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The Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board will vote Tuesday to update its rules governing disclosure during a ballot campaign. Open government advocates are concerned the ruling could open loopholes just as the state nears the 2012 vote to constitutionally ban gay marriage, a campaign that is expected to draw millions of dollars in outside spending to the state. The campaign board is proposing changes to its recently released guidance documents.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, appearing today before the congressional bailout oversight panel, repeatedly emphasized the importance of transparency to the

Party-switching Rep. Parker Griffith (R-Ala.) is getting whacked again for his life-long record of supporting Democrats, this time from Tea Party-backed

The Iowa Independent reports that Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) today echoed Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele’s comments that yesterday’s

In fairness, this was a rapidly issued apology (near-apology?) by U.S. Forces-Afghanistan. Here’s the statement in full, which I received 20 minutes

Finally, a sovereignty question! I was starting to think the GOP wasn’t what it used to be. Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) is concerned about American sovereignty at

Sen. John McCain, as everyone knows, loves to say that he has never once, in his whole career, requested nor received a single earmark or pork-barrel project

Benton Harbor Emergency Manager Joe Harris said last night that 90 percent of the local citizens believe that he is the “angel of common sense” though he acknowledged that no poll has been taken. Earlier this month Harris used new powers granted under Public Act 4 — the Emergency Manager law — to remove all decision making power from Benton Harbor’s elected officials.

Iowa Senate Democrats have agreed to 50 items within the House Republicans’ omnibus budget bill, Democrat leaders said today, primarily Republicans’ desires for a two-year budget and a $5.99 billion spending cap. Most of the items Democrats have agreed to — or “accepted,” as Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal (D-Council Bluffs) characterized it — are within education and health and human services. One such comprise is that the universal preschool program will see no change in allowable growth in their budgets for the coming fiscal year.

The Pakistani Army is claiming that it has practically cleared the Taliban out of the Swat Valley. Now comes the real counterinsurgency test: holding the area.

With a raft of controversial social and budgetary bills moving through the Republican-controlled state House, Rep. Dave Agema (R-Grandville) is already looking for a possible new job

A glimmer of good news in the monthly Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey released today: In July, there were more job openings than in June -- the first

With Congress returning this week, I thought it would be a good time to do a quick overview of what to expect on energy and environmental legislation. The

I am a pro-life conservative, said Carly Fiorina. I believe in the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman. I am a fiscal conservative. In other words, I share the conservative values that many Republican voters share, and have been public about that for a very long time.

Within president Obama’s $447 billion jobs bill he announced Thursday in an address to a joint session of Congress, some $55 billion would go directly to

Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), suffering from brain cancer, will step down from the powerful Judiciary Committee when Congress returns to Washington in January,

Friends of the Earth, which released a series of emails between the State Department and TransCanada lobbyist Paul Elliott last week, is now asking the Department of Justice to investigate possible legal violations based on those communications. In a letter to the DOJ, the group says: On behalf of Friends of the Earth, I am submitting the following information to demonstrate that, Paul Elliott, a government relations employee of TransCanada, has acted as agent of a foreign principal and therefore violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

She doesn’t mention that Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.) called her out for the Government Printing Office’s publication of hundreds of civilian nuclear sites, but House