Government Secrecy: Another Kind

Usually when we talk about government secrecy, the topic is something like the US war crimes exposed by Bradley Manning and Wikileaks, the NSA's illegal surveillance programs exposed by Edward Snowden, etc.

It just occurred to me that there's another form of unjustifiable government secrecy. Here's an instance of someone being sanctioned for violating it:

Usually, the worst an ill-advised Facebook post can do is embarrass you (assuming you haven't committed a crime). But recent prep school grad Dana Snay cost her father $80,000 when she made the mistake of talking about her dad's wrongful termination settlement with Gulliver Preparatory School, the Miami Herald reports.

Patrick Snay, 69, had sued the school for age discrimination and won $10,000 in back wages plus an $80,000 settlement. But there was one little condition: Snay had to keep the deal secret.

Now, I'm not a lawyer and I could be wrong, but if I'm not mistaken, civil "settlements" work like this:

• Party A sues Party B. The suit is filed with, and litigated in, a government court.
• Party B proposes to Party A that the suit can be settled without going all the way through the trial process. Party A agrees to Party B's settlement offer, or they negotiate until they do reach agreement.
• The government court approves or rejects the settlement.

I don't see how a secrecy requirement vis a vis such a settlement could be legitimate. The taxpayers paid for the infrastructure in which the proceedings took place. The taxpayers paid the judge's salary. How can the taxpayers not have a right to know anything and everything about the litigation -- including settlement terms?

Looks Like We May Be About to Find Out ...

... whether Barack Obama is as good at this president stuff as George W. Bush was.

In 2008, Georgia's Mikheil Saakashvili ordered his troops to invade South Ossetia, where they promptly got their asses handed to them by the Russians. It was a pretty tense time, but Bush handled it masterfully, having his various minions make conflicting statements that pretty much added up to nothing. Even with his own party's senile, crabby old Uncle John and his  assistant (the one who could see Russia from her house) trying to raise the war flag as an election issue, he managed to defuse things and avoid sub-optimum outcomes like, oh, global nuclear holocaust and stuff.

So: Does Obama have the right stuff -- the political/diplomatic chops to let himself be walked back off the ledge he's ever so gingerly been tip-toeing out onto (with McCain and Palin once again behind him, pushing for all they're worth)?

I guess we'll see. Might want to practice the ol' "duck and cover" routine just in case.

They Must Have Taken a Wrong Turn at Albuquerque ...

... because Seattle, Washington's city council is quite obviously very, very lost.

On Thursday, the council voted to "regulate the number of drivers that companies like UberX, SideCar and Lyft have active on their systems at any given time."

But Uber, SideCar and Lyft aren't located in Seattle, Washington. They're all located in San Francisco, California.

It's one thing for the city council to try to regulate the number of drivers offering rides in Seattle by regulating those drivers. That's a stump-stupid idea, but at least they can make a plausible (to supporters of political government, anyway) argument that they have the power/jurisdiction to do that.

The power to regulate what a company two states away may or may not display on its web site or communicate to its users/members in Seattle ("Fare waiting at 1100 Olive Way")? Um, no. Not a chance.

Hopefully some local Seattle companies will weigh in with common sense here and prevail upon the council to re-think (actually, think for the first time about) this. If this idiocy is allowed to proceed, it won't be long before some city council in Utah tries to tell I Can Has Cheezburger that it can only serve up 100 LOLCats an hour there.