Look at me! I’m filthy, stinkin’ rich.
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America's oil companies took out a full page ad in the biggest newspapers in America in the last week to explain why ExxonMobil made the most money ever reported in corporate history. Why not be proud of the fact you made a ton of cash in business? Why apologize for it? Well, whatever, the company was embarrassed, it seems by its embarrassment of riches.
Politicians haven't reached that level yet where they apologize for making money like it's going out of style. There's nothing illegal about it, but it's just a bit odd to see the press releases being cranked out in the last 24 hours proclaiming a candidate's prowess at raking in the dough, especially when the 30-minute workout in Washington these days is to "tsk tsk" the state of American campaign financing in the wake of the Jack Abramoff scandal.
Anyway, there'll be more press releases today. If you want to poke around on your own, there's a couple of good places to do so. The Federal Election Commission is doing a much better job these days of getting the data inputted. Still not great, mind you. But considering it's the federal government, not that bad. You can search for a particular candidate here. That'll give you the bottom line. With the candidate's name hot-linked, you can find out who gave the cash. Some of the results are pretty lame. For example, it shows no individual gave any money to the Phil Krinkie campaign. Hard to believe. If you want to get some meat with your potatos, try this starting page instead.
It'll give you a list of all forms that have been filed. Look for the "year-end" report.
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If you want something a little prettier, try Political Moneyline, which was started years ago by former FEC workers who were unhappy with the glacial pace at which the FEC was migrating data to an online platform.
Like any good cybernauts, a lot of the good stuff is now behind the premium content firewall (hey, democracy is fine, but you have to make money too!). But you can still get a nice graphical depiction of the cash.
And if you want to go to a very nice bottom-line, across-the-board, gee-there's-too-many-hyphens-in-this sentence look at things, then this page on Minnesota is the best spot.
Political Moneyline is lightning-quick at getting the data posted. It only too minutes, it seems once Jim Knoblach filed in the 6th District (he hadn't as of mid-afternoon yesterday) to get his numbers included. And, by the way, they show he was the top fundraiser in the race for the 6th District.
It'll be interesting to see if Elwyn Tinklenberg's numbers today (he hadn't filed as of this morning) show him keeping pace with his Republican counterparts. Patty Wetterling is still sitting out there, maybe even looking for reasons to jump into the race. We'll see.
There's a couple of other spots out there worth mentioning. Opensecrets.org is a nice look at how fundraising works. As a data source, it's really quite stale.
A site that looks more at state money (hey, is it asking too much for Minnesota to get its campaign finance data online? Apparently so.), try the Follow the Money. Unfortunately the site still thinks it's 2004.
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