Transparency News 7/15/13

 

Monday, July 15, 2013

  State and Local Stories

 

Virginia lawmakers, elected leaders and those trying to get elected can’t seem to embrace ethics and financial disclosure reform for public officials fast enough since troubling questions about unreported gifts to Gov. Bob McDonnell triggered federal and state criminal investigations. . . . The Virginia legislators clamoring for greater transparency are the same ones who voted just a few months ago to exempt from public disclosure their own emails, written and sent on state accounts by themselves or their aides at taxpayer expense.
News Leader

As cities and counties have struggled with sluggish revenues over the past three years, officials have trimmed staff, nixed raises and curtailed travel and other expenses. In some localities, salary freezes have reached from top to bottom, affecting all employees. But a Daily Press examination of localities' salaries for the past three fiscal years shows that many of the top earners have seen their salaries increase over that period. The Daily Press reviewed the salaries of all employees earning more than $10,000 in Hampton, Newport News and Poquoson, and Gloucester, Isle of Wight, James City and York counties. While the review concentrated on employees earning $90,000 or more annually, the data showed that salaries for employees earning either hourly wages or salaries below that threshold changed little over the three-year period. Some jurisdictions gave one-time bonuses, but those did not affect employees' base pay.
Daily Press

In Patrick County, the school board is banning a former Virginia attorney general from its meetings, the board of supervisors chairman has said the school superintendent needs to go, and the superintendent has sued the supervisors’ chairman for defamation, seeking $10.35 million. It’s not quite politics as usual these days. Feelings were running high even before Mary Sue Terry, who served as Virginia’s attorney general for two terms in the 1980s and 1990s (and is not related to the school board chairman), stepped into a closed-door session of the Patrick County School Board in late June. But before that, there were questions about the school system’s credit card bills, complaints to the state that resulted in a finding that 21 students received diplomas they weren’t entitled to, and teacher complaints of harassment and retaliation. Teachers had earlier protested use of their Social Security numbers in a computerized grading system and alleged breakdowns of discipline in the high school.
Roanoke Times

Donna M.G. Gray claims a "good ol' boy way of doing things" drove her to quit Middletown Town Council. Now Gray says she fears former council members may try to fill her seat and two other vacancies in a special election in November. Gray gave no reason for her resignation in the letter she submitted to the town on Monday. But in a phone conversation Thursday, Gray explained that she felt frustrated by the actions of a few council members. "You go into meetings and there's a couple people ... that just have the ability to be in the office and everything a lot and so they are kind of running and directing things," Gray said. "We have a very young mayor and that was one of the things that I was a little bit wary of in the beginning anyway. "It's a waste of my time when I'm going to meetings or we make some decisions and work sessions or committee meetings and turn around and something's changed at the next meeting," Gray added. "So I just feel like it's a lot of behind the scenes, pulling strings are going on."
Northern Virginia Daily

National Stories

Former Denver Post reporter Jeffrey A. Roberts has been named executive director of the Colorado Freedom of information Coalition. The appointment was announced Friday. The coalition advocates for transparency in Colorado's state and local governments. The Associated Press is one of its member organizations.
NECN

Opponents of the proposal to build a wind farm in Nantucket Sound have sued the U.S. Coast Guard in federal court, saying the agency failed to respond to a request for public records as required by law. The Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound filed the suit Monday in U.S. District Court in Washington D.C., making it the latest legal action against federal officials and agencies connected to the approval of Cape Wind. "We have filed (Freedom of Information Act) requests with numerous federal agencies that are defendants in many of the lawsuits that are being filed," alliance president Audra Parker said. "The Coast Guard is the only federal agency that hasn't provided documents. This is well over two years ago."
SouthCoast Today

Secret courts. Secret emails. Phone surveillance. Drones. The list of cloak-and-dagger tactics employed by the Obama administration -- and those that preceded it -- keeps growing, as NSA leaker Ed Snowden feeds classified materials to the media and other reports show the extent of the U.S. government's more opaque dealings.  The latest was a report by The Associated Press that said the administration had military files about the Navy SEAL raid on Usama bin Laden’s hideout transferred to the CIA, where they would be harder to uncover by the press and public.   If this were any other administration, perhaps the fallout would be minimal. But President Obama ran on a message of open government. When he was sworn into office in 2009, he declared his presidency would be “the most open and transparent in history.”  Now in his second term, those claims have been challenged by a host of revelations -- from controversies over secret mails to the steady drip of information about NSA surveillance. FoxNews.com takes a look at six controversies that have clouded the transparency message.
Fox News

Former Cincinnati Bengals cheerleader Sarah Jones has won a $338,000 jury verdict in a defamation case against a website operator involving third-party postings accusing her of sexual excesses. Her August 2010 amended complaint said the article named the school where Jones teaches and alleged that she has had sex with every Bengal football player and suffered from chlamydia and gonorrhea. Karamian himself posted a comment saying, “Why are high school teachers freaks in the sack?” she alleged.
National Law Journal

Asiana announced Monday that it will sue a San Francisco TV station that it said damaged the airline's reputation by using bogus and racially offensive names for four pilots on a plane that crashed earlier this month in San Francisco. An anchor for KTVU-TV read the names on the air Friday and then apologized after a break. The report was accompanied by a graphic with the phony names listed alongside a photo of the burned-out plane that had crashed at San Francisco International Airport on July 6, killing three and injuring dozens.
Politico

A Colorado judge denied a request by a Fox News journalist on Friday to view a notebook accused movie theater gunman James Holmes sent to his psychiatrist that reportedly detailed his plans to commit mass murder. New York-based reporter Jana Winter had sought access to the notebook as she fights subpoenas seeking to force her to divulge confidential sources that she used in a story about its contents while a court-imposed gag order was in place.
Reuters

The Justice Department on Friday proposed curbing the ability of prosecutors to seize reporters' records while investigating leaks to the media, after complaints that journalists' rights were violated in recent high-profile cases. A revised set of guidelines proposed by the department said that search warrants would not be sought against journalists carrying out "ordinary news-gathering activities."
Reuters

Saturday night’s not-guilty verdict in the George Zimmerman trial will enable the neighborhood-watch volunteer to resume his case against NBC News for the mis-editing of his widely distributed call to police. Back in December, Zimmerman sued NBC Universal Media for defamation over the botched editing, which depicted him as a hardened racial profiler.
Washington Post

Fugitive former U.S. spy contractor Edward Snowden controls dangerous information that could become the United States' "worst nightmare" if revealed, a journalist familiar with the data said in a newspaper interview. Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist who first published the documents Snowden leaked, said in a newspaper interview published on Saturday that the U.S. government should be careful in its pursuit of the former computer analyst. "Snowden has enough information to cause harm to the U.S. government in a single minute than any other person has ever had," Greenwald said in an interview in Rio de Janeiro with the Argentinean daily La Nacion.
Reuters

After interviewing nearly three dozen people in the George Zimmerman murder case, the FBI found no evidence that racial bias was a motivating factor in the shooting of Trayvon Martin, records released Thursday show. Even the lead detective in the case, Sanford Det. Chris Serino, told agents that he thought Zimmerman profiled Trayvon because of his attire and the circumstances — but not his race. Serino saw Zimmerman as “having little hero complex, but not as a racist.” The Duval County State Attorney released another collection of evidence in the Zimmerman murder case Thursday, including reports from FBI agents who investigated whether any racial bias was involved in Trayvon’s Feb. 26 killing.
McClatchy

Guess who doesn't get radar tickets in Colorado? Politicians /  State senators and representatives in Colorado have special license plates that just happen not to be in the DMV database. So, if they speed, they never receive a citation.
CNET News

When Kansas lawmakers handed Gov. Sam Brownback the power to pick appeals court judges, they wanted to make the process more public and accountable. The governor is certainly learning about the accountability part. He’s run into a whirl of criticism because he won’t — as he confirmed on Thursday — tell the public who has applied for a newly created seat on the Kansas Court of Appeals.
Kansas City Star

The proceedings of a New York state commission designed to examine public corruption and campaign finance practices will not necessarily take place in public, its director said after the 25-member panel met Wednesday behind closed doors and without public notice. The panel is advisory in nature, its executive director Regina Calcaterra said, and is exempt from requirements under the state Open Meetings Law. While government bodies can enter executive session to discuss sensitive matters, including investigations, the law requires public notice whenever a quorum of a public body gathers to conduct public business.
Albany Times Union

Editorials/Columns

Times-Dispatch: GOP gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli has proposed rapid reporting requirements for gifts greater than $500 and elimination of the family-member exception in reporting requirements. His opponent, Terry McAuliffe, has proposed banning all gifts to the governor and his family. The Democratic nominee for attorney general, Mark Herring, has seconded the motion. Mark Obenshain, his GOP opponent, would ban gifts worth more than $100 for the governor and members of his household.The proposals simulataneously go too far and not far enough.

Donald Luzzatto, Virginian-Pilot: Politicians here, including McDonnell, still talk about the Virginia Way, and many actually believe in a politics that can be both civil and civilized, built on compromise and problem-solving. Sadly, there are also an increasing number in Richmond who have no patience with such niceties. Those are the people who pay lip service to the Virginia Way only because it would be unseemly to admit that you'll actually do anything to win (say, coerce the Board of Health, as Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli did, in hopes of shuttering abortion clinics at the behest of the Family Foundation). In our neighbor states, where politics has long been fought with knives and teeth and where politicians are all assumed to be crooked, there's never been such shyness about means and ends.

Los Angeles Times: The Obama administration stumbled badly in recent months as it repeatedly overstepped its authority in seeking information from news organizations. Prosecutors swept up phone records tracking calls by reporters and editors of the Associated Press, suggested that a Fox News reporter might be criminally prosecuted and continued their vigorous pursuit of information held by reporters in ferreting out alleged leaks. For that, the administration has been properly excoriated. On Friday, however, Atty. Gen Eric H. Holder Jr. unveiled new guidelines to govern the department's behavior in cases involving news organizations. Those guidelines represent a historic step toward restraining the reach of government and affirming the rights of a free press. The administration got to this place only because of the outrage it brought on itself, but it got to the right place anyway.