Lovely News for the Health of the Republic

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — The White House announced Friday that it would cut off public access to visitor logs revealing who is entering the White House complex and which officials they are meeting....

Because secrecy is the hallmark of a free society, yes?

Because shielding your activities from scrutiny is an essential part of "draining the swamp," no?

Why would the public even want to know what donors and lobbyists and foreign agents are gaining access to the president and his top advisors, huh?

But this newest decision is totally in keeping with that other decision not to release Trump's tax returns, so a foolish consistency is now the hobgoblin nesting in Trump's orange thatch.

And what justification is Trump's mouthpiece offering for the secrecy? Why, the last dodge of an authoritarian mind-set ... "national security." You can't know who's going in and out of the White House on a daily basis because of "national security."

This decision for official cover-up follows closely on the White House's refusal to release the visitor log for Congressman Devin Nunes' midnight stroll on White House grounds to pick up classified information that might have helped Trump prop up his lie that President Obama had wiretapped him. It's a piece of the same cloth.

McCrory: First Thing We'll Do Is Hide the Evidence

Pat McCrory pledged several times on the campaign trail that he would have an "ethical and accountable" government, and he claimed that he would support open records laws. "You should not be waiting until a week before the election to find out who is giving to a campaign," McCrory said. "Today with computer technology it can be done much more often. I think the public has a right to know more frequently." McCrory also said he would open his daily calendar of public activities. Blah, blah, blah.

Open and accountable, huh?

McCrory has just signed HB972, "Law Enforcement Recordings/No Public Record," yesterday, allowing law enforcement agencies to keep police body camera and dash camera footage from the public unless ordered by a court.

ProgressNC:

Under the new law, body camera and dash camera footage are no longer public record, and footage can only be released to people who are recorded. If an agency refuses, the person who was filmed must get a court order in order to view the footage.

This law would require people who are filmed by police body cameras to spend a great deal of time and money in court in order to see that footage. For people in poor communities, this law essentially strips them of due process.

The new law also prohibits law enforcement agencies from releasing videos of public interest to the general public other than through a court order, which directly targets news organizations. This is yet another assault on transparency and the media by the McCrory Administration.

Bottom Line: Body cameras are a proven way to make law enforcement more transparent and accountable. This law stands in the way of those goals by making it nearly impossible for the public to see footage of an incident.

 

Government Spying

Warned you guys about this during the waning days of George W. Bush:

"...Republicans who claim to love the Constitution ... might want to consider these extraordinary spying powers in the hands of a president of the other party. We don’t want them in the hands of a president of EITHER party."

Still don't.

Access to Public Information

We chuckled last week when we came on the story of a local blogger in Portsmouth, Oh., getting cussed out royally by the city's mayor for requesting access to public documents. The mayor wrote an e-mail to the blogger:

If there is anything else that I can do for you, which is required by law, don't hesitate to call my office. If it isn't required by law then don't bother asking, because I think that you're a worthless piece of s**t and I wouldn't p**s on you if you were on fire (my opinion). You're a poor, lonely, jealous, old man with aspirations of being a writer. You write your lies and uneducated opinions on people and issues from behind the safety of your slobber stained keyboard with the hope that somebody will read them that doesn't know you and believe that you're more than the pitiful, broke-down, lizard-looking thing that you are, in my opinion. Get a life old man. On second thought, don't bother..............

Apparently, it felt good to get that off his chest, though the mayor also coughed up the requested documents.

The recent local case of stone-walling public access to governmental documents, as recounted in Deborah Greene's letter to the editor in Friday's Watauga Democrat (scroll down to "Open records should not be expensive") is not as colorful in its language but is in some ways more egregious than the Portsmouth case.

It's one thing if a rattled superintendent of schools came up with those road blocks on the fly. It would be far more troubling if he did so on the advice of School Board counsel.