Transparency News 4/3/14
Thursday, April 3, 2014
State and Local Stories
National Law Journal
The captains of the two vessels that collided in the Houston Ship Channel were aware they were perilously close to one another but still failed to avert a spill that dumped 168,000 gallons of oil into the water, according to a U.S. Coast Guard audio recording. The recording, obtained by the Houston Chronicle in a Freedom of Information Act request, indicates the captains spoke in a frantic radio exchange beginning about five minutes before the March 22 collision. But the exchange apparently came too late for the captains to avoid making contact in the crowded waterway, trafficked daily by massive, oceangoing container ships.
ABC News
Alabama blogger Roger Shuler was released from a Shelby County, Ala. jail on March 26, more thanfive months after he was imprisoned on contempt charges for refusing to comply with a court order to take down allegedly defamatory articles. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press argued in an October letter that the order was an unconstitutional prior restraint. Shuler had written a series of posts on his blog, Legal Schnauzer, claiming that Robert Riley, Jr., son of former Alabama governor Bob Riley and potential candidate for a soon-to-be-vacant U.S. House of Representatives seat, had an affair with and impregnated lobbyist Liberty Duke. Shuler was released from jail after his wife, Carol, removed most of the articles about Riley and Duke from the blog, and from You Tube and Twitter accounts, according to Alabama news outlets.
Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press
A U.S. federal judge has temporarily suspended the execution of two inmates planned for this month in Texas, saying the state has hidden information about the supplier of the drugs to be used in the lethal injections. The decision is part of a series of recent court rulings that have mandated states to release information about drugs used for lethal injection, saying that keeping the information secret violates due process protections of the U.S. Constitution. "While the state has provided plaintiffs information about the process by which they will be executed, it has masked information about the product that will kill them," U.S. District Judge Vanessa Gilmore wrote in Houston in a temporary injunction issued on Wednesday.
Reuters
A federal judge on Wednesday sentenced a former State Department contractor to 13 months in prison for leaking information about North Korea to a Fox News reporter. The former contractor, Stephen J. Kim, pleaded guilty in February in exchange for a deal that would limit his prison time to that duration. Mr. Kim is the sixth person to be convicted under the Obama administration after being accused of leaking information to the public, and two other cases remain open.
New York Times
The U.S. government masterminded the creation of a "Cuban Twitter" — a communications network designed to undermine the communist government in Cuba, built with secret shell companies and financed through foreign banks, The Associated Press has learned. The project, which lasted more than two years and drew tens of thousands of subscribers, sought to evade Cuba's stranglehold on the Internet with a primitive social media platform. First, the network would build a Cuban audience, mostly young people; then, the plan was to push them toward dissent. Yet its users were neither aware it was created by a U.S. agency with ties to the State Department, nor that American contractors were gathering personal data about them, in the hope that the information might be used someday for political purposes. USAID and its contractors went to extensive lengths to conceal Washington's ties to the project, according to interviews and documents obtained by the AP.
Politico
Oregon State University has paid $1,000 plus $100,000 in legal fees to a former student to settle a lawsuit over the confiscation of distribution boxes for a conservative-leaning student newspaper. Supporters of the newspaper called The Liberty sued the school in 2009, alleging the university president and other school officials granted the official campus newspaper numerous bins while restricting The Liberty's distribution. The suit alleged that school officials confiscated distribution bins for The Liberty and tossed them onto a trash heap. The bins, which contained copies of the paper, were allegedly removed without notice and thrown next to a dumpster.
Fox News
The Obama administration announced on Wednesday that it will for the first time reveal how much Medicare pays individual doctors for medical services and procedures, including MRIs and CT scans. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will release on April 9 massive amounts of data on more than 880,000 individual doctors and other health professionals in all 50 states who participate in Medicare's Part B fee-for-service program, which covers physician fees and out-patient services. The information, which includes doctors' names and addresses and summaries of their services, had been barred from public release by court injunction for more than 30 years until last May when a federal judge in Miami lifted the ban in response to a motion by Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal.
Reuters
Free Lance-Star
The McCutcheon vs. FEC ruling lifts aggregate contribution limits, meaning that a donor could give a total of $3.5 million in direct support for candidates. Thank you, Supreme Court. Before your decision Wednesday in McCutcheon vs. FEC, Americans were confined to giving a measly total of $48,600 in campaign contributions to federal candidates (enough for about nine candidates) and a total of $74,600 to political action committees. That means individuals were subject to aggregate contributions limits totaling a mere $123,200.
Los Angeles Times
Charlottesville no longer is asking job applicants whether they have ever been convicted of a felony. The value is not in determining whether the applicant is an ex-offender — a background check will reveal that. Rather, the question would reveal whether the applicant would lie about it. And honesty surely is an important quality in an employee.
Daily Progress
State and Local Stories
Old Virginia’s Virginians of the year for 2014: Most Successful Activist (Matt O’Brien), Best Legislator (Todd Gilbert), and Most Dedicated Government Watchdog (Megan Rhyne).
Old Virginia News
Five former Virginia attorney generals are supporting dismissal of corruption charges against former Gov. Bob McDonnell. The former attorney generals, who span both political parties and who served over several decades, submitted a memo in support of McDonnell’s motion to dismiss the charges. The memo was filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court. Representing the former attorney generals are William H. Hurd, former state solicitor general, and Stephen C. Piepgrass, both of Troutman Sanders LLP. Democrats Andrew P. Miller, Mary Sue Terry and Stephen D. Rosenthal join Republicans J. Marshall Coleman and Mark L. Earley in the filing, arguing that the “expansive interpretation of federal law” on which counts 1-11 are based “is completely alien to any legal advice that any of us would have given to any governor of Virginia.”
Times-Dispatch
National Stories
The U.S. Supreme Court yesterday morning struck down aggregate contribution limits under federal campaign finance law, continuing its line of cases rejecting restrictions on campaign money under the First Amendment. Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. announced the decision for a divided court in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission. Shaun McCutcheon, an Alabama businessman, challenged the limits as an infringement of his freeom of expression. “Congress may not regulate contributions simply to reduce the amount of money in politics, or to restrict the political participation of some in order to enhance the relative influence of others,” wrote Roberts, who was joined in his opinion by only three other justices: Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy and Samuel Alito Jr. But Justice Clarence Thomas wrote separately to join the bottom-line judgment of the court, while asserting the court should overturn Buckley v. Valeo, the 1976 ruling that has been the foundation of campaign reform legislation ever since.National Law Journal
The captains of the two vessels that collided in the Houston Ship Channel were aware they were perilously close to one another but still failed to avert a spill that dumped 168,000 gallons of oil into the water, according to a U.S. Coast Guard audio recording. The recording, obtained by the Houston Chronicle in a Freedom of Information Act request, indicates the captains spoke in a frantic radio exchange beginning about five minutes before the March 22 collision. But the exchange apparently came too late for the captains to avoid making contact in the crowded waterway, trafficked daily by massive, oceangoing container ships.
ABC News
Alabama blogger Roger Shuler was released from a Shelby County, Ala. jail on March 26, more thanfive months after he was imprisoned on contempt charges for refusing to comply with a court order to take down allegedly defamatory articles. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press argued in an October letter that the order was an unconstitutional prior restraint. Shuler had written a series of posts on his blog, Legal Schnauzer, claiming that Robert Riley, Jr., son of former Alabama governor Bob Riley and potential candidate for a soon-to-be-vacant U.S. House of Representatives seat, had an affair with and impregnated lobbyist Liberty Duke. Shuler was released from jail after his wife, Carol, removed most of the articles about Riley and Duke from the blog, and from You Tube and Twitter accounts, according to Alabama news outlets.
Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press
A U.S. federal judge has temporarily suspended the execution of two inmates planned for this month in Texas, saying the state has hidden information about the supplier of the drugs to be used in the lethal injections. The decision is part of a series of recent court rulings that have mandated states to release information about drugs used for lethal injection, saying that keeping the information secret violates due process protections of the U.S. Constitution. "While the state has provided plaintiffs information about the process by which they will be executed, it has masked information about the product that will kill them," U.S. District Judge Vanessa Gilmore wrote in Houston in a temporary injunction issued on Wednesday.
Reuters
A federal judge on Wednesday sentenced a former State Department contractor to 13 months in prison for leaking information about North Korea to a Fox News reporter. The former contractor, Stephen J. Kim, pleaded guilty in February in exchange for a deal that would limit his prison time to that duration. Mr. Kim is the sixth person to be convicted under the Obama administration after being accused of leaking information to the public, and two other cases remain open.
New York Times
The U.S. government masterminded the creation of a "Cuban Twitter" — a communications network designed to undermine the communist government in Cuba, built with secret shell companies and financed through foreign banks, The Associated Press has learned. The project, which lasted more than two years and drew tens of thousands of subscribers, sought to evade Cuba's stranglehold on the Internet with a primitive social media platform. First, the network would build a Cuban audience, mostly young people; then, the plan was to push them toward dissent. Yet its users were neither aware it was created by a U.S. agency with ties to the State Department, nor that American contractors were gathering personal data about them, in the hope that the information might be used someday for political purposes. USAID and its contractors went to extensive lengths to conceal Washington's ties to the project, according to interviews and documents obtained by the AP.
Politico
Oregon State University has paid $1,000 plus $100,000 in legal fees to a former student to settle a lawsuit over the confiscation of distribution boxes for a conservative-leaning student newspaper. Supporters of the newspaper called The Liberty sued the school in 2009, alleging the university president and other school officials granted the official campus newspaper numerous bins while restricting The Liberty's distribution. The suit alleged that school officials confiscated distribution bins for The Liberty and tossed them onto a trash heap. The bins, which contained copies of the paper, were allegedly removed without notice and thrown next to a dumpster.
Fox News
The Obama administration announced on Wednesday that it will for the first time reveal how much Medicare pays individual doctors for medical services and procedures, including MRIs and CT scans. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will release on April 9 massive amounts of data on more than 880,000 individual doctors and other health professionals in all 50 states who participate in Medicare's Part B fee-for-service program, which covers physician fees and out-patient services. The information, which includes doctors' names and addresses and summaries of their services, had been barred from public release by court injunction for more than 30 years until last May when a federal judge in Miami lifted the ban in response to a motion by Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal.
Reuters
Editorials/Columns
On Wednesday the U.S. Supreme Court dealt a blow to campaign donation limits, ruling that aggregate limits on individual donations to federal candidates violate the First Amendment. The ruling in the McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission doesn’t remove the $2,600 per candidate cap on individual contributions. Instead, it removes two-year donation limits—before this ruling, an individual’s donations were capped at $48,600 every two years to all federal candidates, and at $74,600 for contributions to political party committees. This is good news for candidates and political party committees, which were increasingly seeing donations go to super-PACs instead of into their own coffers. But it’s not good news for a political system that theoretically promises individual voters equal representation and an equal shot at having a voice.Free Lance-Star
The McCutcheon vs. FEC ruling lifts aggregate contribution limits, meaning that a donor could give a total of $3.5 million in direct support for candidates. Thank you, Supreme Court. Before your decision Wednesday in McCutcheon vs. FEC, Americans were confined to giving a measly total of $48,600 in campaign contributions to federal candidates (enough for about nine candidates) and a total of $74,600 to political action committees. That means individuals were subject to aggregate contributions limits totaling a mere $123,200.
Los Angeles Times
Charlottesville no longer is asking job applicants whether they have ever been convicted of a felony. The value is not in determining whether the applicant is an ex-offender — a background check will reveal that. Rather, the question would reveal whether the applicant would lie about it. And honesty surely is an important quality in an employee.
Daily Progress
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