From The Hill:

On Tuesday of next week, a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee will hold a hearing titled “White House Transparency, Visitor Logs and Lobbyists.” The hearing comes after a report by the Center for Public Integrity detailing disclosure gaps in visitor records released by the White House.

In a memo describing the hearing, staff for the House Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee cite the Center’s report about the visitor records. They also list a number of questions for the Obama administration on how its disclosure policy has come to function.

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Illinois has long earned the reputation as one of the most corrupt states in the union and for reasons too numerous to list here. However, not content to have reached rock bottom, the Illinois Municipal League (a collection of local government officials) and Lord State Senator Ed Maloney have decided to start digging.

This week is Sunshine Week, a week dedicated to promoting the cause of governmental transparency. It should come as no surprise that transparency is needed in Illinois. However, the Illinois Municipal League and Lord State Senator Ed Maloney believes that is the problem, not the solution.

They have introduced Senate Bill 1645 which would allow local government officials to label any individual who files more than 15 Freedom of Information Act requests in a year, or more than 5 in a month, “vexatious”. This would then allow them to summarily reject any and all FOIA’s filed by that person. There is no judicial review of this designation nor any right to appeal. You see, us taxpayers who want to know more about our government are annoying so they want to be able to shut us down.

To give you an idea of what kind of politician Lord State Senator Ed Maloney is, he earlier this year was embroiled in a controversy for sponsoring legislation that would require all home schoolers to register with the government. His stated purpose was that he was worried that people who homeschool their kids were not accountable to any government officials. You read that right, he views his job as enabling government to hold private citizens accountable for their private conduct.

The bad news is that SB1645 has already passed out of the Senate Executive Committee (the committee where “important” legislation is considered and fast-tracked) by a 10-4 margin. Disappointly, this included two Republican Senator votes (John O. Jones and Dave Luechtefeld). We can just call this coaltion the “Pay up and shut up” Coalition for their support of the public’s right to know.

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From the Associated Press:

Two years into its pledge to improve government transparency, the Obama administration took action on fewer requests for federal records from citizens, journalists, companies and others last year even as significantly more people asked for information. The administration disclosed at least some of what people wanted at about the same rate as the previous year.

People requested information 544,360 times last year under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act from the 35 largest agencies, up nearly 41,000 more than the previous year, according to an analysis by The Associated Press of new federal data. But the government responded to nearly 12,400 fewer requests.

The administration refused to release any sought-after materials in more than 1-in-3 information requests, including cases when it couldn’t find records, a person refused to pay for copies or the request was determined to be improper under the law. It refused more often to quickly consider information requests about subjects described as urgent or especially newsworthy. And nearly half the agencies that AP examined took longer—weeks more, in some cases—to give out records last year than during the previous year.

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While the world focuses its attention on the revolt against the dictator in Egypt, we’ve got an American president exhibiting his own dictatorial tendencies.

Over the past week, Obama’s signature “achievement,” the monstrous ObamaCare, was ruled unconstitutional by a second federal judge. In his opinion, U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson stated that his declaratory judgment that the entire law be voided was a de facto injunction. In other words, without an administration request for a stay, Judge Vinson’s ruling stands. The federal and state governments should thus cease and desist. The current status of ObamaCare is that it’s been declared unconstitutional and all implementation must stop.

Obama’s reaction? “What? Did someone say something?”

As The Wall Street Journal reported this week, “The Obama administration said it has no plans to halt implementation of the law.” A senior administration official said, “We will continue to operate as we have previously.”

In other words: Up yours, judicial branch!

In another stunning example of the executive running roughshod over the judiciary, another federal judge, Martin Feldman in New Orleans, ruled this week that the Obama administration was in contempt for blowing off his ruling lifting the deepwater drilling moratorium. After the Deepwater Horizon spill, Obama halted offshore drilling. Feldman struck down the moratorium. Obama’s Interior Department went ahead with another moratorium, which was rescinded in October, but replaced with onerous new drilling safety rules. Feldman struck those down as well.

This week, the judge found that the Interior Department acted with “determined disregard” for his ruling when it deliberately reinstituted policies that restricted offshore drilling. “Each step the government took following the court’s imposition of a preliminary injunction showcases its defiance,” Feldman said in the ruling. “Such dismissive conduct, viewed in tandem with the re-imposition of a second blanket and substantively identical moratorium, and in light of the national importance of this case, provide this court with clear and convincing evidence of the government’s contempt,” Feldman said.

“The government’s contempt.” Wow.

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Canada’s Macleans has a profile of the skeptic at the center of the ClimateGate e-mails (what, you expected an American newspaper to cover this story?):

The private emails and logs leaked last month from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia can’t tell us whether industrial activity is really heating the earth’s atmosphere and endangering civilization. But they have settled the identity of the Great Satan of climate science. Torontonian Stephen McIntyre, a gentle, persistent amateur who had no credentials in applied science before stepping into the global warming debate in 2003, is mentioned more than 100 times.

In the emails, leading climate researchers dismiss him as a capitalist hireling or a hapless “bozo,” and argue about the relative merits of ignoring him versus counterattacking him, even as others acknowledge that his criticisms have merit and imitate his use of the Web as a venue for hyper-detailed scientific discussion. At one point in 2005, CRU director Phil Jones, now under suspension, ponders the possibility that McIntyre might use U.K. freedom-of-information laws to obtain raw weather-station data compiled by the CRU. He grumbles: “I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone.” The overall impression is that of 100 elephants stampeding in confusion and panic around a mouse.

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One thing about “ClimateGate” nagging at the back of my mind is the absence of any discussion by ringleader Phil Jones (or others) of the remarkable, shocking discovery that Jones now claims he had that his precedessor destroyed the raw data in the 1980s.

That is the data that scientists have for years been seeking from Jones under the UK’s freedom of information law. Against numerous such requests he offered equally numerous excuses for refusing access culminating with the September 2009 claim – when it looked like he’d been cornered and had no excuses not to provide it to Prof. Ross McKitrick who met all of his long-stated qualifications – that in fact he’d lost it.

First, it does seem odd that Jones would so firmly and crisply articulate his many, very specific excuses for so many years about why he could not provide something that in fact they had, as he now tells it, lost. His refusals all clearly imply that a belief that he had it.

But where are the emails putting out the word, oh, snap, you guys aren’t gonna believe this?

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