{"id":4876,"date":"2011-09-27T14:57:16","date_gmt":"2011-09-27T18:57:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/?p=4876"},"modified":"2011-09-29T09:20:56","modified_gmt":"2011-09-29T13:20:56","slug":"in-2012-politics-following-the-money","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2011\/09\/27\/in-2012-politics-following-the-money\/","title":{"rendered":"In 2012 politics, following the money"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m sitting in a worksh0p in New Orleans, learning about the latest resources and strategies for covering the influence of money on politics &#8212; part of our effort to get ready for next year&#8217;s elections.<\/p>\n<p>One of the really cool on-line tools out there is <a href=\"http:\/\/followthemoney.org\/\">followthemoney.org<\/a>, a site that offers really accessible data about politicians, donors, lobbyists and how they all work together to shape the legislation and policies that we all live with.<\/p>\n<p>Sounds dry, but buried in the data are interesting nuggets that tell us a lot about our government.<\/p>\n<p>One example is the fact that five of state Senator Betty Little&#8217;s top 20 donors &#8212; including the two biggest &#8212; are labor unions.<\/p>\n<p>Public employee unions representing corrections officers and healthcare workers are the Republican lawmakers two biggest donors.\u00a0 Interesting, right?<\/p>\n<p>This isn&#8217;t &#8220;gotcha&#8221; stuff.\u00a0 But the money trail definitely matters and it often complicates the Republican vs. Democrat, conservative vs. liberal picture that shapes a lot of elections.<\/p>\n<p>More to come as we get deeper into the 2012 campaign&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m sitting in a worksh0p in New Orleans, learning about the latest resources and strategies [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[6560,6550,20],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4876"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4876"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4876\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4877,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4876\/revisions\/4877"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}