[speedgibson] Speed Gibson: Wrong Target

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Posted by Speed Gibson:
Wrong Target
http://speedgibson.powerblogs.com/posts/1187748151.shtml


   The [1]Fraters found this Minneapolis Star Tribue gem of an [2]Op-Ed
   penned by State Rep. Ryan Winkler.

     [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?

References

   1. http://www.fraterslibertas.com/
   2. http://www.fraterslibertas.com/2007/08/bridge-falls-bad-ideas-rise.html