Holly Green, who not too many years ago served as staff to the Honolulu Community-Media Council, pleaded guilty to 47 felony counts of theft and forgery in state court this week, the Star-Bulletin reports. Green was charged with stealing more than $329,000 from former Advertiser publisher Thurston Twigg-Smith. The brief non-bylined story doesn’t mention Green’s former association with the HCMC.

I did manage to watch or listen to most of yesterday’s presidential debate. My overall impression was that John McCain offered up many convincing reasons why he should not be elected because the issues he cited are way beyond Sarah Palin’s experience or knowledge or abilities to cope with.

If you still doubt, check out this mind-numbing bit of Palin wisdom (and don’t miss the commentary that follows). Or try this summary from the Alaska Daily News.

As one conservative pundit wrote this week in the National Review: “If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself.”

A reader who was blocked from leaving a comment yesterday later emailed me:

“Your Dad is the MAN!

Although he has never been an ideologue, my Dad, he of the Greatest Generation and a West Point grad to boot, pretty much always voted Republican (and may do so again). But imagine how stunning it was to have been told in my middle age that, had my lottery number come up at the end of the American War in Viet Nam, he would have sent me to Canada! And to hear him rip Robert McNamara for his too-little-too-late mea culpa about the war. And for him to deride W as the worst president in his lifetime and a scourge to his grandchildren’s grandchildren!

Age brings clarity or, at the very least, a disinclination in the shortness of time to hold back the wisdom born of a long life well-lived.”

Let’s see…I’ve been watching recent Sunshine Law developments elsewhere that may have implications for us here.

• In Florida, a lawsuit alleges that a number of city officials violated that state’s law by sending emails about official business from their personal computers and failing to keep copies for the public record.

Besides setting the trial date, Judge Robert Bennett again ordered two City Council members to pay for experts to retrieve e-mails from their personal computers. Mayor Ed Martin and John Simmonds had argued that they should not have to pay potentially thousands of dollars for the computer work.

• In Colorado, e-mails obtained by a local newspaper show the Town Board in Oak Creek may have violated an open meeting law by using e-mail for discussions of police-community relations.

• Reporters and photographers at the Knoxville News Sentinel who testified in a sunshine law suit filed against the Knox County Commission last year could have waived their privilege under the Tennessee Shield Law.

• In Fairhope, Alabama, the City Council violated the Sunshine Law by taking action during a closed executive session on an agreement to settle a dispute with a local business. It’s interesting to see that the Alabama statute limits discussion in executive session far more than Hawaii’s law.

The Alabama Open Meetings Law permits executive sessions to be held by governmental bodies such as city councils for certain purposes including discussions with their attorneys regarding the “legal ramifications of and legal options for pending litigation, controversies not yet being litigated but imminently likely to be litigated if the governmental body pursues a proposed course of action.”

However, the statute also sets out explicitly that no “deliberation” by a council is to occur in an executive session.

“Notwithstanding the foregoing, if any deliberation begins among the members of the governmental body regarding what action to take relating to pending or threatened litigation based upon the advice of counsel, the executive session shall be concluded and the deliberation shall be conducted in the open portion of the meeting or the deliberation shall cease,” the Open Meetings Law reads.

Bailey said that once such deliberation starts, a council member must leave the meeting or face the penalty provisions of the statute, which include civil fines of no more than $1,000 per violation or one-half of that month’s salary for service on that governmental body, whichever is less.

• The Fayetteville Observer reports on closed door meetings that have been held to discuss “key policy issues affecting taxpaers, such as transit, safe drinking water and downtown parking decks.” The meetings between members of the Fayetteville city council and Cumberland County commissioners are legal under North Carolina law because they carefully involve less than a quorum of the public bodies.

Amanda Martin, a lawyer for the N.C. Press Association, said the closed-doors meetings are legal because neither board has a quorum present. But that doesn’t make the practice right, she said.

“I think it’s a horrible public policy,” she said Tuesday. “The Open Meetings Law is in place to put transparency in our government operations. And the public has a legitimate interest in knowing how public officials are conducting public business.”

Martin said the practice was rarely heard of 10 years ago.

“I think it is not uncommon now to try to break into groups and fly under the radar,” she said.

Dale Harrison, assistant director of the Sunshine Center at Elon University, called the practice a “classic circumvention of the spirit of the sunshine law.” He said the intent of the law is that deliberation be done openly, even in these smaller meetings.

I have to apologize for technical problems that apparently prevented anyone from leaving comments yesterday, perhaps for a couple of days. Even when I signed on using my administrator’s access, it was no go. It now looks like HostRocket has fixed the problem overnight and it’s now good to go.