According to information from the Federal Elections Commission, Latham pulled $1,003,987 in receipts for the first six months of 2011 — well below the more than $6 million garnered by U.S. House Speaker John Boehner, but still well above most of his congressional colleagues.

In looking only at contributions from PACs or other committees, however, Latham nearly matches Boehner. Latham, who ranks seventh among incumbents in this category, reaped more than half of his receipts — $691,491 — from PACs while Boehner garnered $787,200 from similar groups. Boehner also ranks first in individual contributions, receiving more than $2.5 million of his overall total from this demographic. Latham, however, is not among the 50 top House incumbents for individual donations.

Latham is also the only Iowan of the state’s five House incumbents who makes the top 50 list for cash on hand as of June 30. Latham ranks 26 with just under $1.5 million cash on hand.

Some of Latham’s largest PAC contributors were:

• Truth, Accountability and Courage PAC, or TACPAC — $10,000
  leadership PAC affiliated with Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican

• Anheuser-Busch PAC — $10,000
  beer, wine & liquor industry

• American Maritime Officers Voluntary Political Action Fund — $7.500
  transportation union

• AT&T Inc. Federal PAC — $10,000
  telephone utilities industry

• Burlington Northern Santa Fe RailPAC — $7,500
  railroad industry

• California Dairies Federal PAC — $10,000
  dairy industry

• College of American Pathologists PAC — $10,000
  health industry

• EricPAC — $10,000
  leadership PAC affiliated with Eric Cantor, a Virginia Republican

• Freedom & Security PAC — $10,000
  leadership PAC affiliated with John Kline, a Minnesota Republican

• Hawkeye PAC — $10,000
  leadership PAC affiliated with Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican

• Honeywell International PAC — $10,000
  manufacturing & distributing industry

• Next Century Fund — $10,000
  leadership PAC affiliated with Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican

• PAC of the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons — $10,000
  health industry

• Physical Therapy PAC — $10,000
  health industry

• R.J. Reynolds PAC — $10,000
  tobacco industry

• Swisher PAC — $10,000
  tobacco industry

• The Freedom Project — $10,000
  leadership PAC affiliated with John Boehner, an Ohio Republican

Eight of his PAC contributions came from organizations that listed Iowa as their headquarters. Those are:

• National Pork Producers/Pork PAC — $3,500
• Principal Life Insurance Co. PAC — $2,000
• Meredith Employees Fund for Better Government — $1,000
• PACEG Committee — $2,500
• West Central PAC — $1,000
• Hawkeye PAC — $10,000
• VGM Management Ltd. PAC — $1,500
• Stanley Consultants Inc. PAC — $250

Due to redistricting, and the Hawkeye State losing a congressional district, Latham has already announced he will be moving and challenging Democratic incumbent Leonard Boswell in the newly formed 3rd District. According to FEC filings, Boswell has total receipts of $332,540 — $121,550 from individual contributions and $199,250 from PACs or other committees. Boswell’s ending cash on hand for June 30 was $285,985.

When all 420 House incumbents are combined, they have receipts of $15.6 million — a $20.5 million, or 15.6 percent, increase from the same period in 2009, the most recent non-election year.

Individual contributions accounted for $75.8 million of House incumbents’ total receipts, representing $13.2 million, or 21.1 percent, increase from the first six months of 2009. Contributions from PACS amounted to $66.9, which only a slight increase of $2.1 million, or 3.2 percent, since the same time period in 2009.

Cash on hand for incumbents, however, has dropped. Currently, the incumbents have a combined $217.4 million available for use, a decrease of $15.5 million from the previous non-election year.

Non-incumbent candidates raised a total of $30.5 million for House races during the first six months of 2011, slightly outpacing the $30.3 million raised during the same six-month period in 2009. As of June 30, 2011, House non-incumbent candidates had a combined cash-on-hand total of $18.1 million, a $500,000 (2.8%) increase from the June 2009 combined total.

Although neither of Iowa’s U.S. Senators — Grassley and Tom Harkin — made the top 50 in any category, the 82 individual Senate campaign committees raised $103.1 million in the first six months of 2011 — the highest total ever reporter for the first six months in a non-election year. The figure exceeded the previous high of $93.2 million raised in the first half of 2009. And, in 2005, the last time this same group of Senate seats was up for election, 85 candidates raised $84.8 million during the first six months of the cycle.

Roughly 74 percent of the Senate contributions were from individuals; PACs contributions to Senate candidates totaled $17.5 million, or about 17 percent of the campaigns’ receipts.

DirtyEnergyMoney.com tracks industry contributions from 1999 to June 2010 based on Federal Election Commission disclosures. The web site was launched by MoveOn, Public Citizen, Greenpeace, Energy Action Coalition, True Majority, 350.org and others.

According to the site, the top five “dirtiest politicians” (those that took the most money from industry) are:

1. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas)

2. Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas)

3. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)

4. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.)

5. Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.)

The site also targets Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.), who is facing a tough reelection battle this year. Lincoln has accepted $814,882 since 1999, the site says. According to the site:

Arkansas’ Democratic Senator Blanche Lincoln seems to have drilled into the largest deposit of dirty campaign cash in the most recent election cycle. What has she done to deserve such generosity? She voted for the Murkowski Big Oil Bailout, a bill that would have gutted clean air protections and increased our oil dependence. She also voted to keep sending our taxpayer money to big oil and gas.

Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) makes his opening statements before a hearing Tuesday on the accident in the Gulf of Mexico involving the offshore oil rig Deepwater Horizon. (Pete Marovich/ZUMApress.com)

On the surface, the two accidents couldn’t have been more different. The first occurred in the rugged mountains of Appalachia; the second was more than a thousand miles away in the Gulf of Mexico. One was miles underground; the other thousands of feet underwater. One happened in pursuit of coal; the other in the unending search for domestic oil.

[Environment1]Yet last month’s deadly explosion at the Upper Big Branch coal mine in southern West Virginia, and the more recent fatal blast on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig off the coast of Louisiana, have at least this much in common: Both were likely preventable, according to a growing number of lawmakers and workplace safety experts — if only federal regulations designed to prevent such disasters had been enforced.

“I don’t believe it is enough to label this catastrophic failure as an unpredictable and unforeseeable occurrence,” Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.), chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said during a Tuesday hearing on the Deepwater Horizon disaster. “If this is like other catastrophic failures of technological systems in modern history … we will likely discover that there was a cascade of failures: technical, human and regulatory.”

The message is clear: Regulations are only as good as the people enforcing them. And Congress, some experts are warning, would do well to recognize that trend as lawmakers contemplate reforms as diverse as those governing coal mines, oil rigs and Wall Street.

Along those lines, Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize winning economist for the New York Times, noted this week that the problems at the Interior Department are by no means unique. Instead, they represent “a broader pattern that includes the failure of banking regulation and the transformation of the Federal Emergency Management Agency … into a cruel joke.” The common thread, Krugman argued, “is the degradation of effective government by antigovernment ideology.”

Krugman targeted the Bush administration in particular. But many work safety experts are quick to note that the lax enforcement over the extraction industries represents a much broader trend, beginning well before Bush took office, and extending well beyond his exit. Along the way, federal enforcement agencies have been stacked, at times, with anti-regulation regulators — many of whom still remain. And the industries have showered millions of dollars on Congress in order to persuade lawmakers that, when it comes to protecting workers, business knows best. The results have been predictable.

“We have a strong anti-regulatory bent in this country,” said Celeste Monforton, former work-safety official in the Labor Department who’s now at George Washington University, “Regulation is like a four-letter word.”

In the case of the Deepwater Horizon, which is leased by BP, the Interior Department is now under a microscope on several fronts. For one thing, the Minerals Management Service granted the rig a “categorical exclusion” from a federal law designed to protect the environment from significant spills. (The agency simply didn’t believe that such a spill was possible from that project.) And quite separately, the MMS has spent the last decade transferring most of its safety-enforcement duties to the industry, in effect allowing the drillers to police themselves. The trend has led lawmakers, in the wake of last month’s deadly accident, to accuse the agency of being too close to those it’s charged with regulating.

“Clearly, stronger, more independent oversight of oil company activities is needed,” Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who heads the Senate Environment Committee, said during a separate hearing on the spill Tuesday afternoon.

Acknowledging that problem, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced Tuesday that the agency plans to split the MMS into two separate entities: One would be charged with inspecting rigs and enforcing safety measures; the other would be responsible for managing leases and collecting royalties.

Similar regulatory questions have dogged the Mine Safety and Health Administration, particularly following the April 5 blast in Raleigh County, W.Va., that killed 29 miners. In the days and months leading up to the explosion, federal investigators had cited the mine for a long list of safety violations. Ultimately, though, they didn’t take any steps to close the operation down. A number of mine-safety experts have charged that MSHA leaders simply didn’t want to confront the powerful mining industry, even in the name of miner safety.

Ken Hechler, former West Virginia congressman and lead sponsor of a 1969 law that overhauled mining safety, said that his bill gives MSHA officials all the authority they needed to close down the troubled mine — if they had chosen to exercise it.

“The legislation is there on the books. You can tell in black and white precisely what it means,” Hechler said in a recent phone interview. “This is why I regard MSHA as partially responsible [for the tragedy].”

Most observers are quick to caution that the cause of neither the Gulf spill nor the West Virginia blast have yet been discovered — and might not be learned for months to come. Indeed, investigators in West Virginia haven’t been able to enter the UBB mine yet, due to the accumulation of toxic gases. And emergency workers around the Deepwater Horizon are still concentrating all of their efforts on stopping the gusher, which is still spewing crude oil into the Gulf at a rate of 5,000 barrels per day.

There’s also a strong sense that the companies themselves should bear most of the blame if it’s discovered that they simply ignored existing safety measures. Peter Galvin, a former MSHA official, noted that both BP and Massey Energy, which owns the UBB mine, have troubling safety records. “In both cases, we have a large and very wealthy parent corporation with a history of ignoring worker safety and health risks until it is too late,” he said in an email.

Still, when companies fail to protect their employees, then it falls on regulators to intervene. And if they’re not doing it, Hechler said, then Congress needs to step in to force their hands.

“This process of writing good laws that are not enforced,” he said, “somehow has to be toughened to require the enforcement.”

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, a non-partisan organization that tracks money in elections, employees of a law firm founded by Charles Keating Jr. have bundled more than $50,000 in contributions to Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign.

In amounts ranging from $200 to $2,300, about 30 partners and employees of the legal firm Keating, Muething and Klekamp, as well as their family members, have contributed $50,200 to McCain’s 2008 campaign. All but two of the contributions came in July, and all but three of those July donations were logged on July 31, suggesting they were delivered at the same time. As with any bundle of campaign contributions, it’s difficult to determine which donor was the “bundler,” the person who solicited the contributions on the campaign’s behalf. McCain’s online roster of bundlers, which purports to name any individual bundling $50,000 or more for the campaign, does not associate any of McCain’s major fund-raisers with the Keating firm.

McCain and Keating were forever linked by the “Keating Five” corruption scandal during the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s. McCain and four other lawmakers were accused of improperly interfering with federal banking regulators investigating Keating’s Lincoln Savings and Loan Assn., which ultimately failed — costing the federal government and investors billions of dollars. Keating spent more than four years in prison as a result.

Keating was a major campaign contributor to each of the five legislators. During the scandal, it became known that McCain had taken several trips at Keating’s expense — including vacations to Keating’s home in the Bahamas, which McCain later paid for. McCain was eventually cleared of any wrongdoing by the Senate Ethics Committee, though the committee reprimanded him for exercising poor judgment.

While there is certainly nothing improper about McCain receiving contributions from individuals at Keating’s firm, it is a reminder of McCain’s past ethics problems — before he styled himself a maverick reformer. The scandal has hardly been mentioned this election cycle; but it does remain an arrow in the Democrats’ quiver if or, perhaps more likely, when things get ugly.