By Paul Baker/Illinois Open Government Data Initiative

Fox Chicago, the Chicago Tribune and others attended a press conference [Friday] in Daley Plaza called by a nonpartisan group of software designers and engineers. They were there to ask candidates for Clerk of the Court of Cook County, Dorothy Brown and Ricardo Munoz, to pledge to open up court data to the public and to institute e-filing of court cases.
Candidate Munoz attended, and signed the pledge, but Dorothy Brown’s press rep told at least some media who inquired Friday morning about her attendance that Brown was outraged that it was being held without her knowledge and without her being invited.
In response, event organizer Paul Baker, CEO of Webitects, showed five e-mails between him and Brown campaign leadership dating back to March 6 and played a voicemail he received yesterday from Brown’s PR Director asking for more details about the event.

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Posted on March 19, 2012

By Beachwood Labs

Psychopaths have been in the news a lot lately – namely the prevalence of them on Wall Street and in the corridors of power.
Our favorite (suspected) psychopath is Rod Blagojevich, and with him off to prison this morning we are announcing the results of testing done by Beachwood Labs using the Psychopath Checklist developed by Dr. Robert Hare of the University of British Columbia, one of the world’s most foremost experts on psychopaths. Let’s take a look.
For each characteristic that is listed, the subject is given a score: 0 for “no,” 1 for “somewhat,” and 2 for “definitely does apply.”

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Posted on March 15, 2012

By Steve Rhodes

“Mayor Rahm Emanuel was frustrated that doubters of his controversial speed-camera plan were ignoring a city study he said offered compelling proof of the life-saving impact of camera technology,” the Tribune reports.
“That study, the mayor said in an interview last month, found that traffic deaths in Chicago had plummeted 60 percent near red-light cameras, cousins of the speed-detecting devices.
“‘You guys have continued to repeat wrong information because it doesn’t fit your storyline,’ Emanuel argued, thrusting it at a Tribune reporter with this challenge:
“‘If the report is wrong, you should go analyze that report.’
“As Emanuel prepares to introduce his speed-camera ordinance to the City Council on Wednesday, the Tribune has, indeed, analyzed that report. The findings raise further questions about how the Emanuel administration has brandished statistics to justify the push.”
Let’s take a look.

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Posted on March 14, 2012

By Abrahm Lustgarten/ProPublica

BP’s refining subsidiary was released today from criminal probation related to a 2005 explosion in Texas City that killed 15 workers.
The company has addressed the most serious safety deficiencies exposed by the accident and satisfied the terms of a felony plea agreement to settle charges that it failed to protect workers from known risks, a U.S. Justice Department spokesman said.
The move closes a controversial chapter for the company, but it leaves an array of worker-safety issues unresolved. BP is still negotiating over more than 400 additional violations brought against its Texas City refinery separately from the criminal case.
Following the explosion, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration and BP reached a settlement requiring the company to address safety issues at the refinery. Fixing those problems became one of the Justice Department’s conditions for settling felony charges relating to the explosion and for ending the three-year probation period.
In late 2009, however, after a series of inspections, OSHA determined that BP had not addressed many of its safety lapses and levied 270 additional violations and a $87.4 million fine. It also hit the company with another 439 additional “egregious and willful” safety violations at the refinery that were not a component of the criminal case.
At issue then was whether the company had violated some of the most important terms of its probation even after it was given a second chance. In 2010, BP settled with OSHA, paying the agency $50.6 million and committing to making substantive safety changes by the court-set sunset of its probation period Monday.
A Justice Department spokesman said BP has met its obligations for probation, including addressing the 270 violations. The remaining 400 or so OSHA violations, however, were not specific to the Texas City agreement.
“These violations were unrelated to the 2005 settlement agreement and did not in the Department’s view rise to criminal conduct,” said Wyn Hornbuckle, an agency spokesman, in a statement to ProPublica. “The Department did not seek any extension or revocation of BP’s criminal probation.”
The resolution of those remaining violations will be dealt with administratively, by OSHA, Hornbuckle said, and not by the courts.
As the probation expired, confusion remained about exactly what improvements BP had made at its refineries.

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Posted on March 13, 2012

By Steve Rhodes

There’s a still a lot to be gleaned from President Obama’s decision to move the G8 summit from Chicago to Camp David. We have the best gleanings. Shall we?
*
“Administration officials and associates, speaking only on the condition of anonymity, said the president in recent weeks began discussing the idea of a more intimate setting for the world leaders – both to ease their communications and to cut down on the security concerns and traffic tie-ups of a big-city summit,” the New York Times reports.
Right. The administration was worried about traffic tie-ups. But the anonymous aides got that absurdity equal footing with security concerns.

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Posted on March 7, 2012

By Jesse Eisinger/ProPublica

In early November 2010, as the Federal Reserve began to weigh whether the nation’s biggest financial firms were healthy enough to return money to their shareholders, a top regulator bluntly warned: Don’t let them.

“We remain concerned over their ability to withstand stress in an uncertain economic environment,” wrote Sheila Bair, the head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., in a previously unreported letter obtained by ProPublica.

The letter came as the Fed was launching a “stress test” to decide whether the biggest U.S. financial firms could pay out dividends and buy back their shares instead of putting aside that money as capital. It was one of the central bank’s most critical oversight decisions in the wake of the financial crisis.

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Posted on March 5, 2012

By The FOIA Project

When the Obama administration came to office in January 2009, it promised openness and transparency in government. On his first full day in office, President Barack Obama issued a memorandum concerning his administration’s beliefs on the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), ordering federal officials to err on the side of openness. The President wrote that FOIA should be “administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails.” Pursuant to this memorandum, Obama’s new attorney general, Eric Holder, on March 19, 2009 issued a directive to emphasize the importance of the FOIA law’s purpose and “to ensure that it is realized in practice.”
This report considers whether a key component of that March 2009 directive which set forth new “defensive standards” for FOIA litigation has been obeyed. Henceforth, the AG’s memorandum stated, the Department of Justice would “defend a denial of a FOIA request only if (1) the agency reasonably foresees that disclosure would harm an interest protected by one of the statutory exemptions, or (2) disclosure is prohibited by law.”
After careful review of the record and interviews with numerous attorneys involved with FOIA litigation, TRAC found little evidence that these new standards are actually being followed. In fact, some individuals interviewed by TRAC expressed the opinion that Justice Department attorneys had become even more aggressive in defending anything that federal agencies chose to withhold.

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Posted on March 2, 2012

By Steve Rhodes

“Politicians exerted their influence at the University of Illinois to boost admissions prospects for the relatives of lobbyists, fundraisers, a union leader and other connected applicants,” the Tribune reported over the weekend.
“The first broad analysis of who benefited from the school’s clout lists shows that a number of lawmakers championed applicants whose relatives donated to their campaigns or represented groups that regularly made political contributions.
“Family members of at least three lawmakers also were part of the now-abandoned secret system, known as Category I, a separate admissions track that allowed some subpar students to get admitted to the state’s flagship university.”
Well that makes sense, since we obviously have subpar legislators.

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Posted on February 28, 2012

By The Beachwood Sin Tax Bureau

Whenever a city, county, state and federal government faces seemingly insurmountable budget problems, our fearless leaders turn to sin taxes – namely boosting the assessment on booze, tobacco and sometimes gambling. In other words, fun. What’s next, condom taxes? Of course, if everybody stopped engaging in vices, sin taxes wouldn’t deliver anything to the bottom line. Makes us want to stop boozing just out of spite.
But we here at the Beachwood Sin Tax Bureau think immorality is in the eye of the beholder. We propose these new sin taxes.
* A new tax on bad taste, starting with music. Every purchase or download of a work on our list will be assessed at 5 percent. Six percent for Coldplay, Justin Bieber, Lana Del Rey and the Jonas Brothers.

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Posted on February 26, 2012

By The Beachwood 99 Percent Affairs Desk

Whose side are you on?
1. “Facing a grim fiscal situation, Illinois Governor Pat Quinn proposed a $33.9 billion state spending plan that includes a $4 million funding reduction for HIV programs. The governor also proposed deep Medicaid funding cuts, which would severely hamper access to health care for people with HIV,” the AIDS Foundation of Chicago says.
“The governor’s proposal seeks $25.4 million in FY12 state funding for HIV services through the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH), a reduction of 14 percent from the current fiscal year. Budget blueprints released yesterday indicate Gov. Quinn proposes no funding cuts for the AIDS Drug Assistance Program (ADAP), which provides life-saving medications to people with HIV. As a result, the entire $4 million funding cut would reduce community-based HIV prevention, housing, corrections, minority health-promotion and harm reduction programs.
“While the AIDS Foundation of Chicago (AFC) lauds the Governor’s recommendation for full ADAP funding, it strongly opposes the overall funding cut that will decimate community-based HIV programs.”

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Posted on February 24, 2012