Sunlight’s Bill Allison, at Real Time Investigations, links to a Many Eyes presentation of the Blagojevich criminal complaint. Looking at the visualization makes one thing clear: while the selling of the Senate seat is by far his most audacious activity, the rest of the charges are actually far, far worse. The imperious pressure the Governor put on the Tribune Company to fire editorial board members and staff is reminiscent of a third world dictator. The pay-to-play contract rigging is also horrific. Just look at this:

On October 8, Blagojevich told Individual A that he wanted to obtain a $50,000 contribution from Hospital Executive 1, the chief executive officer of Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago, which had recently received a commitment of $8 million in state funds. When the contribution was not forthcoming, Blagojevich discussed with Deputy Governor A the feasibility of rescinding the funding.

The Governor threatened to close a Children’s Hospital over a $50,000 campaign contribution.

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ProPublica features a terrific graphic showing the relative size of the government bailouts as compared to previous bailouts. Take a look (click through for the key to graphic):

(image credit: ProPublica)

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Wonder just how Wall Street has become so influential on Capitol Hill that it can command the attention of the federal government from the President on down? The answer isn’t only in how gyrations in the stock market may affect the real economy. The answer is revealed by the fact that the finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) industries that collectively are at the center of the current crisis are the single largest sector–by far–of all the major economic and interest groupings that give campaign contributions to federal politicians.

Our friends at the Center for Responsive Politics have been keeping track since 1990, and their data tells a compelling story. What you see is a new way of actually picturing the role of FIRE in relation to all these other sectors, and also in terms of how money from FIRE has tilted to one political party and then the other. You can click on the chart, which was built using Google’s Motion Chart tool, layered on top of a simple spreadsheet, and mouse over the colored circle to drill down on the data. First, we recommend you watch this explanatory screencast by our very own Larry Makinson.

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If you haven’t discovered GOOD magazine yet, do yourself a favor and check it out. It bills itself as a venue "for people who give a damn." It’s also a lot of fun. In the past couple of weeks, the magazine has published four political visualizations in its TRANSPARENCY section.

The first is an amazing graph illustrating the amount of work accomplished and time spent by the U.S. Senate over each of the last 20 years.

Another is a very cool three-minute video on where John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have received their campaign cash.

They have a fascinating graph titled "The Cost of Nation (Re) Building" illustrating the value of U.S. government contracts awarded in Iraq and Afghanistan from October 2003 through September 2006.

And the fourth is titled Poll Position, an awesome graph illustrating the accuracy of all the major public opinion polls in each of the presidential elections since 1960.

This is one of those sites where, because of the information and stylish presentation, you don’t feel so guilty chasing rabbits all over the place. It’s like crack for the political junkies out there.

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