By Steve Rhodes

POST-RULING UPDATE BELOW . . .
Angry that the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision this morning will be based on politics?
Let me ask you a question: To what degree is your view on what the court should decide based on politics?
Unless you are one of the very few who have actually read the legal briefs and listened to the oral arguments and researched the legal analyses of the case, your view is the one based on politics.
I once posted on Facebook a status update that said something like “A law’s constitutionality isn’t based on whether you like it or not.”
The responses seemed to assume this was a shot at Republicans and the court. It wasn’t. In fact, it was directed more at liberals, though it was directed at everyone.
Similarly, presumed good intentions or outcomes of a law don’t confer constitutionality upon it. Just because insurance companies must under this law issue policies to those with pre-existing conditions doesn’t make the mandate that those companies demanded in exchange – they ran the numbers and it’s quite a profitable structure – constitutional.

Read More

Posted on June 28, 2012

By Steve Rhodes

I wonder if Jesse Jackson Jr. is exhausted from booze, drugs, sex or federal investigators.
*
Junior joins an illustrious list.
*
Look, if the guy is suffering from an addiction or depression or just needs some time to work out issues in his marriage – as the Sun-Times reports – we can all be sympathetic. But don’t give us “exhaustion.” If you’re going to ask that we respect your family’s privacy, respect our intelligence.

Read More

Posted on June 26, 2012

By Cora Currier/ProPublica

The covert U.S. effort to strike terrorist leaders using drones has moved further out of the shadows this year – targeted killing has been mentioned by President Obama and defended in speeches by Attorney General Eric Holder and Obama counterterrorism adviser John Brennan. The White House recently declassified the fact that it is conducting military operations in Yemen and Somalia.
But for all the talk, the administration says it hasn’t officially confirmed particular strikes or the CIA’s involvement.
Over the past year, the American Civil Liberties Union and reporters at The New York Times have filed several requests under the Freedom of Information Act seeking information about the CIA’s drone program and the legal justification for attacks that killed terrorists and U.S. citizens. The government answered with a Glomar response – neither verifying nor denying that it has such documents.

Read More

Posted on June 25, 2012

By Justin Elliott/ProPublica

Last month, a “senior administration official” said the number of civilians killed in drone strikes in Pakistan under President Obama is in the “single digits.” But last year “U.S. officials” said drones in Pakistan killed about 30 civilians in just a yearlong stretch under Obama.
Both claims can’t be true.
A centerpiece of President Obama’s national security strategy, drones strikes in Pakistan are credited by the administration with crippling al-Qaeda but criticized by human rights groups and others for being conducted in secret and killing civilians The underlying facts are often in dispute and claims about how many people died and who they were vary widely.
So we decided to narrow it down to just one issue: have the administration’s own claims been consistent?

Read More

Posted on June 18, 2012

Our Fraudulent FOIA

“It took Ed Mrkvicka Jr. a year under the improved Illinois Freedom of Information Act to get a two-page state disciplinary report about a real estate agent,” the Northwest Herald reports.
“The Marengo resident and his daughter filed two FOIA requests with the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation. Not only did the agency ignore the request, but it also had ignored the Illinois Attorney General Public Access Counselor’s order to submit the documents for review.
“Suffice it to say, Mrkvicka doesn’t think highly of the new and stronger law.
“‘It’s tantamount to fraud to let Illinois believe that we in fact have a [Freedom of Information] law that has teeth in it, because we don’t,’ Mrkvicka said.
“Audits of governments’ compliance with the law – both before and after the reforms took effect – lend weight to Mrkvicka’s skepticism.
“Watchdog groups before the reforms found mass noncompliance among Illinois’ local governments. A new audit two years into the stronger FOIA finds that little has changed.
“The Illinois Campaign for Political Reform submitted FOIA requests to 400 governments statewide – 43 percent of them violated the law by never even responding to the request, according to its April report.
“The result mirrors pre-reform analyses done by The Associated Press and the Better Government Association showing that many of the state’s 7,000 units of government don’t provide the public with the public records paid for by their tax dollars.”

Read More

Posted on June 18, 2012

By Steve Rhodes

“Rising from the rubble of an old industrial site, the 20,000-seat Toyota Park was supposed to put a small suburb on the map,” the Tribune reported over the weekend.
“Yet the soccer stadium also has become a model of what can go wrong when a little town takes massive development gambles in a state with loose borrowing and ethics laws: Politicians and insiders benefit, while taxpayers are stuck covering budget-busting losses.
“The blue-collar suburb of Bridgeview now suffers under the highest rate of debt in the Chicago region, a Tribune analysis of thousands of pages of state and local records found.”

Read More

Posted on June 11, 2012

By Cora Currier/ProPublica

When Bank of America announced it was buying Merrill Lynch in September 2008, bank execs told their shareholders that the merger might hurt earnings a touch. It didn’t turn out that way. Losses at Merrill piled up over the next two months, before the deal even closed. Yet the execs kept painting a prettier picture to shareholders – even though it turns out they knew better.
As the New York Times detailed on Sunday, a brief in a new lawsuit filed in federal court in Manhattan recounts sworn testimony and internal e-mails in which execs admitted to giving bad information to shareholders and that they had worried about the legal ramifications of doing so.

Read More

Posted on June 8, 2012

By Steve Rhodes

“The NATO summit at McCormick Place cost Metra $800,000 in lost revenue from customers who stayed away and extra security expenses like bomb-sniffing dogs, the commuter railroad agency said Wednesday,” the Tribune reports.
Oh, they’ll make it back through increased tourism down the road.

Read More

Posted on June 7, 2012

By Justin Elliott/ProPublica

In a lengthy front-page story last week exploring President Obama’s use of drone strikes in countries including Pakistan and Yemen, the New York Times reported that the president had “embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in.”
Citing “several administration officials,” the Times reported that this method “in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants . . . unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.” The Times reported that this standard allowed counterterrorism adviser John Brennan to claim in June 2011 that for nearly a year “there hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities that we’ve been able to develop.”
Human rights groups and others have expressed outrage at the reported counting method. And in the last few days alone, 27 “suspected militants” have been killed in three drone strikes in Pakistan, including the reported No. 2 of al-Qaeda.
We wanted to lay out exactly what’s known (not much) about the apparent policy, what’s not (a lot), and what the White House is saying in response to the Times report.

Read More

Posted on June 6, 2012

By Steve Rhodes

What in the world is up with arbitrator Edwin H. Benn?
That’s what city inspector general Joe Ferguson – and much of the (small) portion of Chicago that pays attention to these things – wants to know.
“Chicago’s internal watchdog on Monday defended his recommendation to fire dozens of firefighters who padded mileage reports and called an arbitrator’s ruling to soften penalties in the case ‘patent nonsense,'” the Tribune reports.
“Last year, Inspector General Joseph Ferguson recommended firing 54 firefighters in the Fire Prevention Bureau that his office determined had falsified their mileage reimbursements to the tune of $100,000 in 2009. Then-fire Commissioner Robert Hoff decided instead to issue lengthy unpaid suspensions to most firefighters but fired four of them.
“The arbitrator, Edwin Benn, reversed the firings last week, ruling that the four instead should be suspended without pay for 40 days. He also ruled that most of the other firefighters have their 30- to 60-day suspensions reduced to 20 to 40 days.
“Benn found that while firefighters and supervisors violated city rules, they engaged in conduct that had been ‘almost a work rule,’ condoned within the department for decades.”
In other words, Benn decided to let the firefighters off easy because the corruption they engaged in is so widespread that they shouldn’t be held accountable for their misdeeds. What a novel legal theory.
On Monday, Ferguson fired back in fine form, releasing this statement:

Read More

Posted on June 5, 2012