Foster care task force in Cleveland: Horrors! They’re not relying on horror stories!

    That must have been an amazing scene outside the Jane Edna Hunter building in Cleveland week before last. The members of the Obligatory Blue Ribbon Commission studying the county's Department of Children and Family Services came marching out and gathered in front of the building. The chairman unrolled a scroll and read aloud: HEAR YE! HEAR YE! THE OBLIGATORY BLUE RIBBON COMMISSION INVESTIGATING THE CUYAHOGA COUNTY DEPARTMENT OF CHILDREN AND FAMILIES DOES HEREBY PROCLAIM THAT ALL IS WELL! DCFS IS FUNDAMENTALLY SOUND!
    And what fools they looked like when, just two days later, it was revealed that they'd never gotten the very information they'd have to have to reach such a conclusion!

    None of that is true, of course. It is, however, the impression left by the King of Loaded Language, Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter Harlan Spector, in a story he wrote about the group's work published on August 13. In that story, Spector never actually lies, he just leaves an impression that is light years from the truth. It is a textbook example of the journalism of child welfare at its worst.

FROM SLEAZY…

    One can see the technique simply by comparing how Spector wrote the story first, before he found a way to spin it, and then a few days later. The first version, on August 10, at least began as a straightforward news account:

    …[T]he head of a task force examining the agency's reunification practices said the department is fundamentally sound.
   Even in the worst cases in which children known to the county were harmed, "there's nothing in these cases that suggests we need to upend . . . the system," said task force chairman David Crampton of Case Western Reserve University. He said the panel still expects to recommend systemic changes.
   "I don't think radical change is needed," he said. 

    Spector then used the rest of the story to try to undermine that conclusion – recapitulating, and in one case, distorting the known facts, in the same litany of horror stories dredged up over and over in the Plain Dealer's attempt to stampede the county into tearing apart more families. The distortion concerns the "cat feces case" discussed in detail in the previous post to this Blog.

    Then came a paragraph alleging that "Critics say the county has been too quick to return children to troubled households, too slow to remove them from risky environments and too conservative in launching investigations" followed by five paragraphs of a foster parent claiming DCFS was doing too much to keep families together , with no rebuttal from anyone, let alone those who might think the agency takes too many children needlessly – especially now that the Spector and his colleagues have set off a foster-care panic sending removals soaring by 60 percent.

…TO SLEAZIER

    But apparently this wasn't sleazy enough for Spector and/or his editors. So on August 13, he essentially rewrote the story with a far more sensational lead:

    A review panel that proclaimed Tuesday the beleaguered county Department of Children and Family Services is fundamentally sound has not received critical information to do its job, including case files about children who were killed or harmed.
    The agency has refused to allow the task force to review agency files of high-profile cases that spurred department Director Deborah Forkas to appoint the panel last spring. 

    While none of that is literally false, (although the part about "critical information" is very much in dispute) all of it is grossly misleading. For starters, notice how what was "said" on Tuesday was "proclaimed" by Friday, making the statement sound like more of a whitewash, and making the Special Task Force, as it's officially called, look that much dumber when they discovered they wouldn't get those supposedly crucial files.

    As for "beleaguered," it is, of course, Spector himself, and editorial writer Sharon Broussard who are "beleaguering" the agency. (Editorials are unsigned, but Broussard wrote the early editorials on these issues and, as far as I know, still has responsibility for them.)

    In fact, there is no evidence that children are any less safe now than they were in past years. Indeed, DCFS maintains that the most reliable available safety indicator – reabuse of children known to the system – has remained unchanged; something the Plain Dealer has chosen not to report – just as the Plain Dealer has chosen not to report the 60 percent increase in children torn from their homes.

    As for the files on the horror story cases, when it comes to judging the overall performance of DCFS, they aren't crucial and the revelation is anything but new. Indeed, the entirely-unattributed claim that this is
"critical information to do its job," is simply Harlan Spector's personal opinion.

MEETING MINUTES TAKEN OUT OF CONTEXT

    While Spector attributes the revelation that the task force won't get this information to meeting minutes, he doesn't mention that this actually appears in the minutes of the task force's very first meeting, on May 20. Perhaps Spector simply didn't bother to read the minutes at the time.

    The next time this issue arises is in the minutes of a task force meeting on July 15. According to Spector:

   Minutes of the task force's meetings show that the panel has not been given information it requested about the cases. The minutes don't specify which cases were requested, referring to them as "high profile and reunification cases."
   "The data will help the panel determine where in the process is the break down," said minutes from a July 15 meeting.

    But Spector took the meeting minutes, available in full here, out of context. The minutes actually say that a subcommittee dealing with a practice known as Team Decisionmaking (TDM) discussed items including:

   The difficulty in getting adequate data on the TDM practice concerns in the high profile and recent reunification cases; the data will help the panel determine where in the process is the break down. [Emphasis added].

So, in fact, the quote in question pertained to:
--One subcommittee of the panel.
--Data from the files, not the files themselves.
--A "breakdown" not in the entire Cuyahoga County child welfare system, but in one facet of that system, Team Decisionmaking, in these particular cases.   

   And for the "reunification cases," which are 122 of the approximately 126 at issue, Forkas has said she will provide the data.

    As I've said often on this Blog, most recently just last week, I believe not only Obligatory Blue Ribbon Commissions but every member of the press and the public should be able to see nearly everything in every case file. But that's a separate issue from whether Harlan Spector grossly distorted what the task force actually said.

HEADS WE WIN, TAILS YOU LOSE

    Spector's distortions in these stories are part of a larger theme in Plain Dealer "reporting." From the moment the task force was announced, the Plain Dealer has whined about the fact that the members were "handpicked" by Forkas who told them what to look into.

    So after briefly noting DCFS' claims that they couldn't provide the actual files in the horror story cases because prosecutors asked them not to share those files, and after briefly paraphrasing the task force's reasoning for not needing horror stories to evaluate the overall performance of the agency (more on that below), Spector writes:

    The denial of case records nonetheless indicates the extent to which the county has shaped the outside review of the department. Forkas appointed the 32-member panel and assigned the group areas of study. [Emphasis added.]

   You do have to admire the work of a true master in almost any field – and once again, with that paragraph, Spector shows his mastery of loaded language. Because, again, it's literally true, but grossly misleading.

   Who, exactly would the Plain Dealer like to see name a task force like this? If, say, the County Commissioners had named the task force, that would make them no more independent, since the commissioners have ultimate responsibility for DCFS.

   In fact, the membership of the Task Force looks just about like the membership of almost every other Obligatory Blue Ribbon Commission named when newspapers rediscover that their communities have child welfare agencies and that sometimes children known to those agencies die.

   As for the claim that Forkas "assigned the group areas of study" in fact, Forkas gave the task force a very broad charge. According to the minutes from the first meeting:

The charge issued to the panel was as follows: to develop specific recommendations focusing on decision points related to the reunification process and the decisions that the agency makes; a review and recommendation on permanency, as well as recommendations to expand the agency's service delivery model related to evidence based practice.

    That covers pretty much anything the task force wants to cover – and neither Spector nor Broussard, has said what other issues they'd like to see the task force look at.

     But this kind of spin is perfect for the Plain Dealer's purposes. If the task force doesn't say what Spector and Broussard want it to say, then the spin is: "Well, what did you expect? Forkas named the task force." Had it issued harshly critical findings, then the Plain Dealer would have said "Even Forkas handpicked panel concluded…" Heads we win, tails you lose.

MISSING FROM THE TASK FORCE

    The real failing of the task force membership is that, like almost every other such panel ever created, it lacks either a birth parent who feels her or his children were wrongfully removed or at least a lawyer who regularly represents such parents. According to the minutes, once again, birth parents were to get a "focus group."

    Virtually every other constituency – doctors who specialize in child abuse, law enforcement, judges, lawyers who represent children in these cases, private agencies, and leading academicians are represented. It's the usual rounding up of the usual suspects. But that means that, as usual, the debate is limited to whether the child welfare agency is doing too much family preservation or just enough. The possibility that the county is doing too little to keep families together was off the table from day one.

    So when the task force says, (not proclaims, says), that DCFS is fundamentally sound, either:

      ● there is a massive conspiracy on the part of virtually every constituency involved in the study or practice of child welfare in Cuyahoga County, Ohio to cover up the failings of DCFS or,

      ● the system really isn't endangering children's lives by failing to take enough of them away.

   Take your pick.

THE EDITORIAL WRITER HAS HER SAY

    The next day, Broussard weighed in. She had a different explanation for why the task force somehow came to conclusions different from her own. They'd been duped!

   After regurgitating the same horror stories that supposedly prove DCFS is failing systemically, Broussard added that "On Friday came news that the task force has not been allowed to see the files on the very cases that triggered its formation." Apparently, Broussard also didn't read the actual minutes of the Task Force meetings. (It's not that much of a chore, they're only five or six pages each).

   But at least Broussard allowed the task force chairman, Prof. David Crampton to defend the task force's work:

    Task force chairman David Crampton, a respected child-welfare scholar and associate professor at Case Western Reserve University's Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, understandably bristles at the notion that he or other panelists are being manipulated into a bias in favor of Forkas or her department.
   "My job is not to protect the job of a Deb Forkas; it is to have the best child-welfare system in the country," Crampton says. "I'm not doing this for any other reason than that."
   He adds that any best-practices review of child welfare won't dwell on a handful of tragedies but instead will take the widest-angled view possible of systemwide practices. [Emphasis added.]

TYPICAL FAILINGS ARE REVEALED BY TYPICAL CASES

    And that last sentence illustrates why the task force has been vastly smarter about all of this than either Spector or Broussard.

    As I've noted often on this Blog, the way to figure out how a child welfare system typically functions is to look at the typical cases.

    Suppose the Plain Dealer were judged solely by its greatest screw-ups, the stories that required the most embarrassing corrections? They'd be the first to say that this is an absurd way to evaluate anyone. "Why dwell on a handful of our worst blunders?" the newspaper would say. "You should be taking the widest angle view of our total performance."

   There is one crucial difference, of course: When DCFS screws up, children die. But that makes it all the more important not to use horror stories to fashion solutions that only make things worse.

   Unfortunately, the Plain Dealer's own crusade already has had just that effect. As is discussed in detail in the previous post to this Blog, the work of the Plain Dealer, mostly Spector and Broussard, has set off a classic foster-care panic – with entries into care up 60 percent and exits down by one-third.

   Not only does this do terrible harm to the children needlessly removed, it also overloads workers so they have even less time to find children in real danger. That's why all over the country, in systems that, unlike Cuyahoga County are so large that it's possible to detect a pattern, over and over foster-care panics have been followed by more deaths of children "known to the system."

   In other words, when caseworkers, terrified of landing on the front page react to hyped, distorted, news stories like the ones in the Plain Dealer exactly the way Cuyahoga County caseworkers are responding now, the typical result is that more children wind up dead.

   To the extent that the minutes of the task force meetings reveal any failings, they suggest that Forkas is too sanguine about the panic, and the task force itself has not yet addressed it.

   But, as I've noted in every post about Cleveland, two former Plain Dealer reporters did – in their outstanding dissection of the last foster care panic in Cuyahoga County, Child Welfare Gone Haywire. That 2004 story warned of exactly the type of journalistic failure that now typifies Spector and Broussard's approach.

   Come to think of it, maybe the worst screw ups of DCFS and the worst screw-ups of the Cleveland Plain Dealer aren't so different after all.

UPDATED JULY 2: Michigan and Illinois: The difference is leadership

An excellent story in The Detroit News Tuesday about cuts to youth services in Michigan includes this excuse from a spokesman for Michigan State Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop:

"I don't know where we're going to get the money," said Matt Marsden, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop. "It's not for not wanting to. It's just a matter of trying to reduce the budget enough to pay for it."
But that's, um, nonsense (there's a better word, but I try to maintain the same standards as a "family newspaper" on this blog). It's nonsense when it comes from Bishop, just as it is nonsense when it comes from the Governor's office.

In another excellent story, from Interlochen Public Radio, about the end of Michigan's Family Group Decision Making program, the head of the DHS office in Grand Traverse County (long one of the state's most regressive) says much the same thing.

But while some things are being cut to close a big budget deficit, that's not the reason for the cuts in prevention and family preservation. As is documented in detail in NCCPR's reports on Michigan child welfare, those cuts are being made to finance big rate increases for the powerful private agencies that institutionalize children - almost always needlessly – in Michigan. And the cuts are going to finance a child abuse investigator/foster care worker hiring binge most of which is not, in fact, required by Michigan's class action lawsuit settlement.

The settlement between Michigan and the group that so arrogantly calls itself "Children's Rights," says caseloads need to be lower – but that's far more likely to happen if you spend more on prevention and family preservation programs that keep children out of the foster care system. As it stands now, odds are the new workers are going to be investigating all the new cases that result from the budget cuts, and shoving a lot more children into foster care, leaving Michigan with the same lousy system only bigger.

Illinois also operates under a class-action settlement, and Illinois also faced draconian cuts in child welfare services. But the ACLU of Illinois, which brought that lawsuit, went back to court and won an order from a federal judge barring implementation of what have been called "doomsday" budget cuts. The head of the Illinois child welfare agency himself testified about the harm the cuts would do.

Compare that to Michigan where DHS director Ismael Ahmed is swinging the ax himself, and, as far as I can tell, CR has neither gone to court nor used its high powered PR machine to even speak out against the cuts. UPDATE, JULY 2: CR Just announced it is fighting similar cuts in Connecticut. So why the silence about Michigan?

What a difference leadership makes.

And speaking of leadership: The Michigan cuts certainly don't say much for the effectiveness of the state's giant Child Welfare Improvement Task Force and its get-along-go-along-let's-all-sing-kumbaya-with-Ismael-Ahmed approach to advocacy.

Perhaps if they'd been a little more, oh, I don't know – "inflammatory"?

A Task Force co-chair tells foster children: Just keep on waiting

After NCCPR released its first report on Michigan child welfare, some people complained about the report's "tone." It was too angry, they said. The language was "inflammatory."

I make no apologies for that. But when I went to Michigan to release our second report on Michigan child welfare, I did tell some of the journalists I met with the reason for that tone and that language. It's the same story I often tell when speaking to groups of professionals in the child welfare field; a story I started telling after the most brilliant advocate I know in any field told me: "You've got to tell them why you're so angry."

And, as it happens, thanks to a smug comment by one C. Patrick Babcock, co-chair of the Michigan Child Welfare Improvement Task Force, in The Detroit News today, the story now has a postscript of sorts:

For most of my professional life, I was either a journalist or a professor of journalism. I covered my first child welfare story in 1976, while I was still a journalism student.

I interviewed a college student who was, at the time, 21. By the time she was nine years old, she had been in nine different foster homes. She told me she survived by keeping the rage inside, "unlike my five brothers who've been in every jail in New York State."

This is some more of what she said:

When you spend your life going from place to place and knowing you're not going to be in any place for very long, you learn not to reach out, not to care, not to feel.

My bitterness is not that I went through what I did, my bitterness is that I don't think it should have had to happen. There was no reason why my family's life should have been destroyed.

After speaking to this woman for two-and-a-half hours, I reached a couple of conclusions:

-- First, I was very glad I'd chosen journalism as a career.

-- Second, I knew I would keep coming back to the story.

As I did keep coming back to the story, I kept finding that the facts on the ground were not matching what the most widely-quoted so-called "experts" were saying. When the dichotomy became too much to bear, I wrote a book on the topic, Wounded Innocents. Ultimately, that led me into advocacy.

As I said, that interview with a former foster child was in 1976. Sixteen years later, I was working in that same city, and I took part in a panel discussion of foster care. Also on the panel was a representative of one of those big, "respected" private agencies with blue-chip boards of directors that lives on per diem payments for keeping children in foster care – a major player in that region's "foster care-industrial complex." He was going on, as they always do, about how supposedly children are taken from their families only as a last resort, and never for even a day longer than necessary.

But, he said, maybe after another generation, they would consider changing the financial incentives under which they operate.

After another generation.

Nothing that had happened to that young woman, that former foster child, and all who came after really mattered to him at all.

Why am I angry?

Because now it's another 17 years, and if anything, it's even more likely that children will suffer as that former foster child did – especially in states like Michigan.

All of which brings me to Mr. Babcock. From 1987 to 1991, he ran the Michigan Department of Social Services. (That's what the agency was called before it was renamed the Family Independence Agency, which is what it was called before it was renamed the Department of Human Services.) Judging by the agency's record at that time, apparently, he did a good job. But that was a long time ago.

Much more recently, Babcock co-chaired the giant Task Force that studied Michigan child welfare at the behest of DHS director Ismael Ahmed. For months, Ahmed pretended he would care about what the task force recommended. But when the Task Force said spend more on prevention and family preservation and work to stop taking away so many children, Ahmed promptly rushed out and did the opposite.

No problem, says Babcock. Asked by The Detroit News about the fact that Ahmed seemed to be moving in the opposite direction from what his Task Force recommended, Babcock replied: "We always knew it would be a long-term process."

In other words: After another generation…

Spitting in the face of your own “Task Force”

It's one thing to ignore your own Obligatory Blue Ribbon Commission, as I've come to call the groups that are appointed whenever a child welfare agency wants to duck responsibility for its failings. It's another to practically spit in the faces of the people who served on it.

You'd think Ismael Ahmed, director of the Michigan Department of Human Services, at least would have waited a decent interval before helping his boss the governor slash at least $19.8 million from funds for child abuse prevention, family preservation and basic help to ameliorate the worst effects of poverty. Depending on how you count things like cuts in day care, employment training and public assistance, the figure could be as high as $40 million or more. There even are cuts of at least $1.2 million for adoption support services and help for young people who've been failed their entire lives by DHS and now are "aging out" of foster care. (Voices for Michigan's Children has a breakdown of the cuts here.)

Many of these programs repeatedly have been cut back in past years; indeed the state of Michigan largely bailed out of funding prevention and family preservation years ago. As is discussed in detail in our report on Michigan child welfare and previously on this Blog they are funded largely on the backs of poor people themselves, using surplus funds from the federal Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program.

The new cuts come in the form of an Executive Order issued by the governor to close a deficit for the current fiscal year. They come on top of at least $38 million in cuts proposed for next year, discussed in a previous post to this Blog. In each case, the Governor couldn't have thought it all up all by herself.

None of these cuts really is required by Michigan's budget crisis. All these cuts could be avoided simply by not giving two big rate increases next year to providers of largely-worthless "residential treatment" – the worst form of "care" for foster children, and by using the great gobs of money going to hire more child abuse investigators and foster care workers to fund prevention and family preservation instead.

You can get a small but revealing sense of the contempt the people at DHS feel for these programs by the fact that they can't even get all of the names right. Family Group Decision Making, a key component of real reform, is referred to in the Executive Order as "Family group discussion making."

This is, of course, precisely the opposite of what Ahmed's own "Child Welfare Improvement Task Force" recommended.

But it's the same pattern as next year's proposed budget: Anything that might provide permanence or security for vulnerable children takes a hit – while the big, powerful private providers do just fine.

I don't know what's worse – Ahmed's hypocrisy or the providers' obscene priorities.

UPDATED, MARCH 22: How much damage can “Children’s Rights” do in just one state?

There is a brief update at the end of this post.
A group called Michigan's Children just put out an analysis of Gov. Jennifer Granholm's proposals for spending on human services. But here's the bottom line: Big cuts in prevention – at least $38 million – to help finance a big increase in spending on foster care and institutionalization.

That includes not only cuts in programs specifically aimed at family support and child abuse prevention, (much of it, as noted in NCCPR's Michigan report last month, actually funded by TANF surplus money that's supposed to help poor people become self-sufficient) but also cuts in concrete help for impoverished families, such as eliminating a planned raise in pathetically-low welfare payments and eliminating a raise in rates for day care providers.

The $38 million figure does not include de facto cuts in a slew of other programs, at least one of them a national model, which are being level funded in the face of increasing need – the same programs cited in NCCPR's Michigan Report in the section called "The coming TANF train wreck."

The whole thing is nuts.

Michigan's settlement with the group that so arrogantly calls itself Children's Rights requires lowering caseloads. The Michigan Department of Human Services has responded in the typical bureaucratic way - assuming the only way to do this is to hire more workers (as opposed to, say, increasing prevention and taking fewer children). So now the new workers will be hired by cutting prevention money – and that almost guarantees more cases. So all Michigan gets is the same lousy system only bigger.

Brilliant.

Worse, while rates for people who provide day care so single parents can work will be cut, rates for expensive, largely worthless residential treatment centers will be increased.

The two people most responsible for these absurd priorities are Marcia Lowry and Ismael Ahmed.

Marcia runs the group that so arrogantly calls itself Children's Rights – a group that long ago abandoned any reform effort that involved working to keep families together and instead claims it can "fix" foster care. She negotiated a settlement that allows Michigan to bleed prevention to fund more and more foster care. So instead of a repaired system, you just get a bigger one.

Ahmed runs Michigan's Department of Human Services. He replaced Marianne Udow who was the first DHS leader in more than a decade who actually understood child welfare – which made her a threat to the state's "foster care-industrial complex," it's network of powerful private agencies paid for every day they hold children in foster care. Ahmed is probably a good guy – but he's clueless - a pushover for anything the private agencies ask for. So it's no wonder they're practically swooning over Ahmed – and the settlement.

One of the leaders of the "foster care-industrial complex," Jim Paparella, Executive Director of Child & Family Services, Capital Area, and one of the most regressive voices in Michigan child welfare, (his exercise in "truthiness" on behalf of one of those awful parking place "shelters" was discussed in an earlier post to this Blog) sure sounded like a man in love when he wrote this in an October, 2008 op ed in the Lansing State Journal:

The settlement resulted from many long months of hard work and was accelerated by newly appointed DHS officials who came aboard last fall. Refreshing from the perspective of private nonprofit agencies in Michigan is the crystal clear vision, direction, and open-mindedness demonstrated by the new leadership. Over the past year, a strong sense of mutual respect and trust has been cultivated between the public and private services sectors, providing the sound foundation that will be needed to implement the major reforms called for in the settlement.

What Paparella really is saying is: Marianne Udow wouldn't give us whatever we wanted – Ismael Ahmed will. And sure enough, even as prevention is cut, Ahmed comes through with more money for institutions. At the same time, the proposed budget includes a cut in Family Group Decision Making, a program similar to a key component of the Annie E. Casey Foundation's Family to Family program – a program Ahmed already has curbed and which many of the private agencies hate. (The Casey Foundation is a longtime funder of NCCPR.)

In addition to the increases in funding for foster care and institutionalization, funding for adoption also is going up. That's not a bad thing in itself – adoption is a vital part of any good child welfare system. And there is nothing wrong with helping adoptive parents with the costs of adoption, even without a means test. But in past years, poor people in Michigan actually have been forced to, in effect, subsidize adoptions by middle-class families, since $41 million in adoption subsidy money came from TANF – money meant to be used to help poor people become self-sufficient. The Michigan's Children analysis doesn't say if this still is going on, but odds are that's unchanged.

So forget the huge report soon to emerge from the giant "Task Force" Ahmed named – the one that will be packed with platitudes about prevention. (I wonder if it will say that "children are our future"?) And don't believe the canned op ed pieces that will be written for task force members to fill in some blanks and pass off as their own in their local newspapers. (According to a power point presentation on the Task Force website a committee is preparing the "template.") The real story is in the budget. And the real story is ugly.

I first took a look at the budget analysis after reading an op ed by Jack Kresnak, a former Detroit Free Press reporter who now runs Michigan's Children. He called for an increase the tax on beer to avoid the budget cuts. At first I thought that was a good idea – after all, I'm a tax-and-spend liberal and proud of it. But looking at where Ismael Ahmed and Marcia Lowry have persuaded the Governor to increase spending makes it clear that any new money supposedly for prevention would only be used to free up more existing funds for more foster care and more money to institutionalize children. There's no point in raising taxes just for the same lousy system only bigger.

By the way, there are people who have complained that posts like these, and NCCPR's Michigan Report are too "inflammatory." (Hard to believe, I know.) I can live with that. There are a lot of good people at DHS and even the private agencies, where they've persuaded themselves that their largely worthless institutions aren't largely worthless. But that doesn't change the fact that, for decades, DHS and the private agencies have been hurting the children they're supposed to help. Isn't it time to light a fire under them?

UPDATE, MARCH 22: The New York Times Florida Newspapers have a story about a guy named Don Winstead, the man picked by that state’s Governor to oversee how Florida will use its federal stimulus money.  According to the story, Winstead has been “praised for helping the state land a federal waiver for foster care that earned the state extra money and more flexibility on where the money was spent.”

            That is, of course, the same waiver that Michigan first accepted, and then turned down at the last minute.  You would think Winstead’s counterpart in Michigan - whoever it was who made that idiotic decision to turn down the waiver - at least would have the decency to own up to it.

            And one would hope the Task Force would demand answers about the waiver and include them in its own report.  But don’t bet on it.  The Task Force, which meets again tomorrow, doesn’t seem interested in lighting a fire under anyone.