Snubbin' the Public
September 21, 2007 | Editorial
On the morning of May 23, 2005, the Texas State Capitol was rife with rumors that multimillionaire James Leininger was in the hall behind the House chambers pressuring lawmakers to vote for his pet project, school vouchers. The Texas Department of Public Safety has now spent more than two years and almost $166,000 in outside lawyer fees fighting a Texas Observer request to release surveillance tapes the Observer, the state attorney general, and a state district judge believe should clearly be made public. The Observer has obtained invoices from law firms defending DPS and we’ve taken the liberty of putting them on our Web site. We invite you to see how your money is being spent.
Just some rough math here. The attorney spent 20 minutes reading an article in The Texas Observer. I have to assume the article wasn't much longer than 1,000 words. This means the attorney was reading at 50 words per minute. The average reading speed of an elementary school child is 200 words per minute. The average speaking rate of an adult is 150 words per minute. One might conclude many things from this. My most positive construction is that the attorney stumbled over the phrase "public right to know" and had to re-read several times to master the concept.
Posted by Bob on October 19, 2007
Why do you want the terrorists to win? If the DPS has to release the tapes, then the terrorists will have to ... try to suss out where the cameras are from the angles in the tapes. Assuming they see the tapes, of course. This is much easier than, say, walking into the back hallway of the second floor and looking up, which I daresay any third grader on a field trip to the Capitol could do.
The inanity of this is mind-boggling.
Posted by DeeceX on October 16, 2007
I believe some interprising attorney or the paper's attorney's themselves, should go to the Travis County Grand Jury, and announce they have business before the Grand Jury and present the facts and request that the head of the agency defying both State law and the Judge's order, along with that of A.G. Abbott, could possibly be indicted for their illegal actions.
Just because Ronnie Earle won't do it, does not mean that anyone else cannot. It needs to be done. And while there, perhaps they may want to discuss the Rick Perry/Merck HPV vaccine and Perry's defiance of State Law by issuing an Executive Order to spend millions per year of taxpayer money, without any public hearings for medical input on the record.
We have a runaway Executive branch in both the Federal and State Executive offices, and the People must do something to halt it. Stealing our money to defy State law, is at best, a criminally intended action.
Posted by Chuck Roast on September 26, 2007
One wonders "qui bono" from DPS' hard work of preventing access to the videotape of Leninger's back-room activities? Surely, the 'Homeland Security' dodge seems rather thin.
Perhaps the issue relates to whomever was visiting Leninger and why...
Perhaps a DPS official who had no business there who doesn't wish to be revealed doing something s/he shouldn't have been doing with the godfather of the ultra-right wing Christopublican Party?
Posted by Marshalldoc on September 24, 2007
Not a subscriber (sorry, I work in a library that does subscribe) but loyal and regular reader. I think we, the taxpayers, should sue the DPS. This is just ridiculous, & only proves that our government is no longer democratic, but ruled by the oligarchs, the rule of the rich that democracy was designed to eliminate. Where are the tumbrils, to take the DPS to the public square for thier just reward?
Posted by Amy K. Eoff on September 23, 2007
I am a subscriber. This is more information on a disgustingly rich person using money to buy votes for his pet project: school vouchers. Vouchers are greatly overrated.
As a pilot project in Milwaukee has shown - vouchers don't make any difference in performance. Voucher and non-voucher schools have performed substantially the same. In fact, the non-voucher schools actually performed a little bit better!
Posted by Frank Hagan on September 20, 2007
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