The Center for Public Integrity

Bruce Springsteen has waded into a Badlands more menacing than any of the shadowy worlds he has conjured in his 35-year songwriting career: Earlier this week, he pleaded for fans to seek tougher government antitrust scrutiny of the proposed merger between concert promoter Live Nation and Ticketmaster — the big entertainment firm that has successfully skirted probes for years and now has footholds in the new Obama administration.

President Obama introduced his high-powered Economic Recovery Advisory Board this morning. The advisory board will offer “independent, nonpartisan information, analysis, and advice” to the President and his team, according to an earlier news release. The release said the members of the board “will be drawn from among distinguished citizens outside the government who are qualified on the basis of achievement, experience, independence, and integrity.”

Public transportation advocates are up in arms this week over the latest twist in an ongoing war between mass transit and highway funding in the stimulus package. Published reports indicate that Senator Kit Bond, a Missouri Republican, plans to propose amendments that redirect $2 billion from high speed rail and $5.5 billion from competitive transportation grants toward an increase in highway funding; Bond is said to be concerned that the original intended uses for that money likely wouldn’t stimulate the economy fast enough.

When it comes to endorsing a Super Bowl team, it seems President Obama might see a lot of himself in the Arizona Cardinals. An underdog that nobody thought had a chance. An uphill battle against an entrenched machine that has decades of success as its party’s… errr, football conference’s shining star. So why, then, did the President wave his proverbial yellow towel for the Steel Curtain yesterday?

With the announcement of former Goldman Sachs lobbyist Mark Patterson to serve as chief of staff for Obama’s new treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, Patterson joins a growing number of former lobbyists in the new administration.

If you, like PaperTrail, try to keep tabs on the lobbyists roaming Capitol Hill, you were probably equally confused when, as of the January 21 filing deadline, the Congressional computer system showed a significant drop-off in the number of registered Washington lobbyists in the last quarter of the year.

The federal government’s to-do list just got a little longer. Congress’s investigative arm, the Government Accountability Office, today released its biennial list of the federal government’s most pressing problems — most of which can be found on the Center’s recent Broken Government project (along with much, much more).

The big winner in the $825 billion stimulus proposal revealed Thursday by House Democrats is roads. State road projects get a proposed at $30 billion, while mass-transit projects got only $10 billion.

In a break with precedent, when asked at his final press conference to name his administration’s biggest mistake, President George W. Bush rattled off a short list instead. He included posting the “Mission Accomplished” banner on an aircraft carrier and not pushing for immigration reform, and he mentioned the government response to Hurricane Katrina, though he stopped short of calling it a mistake.

As America approaches a historic transfer of power, it is becoming ever-clearer what a daunting set of tasks awaits the new administration. When Barack Obama takes the oath of office at noon on January 20 he will inherit an economy collapsing before our eyes and a pair of ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But he will also inherit a federal government whose machinery should bear an “out of order” sign.