Like the pigs that took over "Animal Farm", our state legislature is now trying to protect their swine brethren over at the Port by enacting silly transparency laws that will only cause more darkness and confusion to a system that has been screaming for sunlight and easily followed audit trails. The proposal is to require executive sessions to be tape recorded in order to persuade bureaucrats from breaking the law behind closed doors.

Say what? This is stupid, we can't fix the corruption in state and local government by writing more laws that the lawyers will only sidestep.

Much of this outrage began when the public discovered that Mic Dinsmoore paid himself a hefty employment bonus that common sense tells us should be illegal. The problem is not so much secrecy as it is the fact that it is not illegal to commit such deceitful acts.

You can require taping all you want, you can amend old reforms, you can enact a whole myriad of new reforms, but unless there is punishment for wrongdoing there will be no reform, only the illusion of improvement. I think a better use of the Legislature's time would be to make it illegal to lie during autits.