Not So Fast, Officer!

Jim Dwyer of the New York Times wrote a most interesting piece Wednesday about a phenomenon that seems to be on the rise. He profiled the case of an encounter between a bicyclist and a New York City police officer that is now resonating through the corridors of 1 Police Plaza (headquarters) here. A bit of explanation is in order here.

Periodically, an organization called Critical Mass holds a sort of  bike-a-thon through the streets of Manhattan. They do so to call attention to the need for more New Yorkers to start pedaling and stop driving, among other things. For reasons best known to themselves, the NYPD doesn't care much for these bicycle demonstrations. So it was last Friday that one cop decided to knock a cyclist off his bike with a picture perfect football tackle, then charge the rider with a variety of offenses.

There was only one problem. Somebody managed to make a videotape of the incident. Before you knew it, the whole thing was on YouTube, and nearly 400,000 people saw what was obviously a cop out of control. To make matters worse, people got a window into how cops will occasionally lie like a rug to cover their own misconduct. The story the officer told bore absolutely no resemblance to what the tape showed.

This isn't the first time this inexpensive digital monitoring has caught cops making up stories to justify arrests. Sadly, the offending cops don't get charged with perjury, as they should. In this most recent case, even the police commissioner, usually a staunch defender of his people, couldn't come up with a valid explanation for the incident, or the cop's version of it. The police union here is backing the cop, saying he was just trying to stop a cyclist who was a danger on the street.

Maybe he didn't see the tape. 

The Best Things in Life ARE Free

Sen. John McCain, as most know, hasn't raised nearly as much money for advertising as his opponent Barack Obama. So what does he do? He creates an ad that's sure to generate plenty of free airings by news outlets hungry for anything during this lull in the election cycle.

McCain's new ad attacks Obama for canceling a visit to wounded troops in Germany during his overseas trip. The ad says Obama bowed out because he couldn't bring television cameras. Obama himself has said he had no intention of bringing cameras on the visit, but no matter. Exposure trumps inaccuracy every time.

The ad began running this past Saturday. It has run as a paid commercial roughly a dozen times to date. Yet it's run literally hundreds of times, for free, as the network and cable news outlets highlight the controversy it has created. Is there a lesson to be learned from this? If so, is it that a candidate should run a wildly inaccurate ad during a time when he or she knows there's little other news to cover?

The news outlets ought to know better, and they do. They can cover the controversy without showing the ad every time they do. McCain himself ought to know better as well. What's good for the goose is also good for the gander. How will he respond if Barack Obama does what he's already done and gets an equal amount of free news coverage of a paid advertisement?

And when will all this end? 

A Different Kind of Affirmative Action

That bunch of lawbreakers at Alberto Gonzales' Justice Dept. are finally being exposed. An internal report says senior aides to the then Attorney General used politics to guide their hiring decisions for a number of important jobs. The interesting part is they often picked less qualified candidates as long as they were seen as card carrying Republicans.

The person at the center of this nonsense, Monica Goodling, was a top aide to Gonzales. She managed a meteoric rise after coming to the Justice Dept. from (and this should tip you off) the Republican National Committee. She herself admitted she may have "crossed the line" in using politics to guide hiring when she testified last year before Congress.  This new report says she was being modest.

It alleges Goodling and other top aides to Gonzales established a pattern of hiring that is described by one official as a farm system, filling temporary jobs with Republicans who could then be moved up. If a candidate was seen as too liberal, they were passed over, no matter how qualified they were. The report doesn't begin to quantify how many political hacks currently work in the department due to the Goodling affirmative action program.

Let's now see how many opponents of affirmative action who speak so loudly when it comes to black people raise there voices to decry this wanton misuse of taxpayer money. 

Bet there won't be many.   

Poll Vaulting

Oh, those polls! Wasn't it just last week that a series of Quinnipiac University polls told us Barack Obama was in trouble in four key states? Hadn't he gone from in front of to behind John McCain in Colorado? Hadn't a big lead in Minnesota virtually evaporated? And now, here comes a new Gallup poll that says something very different.

This, I suppose, should come as no surprise. Polls fluctuate based on a number of factors. Yet polls also become a big part of the media storyline in a presidential campaign. This is especially true now, during that fallow period before either national convention. So Gallup says Obama is now nine points up on McCain, and the important part is that the poll was taken after his overseas trip.

There's an interesting component of human nature on display every time polls are released. If the poll reinforces what someone already thinks, or is good news for a candidate a person supports, the poll has validity. On the flip side, if the poll is bad news, it's flawed or irrelevant. Polls are simply snapshots of a segment of the electorate at a given point in time, little more, little less. If they drive anything important, it's fundraising. 

When people hear commentators say the results of any poll are the voice of the American people, beware.

You are that voice.