It's Friday afternoon, and you know what that means - it's State Round-Up time.  Use the Comments section to fill us in on any news we missed from your state.

• Common Cause New Mexico threw a party to kick off their statewide Voters First Pledge campaign; it was a huge success.
  
• Georgia past legislation last year mandating voter ID cards, but less than a month before the primary, they still haven't issued them.
  
• Florida politicians and contractors toed the Sunshine line.
  
• The New York Legislature's session ended this week, leaving a lot of work to be done at the last minute.
  
• Massachusetts lawmakers have earmarked more than $700 million in spending on pet projects this year.
  
• A headlining corruption trial in Wisconsin has people considering the future of campaign finance and ethics reform in that state.  Meanwhile, the state's most notorious corrupt politician has been allowed to remain free on bail while his appeals are pending.
  
• California's anti-revolving door law for statewide officials has been expanded to include local and county politicians as well.
  
• The head of the Oregon ethics commission is leaving to head up the independent and better-funded sister commission in Nevada.
  
• Samuel Gresham of Common Cause Ohio appears tonight on a roundtable news show, talking about politics in Ohio.
  
• The Pennsylvania Speaker of the House has introduced his weak lobby reform bill while delaying and blocking stronger measures.  As imagined, there are a lot of unhappy people in Pennsylvnia right now.

This is a sad commentary on the state of Oregon's ethics commission, and also underscores the need for an independent ethics watchdog commission.

The Executive Director of the Oregon Government Standards and Practices Commission, Pat Hearn, is leaving that position to take a similar one at Nevada's ethics commission:

The disproportionality is ridiculous!  Ridiculous, I tell you!  -- And that's all you're going to get out of me until you click "Read more."

It's official: the effort to repeal Portland's Voter-Owned Elections law failed to make it on the ballot. In addition to a high number of invalid signatures, the corporate-backed "First Things First" committee suffered from an incredibly high number of duplicate signatures.

And here's their response:

Last year, Portland's city council passed the first municipal Voter-Owned Elections law. The city's big corporate players responded by spending almost $350K collecting petition signatures in an attempt to place a repeal before voters on the May 06 ballot. The supporters of the repeal effort make up a who's who of Portland corporate interests: Portland Business Alliance, Qwest, Portland General Electric, Comcast, etc.

And it now looks like they've failed!