Eric O’Keefe

It is “open season on Michigan’s public officials,” writes the Detroit Free Press in an editorial titled “Recall Madness.”

The editorial denounces a federal court decision upholding the First Amendment rights of petitioners. The Free Press agrees with the court “that circulating recall petitions constitutes core political speech.”

But it calls on the state to appeal the decision, and calls for constitutional reform to restrict the recall process “that is already too easy.”

Let’s see — there has not been a recall vote on a Michigan legislator since 1983, the last time the legislature passed a tax hike, according o a comprehensive survey in Ballotpedia.

So what is the panic about? Could it be that the Free Press fears a voter revolt over the massive tax hikes Speaker Dillon and Governor Granholm pushed through, which triggered this recall?

The Free Press performance throughout the recall campaign has been disgraceful. Dillon and local political boss Miles Handy — who was defeated for re-election earlier this month — used paid street blockers to harass petitioners; the local police participated in the harassment; the Dillon agents made slanderous attacks on taxpayers and hired lawyers to make spurious arguments in court. The Free Press did nothing to come to the defense of citizens being abused by powerful government officials and their hired agents.

And now they panic because federal judge Robert Holmes Bell has ruled that the First Amendment applies to more than just the hired hands at the Free Press. It also applies to citizens who question the actions of politicians.

The Free Press is good at covering the Tigers and Red Wings. It should stick to covering sports, the weather, and the continuing decline of Michigan’s over-taxed economy.

Government 2.0 earns a fine column by Gordon Crovitz in the Wall Street Journal. The authors of Wikinomics are looking at government and how collaboration can improve the operation of that last great bastion of top-down mismanagement. Crovitz hopes that “Web 2.0 can make government more effective by tapping information among officials and citizens, perhaps even finding a new consensus on where the wisdom of government begins and ends.”

Ballotpedia is a fine example of how citizens can collaborate to make government and governing more accessible.