Be nice to the District’s news reporters

The P-T runs a this Associated Press story on the biggest news in bad cops—the meltdown of the OC Sheriff. You want allegations of Christian sex, cash, yachts, boxing, kickbacks, and scams? Read. And then consider: though the AP story doesn’t mention it, everything in the indictment appeared first in OC Weekly, birthplace of the staff of the District Weekly. I won’t boast (again—because I’ve already done so) about our connection with R. Scott Moxley (the OCW reporter who busted open a majority of the biggest scandals in the OC Sheriff’s Department). But this AP story—and Dave Wielenga’s recent posts on the Queen Mary—reminds me of Steve Lowery’s famous “Sermon of the Muffin Basket,” which may be found in its entirety here. Steve’s sermon was a kind of open letter, his reaction to OCW reporter Nick Schou’s investigation of a Huntington Beach official (later indicted and then found guilty of bad stuff whilst in office). It applies equally to the District Weekly, and reads in part:

“And, dude, if you’re a politician from Huntington Beach, I would sincerely consider sending these boys a muffin basket, you know, and hope the Angel of Death passes you over. If they do come calling, you answer your question, cop to anything and thank them for their time. It’s like I told this guy Jeff, who was getting his head rammed into a car bumper by my best friend Dom out by the convent. ‘Stay down,’ I told him. ‘Take your beating and stay down.’ It wasn’t like he didn’t have it coming. He clearly blew the palming call in the finals of the St. Raymond’s intramural basketball league; Dom had to do something. We should have easily romped over the team of Dave Domenici, who everyone knew always took an extra step to the hoop, but Jeff conveniently missed that while calling palming when what he had seen was in fact an optical illusion stemming from my superior hand and foot speed, which I told Jeff before, after and during his beating. The point is Jeff was clearly responsible for slamming his head into the back of a car—which, in those days, were made of steel—his biggest mistake being trying to get up.”

Tags: basketball and bumpers, Dave Wielenga, investigative reporting, muffin baskets, Queen Mary, sheriff carona, Steve Lowery