Red Gecko

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Rich Eisen Runs The 40 At the NFL Combine, Hilarity Ensues

You have to give Rich props for not only agreeing to be timed, but for allowing the world to see the results.

Run, Forrest, run!

The Secret Police of Northern Virginia

I know this sort of thing happens in banana republics and eastern bloc countries, but how in the world can secretive police agencies be allowed to exist in the good old USA?

Radley Balko writes at Reason about three Northern Virginia police departments - Fairfax County, Arlington, and Alexandria - that deny open records request by default and operate is such an opaque manner that you'd think they were taking lessons from the KGB.

Balko writes:

Michael Pope, a reporter who covers Northern Virginia for the Connection Newspapers chain and for the Washington, D.C., NPR affiliate WAMU, filed a series of open records requests with the Faifax Police Department related to the Masters shooting. All were denied. Last month, Pope asked Fairfax County Police Public Information Officer Mary Ann Jennings why her department won't at least release the incident report on Master's death, given concerns raised about the shooting. "Let us hear that concern," Jennings shot back. "We are not hearing it from anybody except the media, except individual reporters."

That's an astounding answer. "Except the media?" That's exactly who you would expect to file most open records requests. When asked why her department won't even release even the name of the officer who shot Masters, Jennings got more obtuse. "What does the name of an officer give the public in terms of information and disclosure?" Jennings asked in reply, presumably rhetorically. "I'd be curious to know why they want the name of an officer."

Cover-ups by law enforcement agencies are nothing new. Neither are officers who abuse their sworn duties, lie under oath, or otherwise besmirch the badge. What's amazing is the utter dearth of concern demonstrated by elected officials within the three jurisdictions.

Don't look to elected officials to correct any of this, either. "I am in the corner of trusting our police department," Arlington County Board member Barbara Favola told Pope. "If they push back I am not going to override them, and I don’t think I could get three votes on the board to override them either."

Really? Then not only is there a transparency problem, but there's an oversight problem too. How dare officials so blatantly disregard public requests for information when it's common (and expected) practice elsewhere?

Balko:

And then there's Alexandria Commonwealth Attorney Randolph Sengel, who fired off an indignant letter to the editor in response to Pope's article. Calling Pope's well-reported piece a "rant" that was "thinly disguised as a news story," Sengel wrote that "Law enforcement investigations and prosecutions are not carried out for the primary purpose of providing fodder for his paper." Mocking the media's role as a watchdog for government officials, Sengel added, "The sacred 'right of the public to know' is still (barely) governed by standards of reasonableness and civility," as if those two adjectives were incompatible with a journalist inquiring about the details of a govenrment agent's fatal shooting of an unarmed man.

The entire column is worth a read. Think it can't happen in America?

Think again.

Republicans Are Running The Jerk Store

Steve Benen on the absolutely incredible alternate universe that the republican party inhabits, via Instaputz:

In order for political discourse to have any meaning or value, there have to be certain agreed upon facts that serve as a foundation for the dialogue. But as the McClatchy piece notes, that foundation is no longer stable -- conservatives frequently choose to believe versions of events that aren't real, because the make-believe version makes them feel better.

The result is an American history in which every era can be distorted to satisfy the far-right ego. Indeed, it continues to apply to more contemporary events -- tell the typical Republican that Ronald Reagan raised taxes in six of his eight years in the White House, and he/she will probably look at you as if you've lost your mind. That is, in fact, what happened, but the right chooses to reject this history, because they don't like it. (Tell these same Republicans that Barack Obama's health care plan is in line with what moderate Republicans have supported for years -- and that the individual mandate was actually a GOP idea -- and you'll get the same reaction, even though it's true.)

For all the talk about getting reasonable people with different ideologies into a room to find common ground on a host of complex issues, it's worth remembering that for many political actors in 2010, there isn't even agreement on the basics. When dealing with a large group of influential conservatives who believe FDR created the Great Depression, Theodore Roosevelt was a socialist, and Joe McCarthy was a hero, what's there to talk about?

It reminds me of the Seinfeld episode where George Costanza struggles to come up with a snappy comeback, and this is the best he can muster: