While there’s much room for improvement, the 110th Congress has made a stab at providing a few rays of Sunlight into the mercenary culture of Washington. For example, in 2008, for the first time, federally registered lobbyists are required to file a new disclosure, called an LD-203, listing the contributions they make to federal candidates, among other things. Those disclosures have been released to the public, but in a form that’s so garbled that contributions are double, triple, quadruple counted or more. My colleague Anupama Narayanswamy painstakingly reviewed 107,000 records, finding the 14,000 individual contributions to federal candidates, and adding up who’s benefited the most from the personal checks of individual lobbyists. The headline above tells you that; read the rest here.

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