Public records

Barack Obama entered office promising the most transparent administration in our history. In reality, his White House set records for stonewalling Freedom of Information requests.

A 2016 review by The Associated Press found that federal agencies under Mr. Obama turned down requests for government documents an incredible 77 percent of the time, up from 65 percent in 2009.

“The review covered 100 federal agencies in 2015,” the Washington Examiner reported. “Agencies that struggled with FOIA requests included the FBI, which couldn’t find responsive records 39 percent of the time. The Environmental Protection Agency’s regional office in New York and New Jersey failed 58 percent of the time, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection failed to fulfill about one third of all requests.”

Incoming President Donald Trump could go a long way toward fending off critics if he took the opposite approach.

To Mr. Obama’s credit, he did sign the FOIA Improvement Act last year, which puts into law the presumption that government documents are public information unless there is some compelling reason otherwise. The law gives media organizations more leverage in court.

But it should rarely come to that. The president must establish a culture of transparency and openness that permeates down to recalcitrant bureaucrats who too often prefer to stonewall rather than to cooperate.

Mr. Trump has a combative relationship with the press and, unlike previous candidates, has famously refused to release his tax returns. But he was elected on a promise of “draining the swamp” and holding Washington accountable. Ensuring that his administration greatly improves on his predecessor’s dismal record when it comes to public access to government records would be an easy place to start.

The Wednesday ReviewJournal article “Removal of McCarran statue sought,” fails to take into account the prevailing view of former Sen. Pat McCarran’s generation. Contemporary critics are quick to condemn earlier generations and are often very select in their criticism.

In President Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address, he said he did not want to free the slaves and he had no legal authority to free them. Go ahead check it out. It is in there. Lincoln also represented a slave owner who went to court seeking the return of a slave. Are they going to dismantle the Lincoln legacy?

I seem to recall a Democratic president locking up Americans of Japanese descent not long ago. I believe his name was Franklin Roosevelt.

My older brother and I married outside our religion. I married in the 1960s and my folks had absolutely no objections. My brother married in the 1950’s and my grandfather refused to go to his wedding. We are both still happily married today.

Sen. McCarran will have a lot of company — and that will include a multitude of presidents, many of them Democrats. We can spend several years moving all the statues out of the Capitol. And we might have to tear down a few memorials while we are at it.

The school system in this state is miserably failing our students and we now learn from ReviewJournal reporter Amelia Pak-Harvey (“CCSD sets its lobby agenda,” Monday) that the Clark County School District will be sending taxpayer-funded lobbyists to Carson City to push for more money by urging lawmakers to impose higher property taxes. How arrogant is that?

In 2005, the politicians in Carson City decided to put a cap on how much the state could increase the property tax. Now, this group of bandits wants the cap removed so they can grab more from our wallets..

Having worked for more than 20 years investigating fraud and waste at the federal level, I never found one bureaucrat who was ever satisfied with the amount of money they seized from taxpayers. The always whined that they needed more money in their budget.

In the case of Nevada’s educational system, everyone knows that it is a failed bureaucracy. But those who are part of it believe the only way to correct the broken system is to get more money. In the private sector, a company that fails either goes out of business or totally revamps itself. When a government program fails, the answer is to ask for more money in the hope it will fix itself.

We citizens of Nevada need to do what the property owners in

There is an old and true statement, something like, “If you keep doing the same thing, you will continue to get the same results.” In my 17 years in Las Vegas, I have concluded that the saying applies to the Clark County education system.

Everybody always says they want strong public schools, but all I see are the teacher unions and the education bureaucracy focusing on their “kingdoms” as opposed to educating the children. The school system keeps delivering the same poor results, hurting many children by giving them a poor start in life. Shameful.

The legislative session in 2015 provided hope that there would actually be a change in direction. Lawmakers passed significant education reforms. Of course, the education bureaucracy is aggressively fighting them in order to stop any change.

And again, Victor Joecks in his Jan. 8 Review-Journal column shows — as have many studies in the past — that pre-K education is a waste of valuable education money and our tax dollars. The best that can be said for pre-K is that it is a babysitting service. Another example of the teacher unions and the education bureaucracy at work.