NASA reverses course on hiding survey results, regrets mistaken “impression”

Last week I wrote about NASA’s incomprehensibly idiotic move to deliberately conceal the results of a national aviation safety survey from the American people. NASA Administrator Mike Griffin has reversed course and promised that he will have the data released “as soon as possible.”

In testimony prepared for a congressional hearing Wednesday, Griffin said he has directed release “as soon as possible” of all the research data that does not contain what he described as confidential commercial information.

“One of the most important NASA principles is to ensure the dissemination of research results to the widest practical and appropriate extent,” Griffin wrote.

That’s nice to hear. Perhaps Administrator Griffin would be so kind as to explain why, then, his agency stonewalled a Freedom of Information Request for 14 months? It sounds like Griffin might have some people working for him that are – shall we say? – less committed to the principles he describes. I’d recommend he do something about that, quickly and permanently.

In an odd twist, Griffin raised doubts in his testimony about the reliability of his own agency’s research by telling lawmakers that NASA does not consider the survey’s methodology or data to have been sufficiently verified.

Griffin also expressed regret over NASA’s assertion that revealing the survey findings could damage the public’s confidence in airlines and affect airline profits. NASA cited those reasons in refusing to turn over the survey data to the AP, which sought the information over 14 months under the Freedom of Information Act. Griffin has directed his agency to reconsider its denial of the data to the AP.

The standard action to take when the methodology of the survey is in question is to go back to the outfit that performed the survey and audit their systems to confirm the survey was taken in accordance with accepted standards. Of course, we can’t do that since NASA ordered the survey company to purge all the data regarding this survey from their systems. That’s a nice touch – NASA blames the methodology when they know full well the survey company cannot respond effectively with all the survey data removed from their systems.

“I regret any impression that NASA was in any way trying to put commercial interests ahead of public safety,” Griffin wrote. “That was not and never will be the case.”

First off, there wasn’t an impression that NASA was trying to put commercial interests ahead of public safety. The denial letter the AP got from NASA’s official dealing with the FOIA request, Thomas Luedtke, explicitly stated that the release of the results could “damage the public’s confidence in airlines and affect airline profits.” That’s not implying that commercial concerns were the overriding factor in this decision, it’s out-and-out saying so in plain English. Griffin is, frankly, trying to weasel out of what one of his subordinates said in their official capacity to speak for the agency. The proper thing for Griffin to be regretful of is that his agency lost sight of their mandate and put commercial interests ahead of public safety. This statement is a close relative of the non-apology apology we’re so used to hearing from politicians trying to duck and cover for something they said.

As for never having been “the case”, well, the record looks pretty clear that such a stance – commercial interests vs. public safety – was the agency’s official position for the 14 months they denied access to the data requested. What I want to hear from Griffin is that this is not going to be the agency’s stance and that anyone in the agency who tries something like this again won’t be in the agency for too bloody long thereafter.

Release the data – and I mean now – and we’ll see what comes next. In the meantime, Griffin needs to restore public confidence in NASA and that means there are people in there that need to hit the road. Do that visibly, Mr. Griffin, and there’ll be hope for you.

Technorati Tags: NASA, aviation, FOIA, air safety survey

Office worker shoots himself in both legs

There’s a fishy story coming out of Ft. Worth, TX this afternoon about an office worker who managed to shoot himself in both legs:

A 47-year-old man was shot in both legs when he accidentally discharged a handgun while sitting in his cubicle at an insurance office, police said.

(Great. Man works for an insurance firm. I wonder if they’re going to deny coverage)

The man, who hasn’t been publicly identified, had put his .45-caliber gun into his jacket pocket and then draped the jacket over the back of his chair, said Brett McGuire, Lake Worth police chief.

The gun discharged Tuesday morning as the man settled into his chair. He said the man must have done something to make the weapon fire.

I’ll say. An unmodified, properly assembled weapon does not fire unless the trigger is pulled, period. All the Hollywood stuff about weapons going off just by being dropped or otherwise smacked around is just myth. Simply placing the weapon into a jacket pocket and then leaning back against it wouldn’t be enough. Something would have to have entered into the trigger guard and pulled the trigger to fire it. The police definitely need to investigate that one. Insurance fraud, perhaps?

Nader sues the DNC

Via Instapundit, here’s a story that’s sure to make Dems wish yet again that Ralph Nader didn’t exist. Nader has filed a lawsuit against the DNC alleging that party officials “conspired” to keep him from taking votes away from nominee John Kerry.

Now, at first glance I immediately thought, “Well, no sh*t, Sherlock. That’s what party officials are supposed to do.” The story doesn’t go into many of the details about that specific part of the suit, except to say that he’s named as co-defendants Kerry’s campaign, the SEIU, and many “527″ organizations such as America Coming Together (ACT). How it is that organizations created to promote a particular political party or agenda should be considered engaged in a criminal act when they work to keep people from voting for competitor candidates is beyond me. Maybe the judge will see Nader’s point differently.

A more concrete allegation in the suit says that the DNC conspired to force Nader off the ballot in several states. From the story:

Among other things, the lawsuit alleges that the DNC tried to bankrupt Nader’s campaign by suing to keep him off the ballot in 18 states. It also suggests the DNC sent Kerry supporters to crash a Nader petition drive in Portland, Ore., in June 2004, preventing him from collecting enough signatures to get on the ballot.

I’ll have to concede Nader’s point in that I don’t think filing frivolous lawsuits against a candidate or party simply to create a drain on their resources should be considered fair play in an election. Assuming the Dems actually did that – that their cases were tossed out nearly immediately – then I think they should get their hands smacked. I would also like to see more about this petition drive thing up in Oregon. If the Dem supporters were interfering with Nader’s efforts to get signatures in any method other than simply stating their case as to why Nader was unworthy of being on the ballot, then that rises to a 1st Amendment violation in my eyes. Again, more detail is needed.

If, however, these allegations are not supportable, then Nader’s engaging in precisely the same kind of attack-by-lawsuit that he’s alleging is a bad thing. Either way, should be interesting.

Technorati Tags: Ralph Nader, Politics, Democrat, DNC

Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween, folks!

Has York abused his office to claim he’s not been abusing his office?

I got a very interesting e-mail this evening. Seems Scott York is very concerned over Mike Firetti claiming that York has abused his office. What’s interesting is that this e-mail – clearly a campaign-related communication – was sent via the official Loudoun government systems. Take a look at the full-size screen shot linked here:

What you’re seeing is the top part of the e-mail. I’ve expanded the e-mail headers to see the entire routing of the message which is displayed in inverse order there in the center of the header. I’ve highlit the first “hop” of the message as it was sent and you can clearly see this is coming right out of the loudoun.gov e-mail servers. (The next 2 hops are, first, another loudoun.gov server and then over to some outfit called “mailsrvcs.net”.) Now, someone please correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t sending out campaign-related responses from the government info systems an abuse of position?

And another thing about Firetti’s residence…

That last post got me thinking about the document attached to it, a shot of the tax assessment for a property owned by Firetti.

As pointed out in the comments section to that TC post, the attached screenshot of the tax assessment shows pretty clearly that this is a vacant lot, not a residence. So where does he live? Well, maybe the specific address just isn’t any of my business and I can certainly see why he’d be just a little bit careful about opening up his family to visits from some of the people hereabouts who seem to think he’s some kind of demonspawn. There are ways of determining if the Firetti family has been in residence here in the county.

We could always perform searches to see if any of his family appears in stuff that would show such residence. Perhaps seeing that his daughters were in public schools here, as he claims on his campaign site? You might find a reference, like this one, to his daughter Haley’s participation in Science and Engineering Fairs listed as representing Loudoun County High School. (You don’t send children to public schools in the county if you’re not a resident.) Granted, that was in 2001, but she’s also listed as a Leesburg, VA resident in this list of 2007 graduating Bachelor degrees from James Madison University. Her sister Samantha is listed right here in the May 06 newsletter from Loudoun County High School as a Junior at the end of the 2005-2006 school year. That means she was a Senior this past school year, graduating just 6 months ago.

Is any of this conclusive? Nah, not really. I mean it’s entirely possible that Mike Firetti sold his house here in Loudoun the day after his youngest daughter graduated and followed that up by tossing his hat into the Chairman’s race in time for the June convention…  Hmmm. The timing might not work out for that.

Well, this has certainly taken up more of my time than it was supposed to, but all that searching kind of got fun. (Did you know you can look up your property’s tax assessments on-line? Check it out here! You can even check out your whole street’s! Loudoun County, of course.) In the end, it’s a legal requirement that a person be a resident in the county to serve as Chairman. If someone thinks they have something that will stand up to scrutiny showing Firetti isn’t a resident, then put it up there. If they can’t, they just have to deal with the fact that few of us are going to take them seriously.

Personally, I’d like to see the Chairman’s race focused on the issues. It gets lost in the haze, I realize, but York didn’t sweep into his Chairman’s seat 4 years ago riding a crushing landslide. He squeaked by on the strength of less than 400 votes out of nearly 40,000 – literally less than 1% – and the policies he’d been advocating including such lovely things as the Property Development Rights (you do remember those PDR’s, right?) were being seriously questioned. Cramming all the development density into the east of the county, spending money on those PDRs while complaining that we just didn’t have the funds to do all manner of other things, allowing things like Chuck Harris’ County-funded purchase of a fully decked-out kitchen to a private business in western districts were all things that were done under his Chairmanship of the last board. The only reason he’s not pushing those things now is that he lost his majority backing at the elections and many of his corporate powers when the newly elected Supervisors saw that he was going to try to keep on keeping on after that election.

Many of those issues were never addressed beyond simply keeping him from pressing ahead with his previous agenda. Should the power balance return to what it was with York still sitting in the Chairman’s seat, do you really think we won’t see more western landowners getting paid with your tax money to not build houses on land they never intended to build upon and which you’ll never see?

Technorati Tags: Mike Firetti, Loudoun County, Virginia, Politics, 2007 Elections

Mountain out of molehill regarding Firetti’s candidacy and residency?

I have to apologize in advance for what I’m about to do. I like the blog Too Conservative, I really do. I find most of the stuff they’ve put up to be informative and well written, but this campaign season has apparently knocked their gyros a little out of adjustment. The last time I happened to quote something from over there, it was in this post regarding the demonization of political candidates via trivialities. Loudoun Insider over there at TC thinks what I referred to as trivial isn’t, and that’s his prerogative. I see it as a symptom of the wider issue of beginning to see political opponents as being purposely malignant in every little thing they do.

Frequent target Eugene Delgaudio (who is held in no high esteem here at this site, either) has been joined by just about every other Republican candidate running for re-election this year with the exception of Lori Waters. BoS Chairman candidate Mike Firetti has been in TC’s sights for quite a while, including speculations that he doesn’t really reside here in Loudoun County. This post over at TC is short, direct, pointed… and ignores completely the more innocent possibilities:

Mike Firetti reacted with righteous indignation the last time people questioned his residency in Loudoun County, given that his wife lives and works in Delaware.  If he does live here, as he asserts, then why do his tax bills for the only property easily located under his name in Loudoun County get sent to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware?  Why would you send your tax bills to your supposed vacation home? 

Perhaps because his wife handles the bill-paying for the family – as do many wives throughout Loudoun – and she’s in Delaware?

Sending the tax bills directly to her instead of sending them to a local address only to have to re-package and send them on (adding delay and the additional chance of having the mail lost) sounds like a good decision to me. To be blunt, I’m sure making things easily trackable to bloggers – those for or against him – likely didn’t even enter into the discussion about how to handle the family finances.

Not everything going on in local politics is a matter of evil intent and I think people lose site of that the closer the elections get.

Smoking: it’s for the children!

Sometimes, a good satire is the only way to get the point across. Without further ado, have a look at “SCHIP: Care Enough to Smoke?“

Technorati Tags: SCHIP, smoking, Congress

Recent Herring mailings regarding Phillips are lies, Phillips says.

State Senate candidate Patricia Phillips (R) is working to unseat 1-term incumbent Mark Herring (D) in the Virginia Senate 33rd District. Up until this past week or so, the race had been fairly low-key outside of the active campaigns of both contenders. Then, last week, I got more of the season’s many campaign mailers (these were from Mark Herring) and noted there were some pretty volatile accusations on them. Herring’s campaign said that Phillips was trying to get laws passed that would require the consent of both parties to a marriage for a divorce to be granted, effectively locking battered women into abusive marriages from which there would be no escape. (See that flyer here.) Another flyer the same day said she was also involved in an effort to have the Harry Potter book series banned from school libraries because they promoted witchcraft among the students.

Pretty incendiary stuff. Herring paints Phillips as a book-banning, evil witch (pardon the pun) who wants abused women to stay abused. Only problem is, it’s untrue. Phillips issued a press release on her site addressing the flyers:

“Unlike my opponent, I won’t lie just to get elected” said Patricia Phillips, Republican candidate for the Virginia 33rd Senate seat, as she responded to several of Mark Herring’s campaign mailings. “I prefer to discuss the differences in positions between me and my opponent. However, when he makes things up that have no basis in fact in an attempt to deceive the voters, I must speak out.” link to mailer

“Sen. Herring claims that my support of Mutual Consent divorce reform means I want to prevent innocent spouses from getting out of destructive marriages. Nothing could be further from the truth. Herring is a lawyer, he knows this.”

The issue Phillips is dealing with is the case of the “No-Fault” divorce, not the type we’re all used to hearing about where the issue is adultery, abuse, etc. In other words, her advocacy for the Mutual Consent divorce laws have absolutely nothing to do with cases of abuse such as are mentioned in the Herring flyer. So, yeah, I’d call that one a lie.

“Then there is his absurd claim that I am leading an effort to ban Harry Potter books from public schools. I’ve read and enjoyed most of the books, and my daughter is a serious Harry Potter fan. His claim is simply not true.”

Herring’s flyer (which I don’t have a copy of any more since I tossed it almost immediately) made reference to Phillips being a member of or a supporter of a group that might have been trying to do such a thing. But being a member of a group does not always translate to supporting each and every action undertaken or suggested by that group. (Perhaps Herring would like to explain his culpability in every action the Democratic Party has taken these past fews years?) Even if the group the flyer refers to has actually made the suggestion to ban the books, he offers nothing to indicate Phillips was on-board with that idea and her explicit statement given on her site puts the lie on that accusation. Herring’s people either just assumed or wanted everyone else to just assume and I’m leaning strongly toward the latter.

In either case, it’s a falsehood and it’s a diversion and that’s all.

Phillips also had something to say about one of Herring’s flyers that dealt with his own positions (for a change):

“In another of Herring’s mailings, he again deceives voters by claiming in bold type that he “Balanced the budget without raising taxes.” He didn’t tell voters that the bill he voted for included the despised abusive driver “fees” and that it established new taxes on northern Virginians alone (taxes on car repairs, annual safety inspections, and real estate transactions, to name just a few). In the fine print he refines his deception by saying that he has “funded vital priorities without broad-based tax increases”. Apparently, when only northern Virginians are hit with his new taxes, the taxes are not “broad based”. When will he tell voters the truth instead of hiding behind lawyer-speak phrases?” Phillips asked.

Emphasis mine. Good point. It’s late in the game, however, and this point is obviously not going to be brought to voters by our regular media. Take the time to educate yourself, folks.

Technorati Tags: Virginia, 2007 Elections, Patricia Phillips, Mark Herring

Ahlemann responds to the Post article Updated!

Loudoun County Sheriff candidate Greg Ahlemann gave a response yesterday to the front-page “news” story that appeared in Sunday’s Washington Post. I wrote about that story on Sunday and I said then that I was hopeful he would respond effectively. I believe he has.

In recent interviews with print and television media, including today’s press conference, Ahlemann spoke frankly and truthfully about the practices of officer discretion among law enforcement officials.  In particular, Ahlemann noted that, “It is common knowledge that many law enforcement jurisdictions allow their officers the latitude and opportunity to use their good judgment in determining which traffic offenses are ticketed and which are not.”  Ahlemann continued, “When it comes to writing tickets, there is generally no exclusion against officers using their discretion to issue, or not issue, tickets.”

When asked about Ahlemann’s own use of discretion to dismiss tickets, Ahlemann indicated that “certainly there have been instances where I have dismissed tickets.”  Ahlemann continued, “For example, I have given a break to individuals who have had the most minor traffic infraction and moving violations, such as going a few miles over the speed limit.  However, I have never given anyone a break when they are involved in any driving hazard that rises to criminal charges like DWI or DUI.”

In stark contrast to Ahlemann’s candor on the issue of officer discretion and the dismissal of tickets, Democrat Mike George and Independent Stephen Simpson both made their best attempts to put on their best face on the issue.  George emphatically stated to The Washington Post that in all his years of service, he “never fixed a ticket.”  Simpson conveniently forgot whether or not during his many years of service as a law enforcement officer he had ever dismissed a ticket stating simply, “I don’t recall.”  [The Washington Post, Oct 28, 2007, “Sheriff Hopeful in VA Says He Dismissed Tickets”]

Ahlemann is not surprised by his opponents comments on these subjects and stated that, “In the race for Loudoun County’s next Sheriff, where integrity and honesty matter more to me than my own political gain, I have once again shown that I am willing to openly discuss the issues that leave my opponents ducking for cover as they continue to make statements ripe with half-truths in an unscrupulous attempt to win them votes.”

One of the things that crossed my mind Sunday as I was reading the story and writing about it was that here, at least, was someone who would be truthful about the situation regardless of whether it made him look good. I didn’t write that at the time and I probably should have. Openness and honesty are qualities we should all be prizing a great deal in our elected officials and it should be rewarded where it springs up. Make no mistake, I think that the practice of giving preferential treatment to fellow officers when they break the same laws the rest of us get tickets for is nothing to be proud of. The fact that it happens everywhere is no excuse nor does it reduce the seriousness of the situation. Someone simply telling it like it is, however, should not elevate it to the same level as, for example, breaking your publicly notarized word. (That’s a reference to this, in case you missed it.)

I’m also giving some points to Ahlemann for his immediate and steady response to the story. Too often a political candidate will try to downplay his quoted words or seek to allow the issue to pass by simply not addressing it. Ahlemann has done neither. That’s a good thing and, should he win the election, I hope he keeps at it.

Update: You really need to read this post over at novatownhall blog regarding this entire issue. I’d wondered in my original post whether the Washington Post reporter was tackling a new story or something he’d been saving for a last minute ambush ahead of the election. Now I know:

The Post reporter, Mr. Brubaker, elected to sit on the story until this past Friday, October 26, when he called Mr. Ahlemann with some follow up questions. In the course of that conversation, Mr. Ahlemann made the remark that tickets were frequently dismissed within the department.

Today, Mr. Ahlemann released to the media some background data which adds a layer of important information to the story. First is an audio recording of Mr. Ahlemann’s interview with an internal affairs investigator.

It goes on from there, including the audio to which the post refers.

Technorati Tags: Loudoun County, Ahlemann, 2007 Elections, Virginia