It don't come easy

Posted at 4:57 PM on June 15, 2006 by Bob Collins

Boy, they sure don't make it easy to find the congressional financial disclosure forms online. What would be great is if the folks that ran the Minnesota Senate and Minnesota House Web sites were put in charge of the U.S. House and U.S. Senate sites, which are hopelessly irrelevant and designed to be impossible for anybody to find anything. But, then again, maybe they really don't want us to find stuff.

Political Moneyline, however, has scanned all of the forms in PDF and
is making them available and here are the direct links.

The server there has really been struggling today (oh, you mean people really want this information?) so it might take a bit.

HOUSE

Gil Gutknecht

Mark Kennedy (there's a second one, I'm not sure why)

John Kline

Betty McCollum

Jim Oberstar

Collin Peterson

James Ramstad

Martin Sabo

SENATE

Norm Coleman

Mark Dayton

Speaking of money, I'm doing a Policy and a Pint appearance next month on the subject of campaigns and money. It's not my favorite topic -- there's nothing illegal about campaign contributions and you can only prove anecodtal correlation between actions and contributions.

Specifically, the question is whether there's a correlation between money and getting elected. The easy answer is "yes," but I'm reminded of my favorite line from the movie "The American President," uttered by Michael J. Fox giving a tongue-lashing to the prez. "In the absence of real leadership, the American people will listen to the first person to the microphone."

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