U.S. Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.) is the recipient of the second-largest amount of money from the defense industry during the 2011-2012 election cycle as he begins his campaign to replace a leading voice in the U.S. Senate opposed to defense contracting waste, fraud and abuse.
Laurie Chapman, who has pleaded guilty to 30 counts of federal bribery charges for taking over $237,000 from Santa Fe-based Omni Roofing as a facilities manager for the Corrections Department and was later fired from a post in the Indian Affairs Department in February, has been receiving unemployment benefits More…
The flood of political spending, coupled with the likely defeat of campaign finance hero Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), is making the elections a pretty grim spectacle for campaign finance advocates, but The Wall Street Journal opinion page is feeling positively giddy:
As for the rest of us, we can
This week, The Washington Independent is featuring a series of investigative stories on the rebuilding of New Orleans, five years after Hurricane Katrina. Find all of them here.
Two weeks before the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans’ mayor, Mitch Landrieu (D), just three months into his tenure, More…
Question of the day: Can guards for your company kill Afghan civilians, set up shell companies to win contracts, siphon off weapons intended for the Afghan police while using the names of cartoon characters to sign for them, and still win additional multi-million-dollar contracts to guard U.S. More…
It has an uncertain budget, a team of fewer than two dozen military officers and civilians, and barely a year to make its mark on counterinsurgency in Afghanistan before the U.S. begins its transfer of security responsibilities to Afghans. In that time, a new military task force will attempt to More…
Via Danger Room, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, took a jaundiced view of the role of contractors in Afghanistan:
“I think we’ve gone too far,” McChrystal said at France’s IHEDN military institute. “I actually think we would be better to reduce the number
Since last week’s Supreme Court decision freeing corporations to spend unlimited sums to influence elections, there’s been a great deal of debate about what Congress, short of amending the Constitution, could do to prevent the nation’s big businesses from buying even more influence in Washington than they’ve already More…
While I was covering the McChrystal/Eikenberry hearings, the State Department finally fired ArmorGroup, the private security company hired to protect the U.S. embassy in Kabul. That company, as you may recall, liked to perform other duties as well, like physical and sexual harassment; not hiring more expensive guards More…
Manu Raju, who’s really dominated the Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) beat this year, has a darkly entertaining story about Republicans who are angry their votes against his amendment prohibiting federal contracts with companies that force their employees to go through internal arbitration are being spun as pro-rape. So they More…
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