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Former Del. Phil Hamilton resigned after being defeated for re-election, apparently cutting short a state ethics investigation into his securing a job at an Old Dominion University teaching center at the same time he was securing state funding for it as one of the General Assembly's senior budget negotiators. Sunday, we'll urge the assembly to change the state ethics law that appears to limit investigations to sitting lawmakers, and we'll ask legislators to investigate ODU's role in the scandal. Lawmakers need to find some route to determine all the facts behind events as they unrolled so the assembly can act to avoid a repeat. And they need to make their findings public, to bolster its frayed confidence in the integrity of their elected leaders.

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy is a strong defender of First Amendment rights when he sits on the court; not so much, perhaps, when he's out from behind the bench.

The New York Times reports that the student newspaper at a private school in Manhattan was unable to publish a timely account of a talk Kennedy gave to high school students in October "due to numerous publication constraints." The constraints proved to be a request by Kennedy's office to approve the story before it ran to make sure that quotes attributed to him were accurate.

That's not real-world journalism in a society with a free press. Yes, journalists want their stories to be accurate. Fact-checking is a routine part of reporting and editing. But handing a story over to a source for editing is a constraint on journalists' ability to report accurately -- not what someone wished he had said, or meant to say, but actually said.

The justice declined an interview, so it's not clear whether he knew of the request by his office -- which, by the way, returned the story, with quotations "tidied up," for later publication.

Eight of Virginia's part-time legislators also work for one or other of its colleges and universities, setting up the potential for conflicts of interests: Lawmakers could try to pad their incomes in exchange for promises to use their influence to get legislative favors. Monday's news story examining these relationships revealed no smoking gun, but it did spotlight a loaded one: Disclosure provisions of the state's conflict of interest law specifically exclude salary or wages paid by state or local government. In an editorial to run later in the week, we'll urge the General Assembly to close that loophole.

When Congress approved the federal stimulus package, the Obama administration promised Americans they would be able to monitor how it spent the $787 billion it contained.  The new era of transparency never really took off as the recovery.gov Web site was, honestly, pathetic.

On Monday, the administration rebooted the site with a new interface and better access to information.  I haven't had time to play with it too deeply, but it certainly appears to be an improvement, though perhaps not as much as I'd hoped. The interactive map, for example, is clunky beyond words. What have they got against embedding data in a google map?

Check it out and see where your children's and grandchildren's taxes are going.

A shady deal brought to light

The circumstances surrounding Del. Phil Hamilton’s shady deal should be aired in public.

House Speaker William J. Howell is right to call for an ethics panel to investigate the egregious incident of a delegate who appropriated $500,000 a year to Old Dominion University in exchange for a $40,000 part-time job.

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We wrote a while back about the Public Access to Court Electronic Records system. PACER, as the name says, provides digital access to court records. The problem with the system is that it charges exorbitant fees for access to public records. For 8 cents a page, and even sometimes charges just to search, it sports an archaic interface that looks like it came straight out of the pre-Internet era.

Some clever programmers with Princeton University have developed a cooperative way around the federal court system's charges. Their Firefox plugin, called RECAP, collects the court documents in one independent system. Every time someone with RECAP downloads a document, it is added to the database and provided free to anyone else who search for it.  So, someone has to pay once, but then the documents are available to everyone.

It will take time for the database to grow, but as more lawyers, journalists and researchers access PACER with RECAP installed, the database will grow. Until the courts figure out that public documents should be easily and affordably accessible, this will be a welcome addition to the Firefox plugin library.

The Obama administration promised that the federal stimulus program would be completely transparent. Americans would be able to monitor how every dollar is spent through a new Web site.  The administration contracted with the company Smartronix to build the site for $18 million.

That all sounds fine.

Then some nosey reporters started asking to see a copy of the contract under the Freedom of Information Act. Maybe, they thought, the public ought to know what it's getting for that much money.

The administration finally released the contract, and redacted it into uselessness. (Check out all of the documents in their full, blackened glory.)

We're writing an editorial for Monday noting both the irony of this situation and the dismaying attempt to conceal information from the public. Certainly contracts released to the public must be reviewed to protect sensitive, proprietary data, but in this case, the black marker went too far.

Elisha Strom is no model citizen. The Bedford County resident has ties to white supremacist groups. She even made the Southern Poverty Law Center's 2003 "40 to watch" list as "The Real Feminazi."

Nevertheless, she has the same right to free speech as anyone else, and we can't excuse police who arrested her because of her blog.  On the blog, I HeArTE JADE, she posted photos, names and home addresses of members of the Jefferson Area Drug Enforcement Task Force.

Her actions did not, as far as we can tell, obstruct justice or interfere with ongoing police investigations. If they had, she no doubt would have been arrested on such charges. Instead, she faces one felony charge for identifying a police officer with the intent to harass even though all of the information posted was publicly obtained.

We are writing an editorial for Thursday in which we will urge lawmakers to revisit this law when they convene next year. Its vague restrictions on speech, we suspect, would not pass constitutional muster if challenged, and it is ripe for abuse. It only serves to stifle speech critical of law enforcement, and the government must be open to such criticism. That's one of the core protections of the First Amendment.