I blogged about State Rep. Mary Margaret Oliver and then happened to run into her about an hour later, along with her partner in ethics. This time she was in color.
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Some legislators tried to hide potential ethics violations in the name of privacy. They failed in the last hour of the last day of the legislative session.
Jim Galloway wrote for the AJC yesterday, Your morning jolt: The failed attempt to make ‘transparency’ commission a translucent one
In other words, the Georgia Government Transparency and Campaign Finance Commission would have been handed permission to cut off from public view the more pesky complaints against your leaders. Cases that it would decide you didn’t need to know about.
Who did this, and when?
State Rep. David Knight, R-Griffin, introduced the conference reportin the House, but didn’t mention the above paragraph. That came to light under questioning from state Rep. Mary Margaret Oliver, D-Atlanta, and other Democrats.
My AJC colleague Chris Quinn described a scene in which the tally board started out with green “yes” votes and red “no” votes evenly divided. But slowly, green lights began blinking out, and the red votes began to grow. At 11:08, the bill was defeated 25-143.
Sanity and ethics prevailed at the eleventh hour.
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Did you know about the Lowndes County Commission retreat this weekend? 
It wasn’t mentioned at their recent regular meetings, it’s not on their website calendar, and there’s no agenda posted, either. Fortunately, the VDT at least has been informed about it.
VDT editorial today, Commissioners annual retreat this weekend,
The Lowndes County Commissioners and staff are attending the annual planning retreat this weekend, but are not spending any county funds doing so.Chairman Ashley Paulk invited the county to hold the retreat at his farm, and he’s doing all the cooking for their meals, at no charge to the county.
It’s good Ashley Paulk wants to contribute to the public good in that way.
However, this is a public meeting of an elected body, and the public has not been informed of where it is, for example, at which of Ashley Paulk’s farms? Maybe they’ll at least keep good minutes.
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Best to record those votes! So said the Georgia Supreme Court last month.
G.G. Rigsby wrote for SavannahNow 6 February 2012, Court ruling favors openness in government
The Georgia Supreme Court ruled Monday that votes taken in open meetings must be recorded, even if they are not roll-call votes.The decision in Cardinale v. the City of Atlanta reverses a Court of Appeals ruling that the state’s open meetings law doesn’t require meeting minutes to reflect how members voted when the vote is not unanimous.
Matthew Cardinale filed a lawsuit against the City of Atlanta for failing to record how each city council member voted when a non-roll-call vote was taken at a February 2010 retreat.
Hm, the Lowndes County Board of Commissioners is meeting in retreat this weekend. Maybe they’ll keep good minutes.
Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Carol Hunstein said,“While the act provides for public access to agency meetings, it also fosters openness by, among other things, requiring agencies to generate meeting minutes that are open to public inspection so that members of the public unable to attend a meeting nonetheless may learn what occurred. …To adopt a contrary holding that agencies possess discretion to decline to record the names of those voting against a proposal or abstaining in the case of a non-roll-call vote would potentially deny non-attending members of the public access to information available to those who attended a meeting.”
Earlier this year, Effingham County’s commissioners took a secret ballot for vice chairman. At their next meeting, after questions from a reporter, they said how they voted so the information could be included in the minutes for the meeting.
The secret vote in Effingham was an indication that the case that was pending before the state Supreme Court was important, Cardinale said.
Effingham County… ah, yes! The county whose Industrial Authority fired Brad Lofton for non-transparent dealings.
Doubtless everything is on the up-and-up around here, so I’m sure all the local government bodies, elected and unelected, will have no problem recording how all their members vote.
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A month ago (28 February 2012), Chairman Ashley Paulk
chastised the VDT for how it reported on recent changes to the alcohol
ordinance.
This month he singled out an applicant for an alcohol license and said:
We expect you to run a clean, quiet establishment. If not, we expect the Sheriff to enforce the law.Sheriff Chris Prine nodded.
Here’s the video:
“We expect you to run a clean, quiet establishment” —Ashley Paulk @ 2012-03-13
Regular Session, Lowndes County Commission, (LCC), Lowndes County Commission,
Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 13 March 2012.
Video by Gretchen Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE).
What’s this about, and what’s the connection with the meeting of a month ago? The Chairman was referring to Continue reading
Paul Krugman wrote yesterday for the NYTimes, Lobbyists, Guns and Money,
ALEC seems, however, to have a special interest in privatizationSame as private prisons. The only real benefit goes to private prison company executives and shareholders.— that is, on turning the provision of public services, from schools to prisons, over to for-profit corporations. And some of the most prominent beneficiaries of privatization, such as the online education company K12 Inc. and the prison operator Corrections Corporation of America, are, not surprisingly, very much involved with the organization.
What this tells us, in turn, is that ALEC’s claim to stand for limited government and free markets is deeply misleading. To a large extent the organization seeks not limited government but privatized government, in which corporations get their profits from taxpayer dollars, dollars steered their way by friendly politicians. In short, ALEC isn’t so much about promoting free markets as it is about expanding crony capitalism.
And in case you were wondering, no, the kind of privatization ALEC promotes isn’t in the public interest; instead of success stories, what we’re getting is a series of scandals. Private charter schools, for example, appear to deliver a lot of profits but little in the way of educational achievement.
Think about that: we seem to be turning into a country where crony capitalism doesn’t just waste taxpayer money but warps criminal justice, in which growing incarceration reflects not the need to protect law-abiding citizens but the profits corporations can reap from a larger prison population.Martin Luther King Jr. wrote from a Birmingham jail in 1963:
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.And today we have an organized threat to justice everywhere. That threat is called ALEC.
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Remember the Georgia legislature was considering sentencing reform? Now it's passed the Special Joint Committee on Georgia Criminal Justice Reform.
Bill Rankin wrote for the AJC Tuesday, Sweeping changes to state sentencing laws passes committee,
A key legislative committee on Tuesday approved sweeping changes to Georgia's criminal justice system in a sentencing reform package intended to control prison spending and ensure costly prison beds are reserved for the state's most dangerous criminals.
Well, that sounds good!
But wait, this is cautious Georgia:
Continue readingTwo former big-time politicos join the fight against CWIP.
Melissa Roberts wrote for CBS Atlanta yesterday, Unlikely duo challenges Ga. utility over rates,
The unlikely duo of ex-Democratic Gov. Roy Barnes and former Republican House Speaker Glenn Richardson are heading to court to challenge Georgia Power over a surcharge they say has cost ratepayers as much as $100 million.
They're going after Construction Work in Progress (CWIP)!
Jim Galloway in the AJC yesterday noted the irony,
The gentleman knows of what he speaks, and that is only one of the ironies here. The legislation that has allowed Georgia Power, for the last 15 months, to charge ratepayers for financial costs associated with the construction of two new nuclear power plants, was passed in 2009 during Richardson’s final session as the second- most powerful man in the Capitol.
Maybe he can help undo the harm he helped do. Ditto Roy Barnes, who got coal-plant-building Cobb EMC former head Dwight Brown off on a technicality.
Melissa Roberts wrote:
The lawsuit contends the utility is charging sales tax on the finance surcharge and the franchise tax paid to cities. Richardson said in a phone interview he and Barnes are two "Davids against the Goliath."
Add those two Davids to the two Davids of Savannah, Drs. Sidney Smith and Pat Godbey and their Lower Rates for Customers LLC. Add a few more thousand Davids around the state paying their CWIP in separate checks with objections.
New Hampshire banned CWIP and their nuke-building utility went bankrupt. Missouri banned CWIP. Iowa is working on banning CWIP. Georgia can ban CWIP, too. Watch out Goliath!
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Received today. -jsq
Too often there are incidents of this nature that go unreported while American Citizens feels that the United States Justice Department knows about these types of incidents but little to nothing seems to end these alleged incidents of Americans CONSTITUTIONAL Rights Violation? But then who cares until they need a young man to volunteer to serve on foreign battlefields for the rights of others.
-George Boston Rhynes
Here’s a playlist:
Taser incident in Boston, Georgia
Video by George Boston Rhynes for bostongbr on YouTube (K.V.C.I.).
I don’t know any more about it than what’s in these videos, and in the writeups by George; see below. -jsq
Continue reading
5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prisoners,
which is
seven times our incarceration rate of 40 years ago,
while the crime rate is about the same,
and Georgia has
1 in 13 adults in the prison system (jail, prison, probation, or parole.
We can’t afford that.
The money we waste locking people up could be sending people to college
or paying teachers.
And the root cause is still the
failed war on drugs,
which is also one of the biggest problems with human rights around the world.
LEAP wrote 16 March 2012, Human Rights is a Foreign Concept in the UN’s “War on Drugs”
“Fundamentally, the three UN prohibitionist treaties are incompatible to human rights. We can have human rights or drug war, but not both,” said Maria Lucia Karam, a retired judge from Brazil and a board member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP).
Richard Van Wickler, currently a jail superintendent in New Hampshire, adds, “I suppose it’s not shocking that within the context of a century-long bloody ‘war on drugs’ the idea of human rights is a foreign concept. Our global drug prohibition regime puts handcuffs on millions of people every year while even the harshest of prohibitionist countries say that drug abuse is a health issue. What other medical problems do we try to solve with imprisonment and an abandonment of human rights?”
Good point.
We don’t lock up people for drinking. We only lock them up for endangering other people while drinking. And we tax alcohol sales and generate revenue for the state. Let’s do the same with drugs: legalize, regulate, and tax. That’s what we did with alcohol in 1933, and it’s time to do the same with other drugs.
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