“If you ask most Americans about the NRA, they will think of the National Rifle Association. But another powerful industry trade group bearing those initials, the National Restaurant Association, conducts its own campaign of duplicitous lobbying and outright deception at the expense of the public interest,” Al Jazeera reports.

“Restaurants employ more than 13 million workers, so it is no surprise that industry lobbyists are paid a lot of money to ensure this workforce remains disempowered. The NRA, which has a staff of 750 people, spent more than $4 million in 2012 alone currying favor in Washington, D.C. But with recent fast-food strikes and restaurant workers increasingly speaking out against low wages and other forms of labor exploitation, the mask of the other NRA is slowly peeling away.”

“Congress didn’t get much of anything done last year, but you wouldn’t know it looking down K Street,” Politico reports.

“Washington Inc. experienced only a minor squeeze, continuing to hum along even as Congress failed to pass the kind of bills that lobbyists are paid top dollar by corporate clients and other special interests to influence — like an overhaul of the Tax Code, immigration reform or a major deficit package.”

“The fact that big business is just barely scaling back on its spending for hired guns in a year when Congress is expected to do even less and a year after the economy was still weak is a testament to the resilience of Washington — and the firms that have thrived in the economy around it.”

“The avalanche of cash that made Washington rich in the last decade has transformed the culture of a once staid capital and created a new wave of well-heeled insiders,” the Washington Post reports.

“The winners in the new Washington are not just the former senators, party consiglieri and four-star generals who have always profited from their connections. Now they are also the former bureaucrats, accountants and staff officers for whom unimagined riches are suddenly possible. They are the entrepreneurs attracted to the capital by its aura of prosperity and its super-educated workforce. They are the lawyers, lobbyists and executives who work for companies that barely had a presence in Washington before the boom.”

Political Moneyline finds that 19 organizations spent more than $1 million on lobbying last quarter.

“Lawmakers hoping for a respite from Washington’s intense lobbying climate won’t get a break back home during the August recess,” the Washington Post reports.

“Once a lull in the political calendar, August is now officially part of the high season. An array of interest groups has methodically plotted how to use the congressional recess to press causes.”

“The sophisticated operations aim to drive a political narrative throughout the month, hoping to produce a strong display of voter sentiment that lawmakers will not be able to ignore when they return to Washington after Labor Day. At that point, they will immediately contend with a showdown over the budget, a House debate on immigration reform and the launch of new state health insurance marketplaces created by the Affordable Care Act.”

New Republic: “Washington lobbyists are required by law to disclose who they work for, how much they get paid and what issues they advocate for. But they’re not obliged to mention it when they do other work–like, say, appear as a policy expert at a think-tank event… We found at least 49 people who have simultaneously worked as lobbyists for outside entities while serving as top staff.”

Bloomberg: “Since the November elections, at least 22 members of the last Congress took jobs with lobbying firms, running trade associations or handling government relations for organizations. That would increase by 14 percent over 2012 the number of former lawmakers now in the lobbying business… Since 1998, a total of 338 former members of Congress have worked as lobbyists or joined such firms for at least some of the time since leaving office.”

Wonk Wire: What most people would call lobbying now falls outside of its legal definition.

Jack Abramoff: “Whether you’re a company, a union, or an individual, to get your bennie–your perk–into a bill, the first thing you need to do is find a bill that’s going to get signed by the president. Ninety-nine percent of what’s proposed in Congress doesn’t make it to the White House, so you’re looking for one of the few bills that’s going to make it all the way through the House, the Senate, the conference committees, and wind up on the president’s desk. We call that a moving train. If you’re a lobbyist pushing something like this, you want your moving train to be a 2,000-plus-page bill. You want to find a way to sneak your bennie into a teeny boxcar in the back that nobody’s going to notice.”

Rosie Gray: “Unlike the Washington firms hired directly by foreign governments,
Ukraine’s leadership has slipped its American agenda through an
increasingly popular loophole in the federal law intended to regulate
foreign activity in the United States, allowing it to follow the minimal
disclosure practices required of domestic corporate lobbies, not the
extensive ones demanded of registered foreign agents. It’s a loophole
now used by a range of post-communist governments, in particular, with
money to burn and no particular love of transparency. And it offers a
path to the end of a disclosure regime put in place in 1938, amid
American concern over the effects of Nazi propaganda.”

A new study finds that nearly half of the lobbyists who were registered with Congress in 2011 and then went “inactive” in 2012 remained with the same employer, and many continued to influence public policy, Roll Call reports.

Jim Messina defends Organizing for Action in a CNN piece saying it’s “an issue advocacy group, not an electoral one. We’ll mobilize to support the president’s agenda, but we won’t do so on behalf of political candidates. The president has always believed that special interests have undue influence over the policymaking process, and the mission of this organization is to rebalance the power structure…”

“But just as the president and administration officials deliver updates on the legislative process to Americans and organizations across the ideological spectrum, there may be occasions when members of Organizing for Action are included in those updates. These are not opportunities to lobby — they are briefings on the positions the president has taken and the status of seeing them through.”

First Read: “In other words, these folks will be able to meet with the president. Here’s another thing to consider: While OFA won’t take corporate money, nothing is there to stop, say, a particular CEO from writing a $500,000 check. This op-ed was clearly intended to calm down the critics, but other than eliminating the possibility of corporate donors, it doesn’t get to the larger criticism that campaign-finance advocates are upset about.”

The Denver Post reports Coloardo state Rep. Cheri Gerou (R) filed an ethics complaint against gun lobbyist Joe Neville “after an encounter in which she admits telling Neville to “fuck off” and he responded by saying: “You just earned yourself another round of mailers in your district.”

President Obama’s political team “is fanning out across the country in pursuit of an ambitious goal: raising $50 million to convert his re-election campaign into a powerhouse national advocacy network, a sum that would rank the new group as one of Washington’s biggest lobbying operations,” the New York Times reports.

“But the rebooted campaign, known as Organizing for Action, has plunged the president and his aides into a campaign finance limbo with few clear rules, ample potential for influence-peddling, and no real precedent in national politics.”

New Republic: “Once upon a time, the only way for a pol to cash in like that was to leave elected office in order to become a lobbyist–a nice living, but one that carries with it a stigma that would likely kill any future ambitions for high office. By contrast, a gig at Heritage, the main voice of the conservative movement, could be a good launching pad for a potential 2016 presidential bid. Candidate DeMint could run as a man of ideas, not another pol out shilling for his donors.”

“The problem with that wholesome image… is that think-tanking and lobbying have come to look more and more alike. Just like lobbyists, think tanks can frame policy debates and generate political pressure–for the right price.”

According to a Washington Post examination, “more and more foreign governments are sponsoring all-expenses-paid trips to countries for lawmakers and their staffs, though an overhaul of ethics rules adopted by Congress five years ago banned them from going on most other types of free trips.”

“This overseas travel is often arranged by lobbyists for foreign governments, though lobbyists were barred from organizing other types of congressional trips out of concern that the trips could be used to buy favor. The overseas travel is covered by an exemption Congress granted itself for trips deemed to be cultural exchanges.”

Roll Call: “If a lobbying campaign is war, then opposition research is the equivalent of elite special forces. K Street deploys all sorts of quiet, behind-the-scenes tactics and troops to influence legislation and policy. The most clandestine and high-risk is the use of political-style operatives to dig up dirt on foes.”

Tim Pawlenty “has been chosen as the new head of The Financial Services Roundtable, a lobbying group, Politico reports.

“The group lobbies on behalf of large banks, insurance companies and other major players in the world of finance. The decision is expected to be announced Thursday morning.”