Transparency News 2/11/14
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
Note: The old format of the newsletter should return tomorrow, Wednesday. Thank you to those who contacted me about the difficulty in reading this format, which I had to use as a stop-gap measure while issues with our usual provider were ironed out. Thank you for your patience and support.
State and Local Stories
The Senate passed an ethics bill after a lengthy debate in which even supporters enumerated its flaws, saying it was either an unnecessary bill or an inadequate one. Senate Democratic Leader Richard L. Saslaw of Fairfax County spoke harshly of the bill, saying it would have done nothing to prevent unethical behavior in the past nor would it prevent future misdeeds. The lone dissenting vote in the Senate came from Sen. John Watkins, R-Powhatan, who said the bill had been crafted in a “knee-jerk fashion” and should be studied further.
News Leader
Virginia legislators chastened by a gift scandal are poised to rewrite state ethics laws imposing new financial disclosure standards on themselves and lobbyists that critics, and some officials, say are more feel-good than culture-changing. Bills the Virginia Senate and House of Delegates advanced Monday overhaul state ethics policy in several ways: They place a $250 per-item limit on gifts from registered lobbyists, enhance reporting requirements, and create a new ethics oversight panel. What critics say they fail to do, as written, ismeaningfully restrict special interests' ability to pay for lawmakers to attend major sporting events, pick up restaurant tabs, or take them on golf outing and hunting trips.
Virginian-Pilot
The Virginia Senate added an extra sentence to its ethics bill during today's floor debate that would prohibit legislators from getting reimbursed for the cost of attending, for lack of a less o phrase, secret meetings. That fits a handful of things, but most notably ALEC - the American Legislative Exchange Council. This group suggests model legislation across the country. It's on the right of the political spectrum, and it caught a lot of heat a while back because one of its model bills was based on Florida's stand-your-ground law, which of course was at issue in Trayvon Martin's death. State Sen. Donald McEachin has been pushing a bill for a couple of years to keep legislators from using taxpayer money to attend ALEC conferences, or other meetings where the order of business is a secret.
Daily Press
Sen. Tom Garrett, R-Louisa County, ended his legislative efforts Monday to ban a campaign tactic used against fellow Republican Ken Cuccinelli in the governor’s race last fall. Garrett, whose district includes part of Lynchburg, proposed two bills that would prohibit government employees and elected officials from retaliating against people who express views they don’t like. Garrett said Democrats in the Senate threatened to kill the entire ethics bill if his bans were to become part of the measure. “I withdrew my amendments because I believe the effort to reform ethics in the Commonwealth is more important than subjecting it to partisan politics,” Garrett said.
News & Advance
Local police in Virginia will retain their ability to collect data from license plate reader cameras for at least another year, even though an attorney general’s opinion last year declared that doing so was illegal. On Monday, the second of two bills in the General Assembly to limit police collection of such data was tabled for the year, after both legislators agreed that their bills required more study and more specific wording. This means the debate weighing the importance of personal privacy vs. solving crimes and finding missing persons will continue for another year. The conversation is happening across the country as politicians try to decide how long data collected from license plate reader cameras — which can snap hundreds of license plate photos per minute, with time, date and location information — can be maintained.
Washington Post National Stories
State and local governments have made significant improvements in how they use the Web to serve citizens. The Center for Digital Government has been highlighting the best websites for 18 years and describes last year's winning sites as "first-class" in terms of service delivery, productivity and performance. But some recent audits have revealed that many states and localities (along with the federal government) continue to struggle with how to build an online service that lets citizens and businesses transact with government in a simple and effective manner, and they lack a strategic plan for developing new services. The result can be confusion for many who want to interact with government online and lost opportunities for governments that are looking for new ways to deliver services at the lowest cost possible.
Governing
On Monday, The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website, unloaded a trove of documents from Mr. Clinton’s White House years from Diane D. Blair, a close friend of Mrs. Clinton who died in 2000. The Blair papers include diary entries based on conversations with Mrs. Clinton, private memos and letters that had been kept at the archives of the University of Arkansas, where Ms. Blair had taught political science. The correspondence reveals new insights into how Mrs. Clinton dealt with the setbacks in the White House, such as her struggles to pass a health care overhaul and difficulties in dealing with journalists whom she described as having “big egos and no brains.”
New York Times
A newly-released email shows that 11 days after the killing of terror leader Usama bin Laden, the U.S. military's top special operations officer ordered subordinates to destroy any photographs of the Al Qaeda founder's corpse or turn them over to the CIA.
Fox News Editorials/Columns
Roanoke Times: Do they really have to ask? Of course not, but it would be nice if they did. The state Senate last week gave its overwhelming support to a referendum in November asking voters whether they'd like to see the creation of a bipartisan redistricting commission. The panel would be authorized to draw legislative and congressional districts, a task now left to the politicians. The referendum would be merely advisory, meaning legislators could ignore the outcome. But it would be a bit awkward. Senators from the Roanoke and New River valleys supported the advisory referendum, to their credit. Now comes the hard part. The measure heads to the House Privileges and Elections Committee, adept at snuffing out reforms by sending them to unfriendly subcommittees.
Note: The old format of the newsletter should return tomorrow, Wednesday. Thank you to those who contacted me about the difficulty in reading this format, which I had to use as a stop-gap measure while issues with our usual provider were ironed out. Thank you for your patience and support.
State and Local Stories
The Senate passed an ethics bill after a lengthy debate in which even supporters enumerated its flaws, saying it was either an unnecessary bill or an inadequate one. Senate Democratic Leader Richard L. Saslaw of Fairfax County spoke harshly of the bill, saying it would have done nothing to prevent unethical behavior in the past nor would it prevent future misdeeds. The lone dissenting vote in the Senate came from Sen. John Watkins, R-Powhatan, who said the bill had been crafted in a “knee-jerk fashion” and should be studied further.
News Leader
Virginia legislators chastened by a gift scandal are poised to rewrite state ethics laws imposing new financial disclosure standards on themselves and lobbyists that critics, and some officials, say are more feel-good than culture-changing. Bills the Virginia Senate and House of Delegates advanced Monday overhaul state ethics policy in several ways: They place a $250 per-item limit on gifts from registered lobbyists, enhance reporting requirements, and create a new ethics oversight panel. What critics say they fail to do, as written, ismeaningfully restrict special interests' ability to pay for lawmakers to attend major sporting events, pick up restaurant tabs, or take them on golf outing and hunting trips.
Virginian-Pilot
The Virginia Senate added an extra sentence to its ethics bill during today's floor debate that would prohibit legislators from getting reimbursed for the cost of attending, for lack of a less o phrase, secret meetings. That fits a handful of things, but most notably ALEC - the American Legislative Exchange Council. This group suggests model legislation across the country. It's on the right of the political spectrum, and it caught a lot of heat a while back because one of its model bills was based on Florida's stand-your-ground law, which of course was at issue in Trayvon Martin's death. State Sen. Donald McEachin has been pushing a bill for a couple of years to keep legislators from using taxpayer money to attend ALEC conferences, or other meetings where the order of business is a secret.
Daily Press
Sen. Tom Garrett, R-Louisa County, ended his legislative efforts Monday to ban a campaign tactic used against fellow Republican Ken Cuccinelli in the governor’s race last fall. Garrett, whose district includes part of Lynchburg, proposed two bills that would prohibit government employees and elected officials from retaliating against people who express views they don’t like. Garrett said Democrats in the Senate threatened to kill the entire ethics bill if his bans were to become part of the measure. “I withdrew my amendments because I believe the effort to reform ethics in the Commonwealth is more important than subjecting it to partisan politics,” Garrett said.
News & Advance
Local police in Virginia will retain their ability to collect data from license plate reader cameras for at least another year, even though an attorney general’s opinion last year declared that doing so was illegal. On Monday, the second of two bills in the General Assembly to limit police collection of such data was tabled for the year, after both legislators agreed that their bills required more study and more specific wording. This means the debate weighing the importance of personal privacy vs. solving crimes and finding missing persons will continue for another year. The conversation is happening across the country as politicians try to decide how long data collected from license plate reader cameras — which can snap hundreds of license plate photos per minute, with time, date and location information — can be maintained.
Washington Post National Stories
State and local governments have made significant improvements in how they use the Web to serve citizens. The Center for Digital Government has been highlighting the best websites for 18 years and describes last year's winning sites as "first-class" in terms of service delivery, productivity and performance. But some recent audits have revealed that many states and localities (along with the federal government) continue to struggle with how to build an online service that lets citizens and businesses transact with government in a simple and effective manner, and they lack a strategic plan for developing new services. The result can be confusion for many who want to interact with government online and lost opportunities for governments that are looking for new ways to deliver services at the lowest cost possible.
Governing
On Monday, The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website, unloaded a trove of documents from Mr. Clinton’s White House years from Diane D. Blair, a close friend of Mrs. Clinton who died in 2000. The Blair papers include diary entries based on conversations with Mrs. Clinton, private memos and letters that had been kept at the archives of the University of Arkansas, where Ms. Blair had taught political science. The correspondence reveals new insights into how Mrs. Clinton dealt with the setbacks in the White House, such as her struggles to pass a health care overhaul and difficulties in dealing with journalists whom she described as having “big egos and no brains.”
New York Times
A newly-released email shows that 11 days after the killing of terror leader Usama bin Laden, the U.S. military's top special operations officer ordered subordinates to destroy any photographs of the Al Qaeda founder's corpse or turn them over to the CIA.
Fox News Editorials/Columns
Roanoke Times: Do they really have to ask? Of course not, but it would be nice if they did. The state Senate last week gave its overwhelming support to a referendum in November asking voters whether they'd like to see the creation of a bipartisan redistricting commission. The panel would be authorized to draw legislative and congressional districts, a task now left to the politicians. The referendum would be merely advisory, meaning legislators could ignore the outcome. But it would be a bit awkward. Senators from the Roanoke and New River valleys supported the advisory referendum, to their credit. Now comes the hard part. The measure heads to the House Privileges and Elections Committee, adept at snuffing out reforms by sending them to unfriendly subcommittees.
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