Iseman sues NY Times
Vicki Iseman, the lobbyist The NY Times suggested was having a romantic relationship with Sen. John McCain, is suing the Times for defamation.
Novak enters new year in recovery
With my secret connections in the dark and sinister world of conservative opinion-making, I have learned that columnist Bob Novak was released from a second stint at Duke University’s hospital today and begins what is expected to be a long recuperation into 2009. Novak fans can take comfort in knowing that his column certainly will return to this newspaper’s opinion pages if he is at all able to resume writing.
You need more information, which I might not give you
Illinois Gov. Rod Blogojevich’s attorney contradicted himself today in just the sort of way that people who play loose with the truth sometimes do. Testifying before an Illinois House committee considering impeachment of the governor, attorney Ed Genson said, hey, all this impeachment talk is based on some snippets of phone conversations taken out of context, so let’s hold on here and not move forward until all the facts are out.
Here is how USA Today put it:
Attorney Ed Genson complained bitterly that lawmakers were considering snippets of tape-recorded conversations that are quoted in a criminal complaint against the Democratic governor. He said no one knows the full context of those remarks or whether they are quoted accurately.
“We are fighting shadows, and that’s not right,” Genson said.
As if in response to or perhaps in anticipation of that statement, “Meanwhile, federal prosecutors filed a motion Monday asking for court permission to release four of the Blagojevich conversations caught by wiretaps,” the paper reported.
“A judge will hear the motion next week. Genson said he hadn’t seen the federal request and didn’t know whether he would support the release of the recordings.”
I just love that. One minute he says it’s so unfair that his client is “fighting shadows” because the full content of the tapes isn’t public, the next he says he doesn’t know if he’ll fight to keep the recordings sealed.
Why are inner-city homicides up in Boston?
Today’s Boston Globe story on the dramatic rise in homicides among young black males in the city all but proclaimed with exclamation points that the cause was a drop in federal funds for youth programs.
“A study analyzing homicides across the country shows that Boston is among six major cities that have seen the sharpest spikes in the number of young black males killing one another between 2000 and 2007, an alarming trend that comes at a time when the state is cutting back on programs geared toward helping troubled youths,” read the lead sentence.
The second graph gave the data: “The number of black males between 14 and 24 years old who killed in the city went up 78 percent to 64 between two two-year periods, 2000 to 2001 and 2006 to 2007, according to a Northeastern University study to be released today.”
The story repeatedly quotes the study’s author saying that the answer is federally funded youth programs and that the sudden withdrawal of federal funds for youth programs after 9/11 is the reason Boston’s youth murder rate shot up. It also quotes Police Commissioner Edward Davis on the disappearance of federal funds, some for crime fighting and some for youth programs. I wonder if he means Operation Ceasefire. The story doesn’t say.
Now, I haven’t had time to dig up the numbers on federal funding for youth programs, and I probably won’t. So I don’t know whether that money really dried up or not. But I do know that these murder numbers started to shoot up in Boston right about the same time the city stopped Operation Ceasefire, a law-enforcement operation that concentrated resources on getting violent young men off the streets and into federal prison.
Operation Ceasefire, which ran from 1996 to 2002, was widely credited with producing such a sharp drop in inner-city homicides in Boston that for two years not a single juvenile under age 17 was murdered in the city. The program was repeated all over the country. And it was no youth program.
Researchers at Harvard found Operation Ceasefire to be highly effective. They described the program this way: “Operation Ceasefire was based on the ‘pulling levers’ deterrence strategy which focused criminal justice attention on a small number of chronically offending gang-involved youth responsible for much of Boston’s youth homicide problem.”
City police, federal law enforcement agencies, judges, the DA, the US attorney, and social services worked together to find the worst offenders and lock them up. It worked.
But the program ended in 2002. (Maybe for lack of funding?)That’s roughly the same time this new study shows the homicide rate of young black men in Boston trending upward.
So we know for a fact that a get-tough law enforcement program credited with sharply dropping the city’s youth homicide rate ended at roughly the same time the homicide rate began to spike again, and we don’t know for sure whether any youth program money dried up (the story never cites any data for this), and yet the source of the homicide spike is credited to the disappearance of youth intervention programs.
That’s particularly funny given that two years ago The Globe reported that the city hoped to revive Operation Ceasefire to deal with the homicide rate that had risen after the program was ended.
In the Time magazine story linked above, Boston Police Sgt. Kathleen Johnson says she hopes Operation Ceasefire keeps going. “If we let up, the homicides could come right back again,” she said. “They are like a chronic disease.”
Well, Boston did let up. And the crime homicides came right back again. Hmmm. Wonder why.
Asides
I’ve been out sick for most of the past two weeks, so sorry for the blog silence. (Or maybe it’s, you’re welcome.) To get back into the swing of things, here are some random asides.
I hear there’s no power in the governor’s office. Yeah, it’s been out since Gov. Lynch was sworn in four years ago. Ba-da-bing!
The amazing story of a Special Forces operation in Afghanistan and how 10 soldiers (including Staff Sgt. Seth E. Howard of Keene) fought off as many as 200 attackers and escaped with their lives.
Red Sox fans, in case you weren’t aware, the team has gone to new lengths to remind you that your team is named after a pair of socks.
Maybe I just have a suspicious nature, but I think this story has “extramarital affair” written all over it.
Has Obama dropped the windfall profits tax idea?
I would like to have been at this event at Harvard’s IOP last night: Obama’s and McCain’s top campaign staffers discussing the election.
The nation’s toughest tobacco ban takes effect in Boston. There are only a handful of cigar bars in the city, and they will all be closed within a decade. Business at the NH border should get even better.
