Federal Agents Raid Office of Special Counsel


Essentially, the news item is a dismayingly familiar tale of (alleged) malfeasance of office and abuse of power. The part that grabbed my attention, in a pointing-and-laughing sort of way, is:


I have a mental image of a petty crook confident that he can't possibly be caught because he saw some clever trick on TeeVee.

Marc Fisher's column in today's Washington Post begins with the question:

What would drive one of the nation's most successful and respected school systems to report which racial and ethnic groups demonstrate the soundest moral character and ethical judgment?

The answer, it appears, is a classic case of bureaucratic "thought" run amok:

But in Fairfax, and in schools across the land, the instinct -- no, the compulsion -- is to amass data points and "disaggregate," ed-lingo for looking at children not as individuals but as members of a group. The move to quantify grows from a religious devotion to test scores, a faith that the shaping of a mind can be mapped like a cancer cell and expressed as a number. And the resort to race stems from the balkanization of society, the self-destructive notion that we are a collection of groups rather than a nation of individuals who believe what it says on the coins in your pocket: e pluribus unum -- out of many, one.

"The superintendent told me that the reason they broke it down by race was that two years ago, the board decided to report all data by race," Hone says. "That was part of the No Child Left Behind frenzy. This is a classic case of a pendulum overswing."

Found via wcg's LJ, a Slate series on "American Lawbreaking" (namely, the laws that are not only routinely broken, but routinely expected to be broken with a wink and a nod, if that, from the authorities).

This is one reason why I keep coming back to the idea that all laws should expire after twenty years or so (the same law could be passed again, with or without modification, but in the absence of such an active step the law would go away).

From PC World, via fuzzface00 's journal:

...Appellate Judge Margaret McKeown responded by paraphrasing public comments by U.S. President George W. Bush, whom she reported as saying, "There is no surveillance of domestic phone calls without a warrant." 

The Bush comment came up again when AT&T attorney Michael Kellogg, also argued for dismissal on the Wonderland-like grounds that allowing the case to go forward, yet not violate state secrets, would prohibit AT&T from presenting a defense. 

"Any sort of program is a state secret," Kellogg said. 

"Even if the program doesn't exist?" McKeown replied, referencing the president's claim. 

"Whether or not it exists is a state secret," Kellogg answered. 

"But if President Bush said it's not happening, how could that be a secret?" the judge asked. 

These are some of the reasons the hearing lasted two and a half hours....

I think this guy testified as a character witness in the Knave of Hearts' trial.

A Washington Post story that possibly sheds a bit of light on our ongoing home-renovation snafu:

"Fairfax County's residential building inspectors carry workloads that exceed their ability to do their jobs competently, according to a firm that evaluates government inspection programs for insurance companies....
The company's findings do more than raise questions about the county's building inspection program. They shed light on the way Fairfax officials, protective of the county's national reputation for efficient, well-managed delivery of services, deal with unwelcome news...."

Their method of dealing with unwelcome news appears to be a clever procedure known in the political trade as "hushing it up":

"Although the company informed Fairfax of the rating reduction May 18, 2006, County Executive Anthony H. Griffin did not disclose it publicly until The Washington Post made inquiries last month...."