Last month, Gawker’s Adrian Chen toyed around with Facebook’s new targeted advertising tool to reveal broad information about Facebook users. We we tried as well, and found some interesting results. Around 1,750 people in Washington D.C. “Like” lobbying. For Facebook users who currently work in Congress (staffers in both the House and Senate), 140 people
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When asked about his plan for higher education, Mitt Romney has taken to endorsing the for-profit higher education industry, even singling out a specific college business, Full Sail University. When speaking with a local newspaper before the Iowa caucus, he volunteered Full Sail and other for-profit colleges as an answer to the rising costs of
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The Occupy Wall Street movement has permeated across the country – the 99 percent have changed the dialogue of the 2012 election and our country’s understanding of economics, inequality, and democracy. As organizers start to regroup and set their sites on the spring, groups in 34 cities have agreed to “a day of nonviolent direct
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Comedy Central fake news host Stephen Colbert’s best contribution to the Election 2012 coverage so far has been his hilarious and incredibly illuminating takedown of the super PAC: Colbert has started a super PAC, employed a former Federal Elections Commission (FEC) chairman as his lawyer, and even transferred control of his super PAC to Jon
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The pharmaceutical industry utilizes its immense lobbying operation to win various protections and subsidies from the federal government. One of these protections is a federal prohibition on allowing Americans to freely buy pharmaceuticals re-imported from countries like Canada, where drugs are much cheaper. Thanks to this protectionist barrier, the pharmaceutical industry  effectively stifles competition, which helps
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As Ricksanity intensifies, Mitt Romney’s upstart challenger, Rick Santorum, appears ready to compete on yet another plane. Call it the For-Profit College Primary, with no delegates but lots of campaign cash up for grabs. Romney certainly has staked his claim to be the For-Profit Education President. He has gushed on the campaign trail about for-profit
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This morning the Heritage Foundation’s investigative reporters, Rob Bluey and Lachlan Markay, published an interesting article alleging that the Obama administration allocated federal dollars in a way so as to “buy” the votes of Congressional legislators on certain key pieces of legislation. The authors focus on the discretionary budgets of various federal agencies, which can
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 The Courier Journal reports today about the huge amounts of money that a drug industry group is spending to fight regulation of certain cold and allergy medications in the state of Kentucky. For years, public health advocates have pushed for tougher regulation of these medications because they are commonly used to produce methamphetamine. Kentucky Senate Majority Leader
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