Congratulations to the people of St. Augustine.

Congratulations to the people of St. Augustine.
Your voices have been heard. Your views have been heeded. A planned 13-day possible Sunshine law violation involving four out of five Commissioners going to Spain is halted. Now only one Commissioner (Errol Jones) is going to Spain. (See below)
Eighteen residents requested records on the Spanish trip and First America Foundation. Shortly thereafter, Commissioners bailed out of their possible Sunshine-violating trip to Spain. Thank you, everyone!
Public outrage halted possible illegality once again, just as it has throughout the history of our Republic. The people, united, will never be defeated.
There is nothing "we, the people," cannot do, working together. Together, we can achieve federal legislation for a St. Augustine National Historical Park and Seashore.
Together, we can achieve government accountability, transparency and openness.
I love this beautiful town, where we live a wonderful life. I'm proud to have lived here for more than a decade (1/5 of my life).
As Sir Winston Spencer Churchill put it best, we "have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat." (May 13, 1940).
While extensively quoting Commissioner Crichlow Friday, calling us “enemies of the city,” Peter Guinta never called me for comment. Why? Peter Guinta never called other concerned citizens whom Crichlow smeared. Why?
There's no excuse for printing hate speech while eschewing any sense of balance or objectivity.
We need good journalism in St. Augustine -- watchdogs, not lapdogs.
When good and decent people speak out, they are smeared with pejoratives. Crichlow sounds like a sorehead, reminiscent of the uninformed burghers in Ibsen’s play, “An Enemy of the People,” who condemne a physician for pointing out public health problems that could hurt a spa town’s tourism.
Our First Amendment, in its majesty, empowers newspapers to cover the government without fear or favor. Our Founders -- and the people -- are watching you.
U.S. District Judge Murray Gurfein, a Nixon appointee serving his first day on the bench, wrote as the trial judge in the Pentagon Papers case that “security of the Nation is not at the ramparts alone. Security also lies in the value of our free institutions. A cantankerous press, an obstinate press, a ubiquitous press must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the even greater values of freedom of expression and the right of the people to know." U.S. v. New York Times Co., 328 F. Supp. 324 (S.D.N.Y. 1974)(Gurfein, J.)
From this day forward, don’t we all deserve a more "cantankerous.... obstinate.... ubiquitous press... [protecting] the right of the people to know" here in the City of St. Augustine, our Nation's Oldest City?
Readers deserve reporters with passion for exposing the truth about government secrecy and wrongdoing.
You can’t sell newspapers if you don’t print the news. You don’t find news by adopting a “kiss up, kick down” attitude as reporter Peter Guinta does, portraying citizen activists as “gadflies” while pompously printing as holy writ any flummery and dupery that government officials want you to hear. Enough. Peter Guinta is opinionated, sometimes loveable, but should be writing a column where opinions would be appropriate.
Will the Record please become a watchdog again and please stop being a lapdog?
So Crichlow thinks citizens concerned about open government, open records and wasteful spending are our city’s “enemies?” As General George S. Patton, Jr. once prayed, before the Battle of the Bulge, “Graciously hearken to us as soldiers who call upon Thee that, armed with Thy power, we may advance from victory to victory, and crush the oppression and wickedness of our enemies and establish Thy justice among men and nations."


Ed Slavin (B.S.F.S., Georgetown University, J.D. Memphis State University School of Law), is CIO of Global Wrap LLC. Ed publishes www.cleanupcityofstaugustine.blogspot.com. Ed won declassification of the world’s largest mercury pollution event (Oak Ridge, Tennessee, nuclear weapons plants, 1983, resulting in the DA’s recommendation for a Pulitzer Prize). He also reported the City of St. Augustine’s solid waste and sewage pollution (2006-2009). Ed worked for Senators Ted Kennedy, Gary Hart and James Sasser during undergraduate school and clerked for U.S. Department of Labor Chief Administrative Law Judge Nahum Litt after law school. Ed has published seven articles on human rights issues in American Bar Association publications (two in the ABA Judges’ Journal). He formerly represented nuclear, environmental and other whistleblowers (including nine judges, among them an EPA judge and a majority of the Administrative Law Judges in the U.S. Department of the Interior, who were harassed, intimidated and threatened with firing for insisting upon judicial independence).
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