What George Bush and Rick Perry don't want you to know

http://www.austinchronicle.com/issues/dispatch/2003-11-07/pols_feature.html

Closing Open Records

One of the many issues on which President George W. Bush and Gov. Rick Perry see eye to eye is open records. Both men seem to have a gut instinct against public disclosure of the operations of government. And if they succeed in their ongoing attempts to restrict access to public records in Texas, they will have undermined a law that, 30 years after its enactment, advocates often describe as one of the best open records laws in the U.S.

The last time Bush and Perry hooked up in an attempt to defeat the Texas Public Information Act was two years ago, when the new governor tried to help the new president keep his state papers out of the hands of journalists and scholars. Now the two leaders are at it again, threatening to create an important exception to disclosure of the same Bush records and thereby restricting the public's right to know.

George W. Bush suffered few setbacks during his time as a public official in Texas, but the defeat of his original plans for his state papers was total. During the chaotic period following the disputed 2000 presidential election, Bush's Capitol staff loaded up a couple of trucks and carted his administration's archives to his father's Presidential Library, and nominally federal jurisdiction, on the campus of Texas A&M. The younger Bush may or may not have had legal authority to attempt the transfer, but the consensus view of the library officials is that he did not. In particular, state archivists began to howl, politely but firmly insisting that the papers are state property and needed to be cataloged before they went anywhere (see W's Paper Chase, Sept. 28, 2001).

As America circles the drain ...

Just another thing to be pissed about as a citizen of Texas!