-Caveat Lector- from: http://metalab.unc.edu/javafaq/bush/ <A HREF="http://metalab.unc.edu/javafaq/bush/">Individual Donors to George W. Bush's President </A> ----- Individual Donors to George W. Bush's Presidential Campaign George W. Bush is releasing daily lists of donors to his campaign. However, he is only doing so in the inconvenient PDF format. I am posting here the ASCII text extracted from those PDF documents and posting them as tab-delimited documents that can be easily imported into any good spreadsheet or database, from which they can be searched, sorted, etc. •The complete individual donor list for July 1, 1999 through August 27, 1999 in tab delimited text format (about three megabytes; some browsers will crash when attempting to load this. I recommend saving it on your local drive and importing it into a database or spreadsheet.) •Same document in gzip format through anonymous ftp (about 728K) •The same document in XML (about eight megabytes) or as gzipped XML (a little more than 900K) •Contributions for the second quarter of 1999 in comma separated values format, gzipped from the Bush web site (This appears to include the actual documents as submitted to the FEC. The format is not quite identical to the one I've reverse engineered. It includes a little more separation of data values than I was able to conveniently derive from the PDF file. I'm going to try to bring mine in line with what's in this document. ) The conversion program is very rough, and may have flaws. Please let me know of any problems you find (e.g. a dollar amount where you'd expect to see a date or some such) by emailing me at [EMAIL PROTECTED] There are definitely areas for improvement. I don't separate the individual pieces of a name so it's not yet possible to sort by last name. Similarly city and state aren't yet separate. I'm working on this. Of course, the Bush campaign could just make this all moot by releasing their data in its original format... I omitted the RCPT (recipient) field from the original PDFs because as far as I could tell it always had the same value, "P", and I didn't know what that meant. I also omitted some comments that were in the original file such as "REATTRIBUTION OR REDESIGNATION REQUESTED (AUTOMATIC)" and "REFUND HAS OCCURRED". I may try to add these back in in the future. So far I'm only doing this for Bush because as far as I know he's the only one who's made this data available, albeit in an inconvenient format. I encourage other campaigns to do so as well. I also encourage them to use a much more basic, simple format than PDF so I don't have to do all this for them! Please excuse the roughness of this page. I'm concentrating on quickly posting complete, tab delimited files. I want to expand this to cover corporate and PAC donations as well as making it available in HTML, XML, and Microsoft Excel formats. I also want to automatically update my files to match the new Bush files as they're posted every day. I'm still working on these. Background and Related Reading •Bush Peels Back the Curtain by Lindsey Arent, Wired •Bush's campaign donor list gets mixed response, Reuters via news.com •The Center for Responsive Politics •Actual filings to the Federal Election Commission •Privacy Advocate Calls On Bush to Take Donor List Off Internet •Public Campaign •Common Cause on Campaign 2000 >From Reuters: His Web site, www.georgewbush.com, lists the donor's name as well as employer and occupation, provided such information is provided or can be obtained. It also lists the amount of the donation and the donor's home city and state. But since it cannot be downloaded, there is no computer-enhanced ability to sift through the information. To do it by hand would cost thousands of dollars and require thousands of hours, consumer spokespersons said. Actually it took me about six hours and $0.00 :-) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Elliotte Rusty Harold [EMAIL PROTECTED] Last Modified September 12, 1999 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om
