Disclosure

All that Rep. Curt Weldon (R., Pa.) asked of the House Wednesday was an overdue dose of candor. Before anyone gets a custom-tailored tax break, Mr. Weldon would make sure the public knows who would benefit, how much it would cost and who sponsored it. If this had been required when the 1986 tax reform bill slithered into law, lawmakers might have been discouraged from stuffing it with $20 billion to $30 billion worth of special breaks for hundreds...

Mike Krancer, who is seeking the Republican nomination to run for the state Supreme Court, is headed for court himself Tuesday in a financial-disclosure challenge similar to the effort to get U.S. Rep. Bob Brady out of the mayoral race. A retired Philadelphia Family Court employee asked Commonwealth Court to remove Krancer's name from the statewide Republican ballot, saying she believes he failed to disclose on the financial statement he filed this month all of his 2006 sources of income.

Inquirer staff writer Dawn Fallik's Aug. 3 article, "Disclosure of toxins stops at the lot: In Pa., house sellers don't have to inform buyers of nearby contamination," struck a responsive chord with us. We are still recovering from our experience of buying what we thought was our "dream home" in July 2002. It should serve as a cautionary tale to anyone considering a home purchase. We had lived on a corner lot in Phoenixville for eight years. A neighborhood can change a lot in that period, and ours certainly did by becoming busier and noisier.

Set in French Guinea, Dakan places two gay young men who have fallen in love in a perplexing predicament. How do they come out to families who have raised denial to an art form? Dakan, directed by Mohamed Camara, takes its two lovers on the same journey followed by many gay-themed western films. It's the obstacles that make all the diffrence. When Manga tells his mother that he is in love with Sory, another senior at his high school, she is at first incredulous.

A bill that would require the first easy-to-understand disclosure of interest paid to small investors and finance charges levied against credit- card customers was approved yesterday by the House Banking Committee. "It is simply wrong to require Grandma Jones to hire a certified public accountant to unravel a bank's creative advertising on savings instruments," said Rep. Fernand J. St Germain (D., R.I.), the committee chairman. "She ought to be told up-front in clear, precise terms so she can make a decision where best to invest her savings.

Since announcing a run for governor, Republican Lynn Swann has campaigned across the state as a reformer trying to knock off a career politician - Gov. Rendell - and sweep in change and accountability to the Capitol. Yet records show that Swann is having trouble mastering some aspects of campaign-finance disclosure laws. Earlier this month, several of his required pre-primary campaign reports were not filed with the Department of State. And those the campaign did submit during the course of the year included incomplete or unclear information in key parts.

IT'S BECOMING increasingly clear how much of a toll that natural gas extraction from the state's Marcellus Shale formation is taking on the environment and potentially on human health. It's also increasingly clear why it's taking so long for state lawmakers to return the favor, and impose a tax on drillers. A new report from the Pennsylvania Land Trust Association found that Marcellus Shale drillers in the state have piled up 1,435 violations in the last 2 1/2 years . The great majority - 66 percent - have the potential for direct impact on the environment.

The basic checking account is getting a lot more complicated. Banks in the last year have revamped terms to introduce new or hiked fees, change minimum balance requirements and tweak other terms. Now U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer (D., N.Y) is calling for regulations that would require banks to provide consumers with an easy-to-read one-page disclosure form listing all fees and terms. Schumer is also responsible for the fee and interest rate disclosure form that banks are currently required to provide with credit card offers.

Gov. Florio yesterday expanded financial-disclosure requirements for members of his administration, partially fulfulling a campaign pledge to raise state government's ethical standards. Florio's executive order covers all executive branch employees and officials in "policy-making" positions as well as members of state commissions and authorities. "More people will be covered than ever before," Florio said at a Statehouse news conference. He said that previous disclosure rules had exempted all employees below the rank of division director and members of commissions and authorities.

The New York investment banker handling a $250,000 stock trading account for Republican gubernatorial candidate Jim Courter refused to disclose the contents of that account yesterday, sparking criticism from the Democratic candidate for governor, James J. Florio. The account, managed by the New York investment firm of Gilder, Gagnon & Co. of New York, has been listed on Courter's congressional financial- disclosure statement from 1986 to 1988, but not its individual stocks as required by House rules.

HARRISBURG - On paper at least, many Pennsylvania elected officials shied away in 2012 from accepting travel, lodging, meals, or other perks on someone else's dime. Wednesday was the due date for legislators and other public officials to file their annual statements of financial interest, on which, among other things, they must list sources of income as well as any gifts or entertainment, travel, or lodging costs over a certain amount if other people picked up the tab. Gov. Corbett, who has taken heat for gifts in the past, declared about $18,500 in travel, lodging, and hospitality, mostly for conferences he attended as well as his trade mission to France and Germany last spring.

Citing concerns about the accuracy of a citywide reassessment that is key to overhauling Philadelphia's broken property-tax system, Controller Alan Butkovitz called Monday for the "full disclosure of the mechanics of this process. " In a letter to Mayor Nutter, Butkovitz questioned the findings of the Office of Property Assessment (OPA), which said the reassessment was comfortably within industry standards. That standard says assessments should be on average within 15 percent of sales prices.

Merck & Co. said Thursday that it would pay $668 million to settle two class-action lawsuits by investors who accused the company of not properly disclosing the failure of a cholesterol drug to meet its target in a key clinical trial. Merck's announcement followed a disclosure by Teva Pharmaceuticals Ltd. to the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday that after it had already set aside $670 million to cover potential damages in a patent-infringement lawsuit brought by Pfizer Inc., the "ultimate resolution of this matter could result in a loss of up to $1.4 billion" more - a potential total of about $2.1 billion.

A Republican lawmaker from rural central Pennsylvania who describes himself as a conservative Christian has made history as the first openly gay member of the state legislature. Rep. Mike Fleck, 39, of Huntingdon, disclosed that he is gay in an interview with the Huntingdon Daily News published Saturday. Fleck, who recently separated from his wife of almost a decade, told the newspaper he had struggled with his sexuality for years and hoped his openness would help others better understand the journey people have to take to live an authentic life.

The day after President Obama's reelection is a good time to reflect on how the campaign was affected by a tragically flawed Supreme Court decision and others that undermined efforts to add some common sense to political spending. This is the day after more than $6 billion was spent on election campaigns, with much of it coming from barely restrained and often secretive groups. Most of that money went to TV advertising that was generally negative and further served to erode the public's confidence not only in the candidates put before it, but also in an electoral system that is supposed to be the model for the rest of the world.

SEPTA has told federal authorities that it did not report paying more than $1 million to Washington lobbying firms because it did not think it was required to disclose the spending. The Federal Transit Administration told SEPTA two weeks ago that the Philadelphia-based agency had violated lobbying-disclosure rules at least five times since 2008 and could face fines of up to $100,000 for each instance. "There is confusion on the applicability of the regulations," SEPTA general manager Joseph M. Casey told the FTA chief counsel in a four-page letter released Monday.

WASHINGTON - Senate Republicans have blocked Democratic-backed legislation requiring organizations pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into campaign ads to disclose their top donors and the amounts they spend. GOP opposition prevented Democrats from getting the 60 votes needed to bring what is known as the Disclose Act to the Senate floor. The vote Monday was 51-44. Democrats revived the act during a presidential election campaign in which political action committees and nonprofit organizations, funded by deep-pocketed and largely anonymous contributors, are dominating the airwaves with largely negative political ads. Another version of the Disclose Act passed the then-Democratic-controlled House in 2010 but was similarly blocked by Republicans in the Senate.

Eighty-four percent of American physicians have a financial relationship with a drug or medical-device company, according to the Archives of Internal Medicine. For more than a year, I was one of them.   When I was a psychiatrist in private practice, a drug company asked me to educate physicians about the benefits of its antidepressant. I was paid up to $750 a session for my efforts. As a result, I saw firsthand how a simple exchange of money could undermine the objectivity of a well-meaning doctor.

For the first time ever, special interests who lobby city officials have filed reports disclosing how much they spend trying to influence city policy. The biggest spender in the first three months of the year was Big Soda - the American Beverage Association - and it wasn't much of a contest. The ABA reported $238,921 in spending for the quarter, six times the amount spent by anyone else. The Nutter administration has tried repeatedly to impose a city tax on sugar-sweetened beverages, ostensibly to boost public health as well as city revenues.

Nearly two years after City Council and Mayor Nutter approved an ordinance requiring lobbyists to register and disclose their expenses, there's still no computer software to make the program work the way it was intended. The city Board of Ethics and the Nutter administration's technology chief, Abel Ebeid, say that Perficient Inc., a St. Louis firm, was unable to deliver on a $227,000 contract to handle lobbyist registration and disclosure statements and put the information on a public city website.