Transparency News 9/24/13

 

Tuesday, September 24, 2013


State and Local Stories

 

E.W. Jackson, the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor, on Sunday lashed out against gay marriage, criticized the pope, and told his audience that those who do not follow Jesus Christ “engage in some sort of a false religion.” Jackson’s remarks about a “false religion” — totaling about 2 minutes — were missing from an audio recording of the speech posted on the church’s website. They were provided to the media by a Democratic tracker Monday.
Times-Dispatch

Charlottesville officials are slated to meet the public from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Thursday for Government Services Day. City employees will be stationed at booths and information kiosks on the Downtown Mall from City Hall to about Fourth Street Northeast. Employees will provide information on departments and services, as well as careers available at City Hall.
Daily Progress

As promised, members of the Loudoun Board of Supervisors will request the Virginia General Assembly take action to remove verbiage in the state's misuse of public assets law that classifies supervisors and other elected officials as “part-time” legislators. The board voted unanimously Sept. 18 to request that state lawmakers strip the word “part-time” from the statute that criminalizes “any elected official who uses or permits the use of public assets for private or personal purposes unrelated to the duties and office of the accused ...” That language is viewed by many as the primary reason Supervisor Eugene Delgaudio (R-Sterling) was not charged on allegations that he misused Loudoun County resources for personal and political gain.
Loudoun Times-Mirror

The Navy has a single blimp, and plans call for flying it over the Washington suburbs during the next couple of weeks. The lighter-than-air craft, which is based at the Patuxent River Naval Air station, is to carry out an aerial mapping assignment at the agricultural research facility in Beltsville and at Fort Belvoir, according to the Naval Research Laboratory. The mission, which is scheduled to run through Oct. 5, is also expected to include occasional trips to the Frederick and Culpeper, Va., areas, the laboratory said.
Washington Post

Until someone mentioned the word ethics, the town-hall meeting at the Reston public library was relaxed, with two seasoned Virginia state delegates joking in a way that made problems such as clogged roads and underfunded schools seem easily fixable. Then came questions about receiving gifts from lobbyists, and Del. Thomas Davis Rust (R-Fairfax) was suddenly standing in front of a voter to defend the $500 worth of Washington Redskins tickets he regularly receives from the Dominion energy company. “Everybody else has done the same thing,” Rust said, provoking laughter as he hastened to add that, in his bid for reelection, he nonetheless supports reining in political gifts in Virginia. Nearby, state Del. Kenneth R. Plum (D-Fairfax) — who last year was treated by Dominion to two dinners costing more than $100 — nodded in agreement about the need for reform. “I’m offended by what’s happening in Richmond today,” Plum said earlier.
Washington Post

Shortly after noon, he got a phone call from someone who said they were with ABC News. “They asked me if I knew Rollie Chance,” Rollie Chance said. “Then they said, ‘Did you know Rollie Chance was the perpetrator of the Washington Navy Yard shootings?’” He said if he had falsely accused someone in the Navy, he would be held accountable. “The media should have a certain amount of accountability,” he said. Chance worried about his prospects in seeking a job, with employers checking him on Google. “To my knowledge, there’s no way to scrub this,” he said. Chance said he was speaking publicly because “I don’t want anyone to go through this. I wouldn’t want my worst enemies to go through what I went through.”
Washington Post

Washington and Lee University’s president has asked for a review of the school’s procedures for reporting admissions data in response to a report about how the prestigious liberal arts school and others count incomplete student applications in calculations that determine a school’s selectivity. The Washington Post reported Sunday that Washington and Lee had included more than 1,100 incomplete applications in its official count of 5,972 applicants for the class that entered in 2012.
Washington Post

Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell is in hot water for taking gifts without disclosing them, and legislators are talking about increasing disclosure requirements for family members. But here in Northern Virginia, personal financial disclosure forms are often incomplete and inconsistent. Some elected officials choose to disclose a great deal of information while others disclose very little. Fairfax County officials have decided to redact information that's supposed to be part of the public record.And nobody is reviewing the forms to make sure they are accurate. THE FORMS are supposed to include information about everything from real estate and business interests to gifts and liabilities. That includes employers of elected officials and their family members. But a request for the public disclosure forms from the Fairfax County School Board was returned with a stack of redacted documents. The employer of one member was concealed, and several telephone numbers and addresses were blacked out of others. The names of immediate family members — required information to be disclosed to the public — was redacted from of all the documents.
Alexandria Gazette Packet

National Stories

When SAC Capital Advisors LP was weighing an investment in Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc., the hedge-fund firm contacted a source it knew would provide nonpublic information without blinking: the federal government. When SAC Capital Advisors LP was weighing an investment in Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc., VRTX -0.21% the hedge-fund firm contacted a source it knew would provide nonpublic information without blinking: the federal government. SAC and its affiliate, Sigma Capital Management LLC, snapped up 13,500 Vertex shares in the first quarter and options to buy 25,000 more, securities filings indicate. The stock rose that quarter, then surged 62% on a single day in April when Vertex announced positive results from safety tests on a separate cystic-fibrosis drug designed to be used in combination with the first. Finance professionals have been pulling every lever they can these days to extract information from the government. Many have discovered that the biggest lever of all is the one available to everyone—the Freedom of Information Act—conceived by advocates of open government to shine light on how officials make decisions. FOIA is part of an array of techniques sophisticated investors are using to try to obtain potentially market-moving information about products, legislation, regulation and government economic statistics.
Wall Street Journal

California school districts and local government agencies will forever be required to provide meeting notices and documents to the public if voters agree this June to add that provision to California’s Constitution. But responsibility for the mandate’s costs – estimated as much as $20 million annually – would no longer belong to the state, which now reimburses local agencies who submit claims for these so-called unfunded mandates. “This Constitutional Amendment – SCA 3 – makes it clear that local governments have a duty to comply with both the Public Records Act and the Brown Act, and that the costs associated with that are to be borne by local governments,” said Jim Ewert, general counsel for the California Newspaper Publisher’s Association and long-time advocate for open access laws.
The Cabinet Report

A former FBI agent has agreed to plead guilty to leaking secret government information about a bomb plot to the Associated Press, a leak that officials had called one of the most serious in U.S. history, the Justice Department said on Monday. As part of a plea agreement filed in U.S. District Court in Indiana, Donald John Sachtleben agreed to a prison sentence of three years and seven months for the leak in addition to a separate sentence for unrelated child-pornography charges, the department said.
Reuters

The U.S. Peace Corps need not reveal sought-after survey information regarding the volunteers of its individual programs, a federal judge ruled. Charles Ludlam had sought the information under the Freedom of the Information Act, but U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan originally ruled in March that the Peace Corps could conceal its annual survey of volunteers on a program-by-program basis, but would have to divulge survey information on a country-by-country basis. Sullivan refused to reconsider that decision Thursday.
Courthouse News Service

Supreme Court opinions have come down with a bad case of link rot. According to a new study, 49 percent of the hyperlinks in Supreme Court decisions no longer work. This can sometimes be amusing. A link in a 2011 Supreme Court opinion about violent video games by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. now leads to a mischievous error message. “Aren’t you glad you didn’t cite to this Web page?” it asks. “If you had, like Justice Alito did, the original content would have long since disappeared and someone else might have come along and purchased the domain in order to make a comment about the transience of linked information in the Internet age.” The prankster has a point. The modern Supreme Court opinion is increasingly built on sand.
New York Times

A federal district court on Thursday ordered the BBC to turn over unseen footage from a 2003 documentary on Yasser Arafat. The U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., said the importance of protecting journalists’ newsgathering function is “weaker” when the sources are not confidential. The footage from the BBC documentary relates to a civil case brought by the family of Esther Klieman, an American who was shot and killed while riding a bus in Israel. Klieman’s family is suing the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) under the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1991 and various other torts. But to hold the PA/PLO liable, the family must first prove that the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades (the alleged shooters) were acting on behalf of the PA/PLO.
Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press

A town council in rural Pennsylvania voted on Thursday to dismiss the police chief after profanity-laced videos showing him firing automatic weapons in support of gun rights surfaced on the Internet. Mark Kessler, a one-man police force in the borough of Gilberton, has been suspended since July 31, when the first video appeared on YouTube.
Reuters

Internal investigators found no serious procedural missteps on FirstNet — the federal board that has been criticized for conducting business behind closed doors as it creates a nationwide wireless network for cops and firefighters. The special review committee, formed in May to review accusations levied by a FirstNet board member, made all of its major decisions about the post-Sept. 11 communications system in public view, according to the report card released Monday. The internal inquiry also found the board hadn’t precluded some FirstNet members from accessing key documents regarding the buildout of the nascent $7 billion project.
Politico

Editorials/Columns

Daily Progress: Courts and corrections systems can alert felons who are being released that they can file for restoration of rights. But the result is that offenders who have been out of the system for a while might be reachable only through concerted publicity or informal word-of-mouth channels. Activists and ex-offenders alike say that restoration of rights facilitates restoration to society, which in turn helps weld the former felon to his community. And when that happens, he is less likely to reoffend and more likely to become a contributing member of that community. For the community’s sake, then, as well as that of the ex-offender, word must be spread that those who have paid their debt to society are free to re-enter it with civil rights restored.

Dick Hammerstrom, Free Lance-Star: Gifts to politicians have dominated much of the political coverage in Virginia this summer. Those gifts led to a federal investigation into thousands of dollars Gov. Bob McDonnell and his family received from a business executive and the embarrassing $18,000 in gifts attorney general Ken Cuccinelli received from the same man.  In some states, any kind of gift would be a crime, but in Virginia, it’s considered  acceptable as long as the gift is disclosed. State laws also do not require disclosure of gifts given to family members and disclosure requirements are generally considered weak. …. If a politician plays a complimentary round of golf, his score card should be a matter of public record, subject to FOIA.

Rep. Randy Forbes, Virginian-Pilot: I strongly support providing a legal framework that reassures all Americans that our rights are being respected, while at the same time taking appropriate steps to ensure our security. We need to strengthen oversight so we can continually ask important questions.How much government monitoring is too much? What oversight mechanisms are in place?Do they need to be strengthened? How do we protect these liberties against the pursuit of security?

Danny Cevallos, CNN: It's time to do away with vanity plates. For the most part, vanity plates have flown under the legal radar, but the time has come for the government to give up on this constitutionally corrupt policy. Like the lottery, vanity plates are another thinly veiled money grab by the government against its citizens. A Michigan case is putting vanity plates under the spotlight.If many different people would disagree on whether a word (or nonword) is offensive, then the statute has failed to properly instruct its citizens on what is prohibited. Worse, should our government really be volunteering for this litigation? Should your tax money be spent litigating in federal court whether IPASGAS should be stamped on a license plate?

Los Angeles Times: The Senate Judiciary Committee has approved a proposed Free Flow of Information Act that garnered support from all 10 of the committee's Democrats and three of its eight Republicans. While the bill isn't exactly the legislation we would have written, it would provide considerable protection for journalists who promise confidentiality to their sources in order to obtain and publish information of public concern.