Here's a highlight reel just for this blog in 2007. Note that most of the highlights for our work beginning in August shift to our sister sites, Oakland Politics and Outside Lansing.

2007 Highlights

January 2007 – Differential responses by two cities (Grand Rapids and Lansing) to FOIA relating to Proposal 2 (MCRI) enforcement uncovers e-mail from affirmative action officer encouraging her fellow public employees to send form letters of protest to County Commission, among a variety of other defiant actions.
http://chetlyzarko.com/b2evolution/index.php?p=539&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1

February 2007 – First Documented Violation of Proposal 2 reported through information obtained through combination of inside source and FOIA.
http://chetlyzarko.com/b2evolution/index.php?p=586&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1

March 2007 –
Testified at Michigan Civil Rights Commission “hearing” announcing new report about Proposal 2 compliance, caught Commission in contradiction with political claims from 2006 and in way it treated another citizen at the hearing. Quoted extensively in Lansing’s insider political journal MIRS, and hit AP wire with quote on Commission “flip-flop”.
http://chetlyzarko.com/b2evolution/index.php?p=596&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1 &
http://chetlyzarko.com/b2evolution/index.php?p=595&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1
Interviewed Southern Poverty Law Center’s Heidi Beirich regarding SPLC’s “hate group” categorization of the student group “Young Americans for Freedom” at Michigan State University. Beirich terminated the phone interview after realizing she had contradicted herself and later falsely accused me of leaving threatening phone messages which had coincidentally been left with SPLC at that time (we challenged SPLC to publish or prosecute, and offered our cooperation with any federal investigation).
The multi-report thread:
http://chetlyzarko.com/b2evolution/index.php?s=beirich

April 2007 – Exclusive Statistical Analysis showing Proposal 2 impact on Governor’s race. http://chetlyzarko.com/b2evolution/index.php?p=662&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1
Holding PBS accountable for biased TV. http://chetlyzarko.com/b2evolution/index.php?p=656&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1
Quoted by AP on McCain Speech. http://chetlyzarko.com/b2evolution/index.php?p=652&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1

May 2007 – Michigan Education Association strikes pre-emptively in “reverse FOIA” to stop PP & M FOIA request.
Detroit News editorializes on issue in favor of disclosure and against MEA.
http://chetlyzarko.com/b2evolution/index.php?p=697&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1
The complete and long thread where PP & M publishes e-mail obtained before the suit (still pending as of December 2007, National Right to Work Foundation has joined as representation of PP & M) demonstrating union leaders misused teaching time and e-mail accounts for political activity.
http://chetlyzarko.com/b2evolution/index.php?cat=102

June 2007
Most of original work focuses on defending against the Howell MEA “reverse FOIA” lawsuit, and privately helping attorneys brief the case.

July 2007
Published FOIA results and original statistical analysis of all 40,000 U-Michigan employees salaries, and how salaries have grown over past 6 years despite claims of budget crunch. Work received considerable behind-the-scenes praise, and a few subtle public uses.
http://chetlyzarko.com/b2evolution/index.php?p=733&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1
MSU analysis:
http://chetlyzarko.com/b2evolution/index.php?p=730&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1

August 2007
City of St. Louis caught in its own words in violation of 14th Amendment.
http://chetlyzarko.com/b2evolution/index.php?p=756&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1

Zarko Research enjoyed 2007.

It was a year in which the Michigan Education Association (MEA) sued (May 8) to stop us from using FOIA to uncover misuse of taxpayer-funded resources by union leaders in the Howell Public School system during a collective-bargaining battle. Nothing wrong with aggressive bargaining - just don't use public resources to tip the hand in your favor. The Detroit News opined in our favor here.

Since that litigation began, Zarko Research has properly joined the matter. The story related to the Howell e-mail FOIA lawsuit spawned this whole category here, and has already resulted in a limited production of e-mails.

In July, this blog again set trends in publishing the salary databases, with serious statistical analysis of employee growth rates and salary increases, of the University of Michigan and Michigan State University. The data debunked the notion that higher-education tuition increases were a result of lack of legislative appropriate or "cuts" by the legislature. The increases are explained by grotesque growth rates in bureaucracy and administration at all universities - where competition is either perverse or non-existent. Here is The U-Michigan analysis and the
MSU analysis.

Finally, in August and September, Zarko Research spawned new blogs, with the idea of increasing the penetration and prominence of our publishing business to more niches, locally and statewide. This blog remains intended for the issues we've focused on in the past, and for a "hodgepodge" of other miscellaneous issues not easily fit into the boxes of "OutsideLansing.com" and "OaklandPolitics.com".

OutsideLansing has broke significant original news, including the filing of a campaign finance complaint against billionaire Jon Stryker in November, and FOIA'd e-mail from Central Michigan University on the Dennis Lennox case cited by Dawson Bell in the Detroit Free Press just this month. OaklandPolitics tapped into the presidential election news cycle, breaking the story of Paul Garfield's termination from the Ron Paul campaign, covering Duncan Hunter's speech here in Pontiac with original video, and covering a number of other issues.

And the force is with both blogs as the statewide columnist Jack Lessenberry has equated Zarko Research to "Zark-Vader".

Of course, there are a thousand little threads leftover I haven't mentioned, and several of them will wind their way into 2008, but look forward to more of the same and some curveballs. Full speed ahead.

Dawson Bell of the Detroit Free Press has picked up on our FOIA request & five part series here in this piece. Here's a link to OutsideLansing.com where we take note of Dawson's piece, and part 3 of our series citing the political diversity issue.

Over at my sister site Equality Talk, I detail the story of yesterday's submission of signatures in Oklahoma for the Oklahoma Civil Rights Initiative (OkCRI). I'll let that site do the work, but wanted to alert my readers here to the important national story. Not only is Oklahoma abuzz with the story of being the first of the 5 states in 2008 turn in signatures, but it is abuzz with a long-running signature-gathering and petition-rights suppression story with the Attorney General seeking to crush Paul Jacob and others for a signature-drive in 2005 (documented in ZR's previous entry here), arguing that they should be jailed for 10 years for using what he defines as out-of-state circulators.

For those of you who follow my miscellaneous national and topical interests like signature-gathering, and Ward Connerly's SuperTuesday, you'll also know that I follow First Amendment questions of whatever type. The Paul Jacob story hits all three. Connerly is helping a group in Oklahoma collect signatures as I write. Signature-gathering difficulties there are driven largely by politics - and although the people of Oklahoma are quite rational, their Attorney General and special interests seem to have figured out that out and realize they must hamstring the people.

Enter Paul Jacob. Like him or hate him and his efforts, he helped a group in 2005 in Oklahoma collect signatures for a version of TABOR (taxpayer rights initiative). Taxpayer initiatives are serious challenges to government and special interests because when taxpayers can say no and turn the spigot off - special interests and the "governmental class" (the army of people working for the government get to vote, and self-lobby, too) get mad. Mad enough to put people who threaten them in jail.

So, when Democrat Attorney General Drew Edmonson told a grand jury to indict Jacob earlier this year, they jumped. Grand juries would indict cinder block if told to, and even under the best circumstances, a grand jury indictment is under a standard of evidence that there is simply enough evidence to warrant a trial - not that anyone is guilty. Regardless, the indictment was for "conspiracy" to "defraud the state", a stretch of that charge based on the underlying crime of ... coordinating signature-gatherers who did not intend to live in Oklahoma forever. That is, using "out-of-state" signature gatherers invalidates a signature in Oklahoma (nowhere in the Oklahoma code however, could I find a law criminalizing out-of-state gathering, merely the AG interpretation that residency means someone must intend to live in Oklahoma forever). From the non-crime of not knowing exactly where one might live in a few years, and two years following the Oklahoma state court's "referee" refusal to place TABOR on the 2006 ballot, the AG indicted 3 petition drive leaders (with no indictments for any criminal circulator below them, another hard piece of logic to follow). Now clearly this all contrived to make all signature-gathering of any type more difficult, and to plant the fear of criminal prosecution in the hearts of petition-drive leaders.

But the AG made a technical mistake in his grand jury indictment, and misused the multi-county nature of that body, so he had to drop the charges. Yesterday, he reissued the charges under his own office's direct power of prosecution, and is going full-steam ahead.

Whether you are liberal or conservative, or libertarian (I guess if you're authoritarian, you should support the AG), you should take note of this case. It's about control and power. It's about suppressing speech and petitioning. Sure, reasonable rules can invalidate bad or petitions created in error - and although there is probably no compelling interest in state residency requirements even if there were, this case is one of ambiguity in law being used as a blunt hammer to quash dissidents. Even if you are an opponent of Jacob's views, to remain silent when his speech and petition rights are subverted is to invite the same to happen to you when you disagree with the establishment.

In all, this is probably the most important First Amendment case, and clearly the most important petitioning case to arise from the year 2007. Follow it closely. Prevent it from happening in your state. Blog it if you can. Write a letter to the editor if its relevant. And be careful when you travel through Oklahoma.

For those of you following the SuperTuesday of Equality by Ward Connerly, you'll note many of the opponents in the new five states suggest that there is no preference anywhere in their state governments, and hence the CRI's are "unnecessary" (of course, that begs the question, why oppose them).

In Arizona, at least 30-some programs do exist, in the report by Clint Bolick.

Appropriately, the question has been raised whether the initiative is a solution in search of a problem. This paper documents more than three dozen such classifications in Arizona government programs at the state, local, and university levels. Given that governmental entities are rarely candid about whether and the extent to which they confer preferences on the basis of race, color, or sex, the fact that three dozen visible programs were easily discovered suggests that the programs identified in this paper may represent only the tip of the Arizona preference iceberg.