The Scoop

The good news is that the Center for Public Integrity (my former employer) has released its database of privately-sponsored congressional travel for web searchers. It’s a great complement to the bundle of strong stories that CPI has done from this dataset. But unlike some other databases from the Center, this one is deliberately designed to [...]

Alexander Cohen and Victoria Kreha of the Center for Public Integrity used federal disclosure reports to show that “through an apparent loophole in agency rules the Food and Drug Administration has allowed its employees to receive more than $1.3 million in sponsored travel since 1999 from groups closely tied to pharmaceutical and medical device companies.” [...]

So humor me today, and the CAR stories will return tomorrow. I’d like to announce a project that Adrian Holovaty of washingtonpost.com and I started working on a few months ago: the Post’s congressional votes database. The first of many, many Post web apps built using Django, this site is a browsable archive of votes [...]

A team from the Center for Public Integrity released LobbyWatch, an analysis of nearly $13 billion spent on federal lobbying since 1998. One story reveals that more than 19 percent of all filings to the Senate Office of Public Records were late and “49 of the top 50 lobbying firms (in terms of revenue) failed [...]

Mike Brunker of MSNBC.com spent three months following the sale of anabolic steroids on eBay, finding that “a few of the auctions occurred in the open but many used the simple ruse of listing the drugs as ‘books about steroids’ to avoid detection by the site’s security team.” An eBay vice president said that such [...]