At least one client says it’s severing ties over his anti-gay stance
Lobbying
Don’t Cry for K Street: Federal Lobbying is Down, But Profits Are Up
Washington’s influence-peddlers are increasingly taking their skills to state, local and even foreign governments.
Occupy the Regulatory Open Comment Period!
There’s nothing “wrong” with protests built around placard-hoisting and park-squatting, but Occupy the SEC is definitely doing something right with its radically different tack. The OWS-offshoot has submitted a 325-page letter to federal financial regulatory agencies on the Volcker Rule, a controversial measure designed to prohibit banks …
Washington SOPA Opera: Lobbying Power Shifts from Hollywood to Silicon Valley
Hollywood loves a good yarn about pirates on the high seas. Piracy online? Not so much. Every day, people around the world effectively steal countless movies, songs and other copyrighted content through websites offering illegal …
Jack Abramoff: Still Detestable
At the height of the Tom DeLay-era, Jack Abramoff was probably Washington’s most influential and lucratively paid lobbyist. He was brash and brazen, displaying a Hollywood swagger long before they made a movie about him. Then Abramoff was exposed as a fraud, a liar and a creep of the first order–someone who effectively stole millions of …
Dave Camp Cashes in on Super Committee Assignment
Tax reform, you will soon hear, can be good for everybody. But few will benefit more than those who write the legislation. On the same day that House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp, R-Mich., got picked to join the 12-member Congressional super-committee that is charged with deciding the country’s spending and taxation fate, his …
Could a No Influence-Peddling Pledge Block Washington’s Revolving Door?
Over the weekend, the New York Times reported on the latest innovation in Washington’s shameful influence-peddling industry. Read the story for details, which involve former Democratic Congressman Earl Pomeroy, who supported the health care industry in Congress and then, after losing his seat last fall, went right into a job promoting …
Trading Hostages: Why Lobbyists Are a Key Part of the Debt-Limit Deal
In the final debt limit compromise, Republicans and Democrats agreed to swap out the hostages. Gone is the threat of defaulting on U.S. bonds by refusing to raise the debt ceiling. In its place: Medicare providers and defense …
A Washington Tale: The Pakistani Agent Who Tried to Befriend Congress
The case of Syed Fai has turned over the rock under which foreign influence peddlers and members of Congress usually shelter together, protected by the darkness of our loophole-riddled lobbying rules. Fai was arrested on Tuesday and charged with acting as a foreign agent for the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, Pakistan’s spy …
Without a Hitch, the Revolving Door Still Spins at the FCC
A spokeswoman for the cable giant Comcast says the company only approached Federal Communications Commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker, who’s just announced she’ll join the company as senior vice president of government affairs for NBC-Universal, about a potential job as a lobbyist in mid-April. Baker then alerted FCC General Counsel …