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Where's the rest of the story?
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Former GSA Administrator Lurita Doan's long-running battle with agency inspector general Brian Miller started when she tried to reduce his budget as part of a "cost-cutting initiative." Doan recently told Federal News Radio that the White House asked her to resign after less than two years on the job because she "refused to back down on my support for the four whistle blowers at GSA" who complained about Miller. But the Corporation for National and Community Service, which agreed to review the case, found no wrongdoing by Miller. However, a high-profile investigation by Office of Special Counsel Scott Bloch found wrongdoing by Doan herself, who allegedly violated the Hatch Act by asking federal employees to help Republican election efforts and steered lucrative GSA contracts to friends and political allies. Here's what doesn't make sense: On April 29, White House chief of staff Josh Bolton and counsel Fred Fielding summoned Dean to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. and told her she was to resign immediately. Her unceremonious departure indicated that the administration wasn't buying her version of events. If so, why is Bloch's head on the chopping block? At a July 12, 2007 House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee hearing, ranking member Tom Davis, R-VA, went after Bloch, asking him if he had authorized a leak of the GSA investigation, a charge Bloch denied. This week, Davis called for Bloch's resignation. What the media hasn't reported is that Doan and her husband Doug just so happen to be some of Davis' major contributors. According to FEC records, the Great Falls couple gave more than $200,000 to GOP candidates and PACs since 2000. Sources tell us the Tuesday raid of Bloch's office and Alexandria home was pay-back for being a straight arrow whose politically embarrassing investigation of the firings of the U.S. attorneys and other allegations of illegal political activity in the executive branch made him some powerful enemies in the administration, including Karl Rove, which is why the White House is now desperately trying to silence him. |
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UPDATE: Another victim of overzealous Arlington social workers
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In response to the April 18 Examiner editorial "Baby snatching by Arlington County" (http://www.examiner.com/a-1347693`Baby_snatching_by_Arlington_County.html) we got an email from an Arlington dad who has also tangled with CPS: "I wish I could say I was surprised by the heartbreaking story of the Slitors, whose child's disability led Arlington County to take their baby away, but I was not. "My child has arthritis, and we experienced a less severe, but no less unnecessary, ordeal. When he was in preschool, he was on a medication that made him bruise easily and impaired his ability to heal from bruises. That winter, he enjoyed sliding on the ice in our driveway, but fell and got a nasty black eye. Based on that injury, his teacher reported us to the county. She claimed that by law she was required t do so. I researched the regulations governing the mandatory reporting, and they actually leave quite a bit to discretion. Nevertheless, she felt bound to report us. "Based on that one person's report, we had to fill out forms and were subjected to multiple interviews from a caseworker. These involved her coming to our home and observing us with our child, and asking our child's relatives questions about our fitness to be parents. Based on a teacher's report of one black eye! "After we were 'cleared', we were told that we would be on a list for several years, so that if he got hurt and had to go to the ER for any reason, the investigation would be reopened and we would again be subjected to this invasive and humiliating process. There has got to be a better way." Another Arlington reader told us about the Center for Individual Rights (www.cir-usa.org) which has information on similar cases in which social workers even presumed to tell parents which medical options they should pursue. In a particularly disturbing case in Idaho in 2002 (Mueller v. Idaho) a five-week-old baby girl was seized and given a spinal tap against her mother's wishes - even though the fever that had prompted the mother to seek medical care had already broken. Parents are increasingly being subjected to this sort of harrassment by social workers who often have less experience with children than they do. But even for unwarranted intrusions based entirely on flimsy evidence, there's no accountability and no consequences for putting people through this hell. Judges who are supposed to throw these cases out often rubber-stamp whatever the social workers tell them, and confidentiality laws intended to protect children wind up protecting power-hungry government workers instead. In the case cited in our editorial, the same former Arlington social worker who used baby Sabrina's "milk-stained" shirt as evidence of parental neglect argued in court that the baby had to be removed from her home because her mother wasn't feeding her! This would be laughable were it not for the terrible injustice done to this family. If you live in Arlington, don't think it could never happen to you. |
UPDATE: Tysons development will overload sewer system too
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The Tysons Task Force is planning to submit its "final" report to the Fairfax Board of Supervisors next month, a report that will conspicuously be lacking the most important information supervisors need to make an intelligent decision about future growth there: a study of the traffic impact on surrounding communities if density in Tysons Corner is tripled per the current plan. But it's not only the county's road infrastructure that won't be able to handle the extra load. According to the Greater Tysons Citizens Coalition, county staff informed task force members on March 24 that there's no way the sewer system can handle the 12 to 15 million gallons of extra wastewater generated by the millions of square feet of new commercial and residential development now envisioned for Tysons. Fairfax County would have to build 20 miles of additional pipeline to divert the wastewater from Tysons. And since it is already nearing its maximum allocation at the District's Blue Plains facility, the county already faces a problem dealing with sewerage generated by projected growth already approved under the Comprehensive Plan. Hand-picked task force members were told that the wastewater infrastructure costs alone could range from $60 to $142 million, not including the cost of purchasing additional capacity or maintaining a larger sewer system, all likely charged to county taxpayers. Once again, the task force proved itself to be nothing more than a rubber stamp for Board chairman Gerry Connolly, who will use its completely useless report to ram the higher densities through the acquiescent board, the public be damned. Connolly has been bending over to accommodate wealthy developers intent on urbanizing Tysons at the expense of his own constituents. He'll feel right at home in the corrupt halls of Congress. |
UPDATE: Expelled from 'Expelled'
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You probably didn't hear about it in the MSM, but in late March, a documentary that wasn't even scheduled to be released until April 18th became the most blogged about story on the Internet. P.Z. Myers, an associate biology professor at the University of Minnesota/Morris, tried to sneak into an invitation-only screening of "Expelled" (www.expelledthemovie.com) at the Mall of America in Minneapolis with fellow atheist and Oxford evolutionist Richard Dawkins, both of whom appear in the film starring Ben Stein. Motive Entertainment producer Mark Mathis spotted Myers standing in line and asked security guards to escort him out because he was afraid Myers would disrupt the preview. Dawkins was admitted even though he hadn't been invited to attend. In my review of "Expelled" in the March 6 Examiner (http://www.examiner.com/a-1261901~Barbara F Hollingsworth America s new blacklist.html) I reported that Stein had somehow managed to get Dawkins, who was paid for the two "Expelled" interviews, to speculate that "aliens" had "seeded the Earth." At the Q&A session following the Minneapolis preview, Dawkins reportedly stood up and demanded to know why Myers had been "expelled from 'Expelled'." According to witnesses, Mathis calmly replied that this was a private showing and that Myers could watch the film as often as he liked after its April 18 release. (Go to http://ti.org.antiplanner/ for theater locations.) Dawkins then claimed he had been interviewed under "false pretenses," even though Mathis reminded him of the emails between the two, which included the interview questions in advance. Then Mathis cut to the chase, telling Dawkins that his alien-seeding comment proved that "you have a blind spot. You accept that there could be an intelligence outside our world, so long as that intelligence isn't God, because of your devotion to atheism." Dawkins' reply? "Nothing. He just sat there," Mathis told me. Richard Dawkins at a loss for words? That must have been something to see. Another academic who appears in the film believes the furor over the movie represents a "significant social phenomenon." Prof. David Berlinksi, a senior fellow with the Discovery Institute, a major proponent of intelligent design, is now in the U.S. on tour for his latest book, "The Devil's Delusion." A Princeton-educated secular Jew who lives in Paris, Berlinksi says that the academic debate between evolutionists like Dawkins and proponents of intelligent design was supposedly over in 1996/97, when Darwinists universally slammed Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe for his book, "Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution," which argued that evolution alone cannot account for the complexity of the cell. Proponents of intelligent design soon became personas non grata on most college campuses - the main subject of "Expelled." Berlinksi says there is so much rancor over this issue because "the academic/scientiific community has a lot to lose." In 1953, he added, the discoverers of DNA themselves inferred some sort of prior design for the elegant genetic framework of life. But 50 years later, what Berlinski calls a "prophetic and very shrewd criticism of Darwinian theory" cannot even be discussed on campus with evolutionists who, he says, prefer to "withdraw from the discussion and sneer" instead. Although Darwinists believe they have already won the debate, the rest of society is just beginning to pay attention, Berlinski added. "This is the first time there is widespread opposition to a previously established scientific dogma. It's unprecedented." Which explains why "Expelled" will be opening Friday in 1,000 theaters nationwide - 132 more that for Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 911," which at the time was the largest opening for a documentary film ever. And Moore got a lot more free advertising in the mainstream media. From here, it looks like the real debate is just getting started. |
What's yours is ours
| Ninety percent of eminent domain cases would not be instigated if the government – and by extension, the public – had to pay the full costs of acquiring the property, University of Chicago law professor Richard Epstein, author of “Takings: Private Property and Eminent Domain,” told me at a recent CATO Institute forum on property rights. Whenever taxpayers are asked to pay the real market price of converting private land to public use - be it for a park, a road, a school, wetlands protection or whatever - a majority almost always votes it down, Epstein says. So the government just takes the property instead and, as a result, “voters never have to pay for the harm they cause.” Systematic undercompensation in the vast majority of eminent domain cases is nothing more than a legalized method of stealing property under the guise of the “common good.” And wronged property owners seldom find redress in the courts, which routinely treat property rights as the poor relations of other, more politically correct, constitutional protections. Prof. Epstein explained why. The modern Supreme Court’s attitude toward private property - as evidenced in its 2005 Kelo decision - is not based on Roman or English common law, which considered property a “foundational right,” but on relatively recent notions from the progressive “good government” movement that predominated in the U.S. between 1900 and 1932. Progressives consider collective rights to be on a higher moral plane than individual rights that are supposed to be protected by the Constitution. So the courts take “a very broad definition of political power, but a very narrow definition of property rights,” Prof. Epstein told forum participants. “In my view, it should be the opposite.” This what's-yours-is-ours philosophy is what's really behind the vast majority of government confiscations of private property by eminent domain. Landowners have to be forced to sell precisely because they are so seldom compensated for the true value of their property. Of course, taking property by eminent domain is the polar opposite of the uncoerced transaction between willing buyer and willing seller that is the hallmark of a free society. Every time we allow our government officials to confiscate another citizen's property on our behalf, we stray even further from that ideal - and erode our own constitutional rights as well. |
MoCo judge to blame for 3 kids’ deaths
| Shock at the senseless drowning of three young children, allegedly by their own father, in a Baltimore hotel room gives way to anger at the Montgomery County judge who refused their mother's pleas for court protection. This wasn’t the first time Judge Michael Mason demonstrated a singular lack of anything remotely resembling judgment in a case involving young children. Ten years ago, Judge Mason – who denied Amy Castillo’s desperate attempts to halt visitations between her three children and their father – was the same judge who handed over custody of a two-year-old boy to the woman convicted of murdering his six-week-old half-sister. Latrena Pixley smothered the infant with a blanket because she was crying too much, stuffed the tiny body into a plastic bag, dumped her into a trash bin, and then went out for barbeque with her new boyfriend. Superior Court Judge George Mitchell sentenced her to 5 to 15 years in prison, but immediately suspended the sentence because she allegedly suffered from postpartum depression, ordering her to spend just weekends in jail for three years. Pixley was eventually sentenced to18 months behind bars – for credit card fraud and parole violation, not infanticide. By then, she had given birth for the fourth time and had handed her infant son over to a police trainee who cared for him since he was three months old and filed papers to adopt him. But when she got out of jail, Pixley wanted the little boy back. Anybody with even a minimal amount of basic common sense and knowledge of human nature would have concluded in an instant that a woman convicted of killing one of her own children posed a grave risk to the others. Not Judge Mason! In one of the most egregious examples of court ineptitude in recent memory, Judge Mason agreed that it would be in the toddler’s “best interests” not to be separated from his biological mother – even though Pixley had given away her first two children and had murdered the third! A wimpy Maryland appeals court upheld Mason’s absurd ruling, demonstrating a stunning lack of common decency and willingness to defend the innocent from violent predators – even if they happen to be their own parents. Now Judge Mason is in the news again, this time for allowing a reportedly bipolar and suicidal Mark Castillo unsupervised visitation with Anthony, 6, Austin, 4, and Athena, 2, even after he threatened to kill them. Silver Spring pediatrician Amy Castillo’s heroic attempts to protect her children were ignored by this clueless judge, who during a hearing last summer himself observed the man’s “difficulties in controlling your anger.” Yet despite seeing Mark Castillo’s instability with his own eyes, Judge Mason refused to take Amy Castillo’s warnings seriously, and instead chose to give her ex-husband the benefit of the doubt. But the judge was wrong again. So now a woman who has devoted her life to healing other people’s children must now face life without her own. This is what passes for “justice” in Montgomery County these days. With two mind-boggingly bad rulings and now three dead children in his wake, Judge Mason obviously doesn’t have the capacity or temperament to make what should have been easy calls. He should be removed from the bench before he does any more harm. |
Learning what's great about America - but not at school
| The Washington area is the nation’s seventh largest portal for immigrants, and while there are plenty of advocacy groups eager to help recent arrivals access government benefits, only one - Liberty’s Promise (www.libertyspromise.org), an Alexandria-based non-profit – is teaching immigrant youth about the responsibilities that go along with the privileges of living in the United States. Since 2005, the group has offered twice-weekly after-school classes in “Civics and Citizenship” which hundreds of low-income adolescents, aged 15 to 21, have attended in Arlington, Fairfax, Silver Spring and Gaithersburg. Students go on field trips and learn about how our system of government works, including such simple things as how to use a public library - a totally mystifying experience if you come from a country without much in the way of public amenities. The program also sets up internships for young people who are legally eligible to work in the U.S. During the last major wave of immigration, America was seen as a giant “melting pot” where foreigners were expected to adopt new identities as Americans. My father was one of the millions of children of immigrant families for whom the public school system was the major catalyst in that transformation. With the rise of “multiculturalism,” however, retaining one’s own cultural, racial and ethnic identity became paramount. Instead of uniting students with diverse backgrounds by teaching them about the history and government of their shared new home, public schools started emphasizing their differences instead. Now even some children born in the U.S. to immigrant parents don’t consider themselves Americans because the schools have largely abandoned their traditional role of assimilating them. “All I do is give them the opportunity to understand and become part of American civic life – that’s what being an American is all about, “executive director Bob Ponichtera told me. “People who live here have to know what’s great about this country.” He’s right, of course, but the fact that a group like Liberty’s Promise has to step in and do what our tax-supported public schools are not doing is disturbing, to say the least. A working knowledge of American history, warts and all, and its great democratic traditions is essential to preserving the little that’s left of our diminishing freedoms for future generations. But when even American-born kids aren’t learning much history and civics, as disappointing standardized test results confirm, you can be sure their immigrant classmates will have an even more tenuous grasp of what it means to be a self-sufficient citizen of a self-governing republic. Unlike past generations, immigrant children don’t learn to love their adopted “home of the free and the brave” sitting at a desk in the neighborhood public school. And while we should all be grateful that Liberty’s Promise is doing its best to step into the breach, it’s a great shame that it has to. |
Spilling fake blood
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This afternoon, as Examiner reporter Bill Flook and I were returning to the newsroom after lunch, we got stuck in an anti-war demonstration right outside our building on 15th Street. Before we knew what was happening, we were both splattered with red paint and the security guards wouldn't let us in because they were afraid the crowd would storm the building. A group of D.C. cops finally came to our rescue and dispersed the chanting, sign-wielding protesters. As anti-war demonstrations go, this one was unimpressive, mostly a bunch of professional agitators and pampered college students on spring break pretending to be revolutionaries. The level of discourse was evident earlier in the day when one speaker stood near a white tent erected in McPherson Square for the occasion and railed against cars, suburbs, and... houses! Yes, the place you lay your head each night is now on the list of Public Enemies right alongside Dick Cheney. Who knew? While I waited, I wondered if any of the paint throwers had read the NYT article on how some Iraqis hanged a 10-year-old girl in Basra and left her body dangling for three days as a warning to others not to cooperate with mostly British forces then surrounding the city or rise up against Saddam Hussein. Resistance to the invasion I get. But did the "Great American Satan" make them do that, too? |
Culling the flock
| The major event during Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Washington next month will not be the outdoor Mass he will celebrate at the new Nationals’ stadium, but a private meeting at the Catholic University of America (CUA). With the presidents of every Catholic college and university in the United States – all 213 of them – in attendance, the pontiff is expected to lay down the [canon] law. Manassas resident Patrick Reilly, founder of the Cardinal Newman Society, says Pope Benedict will likely return to a favorite theme: the crisis in Catholic education today. The former head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, the pope has made it his mission to revitalize Catholic culture. But he won’t find much of it in these dramatically secularized institutions, where political correctness is often given more deference than church teachings. For example, Georgetown Law School now funds student internships at abortion rights groups, and the controversial “Vagina Monologues” has been performed (or approved) on more than 100 Catholic campuses, including Notre Dame. Reilly says the pope will remind Catholic college presidents that the bishops retain authority over their institutions, and that since 2000, canon law requires that any faculty members who teach Catholic theology must sign a “mandatum” indicating they are in accord with the church’s teaching magisterium. Reilly believes this less publicized meeting will have the most long-term impact on the Catholic Church in America, whose members have been dwindling in recent years - and would in fact be decreasing were it not for the huge influx of Hispanic immigrants. CUA has come a long way since then Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith who was nicknamed “Cardinal No” for his strict enforcement of church doctrine, pushed to get rid of dissident theologian Fr. Charles Curran. CUA now has the only theology department in the country that is in full accord with Catholic teaching on such hot-button moral issues as abortion, gay marriage, priestly celibacy, embryonic stem cell research and liberation theology. The Newman Society, a group dedicated to renewal of Catholic higher education, believes that Catholic colleges and universities are ignoring the moral traditions that Catholic parents send their children there to learn and undermining their own mission. “They are the largest factor in the dissent and loss of the Catholic faithful in the United States,” Reilly says. “We consider this a truth-in-advertising issue.” Two years ago, for the first time ever, the Vatican’s Congregation for Catholic Education urged all Catholic colleges and universities, the vast majority of which are located in the U.S., to develop voluntary benchmarks of “Catholicity” that would be used to gauge their adherence to church dogma. But Reilly says there is no evidence that the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities has since followed suit. But after issuing a number of warnings and offering them a voluntary way back to orthodoxy, Reilly agrees that Benedict’s next step is likely to be enforcement, especially at nominally Catholic institutions like Georgetown, which the Newman Society considers “one of the worst” in terms of fostering Catholic identity. “Pope Benedict believes that a smaller, authentically faithful Church is better than one with more numbers that doesn’t believe in Catholic theology,” Reilly added. With the pope’s cull-the-flock mentality directed at straying academics who are the most likely to challenge his authority, the pontiff may soon get his wish. |
Another utopia bites the dust
| In March 1961, as the futuristic main terminal of Dulles International Airport was being built, Robert E. Simon, Jr. bought 6,750 acres way out in the Virginia countryside that once belonged to a physician name Wiehle - whose 19th century dreams including establishing a utopia on the spot. Simon, whose father co-owned New York’s Carnegie Hall, had embraced the New Towns movement which, unlike the strictly zoned suburbs of the 1950s, offered residential, commercial, industrial and cultural activities all in the same place. Today it’s called mixed-use development. Borrowing ideas from experimental Radburn, NJ, Simon built Reston, the first planned community in the Washington region. Its many features included a lake and the widely copied Reston Town Center. Simon believed nobody would ever want to leave his little paradise. It hasn’t quite worked out that way. In 1990, Reston had a nice mix of age groups: 21 percent under 18, 10 percent over 65, and the rest in the taxpaying 18-64 bracket. A decade later, however, there were 28 percent less retirees (who require less local resources) and 4 percent more children (who require more). In contrast, the retired population in unplanned Vienna skyrocketed 122 percent during the same two decades, while the number of youngsters declined 1 percent. Older people were staying put in Vienna, not Reston. And Reston couldn't keep South Lakes H.S. even close to capacity, even though other nearby schools were overcrowded. It’s been easy for backers of the Fairfax School Board’s recent redistricting debacle to describe their opponents as racists because South Lakes has a higher percentage of low-income minority students. What hasn’t been reported is the fact that much of the opposition to redistricting came from legal immigrants, many of them professionals who bought homes in certain neighborhoods specifically so that their children could attend some of the highest-ranked schools in the nation, including Madison H.S in Vienna. South Lakes is not on the list. After choosing where to live based on the quality of the school district, they understandably felt betrayed when the boundaries shifted right under their feet. So in just 50 years, Reston went from a planned utopia to a place where even discerning newcomers to America don’t want to live or educate their children. Meanwhile, unplanned Vienna is, by all accounts, prospering. The story of Reston is important because the Tysons Corner Task Force is now trying to do the same kind of thing to Tysons that Simon tried in Reston almost a half century ago. But planning doesn’t always work out the way it’s advertised. Fairfax County is forgetting – once again – that real communities are the result of slow, organic growth as residents gradually get to know each other through voluntary association, not a fast-buck developer’s dream or a socially-engineered utopia that never quite lives up to the hype. |
DC Examiner Local Opinion Editor Barbara Hollingsworth on local issues and politics.
- Where's the rest of the story?
- UPDATE: Another victim of overzealous Arlington social workers
- UPDATE: Tysons development will overload sewer system too
- UPDATE: Expelled from 'Expelled'
- What's yours is ours
- MoCo judge to blame for 3 kids’ deaths
- Learning what's great about America - but not at school
- Spilling fake blood
- Culling the flock
- Another utopia bites the dust
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