Mr. William March

Our latest guest speaker was political reporter, Wendy March. He is the longest tenured political reporter in the Tampa Bay area. He had a great deal of knowledge and experience to lend is.

Mr. March did a good job at keeping the class included on how he would obtain records, all while giving us real-life examples. He talked about it taking almost 2 months to obtain some public records back before the Internet. This put some things in prospective. I can no longer complain about our project we have to do.

He told us a story about the only time he ever got somebody indicted through a story. That was an interesting story and really caught my attention because he got his information of public records.

The article is about political contributions to Bill Clinton's campaign for his second term as President. There was a guy named Mark Jiminez who was Florida's largest Democratic National Committee contributor.

Something strange about him though is that people amongst his company, Future Tech, had donated the largest amount they could for a nominee. Mr. March then explained to us the difference between hard and soft money. There's a cap on how much an individual can give to a nominee, hard money, but no cap when it comes to a political party, soft money. Also a corporation can't make campaign contributions at the Federal Level.

Mr. March found a suspicious trend amongst Future Tech employees. They were all donating the highest possible donation to Bill Clinton's campaign. Looking through public records, Mr. March started to find some interesting things about some of the donors.

Most of them had very modest homes and cars. He had multiple examples of them not only not voting, but not even registered to vote. Some were registered Republicans, others were unable to pay their own mortgage. If I'm going to give someone 1,000 dollars of my money, you better believe I'm going to do something as simple as voting.

Mr. March's article was interesting and showed what power public records can have. I until now had no idea campaign donations were public record, nor did I know anything about hard or soft money.

Mr. March was a rare blend of interesting and informative. He gave us a bunch of websites that will help a great deal for our project. They will be posted at the bottom. It was just another reason why politics can't be trusted and needs public records to keep it in check. Florida needs to do it's very best to keep it an open government. Until next time everyone.


Here's the sites:
http://maplight.org/
http://www.opensecrets.org/
http://www.votehillsborough.org/items.aspx?id=331&s=331
http://lobbyingdisclosure.house.gov/

There are many others, let me know if anyone would like me to send the rest to them.