That’s how Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) sees it. Speaking Tuesday in support of Indiana U.S. District Judge David F. Hamilton’s nomination to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, Specter said:

Speaking candidly, perhaps bluntly, Judge Hamilton is a pawn in partisan political warfare. That is the long and short of it. This is the 90th filibuster in the past several months. This follows a pattern, regrettably, that goes back almost two decades, when both sides, Democrats and Republicans at various times, have engaged in filibusters against judicial nominees where there was no justification to do so. It occurred extensively during the Clinton administration. At that time, on the other side of the aisle, I supported many of President Clinton’s nominees. It occurred during the Bush administration, when I chaired the Judiciary Committee, and there were repeated filibusters by Democrats against President Bush’s nominees.

At that time, this Chamber was almost torn apart with the ferocity and intensity of the partisanship, with serious consideration being given to what was called the nuclear or constitutional option, when there was serious consideration given to altering the traditional requirement of 60 votes to end a filibuster. There was a tactic devised to challenge the ruling of the Chair, which could be overruled by or upheld by only 51 votes, and thereby move the judicial nominees without the traditional 60 votes. Fortunately, sanity and tradition prevailed and we worked out a compromise with the so-called Gang of 14 to confirm some and to reject others. Now we find the pattern continues.

It is my hope that at some point we can declare a truce, an armistice, and stop the partisan political warfare. The nomination of Judge Hamilton would be a good occasion to do that. 

Well, there was no truce.

On Tuesday, Republicans tried unsuccessfully to filibuster Hamilton’s nomination, which prompted the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank to observe: “When you’re in politics, a certain amount of hypocrisy comes with the job. Still, what happened on the Senate floor Tuesday stretched even the senatorial capacity to suspend shame to new levels of elasticity.”

And on Thursday, in a highly partisan vote, the Senate confirmed Hamilton by a 59-39 margin. The only Republican to vote for Hamilton was Sen. Richard Luger of Indiana, who, along with his Democratic colleague Evan Bayh, recommended Hamilton in the first place.

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Today’s edition of the State Register lists three meetings that did not comply with the public notice requirements of West Virginia’s open meetings law.

The agencies involved were the Cabell-Huntington Board of Health, the DHHR Drug Utilization Review Board and the Board of Psychologists.

As we’ve reminded folks before, the West Virginia Open Governmental Proceedings Act requires agencies to send meeting notices to the Secretary of State in time for notices to appear in the State Register five days prior to a scheduled meeting. Every week, we list the agencies that didn’t comply, thanks to the Secretary of State’s office, which kindly marks those agencies with an asterisk in the list of meetings published each Friday in the Register.

Happy Thursday. If you haven’t seen these gems, you might want to take a look:

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has been criticized by some of its own members, and some members have quit, over the chambers old-fashioned views on climate change.  Chamber Director Thomas J. Donohue is unfazed, by a lot of things, apparently, in this New York Times profile.

Workplace e-mail issues? Companies are facing tougher tests in the nation’s courts when they try to monitor employees’ personal accounts. It seems there is a growing presumption of privacy, the Wall Street Journal reports.

PCBs were banned three decades ago, but they still persist in the food chain, and a new study at the University of Albany in New York suggests that PCBs could be linked to high blood pressure, says Science News.

All students would be required to speak two languages to graduate, Fairfax County, Va., schools decided in 2006. They began teaching foreign language to elementary students. But with the economic downturn, foreign language for little kids may now be considered a frill, according to The Washington Post.

More than 300,000 West Virginians lived in poverty in 2008, according to new data from the Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates released by the U.S. Census Bureau yesterday.

That translates into 17.4 percent of all residents (or slightly more than one in six).

For children, the numbers are even worse: 90,000 (23.9 percent) under the age of 18, and 32,000 (31.1 percent) of children under the age of five lived in poverty. (I’ve rounded the estimates but not the percentages.)

Worse still, all of those numbers are creeping up from 2007, after a slight improvement from 2006.

Nationally, only Louisiana (17.6) and Mississippi (20.8) had higher percentages of their population living below the poverty line. And at $37,528, West Virginia had the lowest median household income in the United States.

The data can also be broken down by county and school district. Staggeringly, an estimated 46.3 percent of people under the age of 18 in McDowell County lived in poverty. This is almost two times higher than Kanawha County (23.5), three times higher than Monongalia County (15.2) and four times Jefferson County (11.1, the lowest percentage of all 55 counties).

Supreme Court Justice Margaret Workman today issued her dissent to the court’s decision last week to block release of e-mails sent by former Justice Spike Maynard to Massey Energy President Don Blankenship.

The dissent is posted here and the majority opinion in this 4-1 case is here.

Workman’s main point is spelled out pretty clear this way:

In the case at hand, a Justice sitting on the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals communicated by e-mail on a somewhat regular basis with a friend who was the Chairman and CEO of a party litigant with a case pending before the Court. With one exception, the literal content of those e-mails did not contain information relating to the conduct of public business.

The fact that those e-mails had been sent, however, did contain relevant information.

First and foremost, it discloses the existence of a personal relationship between a sitting Justice and a CEO of a party litigant. In addition, when the AP made its first FOIA request, a motion filed by the Plaintiffs in Caperton  seeking Justice Maynard’s recusal from that case was pending, the basis of which was his personal relationship with Mr. Blankenship.

The fact that the e-mails were sent, albeit on issues unrelated to matters pending before this court, is clearly relevant to the relationship between Justice Maynard and Mr. Blankenship.

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Plea hearings have been scheduled for three people implicated in a state workforce training grant scandal.

Comar CEO Al Hendershot, former Workforce West Virginia administrator Mary Jane Bowling and West Virginia State University Extension agent Christine Gardner are set to appear in federal court Dec. 8 at 9:30 a.m.

Hendershot, Bowling and Gardner are expected to plead guilty to charges that they misused federal grant money administered by Workforce West Virginia, according to previous court filings.
U.S. District Judge John T. Copenhaver has been assigned the case.

A fourth person involved in the scandal, former Comar Chief Technical Officer Martin Bowling, already has pleaded guilty and is scheduled to be sentenced on Dec. 3.

You can find the Gazette’s ongoing investigation of Workforce West Virginia here.  
 

The people, in delegating authority, do not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for them to know and what is not good for them to know.

– W.Va. Freedom of Information Act

Well, that’s the way it is supposed to work, anyway.  Last week’s ruling by the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals in The Associated Press quest to get a look at former Justice Spike Maynard’s e-mail messages to Massey Energy President Don Blankenship might change that pretty significantly.

The 4-1 decision — with a majority opinion written by Justice Robin Davis — is one of the few cases in the history of West Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act that seems likely to reduce the information available to the public.

It’s hard to say what exactly what the long-term impact will be, but the reasoning employed by Davis could give secretive or mischievous West Virginia government officials some language to try to lean on if they want to withhold their appointment calendars, job-seeking letters or e-mails where they are campaigning on public time, and potentially a wide variety of correspondence if the person they are corresponding with happens to be an old friend.

“It’s mild to say that we are dismayed by the decision, which goes against the spirit and intent of the law,” said Franklin G. Crabtree, executive director of the West Virginia American Civil Liberties Union, which joined the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press in filing a friend-of-the-court brief in the case. “It’s our understanding that state FOIA was written to encourage a transparent government. This decision doesn’t do that.”

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A new Government Accountability Office report made public today recommends that the U.S. Department of Labor improve the way it counts injuries and illnesses among the nation’s workers.

Among other things, the GAO investigators reported that a third of occupational health professionals they surveyed said they had been pressured by employers to provide insufficient treatment to workers in order to hide or downplay injuries or illnesses.  The GAO also reported that two-thirds of those health professionals observed worker fear for reporting injuries, and more than half said they were pressured to downplay an injury so it would have have to be reported on official logs.

The report is available here, with a summary here and highlights here.

In short, GAO investigators found that efforts by the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration to confirm injury and illness reports filed by employers and workers are not adequate. Some of the reasons:

– OSHA overlooks information from workers about injuries and illnesses because it does not routinely interview them as part of its records audits.

– OSHA also does not review the accuracy of injury and illness records for worksites in eight high hazard industries because it has not updated the industry codes used to identify these industries since 2002.

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Today’s edition of the State Register lists three meetings that don’t comply with the public notice requirement of West Virginia’s open meetings law.

The first offender is Pierpont Community & Technical College, which filed notice of the educational retreat for its board late.

The second is the West Virginia Prosecuting Attorneys Institute, which also missed the deadline for filing notice of its Fall Executive Council Meeting on Nov. 16.

The other is the WVU Institute of Technology, which filed late notice for the meeting of the WVU Tech Institutional Board of Visitors.

As we’ve reminded folks before, the West Virginia Open Governmental Proceedings Act requires agencies to send meeting notices to the Secretary of State in time for notices to appear in the State Register five days prior to a scheduled meeting. Every week, we list the agencies that didn’t comply, thanks to the Secretary of State’s office, which kindly marks those agencies with an asterisk in the list of meetings published each Friday in the Register.

Once again, here is a snapshot of some of the stories and reporting that caught our eye this week. To make up for last week’s hiatus, we’re presenting a slightly expanded list:

Last week’s shootings have focused national attention on Fort Hood, but the area around Killeen, the Texas town where the military facility is based, had already seen a spike in violence and crime, including domestic abuse, since the beginning of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the New York Times reported.

In a study published on Veterans Day, two Harvard medical professors concluded that 2,266 veterans died in 2008 because they didn’t have health insurance, which is more than 14 times the number of active American troops killed last year in Afghanistan, the Agence France-Presse noted.

As many as 21 streams in West Virginia could be vulnerable to the golden algae that caused a massive fish kills in Texas and Dunkard Creek, according to the journal Environmental Science and Technology. U.S. EPA scientists say many other rivers and streams in neighboring states could also be at risk, the study states.

Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down, takes an in-depth look at the slippery slope being navigated by law enforcement as it goes after online sexual predators in the December issue of Vanity Fair.

Elizabeth Kolbert’s review of “SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance” in The New Yorker says authors Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner ignore “whole libraries’ worth of data on global warming” and that “just about everything they have to say on the topic is, factually speaking, wrong.”