This is excellent:

A veteran Rampart Division police officer was relieved of duty Friday after being accused of lying about a drug arrest. His suspension comes days before a judge is to decide whether to lift federal oversight of the department imposed because of a corruption scandal at the station six years ago.

Los Angeles Police Department Chief William J. Bratton suspended the officer after a six-month sting operation by internal affairs investigators. As part of the sting, officials set up a situation late Tuesday in which Officer Edward B. Zamora, 44, arrested an undercover detective, according to two sources.

Zamora said in his police report that the undercover detective dropped narcotics during the arrest, sources said, but surveillance officers knew that he hadn’t.

I think this is great. Everyone in LAPD should know that any suspect at any time could actually be an undercover Internal Affairs officer, testing the arresting officer’s courtesy and honesty. This can only increase public confidence in LAPD. In addition, it gives prosecutors the information necessary to review past arrests by this officer. We seek justice in the D.A.’s office, and don’t want to convict innocent people. Stings like this help us achieve justice.

Thanks to commenter nosh for the pointer (although he was far too rude about the way he tipped me off.)

Meet Karl Fleming, the L.A. riots version of Robert Fisk:

IT WAS EXACTLY 40 years ago today that I, a WASPy, Southern-bred Newsweek reporter in a Brooks Brothers suit and a crew cut, was attacked and almost beaten to death by angry blacks in a melee on a smoggy street in South-Central Los Angeles.

. . . .

I’d seen whites do things to black people that filled me with shame and rage — in the South and out of it — including overt acts of racism and violence by Los Angeles Police Department cops just as raw as what I’d seen in Alabama and Mississippi. I also knew about the lack of jobs, poor education, broken homes and lack of healthcare that young black men experienced in South-Central.

But I’d never expected to be the target of violence committed by blacks.

So my feelings were confused. And when the media came to interview me in the hospital (a white reporter beaten by blacks was big news), I gave them an answer I am sure surprised them; it even surprised me a bit. I said that knowing what I did about what black kids growing up in Watts went through, I might, were I one of them, feel like hitting some anonymous white guy in the head too.

Yup, it’s hard not to be reminded of Robert Fisk, who opened a famous piece for the Independent with this self-loathing paragraph:

They started by shaking hands. We said “Salaam aleikum” – peace be upon you – then the first pebbles flew past my face. A small boy tried to grab my bag. Then another. Then someone punched me in the back. Then young men broke my glasses, began smashing stones into my face and head. I couldn’t see for the blood pouring down my forehead and swamping my eyes. And even then, I understood. I couldn’t blame them for what they were doing. In fact, if I were the Afghan refugees of Kila Abdullah, close to the Afghan-Pakistan border, I would have done just the same to Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find.

Ripping apart someone’s ridiculous piece line by line is currently known as “Fisking.” But perhaps, in America, it should be known as “Fleminging.”

Anyone care to “Fleming” Fleming’s piece?

Pejman has an excellent movie review of United 93. His post also serves as an eloquent eulogy for the heroes of the flight.

Hot Air has video of Tony Snow performing his new duties. Instapundit points to Howard Kurtz saying:

[Snow] showed more emotion in 60 seconds than Scott McClellan did in three years.

True enough, as you can see from the video. But if he can take on Bill Maher — who (for all his faults, and they are many) is a well-informed, articulate, and intelligent guy — then he can take on a (I say this with all due respect) doddering old bat like Helen Thomas. Again, watch the video.

The other day I told you who is responsible for the crisis in which criminals are released from jail after serving a small fraction of their sentence. Blame the L.A. County Board of Supervisors and the voters who keep electing them:

The Supervisors say they are doing the best they can with the money they have. That’s a farce, of course. They could and should allocate much more to law enforcement. But they don’t expect to pay a political price for failing to do so. Because they won’t.

It all comes back to you, the voters and taxpayers. You keep voting down tax increases for law enforcement, on the (reasonable) theory that government ought to be able to provide for the public safety with the money it is already taking in. But you keep voting these same Supervisors into office, time and time again.

Blame yourselves.

Someone at the L.A. Times gets this:

It’s really an ingenious political operation when you think about it. L.A. County supervisors are invincible, tossing around citations and millions of dollars in discretionary funds to seed their own reelections but avoiding tough choices and answering to no one for the resulting debacles.

The King/Drew fiasco exposed by The Times, in which patients lost their lives because supervisors didn’t have the will to challenge incompetent hospital administration, got supervisors squirming, but only a little. They can always point to another supervisor, the state, the system, anyone but themselves, or they can simply claim the solutions are in the works.

“There’s no accountability,” says Bob Stern of the Center for Intergovernmental Studies.

It’s the same with dangerously overcrowded jails, the disastrous lack of oversight of conservators and other entrenched problems that affect millions of lives. And yet the only two supervisors up for reelection next month — Yaroslavsky and Molina — appear to be in no danger of losing their jobs.

Who said that?

It’s Steve Lopez, who attended a meeting the other day, and watched as the Supes discussed all manner of trivia, while ignoring the real issues:

With so many big stories in the news, all of them critical to the welfare of Los Angeles County, I dropped in on a Board of Supervisors meeting Tuesday to see which tough and thorny issue they would tackle first.

The housing crisis? The horrific consequences of releasing inmates early from grossly overcrowded county jails, as documented in Sunday’s Times? The raging immigration debate and its many implications for Los Angeles County, which has more illegal immigrants than any other county in the nation?

The meeting began at 9:30 a.m. with two supervisors missing and no explanation for their absence, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Mike Antonovich and Gloria Molina were the no-shows, which cut down on the usual parade of citations, commendations and photo ops that make the start of each weekly session feel like a Russian circus.

. . . .

Sure, a tiny bit of business was conducted Tuesday, such as approval of a $300,000 payout to “the family of a man who died while in sheriff’s custody.” Then they moved on to other deaths.

Knabe honored, among others, a woman from his district who “was an avid player of the slots in Vegas.” It goes without saying, except in Knabe’s case, that she and the others on his list “will be sorely missed by all.” I’m surprised the supes don’t have a different color guard brigade come out each week to play taps and pick up several citations.

[Lopez describes several more dead people honored by the Supervisors.]

But there was one group of dead folks they never got around to discussing: The 16 people allegedly killed by guys who were supposed to be in jail but had been let out early because of county budget cuts.

The Get Out of Jail Free Program also resulted in charges for 518 robberies, 215 sex offenses, 641 weapons violations, 635 drunk-driving incidents, 1,443 assaults and 20 kidnappings during time the alleged perpetrators should have been locked up.

Why were those inmates released early? Not enough cells to keep them all. Why not? Not enough money to build new ones or pay additional staff, according to Sheriff Lee Baca. And what are the supervisors doing about this problem, which has been festering for many years?

They’re working on it.

Read the whole thing.

The AP reports:

Mexico said Tuesday that it would file lawsuits in U.S. courts if National Guard troops on the border become directly involved in detaining migrants.

And I am announcing that if any such lawsuit is filed, I will file a lawsuit against the plaintiffs, for intentionally causing me the emotional distress of having to read about such a frivolous lawsuit.

Whose lawsuit do you think would be more sanctionable? Theirs, or mine?

I think this would be an even stupider lawsuit than Michael Cohn’s.