On hiding politicians who violate ethics laws
Updated at 11:10 p.m.: This was just posted by my AJC colleague James Salzer:
A couple of years ago they changed the name of the Georgia Ethics Commission to the Government Transparency Commission. Tonight the Senate passed a last-minute amendment that allows the “transparency” commission to seal the records in some cases against politicians and delay reporting some violations. Nothing like the 40th day – and night – of a session at the Georgia Capitol
Find the largesse in HB 875, a fishing license bill.
Updated at 10:07p.m.: In very volatile speech, state Sen. Steve Thompson, D-Marietta, all but accused House Majority Leader Larry O’Neal, R-Bonaire, of collusion with banks to block a bill – SB 448 – that would free some developers in Georgia of making good on loan guarantees that are sold by banks to other lenders.
A compromise was eventually reached, contained in SB 129. But not before Thompson had his say. “I hope they pay for it one day. Because they’re fixing to ruin some people who built our state,” Thompson said. “I haven’t called a name. if you can’t figure it out, come see me.”
Thompson noted that the House majority leader – i.e., O’Neal – was on the board of directors of a major bank in Georgia. He also raised O’Neal’s role in the passage of a tax exemption passed for his client, then Gov. Sonny Perdue a few years ago.
We have no way of getting in touch with O’Neal as we write this, but invite comments from him or his friends.
Updated at 7:45 p.m.: The House Rules Committee just stripped out the sections of SB 469 that would ban demonstrations at or near private dwellings, in order to permit the bill to come to a vote tonight.
The remaining portion of the bill requires unionized employees to renew annually permission to deduct dues from their paychecks. The bill exempts educators, law enforcement and – with yet another amendment – firefighters. Debate will be limited to one hour, but passage is likely.
Union forces here aren’t pleased, but say the remaining provisions of SB 469 are likely to be moot, since they run afoul of federal requirements.
The Georgia Chamber of Commerce sends this, from spokeswoman Joselyn Baker:
“Based on our work with legal experts and the US Chamber, we believe that the other two provisions you refer to – workplace notice and paycheck protection – will be legally upheld if challenged.”
The anti-protest provision of SB 469 originally included only union activities – but nonetheless resulted in an odd alliance of labor organizations and tea party forces. “Sometimes the good guys win,” said Debbie Dooley of Atlanta Tea Party Patriots.
Updated at 7:10 p.m.: Here’s what we’re told is the deal intended resolve the passage of HB 954, the bill to shorten the period during which a woman can seek an abortion:
The House will agree to the Senate amendments protecting doctors against civil suits, and offering an exemption for “medically futile” pregnancies. But yet another amendment would require that before a fetus is declared non-viable, a woman would have to seek out a second opinion.
Original:Two pieces of hot legislation just got a last chance in the final hours of this legislative session.
SB 469, the bill that now bans all protests at private dwellings, has been recommitted to the House Rules Committee, which gathers at 7 p.m.
More important, HB 954, the bill to shorten the period during which a woman can seek an abortion, is now going to a House-Senate conference committee. House conferees are Doug McKillip, R-Athens, the bill’s sponsor; House Appropriations Chairman Terry England, R-Auburn; and Donna Sheldon, R-Dacula.
Both bills will likely be racing against a settlement on HB 347, the bill that will determine how Georgia repays the federal government $780 million borrowed for unemployment benefits.
When that bill passes, the Legislature will be in a mood to go home.
- By Jim Galloway, Political Insider
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187 comments Add your comment
UGA 1999
March 30th, 2012
11:00 am
Liberal….you would like that wouldnt you?
Aaron Burr V Mexico
March 30th, 2012
11:02 am
UGA 1999 – Hooray! Anti Science.
Table. Q.E.D.
td
March 30th, 2012
11:09 am
deegee
March 30th, 2012
10:44 am
td, you can’t say with certainty that the majority of single women with children are Democrats.
I do not say it the polling agencies do.
UGA 1999
March 30th, 2012
11:13 am
Aaron…Care for me to provide you with posts from all of the “scientist” that agree with me.
Did humans cause the “Ice Age”? Oh, is it “global warming” or are you calling it “climate change” now?
Aaron Burr V Mexico
March 30th, 2012
11:14 am
@UGA – I am, literally, so sick of talking to tables about this particular subject that, no, I am not going to swap your idiot data for real data.
You either believe in science or you don’t.
You don’t.
td
March 30th, 2012
11:14 am
iberalefty
March 30th, 2012
10:56 am
td
do u think BRISTOL PALIN is a slut like u think SANDRA FLUKE is?
Did Bristol Palin testify before congress that she needed the government to pay $1000 per year for her birth control so she could have all the sex she needs on campus?
liberalefty
March 30th, 2012
11:15 am
TD
do u think BRISTOL PALIN is a slut like u think FLUKE is?
UGA 1999
March 30th, 2012
11:16 am
Aaron….HAHAHA YOU BROUGHT IT UP!!! HAHAHA
liberalefty
March 30th, 2012
11:17 am
td
answer the question…do u think BRISTOL is a slut or not…and do u think parading around her pregnancy was good for AMERICAS’ teen girls
UGA 1999
March 30th, 2012
11:22 am
liberalefty….I will answer your quesiton. No, she is not a slut but she is confused by her sexual decisions. But she is not asking the gubament to pay for his mistake.
GaBlue
March 30th, 2012
11:22 am
liberallefty,
td won’t answer that because the truth is, all women are wh-o-res to him. By his own admission, he prefers the wh-o-res with the highest prices.
GaBlue
March 30th, 2012
11:24 am
UGA 1999,
If Briston Palin is “confused by her sexual decisions,” then she should move to Georgia, where men can make those decisions for her. The Georgia General Assembly puts making decisions for women a higher priority than anything else before them. Aren’t the women of Georgia LUCKY to be so “loved?”
Aaron Burr V Mexico
March 30th, 2012
11:31 am
@UGA1999 – I did, but, you asked why I called contards anti science.
liberalefty
March 30th, 2012
11:37 am
uga
so a woman who screws and gets pregnant isnt a slut but if she speaks in congress to get acess to birth control shes a slut? and what was BRISTOL confused about while she was screwing around?
liberalefty
March 30th, 2012
11:38 am
who raised BRISTOL to be so permissive?
liberalefty
March 30th, 2012
11:41 am
the more religious this country was the more racist/sexist/homophobic it was…why do repubs long for these days of hate like its a LEAVE IT TO BEAVER sitcom..
liberalefty
March 30th, 2012
11:42 am
i bet the OBAMA daughters wont be an unwed mother like BRISTOL IS…they have better parents
liberalefty
March 30th, 2012
11:43 am
ANDREW BTEITBART the lying racist piece of feces death must have made SHIRLEY SHERRODS day..
liberalefty
March 30th, 2012
11:44 am
i meant “BREITBART.”..
Shar
March 30th, 2012
12:03 pm
td, the definition of “submit”, according to Merriam Webster (the verb without an object attached, as in “I submit this paper..”) is definitely not “to freely give.” It is “to yield oneself to the power or authority of another: to submit to a conqueror; to allow oneself to be subjected to some kind of treatment: to submit to chemotherapy; or to defer to another’s judgment, opinion, decision, etc.: I submit to your superior judgment.
The posture of the Southern Baptist Convention is directly opposed to your contention that “If you really think conservative women do not control their conservative households then you are just plain delusional.” Apparently, the SBC has decreed that wives who don’t “give away the milk” are to blame for their “Gods” going off and finding another submissive woman who will.
The bottom line here is whether women have to submit to others in general, particularly in regards to their reproductive choices. According to your line of reasoning, women should not have sex without demanding guarantees or payment of some kind, and they should not have sex without wanting to become pregnant. However, if one of the guarantees they seek is contraception, they are sluts. If married women do not want to have sex, they are to blame for the promiscuity of their husbands. If women are made to have sex without their consent, either with a knife at their throats or the threat of infidelity, they must be forced to carry any resulting fetus to term whether they want to or not. Their doctors may not provide any women with their best medical advice; it must go through a filter of the “superior judgement” of people like Dan Becker. After they deliver this child, they are unfit Democrats who are ruining this country.
td. even you must see how offensive, infantilizing and dangerous this position is. Your religious beliefs have no place in my private discussions with my husband or my doctor, any more than I should walk into your examination room and decide for you whether you are a good enough person to deserve specific treatments. The Legislature, in pursuit of money from people like Dan Becker who has no interest in or respect for me as a person but is obsessed with controlling my reproductive and sexual decisions, has made sweeping decisions backed by the force of law that take those personal powers away from me and make me “submit”. It is all the more gallling that the people who made these decisions will never be faced with the decision themselves.
You can believe all you want that a fetus has more rights than an adult woman. You can decide that the possibility of “fetal pain” is worth inflicting the very real pain of pregnancy, labor and delivery on that adult woman. I don’t believe those things, and I have just as much right to my belief as you have to yours. I take very strong objection to you, Dan Becker and the Georgia Legislature banding together to use the political and legal system to force your beliefs on me.
liberalefty
March 30th, 2012
12:09 pm
i wish the rightwingers would keep their hate{religion} to themselves..
td
March 30th, 2012
12:36 pm
Shar
March 30th, 2012
12:03 pm
“You can believe all you want that a fetus has more rights than an adult woman. ”
Equal rights not more rights. In other words by the statement above you feel that a woman is given a special right to determine life or death over another human being?
“controlling my reproductive and sexual decisions”
If you believe that controlling means the protection of other human life then yes for reproductive. Where has any piece of legislation wanted to control your “sexual decisions”? Where is your personal responsibility in your decision making? So you think it is your right to choose to have unprotected sex and if the consequences of that choice is you conceive a human being then you can choose to murder that human life if it may inconvenience the direction you want to take with your life. In reverse of that you can choose to have the child (over the objections of the father) and then force the father to pay for that choice? Now talk about a double standard.
“I don’t believe those things, and I have just as much right to my belief as you have to yours”
You sure do have the right to believe in any manner that you want too and I will defend that right with my life if I need too. You also have to follow the law and it is my right and belief that the law allowing people to murder another human being and have no consequences for those actions is wrong. I shall take my belief in this principal and spend my money and time to help protect these lives.
honested
March 30th, 2012
12:38 pm
Keep that outrage in focus folks, because this is an election year.
Time to turn out the incompetent toadys and squeezed tea baggers.
New faces are the only way to start next session without a slew of anti-Citizen ALEC specimen bills and change government of, for and by the DOLLAR.
honested
March 30th, 2012
12:41 pm
No, fetuses do not (and should not) have rights, and there is no justification whatsoever for letting religious lunatics invent such ‘rights’.
Until it is born, a fetus is essentially a parasite, entirely dependent upon it’s host and potentially fatal to the life of the host. The RIGHTS remain with the HOST. Such is the natural order and such should remain forever the law.
Aaron Burr V Mexico
March 30th, 2012
12:55 pm
So let me get this straight?
Passing laws and regulations takes away the rights of business owners, but unions should be illegal because when they form agreements to leverage their true market value (as compared to an owner dominated and tilted marketplace).
But its not slavery when a fetus with ‘equal rights’ automatically makes any woman subject to all kinds of restrictions about her physical activities, especially when she MIGHT be pregnant.
I now think an effort should be made by science to forcibly impregnate men and force them to carry fetuses to term. We’ll see if fetuses have ‘equal rights’ then in Republican eyes.
bronson
March 30th, 2012
12:59 pm
@honested
Based on the things like the documented lack of integrity of the officials we elect, to having the highest state ranking in per capita lottery sales, Georgians are at or near the bottom of the list for cognitive abilities. Attempting to reason with citizens like td is an exercise in futility.
Shar
March 30th, 2012
1:06 pm
TD, you can have your beliefs. That is entirely separate from translating them into laws that you can then force on me.
You don’t care whether the woman freely chooses to have sex or not. The only relevant thing to you is that she gets pregnant. Then your belief system trumps her right of self-determination, her decisions about her own health and welfare, and even her doctor’s right and responsibility to give her the best medical advice and care.
Of course, once she has this unwanted baby she’s ruining the nation.
If the Taliban were to be given the power to decide your medical access and life choices, you would object. Their belief system is not yours, and their usurpation of a legal system to force them on you would be abhorrent to you.
You do indeed give a fetus rights over a woman when you support laws that force a woman to host one, to endanger her life and health to do so. You assume that my “personal responsibility in decision-making” will not include serious soul-searching and reflection on what is best for myself, my partner/spouse, any existing children we may have as well as the child itself when you lambaste me for wanting to make my own decisions; however, you only focus on one element of a situation and push the rest aside as trivial “inconveniences”.
You diminish women by assuming that we, the child-rearers and nurturers, make such decisions cavalierly (and where is your proof that we do?) You place yourself in judgement, believing that any considerations we might weigh in making a decision to terminate a pregnancy are irrelevant, that your absolutism is the only “right” way. You brush aside the issue of whether a woman has freely consented to sex just as you ignore the fact that pregnancy is dangerous, neither of which considerations will ever affect you personally.
I have faced a pregnancy that, had I not miscarried, would have spread cancer throughout my body and likely ended in my death. Dangerous pregnancies happen, often (as was my case) to women already mothers who must balance raising an existing child with the possibility of making that child plus the new one orphans. Women must choose between raising a healthy child and bearing a deeply flawed one, thus draining the resources available to the first. Women who have sex against their will must decide whether to risk their health and life to bear a child with potentially questionable hereditory characteristics who will be a lifelong reminder of abuse.
Where, exactly, do you fit into these considerations? Why, precisely, do you find them trivial? By what right does the Legislature insert themselves so deeply into the privacy of these women’s lives?
deegee
March 30th, 2012
1:16 pm
Explain how 16 year old high school kids are confused about their sexual decisions? Was it Bristol or her teenage heart throb, Levi Johnston that was confused? Were they both confused? When I was 16 I remember being confused about a lot of things but sexual decisions weren’t confusing. Let me see, should I sneak around my parents and have sex with my boyfriend or go to the movies???? I’m so confused!?!?!?!?
td
March 30th, 2012
1:30 pm
Shar
March 30th, 2012
1:06 pm
You are making arguments for small set asides. If the woman’s life is in danger (real danger of dying) then she should have the right to self preservation. As far as rape, What type of rape are talking about? Some states think if a woman is drunk then she can not have consensual sex.
I see you ignored my questions about the father’s right and personal responsibility. Here is another for you: Why do we put women in jail for taking drugs and harming the unborn human being? Why do we charge people for double murder if they kill a pregnant woman? Is it not true that a child can not live on its own until around age two? If the woman is the nurturer of the child (in and out of the womb) and the child can not live on its own after birth, then why should not a woman be able to choose not kill the child until that time?
UGA 1999
March 30th, 2012
1:36 pm
You guys are hilarious. Thank you for the laughs. Sincerely.
zeke
March 30th, 2012
1:45 pm
this submit yourselves to your husbands is a little disturbing….men don’t want children for everytime they have intercourse and often times don’t want to be bothered with contraception so it often falls on the woman…
Aaron Burr V Mexico
March 30th, 2012
1:49 pm
@TD1 – We put them in jail because angry mothers are the most easily exploitable political demographic in the nation (look at Nancy Grace) so angry suburban house wives like to be democrat and republican and the same time. They support abortion rights as long as it affects them, but people that take drugs to harm their fetus are CRIMINALS which is different.
As far as children not being able to survive on their own until they are two, good point there TD re: ’survivability outside the womb’….so then why do Republicans cut programs for young children all the time? Aren’t they supposed to show ’self reliance’?
@UGA Table – The thanks are mutual, my imaginary friend, the thanks are mutual.
Shar
March 30th, 2012
2:35 pm
td, we charge double felonies at the behest of the Right To Life organization – just another little chip on the way to equating a fetus with a person. Same with jailing pregnant women who take drugs. Those are the result of politicization of this issue, only existing to give credence to questions like yours.
You’re right on the requirements of paternity. The most difficult part of the abortion debate, for me, is the case of fathers who want a child and mothers who don’t. In those cases, I would (personal choice) want the father to pay all costs associated with the pregnancy, and then hold the woman harmless once the child is delivered and the father takes custody. In the case of a woman wanting a child and a man not, he would need to pay for part of the pregnancy costs (as he was instrumental in creating the pregnancy) and then he would be able to walk away once delivery was safely passed. With abortion safe, legal and available, women and men need to take responsibility for their actions and make informed choices about parenthood.
In either case, if a child ended up a charge to the public, I would support laws that cut off any future benefits for both parents (not for the child) unless they both provided at least minimal support to lighten the load for the taxpayer.
I do not reference “small set asides” in talking about the decision to bear a child. Only a person who has never, and will never, weigh those considerations would suggest that. Every pregnancy is a life-altering event, and carries those kinds of personal decisions. And rape, td, is rape, whether in or out of marriage, whether drugged or sober, whether by an unknown assailant or a relative. Rape is any time a woman has the choice of sexual contact made for her by another person. Rape can be physically forced but it can be pharmaceutically forced and emotionally forced as well. What about all those SBC women who don’t want to have sex with their husbands but who are branded as worthy of desertion if they don’t? Intimidation is another form of coercion. Either a choice is free or it is not.
Aaron Burr V Mexico
March 30th, 2012
2:56 pm
You know…upon reflection, I like the idea implied in the name “Will the last democrat in Georgia please turn out the light” implying that Republicans have neither the intelligence to maintain electricity on their own, much less that of fire, making them less intelligent than cavemen.
dikran
March 30th, 2012
5:40 pm
Thinking about abortion. Murder? And the several great women I know who have had one. When you come for them, humping your bibles and your stones, you will have to come through me.
Truthbe
March 30th, 2012
9:23 pm
The entire Democrat Party (sorry excuse me I met the new socialist party) are a bunch of perverted liars with an agenda that will “transform” America into a third world Country. And all you Obama supporters should be ashame of yourselves. Yes even you African Americans. This President wants to give away 7 Alaskan Islands loaded with Oil to Russia, give American First Defense Missles Codes to Russia, gave Billions and Billions of taxpayers dollars to the Muslim Brotherhood,PLO,Hamas,and Hezbullah. Obama and HIllary gave this money to them thru the State Department, also Obama and HIllary signed behind your backs a UN Small Arms Treaty that takes away your Second Amendment legal gun owning rights. All this without Congressional vote or support. Obama is breaking the LAW according to the U.S Constitution. Impeach the traitor Obama and Hillary and throw them in jail
Truthbe
March 30th, 2012
9:27 pm
Jim, Please! Where’s the kicked off button for the very ugly comments from Liberalefty? His posts are discusing…………..Lets keep your blogg civil.