Mr. Werner Goes to Washington

I recently returned from my first trip to Washington, DC since the fall of 2005. This trip was prompted by my need to work directly with my web/database programmer who's putting together the initial commercial version of deliverasong.com. We have a very tight schedule for our new site, which we plan to introduce just prior to the South by Southwest Music Festival in Austin this March. Hope we can meet that deadline.

He's doing this job after hours (has a daytime programmer's job), so I filled up the days in DC with visits related to the Traffic.com scandal. I met with several members of the press, several legislative assistants (including a Counsel for the Majority side and Deputy Legislative Director for the Minority side of the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform), and staff members from two non-profit government watchdog organizations (POGO and CREW) who I had talked with many times but never met in person. Now I have. I also met for two hours with a Special Agent and Supervisor from the USDOT's Office of Inspector General (OIG) to explain how the Traffic.com scandal works. Because this scandal has been going on since at least 1997 through two transportation bills and involves quite a few different people (including high-profile people), it takes a while to explain.

This week POGO issued their second Freedom of Information Act Request related to the Traffic.com scandal, this one to acquire Mr. Mineta's earlier Year 2000 Public Financial Disclosure Reports that were filed with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics. His most recent filing on record fails to disclose the details of his exercise of Trimble Navigation stock options, which (according to senior members of OGE I have talked with) he should have disclosed. Something fishy is going on here. Trimble is related to the Traffic.com scandal in a couple different ways, and I think (and convinced POGO) that this information is important.

One very interesting -- and almost surreal -- thing happened on this trip that relates to the title of this blog entry. I met with the Washington Bureau Chief of Mother Jones, who's interested in this scandal and just co-authored a related story in the magazine called The Highwaymen. During our meeting, he mentioned to me that Rep. Peter DeFazio (D,OR), who's the new Chairman of the House Transportation Committee's Subcommittee on Highways, Transit, and Pipelines, is very upset about a number of technology-related highway issues, including real-time traffic information. He strongly recommended that I try to meet with DeFazio during my trip. I then called DeFazio's office and tried to set up a meeting, but was unable to do so.

As luck would have it, the next morning, as I was sitting in the cafeteria of the Rayburn House Office Building having a cup of coffee prior to my meeting with legislative staff, who should walk in to cafeteria other than DeFazio! I went up to him and gave him a very quick summary of the Traffic.com scandal and said that I would be glad to drop off a bunch of background information about it (including some of my FAXes to the FBI). He was very receptive, and said I needed to give that information to his legislative assistant Kathy.

So after my meeting with the Government Reform staff member, I stopped by DeFazio's office to meet with Kathy. When I first walked in the door, the first thing that greeted me was -- surprise -- a big poster from the classic Frank Capra movie "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington." It seems that Rep. DeFazio won the award of the same name a couple years ago from the Taxpayers for Common Sense.

If you've been reading this blog, you know that my number one favorite movie of all time is Frank Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life," so in some sense I see this whole episode as (hopefully) foretelling. It reminds me of Victor Hugo's classic saying: "There's nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come." Getting this very repugnant scandal exposed to the light of day is an idea whose time is coming very soon.

Sayings like that -- which I also happen to believe are true -- give me inspiration to keep plugging.

Jerry