[Speed Gibson,
Tuesday August 21, 2007 at 9:02pm]
Wrong Target
The Fraters found this Minneapolis Star Tribue gem of an Op-Ed penned by State Rep. Ryan Winkler.
First, if I ever find myself needing an investigator, I'm going to hire a detective, not an attorney. Why settle for half a loaf at twice the price?
Second, the best people to assess what happened are already working on it. We don't need no stinking Legislators or Special Counsels. They may in fact have the opposite effect, casting a pall of fear over what should be a technical board of inquiry. Let the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) folks do their job. What a lawyer thinks happened is incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial.
Third, who said anyone is to blame? The NTSB may simply find it was a perfect storm of small factors, each innocuous by themselves, but together added unidirectionally toward disaster. The same was true of the Titanic, where even a pair of binoculars in the crow's nest might have spotted the iceberg in time.
Keep the Legislature out of this whole project for as long as possible. If the Governor can find either the courage or political horse sense to avoid calling a Special Session, the engineers will be in charge until at least March.
If Rep. Winkler wants to investigate something, how about Light Rail, Ethanol, or Education Minnesota?
[T]he Legislature should appoint a special counsel for its joint committee to investigate the bridge collapse. The mission of the joint committees is to seek the truth and to establish who had any responsibility for the collapse, regardless of political party, branch of government or limits of liability insurance. To deliver on this mission, the joint committee will need a special counsel to perform the investigation in a way that only a prosecutor knows how to do, and the committee must stand ready with the Legislature's subpoena power to back up that investigation.This is a truly awful idea, and clearly written by an attorney, almost certainly DFL. I didn't cheat - I just now Googled it - and right on both counts. It's worse than that even. He's from Golden Valley, sister city of Pyongyang as I think one of the Fraters once observed. But on with the fisk.
First, if I ever find myself needing an investigator, I'm going to hire a detective, not an attorney. Why settle for half a loaf at twice the price?
Second, the best people to assess what happened are already working on it. We don't need no stinking Legislators or Special Counsels. They may in fact have the opposite effect, casting a pall of fear over what should be a technical board of inquiry. Let the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) folks do their job. What a lawyer thinks happened is incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial.
Third, who said anyone is to blame? The NTSB may simply find it was a perfect storm of small factors, each innocuous by themselves, but together added unidirectionally toward disaster. The same was true of the Titanic, where even a pair of binoculars in the crow's nest might have spotted the iceberg in time.
Keep the Legislature out of this whole project for as long as possible. If the Governor can find either the courage or political horse sense to avoid calling a Special Session, the engineers will be in charge until at least March.
If Rep. Winkler wants to investigate something, how about Light Rail, Ethanol, or Education Minnesota?