On Thursday, the Senate voted 96-3 to ensure that the same insider trading laws that apply to citizens also extend  to members of Congress.

But as the Associated Press points out, elected officials enjoy at least seven legal exemptions that the rest of us do not:

Hall of Fame ceremonies are reserved for those people who stand out from the masses, whether it is football, country music or rock and roll.  However the latest inductions into a new kind of Hall of Fame are those who hand out unemployment insurance checks.

Yes, now no one can say President Obama hasn’t done anything about unemployment—he is allowing those bureaucrats who sign the checks to be recognized for their work.

In 2010, the unemployment insurance (UI) program celebrated its 75^th anniversary.  To commemorate, a new awards ceremony was introduced.  The Department of Labor (DOL) established the UI Innovation Awards and the UI Hall of Fame to recognize the outstanding work of individuals and state UI agencies.

The 2011 awards ceremony will be held Oct. 17-20 at the Biltmore Hotel in Providence, R.I.  The going rate for a junior suite with two king-sized beds during the convention is $119 a night, not too bad.   Of course since this is a federal government department, you can assume your tax dollars are paying for the convention as well as probably contributing to the UI Hall of Fame celebration.

A request of the budget for this convention from the organizer of the awards ceremonies at the Department of Labor went unanswered.  Americans for Limited Government (ALG) is currently working on a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to find out the cost to taxpayers for this event.

To nominate a person for the UI Hall of Fame, whether dead or alive, one of more of the following achievements must have occurred (as reported from the DOL’s information on the award):

1. Promoting Legislation or Public Policy

Nominee has made important contributions to the achievement of significant Federal legislation or public policies that have improved and strengthened the Unemployment Insurance program.

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In a response filed yesterday to a federal judge’s order May 11, an FBI official offered no denials about the existence of video images captured by more than 20 surveillance cameras operating prior to 9:02 a.m. on April 19, 1995, in the vicinity of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. Instead, he explained that officials at the bureau merely cannot find the tapes and raised the possibility that they “might have been misfiled and thus could be located somewhere other than in the OKBOMB file (though it would be impossible to know where).”

The order, issued by Judge Clark Waddoup in the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah, Central Division, stemmed from the bureau’s failure to comply with a three-year-old Freedom of Information Act request submitted by Salt Lake City lawyer Jesse Trentadue, a man on a quest for answers related to the Oklahoma City Bombing and the death of his brother, Kenneth Trentadue, who died under suspicious circumstances several months later while in custody at the U.S. Bureau of Prisons Federal Transfer Center in Oklahoma City.

Judge Waddoups’ order was both clear and concise. The items to which the FBI was to respond by June 30, 2011, and how the bureau responded (shown in italics after each item) appear below:

1. Affirm whether the six government officials from the FBI and CIA who had submitted affidavits in this case had misrepresented information or provided incomplete or otherwise misleading information to the Court. In response to this item, the only thing Judge Waddoups received as an affidavit from David M. Hardy, section chief of the FBI’s Record/Information Dissemination Section of the Records Management Divsion in Winchester, Va. The CIA submitted nothing.

2. Advise whether the I-Drive and S-Drive, data storage areas on the FBI computer system, were searched for the videotapes and other documents sought by my FOIA request and, if not, why not. In response, the FBI told the judge the I-Drive no longer exists and that FBI officials have no reason to believe that S-Drive would contain anything.

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More than 18 months after publishing a piece about the whereabouts of the unedited versions of the Oklahoma City Bombing surveillance tapes, I learned Wednesday that a federal court hearing concerning a Freedom of Information Act request for those videotapes is set to take place May 11 in Salt Lake City.

The hearing will take place with Judge Clark Waddoups presiding in the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah, Central Division. It comes some three and a half years after Utah attorney Jesse Trentadue used FOIA to request the FBI turn over copies of surveillance video captured April 19, 1995, by more than 20 cameras operating in the vicinity of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City.

I don’t agree with Trentadue’s belief that the bombing was likely a U.S. government-sponsored operation; instead, I side with the conclusions offered by Jayna Davis, award-winning investigative reporter and best-selling author, in her 2004 book, “The Third Terrorist: The Middle East Connection to the Oklahoma City Bombing.” Still, I remain troubled that the FBI has fought the release of videotape footage likely to reveal the identity of at least one additional person involved in the bombing that took place less than 30 minutes from where I was living at the time.

Specifically, Trentadue requested footage captured prior to 9:02 a.m. Central, when a truck bomb exploded, killing 168 people, and footage from the dashboard camera of Oklahoma Highway Patrolman Charles Hanger’s vehicle showing the arrest of Timothy McVeigh. He received footage from several cameras, but not from the cameras on the Murrah Building itself; hence, the reason for the May 11 hearing.

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I think it was Thomas Jefferson who first said ‘Laws are great, in theory, but…’

As his other project, the University of Virginia, gets further backed into a corner on the ‘Hockey Stick’ records it is spending upwards of a half a million dollars to keep from the public (even though the public paid for and has every right to them), we now see what Charlottesville radio host Joe Thomas of WCHV likes to note in this context as “UVA getting its Nixon on”. This time with a little help from its friends outraged that laws would be applied to the academic class:

Delegate David Toscano
211 East High Street
Charlottesville, VA 22902
434.220.1660 PHONE
434.220-1677 FAX
www.davidtoscano.com

******MEDIA ADVISORY******

Press Conference

Richmond –Senator A. Donald McEachin (D-Henrico), Senator J. Chapman Petersen (D-Fairfax) and Delegate David Toscano (D-Charlottesville) will hold a press conference on Tuesday, January 18, 2011, in Senate Room 1 at the Capitol at 10:45 am to discuss their proposed legislation that repeals and limits the authority of the Attorney General to issue civil investigative demands.

Who: Senators McEachin, Petersen and Delegate Toscano

What: Press Conference on CID authority

Where: Senate Room 1

When: 10:45 am

Why: Limit the Attorney General’s authority to issue CIDs

At this press conference someone in the press might ask (hey, stop laughing) why the legislators in unanimously passing this law in both chambers forgot to exempt the academic class when passing the law. Or, did they just think it would be applied to people doing things they didn’t approve of?

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If my experience with one U.S. Department of Justice agency is indicative of how the federal government operates in this new era of transparency, then I must conclude that transparency causes “blindness.”

Several times during the past 18 months, I’ve contacted people at the National Institute of Justice — the research, development and evaluation arm of the DoJ in Washington, D.C. — with seemingly-innocuous questions about a grant the agency awarded to a state mental health agency in Oklahoma almost five years ago. NIJ’s answers would better equip me to explain to my readers how NIJ works. Unfortunately, it seems NIJ officials prefer I remain “blind” to what’s going on inside the agency.

Some background: Curious to learn details about NIJ’s criteria for granting non-competitive awards, I forwarded several questions to Jolene Hernon July 28. After pointing out to my contact in the NIJ Office of Communications that less than one percent of the total amount of NIJ’s annual awards in 2009 was non-competitive, according to the Guidelines Regarding Non-Competitive Awards published on the NIJ web site, I asked several questions as follows:

• I asked Hernon to explain whether or not the guidelines used in granting non-competitive awards have changed since Jan. 1, 2005, and, if they have changed, asked her to explain those changes;

• Prefacing my request with “If the guidelines have not changed,” I asked her to explain the basis upon which a particular non-competitive award was granted; and

• Finally, I asked for a copy of the NIJ director’s “determination in writing,” as called for in the current guidelines, that the award in question was worthy of non-competitive status.

I asked the final question above after reading on the NIJ web site that the agency’s policy is to make non-competitive awards only under the following circumstances:

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The Census Bureau dumped ACORN as a “national partner” in the 2010 head count last fall after James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles’s undercover videos spotlighting ACORN’s rampant corruption debuted here on Big Government.

In a letter dated Sept. 11 that terminated the Census Bureau’s relationship with ACORN, Census director Robert M. Groves wrote

Over the last several months, through ongoing communication with our regional offices, it is clear that ACORN’s affiliation with the 2010 Census promotion has caused sufficient concern in the general public, has indeed become a distraction from our mission, and may even become a discouragement to public cooperation, negatively impacting 2010 Census efforts.

While not decisive factors in this decision, recent events concerning several local offices of ACORN have added to the worsening negative perceptions of ACORN and its affiliation with our partnership efforts.

The Census had to act because it’s important to keep dishonest and incompetent workers far away from the nation’s once-a-decade Census.

The data gathered are used to help determine who gets what and how much in the nation’s federalist system of governance. Population figures arrived at through the Census decide which states gain and lose seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, the redistricting of state legislatures, county and city councils, and electoral districts.

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Yesterday, on behalf of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, I filed three Notices of Intent to File Suit against NASA and its Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), for those bodies’ refusal – for nearly three years – to provide documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act.

The information sought is directly relevant to the exploding “ClimateGate” scandal revealing document destruction, coordinated efforts in the U.S. and UK to avoid complying with both countries’ freedom of information laws, and apparent and widespread intent to defraud at the highest levels of international climate science bodies. Numerous informed commenters had alleged such behavior for years, all of which appears to be affirmed by leaked emails, computer codes and other data from the Climatic Research Unit of the UK’s East Anglia University.

All of that material and that sought for years by CEI go to the heart of the scientific claims and campaign underpinning the Kyoto Protocol, its planned successor treaty, “cap-and-trade” legislation and the EPA’s threatened regulatory campaign to impose similar measures through the back door.

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On Friday, 20 November 2009, The National Right To Work Legal Defense Foundation (Foundation) decided enough was enough and filed a complaint with the U.S. District Court demanding that they compel the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) to comply with the Foundation’s April 6th Freedom of information Act (FOIA) request.

The Foundation’s FOIA requested:

• Records from communications and recorded events where specified Obama appointees and Big Labor official were present
• Lists of lawsuits involving the Department of Labor and Deborah Greenfield within the past eight years.
• List of any gifts received by Solis in the past 5 years from Big Labor or its officials
• Specifically provide in detail (a) notes, (b) agreements, (c) communications, and (d) agendas related to the regulations related to the labor union and officer disclosure rules
• Copies of phone logs
• Copies of any notes or documents related to any enforcement of any labor laws and any outside groups such as labor unions, American Rights at Work, or ACORN

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Well, the admissions just keep on coming. In the UK, lead canary for all things “climate change” — for example, polls show a majority of their public now see the agenda as just a new excuse for the state to extract more wealth from its citizens — we have a paper by the Tyndall Centre for  Climate Change Research saying the agenda demands “reducing the size of the economy through a ‘planned recession’”, in the words of the Daily Telegraph. Tyndall is an activist consortium of British academic institutions known for carrying the banner on the “climate” agenda.

The Telegraph offers an eye-catching sub-head: ” Britain will have to stop building airports, switch to electric cars and shut down coal-fired power stations as part of a ‘planned recession’ to avoid dangerous climate change.”

This should only surprise you if you have relied upon claims by the global warming industry — itself a consortium of activists inside and outside of government, Big Science, Big Academia, and other rent-seeking industry crafting schemes to profit in the near-term from the wealth-transfers — or the Obama administration, desperate to walk-back the president’s admission that his plan of cap-and-trade will “bankrupt” all sorts of facilities and cause your energy prices to “necessarily skyrocket.”

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