Comments on: Open Secrets

Open Secrets

mathowie — Thu, 13 Jul 2000 00:02:47 -0800

Open Secrets is a site for election information that takes the term "full disclosure" to the nth level. You can see how much money all the presidential candidates have taken and from whom. You can even do searches for "all the people in a single zip code that gave more than $1,000 to George Bush." And it's not just for would-be presidents, you can see who is filling senator's pockets too (like Philip Morris bankrolling Jesse Helms - big surprise there). It's all information that we deserve to know, and thanks to the web, it's there for the reading.

By: aflakete

aflakete — Thu, 13 Jul 2000 02:02:44 -0800

Finally, disclosures at a click. Politics will change as utterly as business. Show us the Money! But will politicians disclose everything? And can we tell when they don't?

By: gyc

gyc — Thu, 13 Jul 2000 08:32:00 -0800

I believe Bush already discloses all his individual donors on his website. Not sure if Gore does that also.

By: mathowie

mathowie — Thu, 13 Jul 2000 08:35:39 -0800

If they don't fully disclose all their donors, I'm pretty sure they're in violation of election law. I forgot to mention you can search for top contributors by state. Check out California's top company contributors. Marc Andreessen's LoudCloud is in the top ten? Who knew?

By: thescoop

thescoop — Thu, 13 Jul 2000 09:51:44 -0800

There's another site that also does this kind of stuff -- FECInfo. Bush and Gore also file their campaign reports electronically...you can download the files and play with them in a database manager.

By: snarkout

snarkout — Thu, 13 Jul 2000 13:10:16 -0800

Gosh, Matt--that link shows that two of the top fifteen donors in California are oil companies, and they're funding Republicans with five times as much money as Democrats. I would never, ever have guessed this to be the case! Silly Al Gore, with his foolish federal gasoline taxes, should get the hint! I like OpenSecrets.

By: birgitte

birgitte — Thu, 13 Jul 2000 15:40:43 -0800

Damn - opensecrets.com is fucking cool.

By: ZachsMind

ZachsMind — Fri, 14 Jul 2000 01:50:01 -0800

I live in Texas so that's where my interests are. Martin Frost is in deep with the PACs. No surprise there. And Kay Bailey Hutchison is funded more by individuals rather than PACs which I found mildly surprising, but most of these "individuals" are Big Business. Again, not surprising. The more I click around in Open Secrets, the more I don't like any of these assholes. And I already didn't like them to begin with. This is how the real voting is done in this country: dollars instead of ballots. Viva Capitalism. And people wonder why there's such a low voter turnout? The decision's made long before election day. I'd move, but there's nowhere to go.