William Cronon's emails raise an uncomfortable question most concerned citizens have probably never considered asking: What's more important — open records laws or academic freedom? Last week, Cronon, a distinguished historian at the University of Wisconsin, revealed on his blog that the state Republican party had filed an open-records request for emails sent to and from his university account mentioning the state's recent labor dispute and prominent GOP politicians. Records requests of public employee emails are perfectly common. Journalists file them all the time to learn what elected ... Read More
Toasting Government’s Good Ideas From 2010
December 30, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
There have been a lot of bad ideas from government officials this past year, knee-jerk responses to national crises or hotheaded proposals that cooled in the wake of the midterm elections. There was Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal's ferocious embrace of sand berms, the man-made islands designed to protect his state from the Gulf oil spill that wound up wasting millions of dollars and invaluable time. There was the sudden rallying cry to rewrite the 14th Amendment, the Virginia attorney general's witch hunt of academic research, and that dubious scheme to spend stimulus money on stimulus road ... Read More
A Ray of Sunshine
March 10, 2010 • By • 3 Comments
One of the favorite open government examples Obama administration officials like to give is the SAVE award, a contest invented last year to make government more interactive not just for the general public, but also for the hundreds of thousands of low-level federal employees who never actually get anywhere near the White House. The administration invited anyone working for a government agency to submit an idea for saving money and improving efficiency. Some 38,000 suggestions poured in to be included in the fiscal year 2011 budget, and 84,000 people voted online for the best among them. The ... Read More
Maximum Disclosure, Minimum Delay
February 24, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
When hacked e-mails between climate change researchers surfaced late last year, they created a furor. The messages, swiped from a server at a British university, included a reference to a statistical trick and slights against critics. To climate change skeptics, this was proof of what they'd been saying all along: The idea of a warming Earth is a boondoggle, bought into by greenie extremists looking to blame SUVs, air-conditioning and factory-farmed sirloin. Critics gave climate researchers a good telling off, but the scientists stuck to their guns — er, graphs — citing a ... Read More
Is This Any Way to Treat Friends?
April 8, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
In "We Should Care This Much About Earmarks? Really?" he quoted Amy Steigerwalt, a professor of political science at Georgia State University who has also studied earmarks: "The thing I'm struck by is that everyone seems to be starting from the premise that all earmarks are bad. Like most things in the world, a simple black-and-white perception isn't true. There are certainly abuses ... but the reality is that earmarks are really the only mechanism that members can ensure that money goes to their districts in ways that are not part of larger bills."A fun piece in Tuesday's The Hill shows ... Read More
