It’s 7:15 a.m., 54° and going to 64°. Details are here.
Trouble at the Ethics Commission: When the commission voted 5-0 to absolve Progress For All, the group behind the “Run, Ed, Run” campaign, of campaign finance violations, it overruled an opinion issued earlier by its own director. From the Bay Citizen’s report:
Last week, St. Croix issued a judgment that Progress For All should be deemed an independent committee “primarily formed” to back a candidate, because its “Run, Ed, Run” campaign’s activities made a material impact on the mayor’s race — even if Lee served as its unwitting candidate. Because independent expenditure committees are not allowed to coordinate their campaign activities with an official candidate’s campaign, St. Croix opined that participants in the “Run, Ed, Run” effort should be retroactively barred from working on Lee’s official campaign, which began Monday with the mayor’s formal announcement that he would seek re-election.
John St. Croix was apparently overruled by his own committee — not the only time the Ethics Commission has shied away from actually enforcing ethics, writes the Bay Citizen:
In March, the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force, a citizen panel, found that the Ethics Commission had found 27 instances of serious violations of the city’s open-records law since it was established in 1994. But the commission has not meted punishment in a single instance.
That may change in the upcoming election: A ballot measure to toughen up the commission is in the works.
Other than that? The economy still ain’t great, and UK Prime Minister David Cameron is calling on America for its “gang expertise” with regards to the London riots. Who knew we were experts?