All Blog Posts from Couric & Co.

Sharyl Attkisson is an investigative correspondent for CBS News.

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Fake occupations like "lover"? Non-existent zip codes like "00000"? Imaginary people like "Doodad Pro"? Neither campaign appears to corner the market on odd entries from the donor files.

But with Obama receiving many more individual donations, a stunningly larger total (Obama's got more than $603 million to McCain's $358 million), and -depending who you ask - an impressive (or suspicious) month of record fundraising in September, some are trying to take a closer look at Obama's stats.

"He's been taking in a lot of money very rapidly," says Sheila Krumholz who heads up the Center for Responsive Politics. She says ...

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Sharyl Attkisson is the Capitol Hill Correspondent for CBS News.

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Rep. Paul Kanjorski, was just trying to do something great for his hometown: He got several million federal tax dollars to build an office building in Nanticoke, Penn., so that a major business had a place to operate and bring several hundred jobs to town. It was named the Kanjorski Center. But a few years ago, the business moved out of the city-owned Kanjorski Center, leaving Nanticoke stuck paying the $15,000 a month bill for the empty building.

Kanjorski's follow up plan was to build a city-owned parking garage for the empty city-owned Kanjorski Center in hopes of attracting new tenants. Once again, he turned to federal taxpayers for help, earmarking more than $5 million for the Kanjorski Center parking garage project.

Critics say federal tax dollars aren't meant to buy economic stimulus projects for every Congressman's hometown – there isn't enough money to go around as it is. Further objections came from local officials who said Kanjorski shouldn't be able to use an earmark to force the city to build and own another liability: a parking garage ...

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Sharyl Attkisson is investigative correspondent for CBS News.

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In a news conference this morning, Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., laid down the gauntlet against the Washington Post – and, by proxy, other journalists who have reported on the wisdom of some of the choices he's made while holding a powerful position in Congress. Most recently, the Post printed a story and an editorial involving Rangel's use of his congressional stationery and other congressional perks to allegedly help in fundraising efforts for the "Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service" at New York City College.

In the news conference today, Rangel defended his actions, saying that in the letters he wrote on his congressional stationery, he never asked for money outright. He said repeatedly that he's violated no laws or ethics rules.

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Sharyl Attkisson is an investigative correspondent for CBS News.

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I can only imagine that they tell themselves the cheap, illegally imported chemotherapy drugs are safe – that they're just as good as any of the more expensive versions that are sold legally in the United States.

That's the only thing that makes it even slightly comprehensible as to why trusted oncologists – cancer doctors – would opt to buy delicate, lifesaving I.V. chemotherapy drugs on-the-cheap from a source in which there's no way to know whether the medicine has been produced properly, transported properly or stored properly. Even if the drugs somehow could be guaranteed safe, the story is still shocking: Doctors aren't passing along the savings (for buying the cheap, imported drugs) to their ill patients. Instead, they're pocketing the profits.

Sharyl Attkisson is an investigative correspondent for CBS News.

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They're definitely having salmon troubles in California, Oregon and Washington State. No doubt about that.

The question many are asking, though, has to do with the massive relief plan that aims to help ... and the way it was snuck into the Farm Bill without congressional debate. The $170 million salmon bail-out was added to the Farm Bill by California's own congresswoman, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. That's on top of $60 million provided by Congress to the Pacific salmon industry last year. Consider that the "lost catch" for the $60 million in relief was $16 million.

This year, the "lost catch" is estimated at $22 million, but they'll be getting a whopping $170 million in relief. Some digging around revealed there aren't all that many folks who fish for salmon, even in a good year. So where is all that money going? It turns out it does a lot more than just put emergency food in the mouths of fishermen who are living on the edge.

There is no means test to receive the salmon relief. In other words, somebody could own a charter boat, be making a ton of money on other catches, yet still qualify for a check from the federal government. In some cases, a very big check ... for six figures.

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Sharyl Attkisson is an investigative correspondent for CBS News.

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Perhaps the most puzzling thing about autism and ADD is that more than a decade into this public health crisis, our best, smartest government scientists and public health officials still say they have no idea what's causing it. Scary stuff, when parents having a child today realize there's at least an estimated 1 in 150 chance their child will have an autism disorder (1 in 90 if it's a boy).

While the government has been utterly unable to stop it, or even tell us what is causing it, they say they do know one thing: it's not vaccines. But today, in an exclusive interview with CBS News, Dr. Bernadine Healy becomes the most well-known medical voice yet to counter the government on that claim.

Healy's credentials couldn't be more "mainstream." After all, she once was a top government health official as head of the National Institutes of Health. She founded the first school of public health in Ohio, and then headed both the school of public health and the school of medicine at Ohio State University. She's an internist and cardiologist. And she's a member of the Institute of Medicine, the government advisory board that tried to put the vaccine-autism controversy to rest in 2004 by saying a link was not likely.

Click below to watch a Web-exclusive extended cut of Sharyl's interview with Dr. Healy:

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Sharyl Attkisson is an investigative correspondent for CBS News.

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Vaccines have saved countless lives, nearly eradicating horrible, deadly and disfiguring diseases that once threatened many Americans. Most government scientists and public health officials discount any link between these lifesaving medicines and autism or ADD. But what is it about vaccinations that some parents and scientists believe is possibly implicated in these disorders? There are many theories.

One vaccine researcher (who does not believe a link between vaccines and autism or ADD has been firmly established) told me that the theories are not mutually exclusive; that there could be some validity behind each.

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EDITOR'S NOTE: this entry by CBS News investigative correspondent Sharyl Attkisson was first posted last June, but as the debate over autism and vaccinations rages on, it seems worthy of repeating. You can read the original post here, or simply scroll down below to see it in full.

Just yesterday, U.S. health officials conceded that childhood vaccines interacted with and worsened a rare disorder that ultimately led to autism-like symptoms in a Georgia girl. Her family is set to be paid from a federal fund.

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With the first autism case now being heard in federal vaccine court in Washington D.C., it makes sense to ask: Why is anyone even still debating the possibility of a link between vaccines and autism? After all, for years, many government health officials, advisors and vaccine manufacturers have said there's no association.

Here are a number of reasons why the question remains open:

1. While government scientists, advisors and pharmaceutical companies have been responsible for infinite lifesaving and life improving medical advances, they are not infallible.

• It's the same group that originally thought it was safe to use x-ray machines in shoe stores, gave pregnant women Thalidomide for morning sickness and once allowed mercury in medicines. They assured us Vioxx and Duract were safe painkillers, prescribed Rezulin for diabetics and then denied any of them were responsible for patient deaths. If we never questioned that group, we might not have discovered that Fen-phen and the dietary supplement Ephedra are not safe weight loss products, that antidepressants in kids can lead to suicidality and Viagra can cause blindness. The list goes on.

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Sharyl Attkisson is an investigative correspondent for CBS News.

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In four short years, the ringtone industry has emerged from nowhere and has become a billion-dollar market. And just as fast, scam artists found a way to tap into the line. That's what's behind a major settlement of a fraud investigation announced today by Florida attorney general Bill McCollum, and it will impact cell phone customers nationwide.

Here's how it works: customers are charged for ringtones, wallpaper, joke-of-the-day, you-name-it on their cell phone bills ... charges they never authorized and services they don't want. The charges aren't properly identified on the bill as to what they are or where they came from.

If a customer does study his bill closely enough to catch the bogus fee and call the phone company to inquire, too often he's told that he "must" have subscribed to the service, that the charges are monthly and will go on indefinitely, and there's really no way to stop it. This has happened to an estimated untold millions nationwide.

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Sharyl Attkisson is an investigative correspondent for CBS News. Her latest Follow the Money segment examined how replying to a text message or even browsing a Web site can unleash a flury of phone-bill charges for unordered and unwanted services. It's called "cramming."

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I communicated with many unhappy customers while working on tonight's story on ringtone fraud. Of course only a few people's stories can actually fit into a report on the Evening News.

But I thought it might be interesting for you to read about the experiences of a few other folks. Judging from how many people have said it's happened to them (it even happened to me and my friends and family) we may be just beginning to hear how widespread this type of alleged scam may be.

What are your rights? If you can't get satisfaction from your service provider on what you believe are bogus charges, report it online to the Federal Communications Commission.

The FCC told CBS News it's glad we're doing the story and helping let people know that this type of fraud is out there. Read on for some of the stories people told me.

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