in the nation, according to Forbes. The Triad and Charlotte metro areas are also in the top 10. As Big Oil profits soar and gas prices approach $4 at the pump, more people and politicians are wondering how the [...]
5/11/2011 - After Citizens United, big donors have poured money into a growing number of nonprofit Section 501(c)(4) organizations to finance political attack ads while remaining anonymous (e.g., Karl Rove’s Crossroads conduit). Now comes this irony: The anti-tax, anti-government donors may eventually get hit with a tax bill, courtesy of the IRS applying its gift [...]
Here are two insightful columns related to the fallout from the Supreme Court’s Citizen United decision in January 2010. One by Nick Nyhart and Tova Wang points out that the decision became a green light for a beefed-up assault on democratic values, particularly the right to self-organize, the right to vote, and the right to [...]
The Los Angeles Times and Center for Responsive Politics have produced a model expose of the mining industry’s use of campaign money and high-dollar lobbyists to kill mine safety legislation in Congress. The story documents the close correlation of campaign contributions and votes by Members of Congress, and the timing of when the donations were [...]
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and the Republican-controlled legislature have stirred national passions with their bold attacks on long-held rights of workers to organize. Now they’re making the state, once a leader in voter participation, the new ground zero for the national movement to restrict voting. There’s a connection between attacks on labor rights, voting rights, [...]
Yesterday, after hours of debate on the House floor over the proposed state budget, Rep. Edgar Starnes (R-Caldwell County) suddenly introduced an amendment to kill North Carolina’s public campaign financing programs. The mood in the chamber dramatically shifted. With blistering intensity, several Democrats plummeted Republican leaders for using the devious tactics they campaigned against to [...]
You can tell NC House Republican leaders what you think of their budget proposal before it gets a final vote this week and goes to the state Senate. The House budget fires tens of thousands of workers, crowds our schools and health centers, and at the same time protects tax loopholes for big-money donors worth more [...]
As the price of gas moves toward $4 a gallon and oil company profits soar, US House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) declared that Big Oil should pay its fair share of taxes and the industry’s lucrative federal subsidiaries should be reviewed. That was Monday of this week. By Thursday, he was in retreat and echoing [...]
Former Sen. Alan Simpson, a conservative Republican from Wyoming, uses a supply-and-demand market analysis to dissect why governance in Washington is broken. It’s broken because the campaign finance system is a private monopoly controlled by wealthy special interests. Everything favors their private agenda, not the public interest, and as a result the nation is going [...]
The Sunlight Foundation provides a valuable overview of President Obama's draft executive order that would require federal contractors to disclose their direct and indirect political spending. Indirect means donations made to other groups (like 527 committees, trade groups or c-4 organizations) with “the intention or reasonable expectation” that the money would be used for independent [...]