Since the presidential race has turned into an episode of MTV Cribs - next up, web ads with seizure inducing editing of million dollar homes - I figured that it would be worth while to look at the personal financial disclosures of John McCain and Barack Obama to see what information we can find on their houses.

Oh wait, what’s that? Personal financial disclosure rules don’t require the listing of residential properties. That’s why no one knew about Chris Dodd’s favorable mortgage from Countrywide or Rep. Laura Richardson’s two foreclosures.

Looking at Obama and McCain’s form I can see that some of McCains eight to eleven residential properties are listed under Cindy McCain’s name while Obama’s home is not listed. Here are some of the ones listed on the McCain financial disclosure:

Residential Real Estate Held for Investment, Coronado, CA - Over $1 million

Sedona Property, Cornville, AZ (Two Parcels. Parcel 1: Residence and Guest House. Parcel 2: Guest House.) - Over $1 million

Those are only two residential property listings that appear in both candidates financial disclosures. There are few proposals flying around Congress to require home disclosure on personal financial disclosures. Perhaps they should address this.

On another personal financial disclosure related topic, I noticed the Mark Nicholas used our Fortune 535 site to compare the net worth of Barack Obama and John McCain. Unfortunately, the site uses as its most recent filing, the 2007 report, which represents the year 2006. This was prior to the huge profits made by Obama through royalties from his latest book. So, if you want to get the most recent average net worth, you’d have to look at his 2008 report (covering 2007), in which he reports well over a million in assets.

John McCain is another story. McCain is the only member of Congress who still checks a box that lists asset value at “Over $1 million”. He does this under an exemption rule allowing the filer to not identify the actual range, over $1 million, if the asset is held by a spouse or dependent child. I should reiterate that McCain is the only member of Congress who claims this exemption and fills out the “Over $1 million” box for many assets. John Kerry, Dianne Feinstein, Jane Harman, and Nancy Pelosi all list the highest accurate value range for their spouse’s large holdings; John McCain does not. Considering this, John McCain, when combined with the actual value of Cindy McCain’s holdings, is worth much more than the amount we extracted from his personal financial disclosures for Fortune 535.

Bottom line: Obama worth more than listed and McCain worth way more.

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Twice this year I’ve been astonished to see Ralph Reed’s mug appear in election coverage. After the New Hampshire primaries the man who received over $4 million in Indian casino cash from Jack Abramoff was talking politics on CNN. Viewer reaction was intensely negative and CNN, embarrassed, canned him. While his campaign is not answering questions about it, it looks like John McCain decided that it wasn’t the best idea to appear at a fundraiser with a participant in one of the biggest corruption scandals in history. Or perhaps Reed decided that he didn’t need to be an undue distraction.

Either way, smart move.

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On his campaign Web site, John McCain laments that “wasteful special interest subsidies are not moving us toward an energy solution.” In particular, McCain tees off on “subsidies, tariffs and price supports that focus exclusively on corn-based ethanol” - one of Barack Obama’s favored fuels.

McCain, however, has become a vocal advocate for the oil industry, which is itself heavily subsidized despite enjoying the fruits of soaring crude prices. Doug Koplow, who’s been researching energy subsidies for 20 years and is president of Earth Track, says that this “very large, very sophisticated, profitable industry” can pay its own freight. “It can pay for its own R&D. It can pay its own cleanup costs,” Koplow observes. “So why are you subsidizing it at all?”

Just how big is the subsidy? It’s hard to quantify with much precision, given the secrecy surrounding corporate tax returns and other barriers to transparency. Friends of the Earth took the most recent stab at it in a July report, “Big Oil, Bigger Giveaways”. The environmental group calculated that the oil and gas industry will receive “more than $32.9 billion in handouts from taxpayers over the next five years.” This includes “tax benefits, royalty relief [forgiveness of royalties], research and development subsidies and accounting gimmicks that benefit the oil industry.”

Koplow believes the Friends of the Earth number is low because it doesn’t include the cost of defending oil shipping lanes in the Persian Gulf, the cost to own and operate the stockpile of oil in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, or accelerated depreciation benefits, which allow companies to write off investments in pipelines, drilling equipment and other infrastructure more quickly than the stuff actually wears out. His total subsidy figure for oil and gas: $39 billion a year.

Using defense spending data from the mid-1990s (adjusted for inflation), and assuming that only about a third of this spending goes toward protecting shipping lanes, Koplow estimates the value of the defense subsidy alone at nearly $20 billion a year - not including the cost of the Iraq war.

In fairness, Koplow notes that - on a per-unit-of-energy-produced basis - oil isn’t the most generously subsidized portion of the energy sector. It’s eclipsed by both ethanol and nuclear power, he says. Obama has embraced the former, touting the biofuel throughout the primary campaign. “Mr. Obama is running as a reformer who is seeking to reduce the influence of special interests,” Larry Rohter reported in the New York Times in June. “But like any other politician, he has powerful constituencies that help shape his views. And when it comes to domestic ethanol, almost all of which is made from corn, he also has advisers and prominent supporters with close ties to the industry . . .”

McCain, for his part, is a friend not only of big oil - he opposes new taxes on the industry, Obama favors them - but has called for the construction of 45 nuclear reactors by 2030. Critics say that no reactor will be built without massive subsidies; the Department of Energy has started down that road with a new loan guarantee program that sets aside up to $18.5 billion for nuclear construction. Here’s a fact sheet on both candidates’ energy policies from Reuters.

Stay tuned for more from Sunlight on the issue of government subsidies.

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Really? Not to pick on John McCain too much, but couldn’t you find someone in Atlanta to host a fundraiser who didn’t receive $4 million from Jack Abramoff to run a phony religious campaign against an Indian casino that was actually organized by another Indian casino to reduce competition?

McCain headed the Senate investigation that uncovered these payments. I know he has to raise money and patch up relationships in Republican quarters that have opposed him in the past. But Ralph Reed? Really?

Even CNN was embarrassed after they let Ralph Reed appear on television to cover the New Hampshire primaries.

The guy was involved in one of the biggest corruption scandals in American history. And it isn’t even history yet, the investigation is ongoing. I hear Bob Ney’s getting out of jail, maybe he can host a fundraiser too.

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Three makes a trend, right? Today, there are three news stories on presidential bundlers - campaign contributors who solicit money from other contributors and bundle it together - and their activities. All of these stories highlight the need for bundling disclosure rules from the Federal Election Commission. But two of these stories pinpoint the potential for abuse in the bundling system.

The Washington Post looks at the odd practices of one Harry Sargent III, the owner of an oil trading company with billion dollar defense contracts. Sargent has raised over $50,000 for Sen. John McCain’s presidential bid from a collection of Arab-Americans who refuse to discuss why they gave money to the Republican’s campaign: (more…)

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Despite protestations from our favorite tweeting and qiking member of Congress, there does appear to be a relationship between supporting the policies of an industry and that industry supporting your campaign. TPM Muckraker, using data from Campaign Money Watch, points out the near immediate contributions from executives of an oil giant, the Hess Corporation, to a joint Republican National Committee-John McCain committee after Sen. McCain switched his position on offshore drilling. (Since Sen. Barack Obama switched his position after the second quarter filings, we’ll have to wait to see if there’s a similar effect.)

Ten senior Hess Corporation executives and/or members of the Hess family each gave $28,500 to the joint RNC-McCain fundraising committee, just days after McCain reversed himself to favor offshore drilling, according to Federal Election Commission reports.

Nine of these contributions, seven from Hess executives and two from members of the Hess family, came on the same day, June 24th, the records show. The total collected in the wake of McCain’s reversal for the fund, called McCain Victory 2008, from Hess execs and family is $285,000.

The Washington Post pointed out last week that contributions from oil executives picked up in the end of June. After the events of the past few days, third quarter campaign reports should be flush with more of these contributions.

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• Conservative activist Grover Norquist called [sw: John McCain] (R-Ariz.) "delusional" for exposing Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) as a shadow lobbying operation and a conduit for Jack Abramoff’s money laundering. Norquist believes that McCain, who issued the report which exposed ATR, "has exhibited personal animus toward [him]" and issued this report in retaliation to the Arizona Senator’s defeat in the 2000 South Carolina Republican Presidential Primary. McCain’s chief of staff rebutted Norquist’s accusations, "We didn’t invent this stuff. Grover’s got a hell of a lot more to rebut than what may or may not have been in the committee report."
  
• Congress put itself in a crunch this year when it decided to set a schedule that, in total, is shorter than a school year and may prove to be shorter than any meeting schedule in the past sixty years. The Christian Science Monitor reports on all of the major bills that the House must debate and pass before this peculiarly short year comes to a close.
• Democrats are upset with one of their main funding sources, labor unions, because they are contributing campaign funds to highly vulnerable Republicans. The Hill interviewed one labor lobbyist who believed that "Democrats can’t expect unions to place all their bets on Democratic candidates and risk being shut out of the legislative process if they lose." That is a perfect explanation of the problems in ourcampaign financing system.
• Clients continue to drop the lobbying firm Copeland Lowery because of its involvement in the growing investigation into Appropriations Chair [sw: Jerry Lewis] (R-Calif.). Riverside County, Boeing Co., and now the Santa Ana Watershed Project Authority have all severed their ties to the embattled lobbying firm.

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• Conservative activist Grover Norquist called [sw: John McCain] (R-Ariz.) "delusional" for exposing Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) as a shadow lobbying operation and a conduit for Jack Abramoff’s money laundering. (The Hill)
  
• Congress put itself in a crunch this year when it decided to set a schedule that, in total, is shorter than a school year and may prove to be shorter than any meeting schedule in the past sixty years. They must now push through numerous important bills with only July and possibly September left. (Christian Science Monitor)
• Democrats are upset with one of their main funding sources, labor unions, because they are contributing campaign funds to highly vulnerable Republicans. One labor lobbyist believes that "Democrats can’t expect unions to place all their bets on Democratic candidates and risk being shut out of the legislative process if they lose." (The Hill)
  
• Clients continue to drop the lobbying firm Copeland Lowery because of its involvement in the growing investigation into Appropriations Chair [sw: Jerry Lewis] (R-Calif.). Riverside County, Boeing Co., and now the Santa Ana Watershed Project Authority have all severed their ties to the embattled lobbying firm. (San Bernardino Sun)

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• An official at the Interior Department will plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge in connection with the Jack Abramoff investigation. Roger Stillwell was "the desk officer for the Mariana Islands at the U.S. Department of the Interior" and dealt often with Abramoff, who lobbied for the Islands. Stillwell is charged with "[f]ailing to report gifts from a ‘prohibited source.’" I’ll second Paul Kiel in saying that investigators are most likely starting with a small fish and working their way up. There is certainly a lot of dirt — and a lot of lawmakers — involved in the Marianas Islands angle in the web of Abramoff scandals. TPM Muckraker and Think Progress have more.
• Our buddies at Room 8 NY did some digging into the personal finances of [sw: Gary Ackerman] (D-N.Y.) to find that his stock options in the defense contractor Xenonics have skyrocketed over the past four years as the U.S. has been engaged in two wars in Afghanistan and then Iraq. Ackerman purchased stock in Xenonics back in 2002 after the invasion of Afghanistan at a worth of $1,000-$15,000. That stock is now worth between $500,000 and $1,000,000! Since Ackerman’s stock purchase and the invasion of Iraq Xenonics has received numerous contracts and multi-million dollar earmarks pushing their stock to higher and higher. Did Ackerman earmark these funds? Well, we don’t know because there is no transparency in the process. Perhaps someone should ask.
• Sen. [sw: John McCain] (R-Ariz.) makes his first foray into the blogging world at Porkbusters to assail Congress’ use of earmarks and his own party’s failure to live up to their ideal of limited government. The conservative blogosphere has picked up on McCain’s post. Check out Instapundit, Freeman Hunt, Tim Chapman, and Ankle Biting Pundits. National Journal’s Beltway Blogroll also has more.
  

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When we created Sunlight we made a point to note that the issue of greater transparency for government actions was a nonpartisan issue. We saw support for it across party lines in our initial polling and we see it again today in an editorial in the conservative newspaper — the Examiner –which endorses transparency for government grants and contracts. The paper strongly supports Sen. Tom Coburn’s Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act (S. 2590) that would make all information about federal contracts and grants available to the public free of charge in a searchable, downloadable online format on the Internet. (Coburn is the original sponsor of the proposal, and the measure is co-sponsored by the unlikely bedfellows of Sens. Barack Obama, Tom Carper and John McCain, R-Ariz.)

Abraham Lincoln said, "Let the people know the facts and all will be safe," so the Great Emancipator would certainly cheer an unlikely group of United States senators who have recently joined forces to push a potentially landmark measure. That measure is designed to put every American citizen within a few mouse clicks of knowing the facts needed to track federal spending as never before.

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

This legislation requires OMB to establish this database of all federal contracts and grants and requires free access to it. The database would contain comprehensive information about federal contracts; block, formula and project grants; cooperative agreements; direct, guaranteed and insured loans; direct payments; insurance and indirect financial assistance. 

The editorial mentions the grant that Sunlight has made a grant to OMB Watch to move forward in creating such a database in the absence of such legislation. Nothing would please them or us more than to have this information mandated by the government. That’s the way it should be. Join OMB Watch’s call to sign on to support the bipartisan legislation.

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