Last week, Republican Senator Jim DeMint made it pretty clear why the opponents of health care reform are fighting so hard. As he told a special interest attack group, "If we're able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him."
Here's how the President responded:
Think about that. This isn't about me. This isn't about politics. This is about a health care system that is breaking America's families, breaking America's businesses and breaking America's economy. And we can't afford the politics of delay and defeat when it comes to health care. Not this time, not now. There are too many lives and livelihoods at stake.
With Congress only days away from finalizing their plans for reform, it's time to stand up with the President and fight back against this disastrous brand of old-style politics. So we need as many people as possible to publicly support the President's principles for health care reform and call on Congress to act.
Before the first full votes in Congress, we'll publish the signatures in newspaper ads across the nation, to make sure your voice is heard.
Watch President Obama's full response, then add your name in support of reform. Or if you've already signed, please forward this message to every one of your friends and neighbors so they can join you.
The President is more dedicated than ever to passing health care reform that satisfies the three requirements he's been talking about for months: Health care reform must reduce costs, guarantee choice -- including the choice of a strong public insurance option -- and ensure all Americans have quality, affordable health care.
If we do not reform our broken health care system this year, we will only shackle future generations with spiraling costs and deteriorating care. The cost of inaction is simply more than this country can afford.
But the special interests who profit from the status quo won't go down without a fight. The ads, the smears, and the attacks -- targeting both President Obama and members of Congress who support reform -- will only get worse. So it's crucial that we show huge backing before Congress finalizes their plans this month.
Stand with President Obama on health care reform:
http://my.barackobama.com/hcdeclare
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Thank You NRA! Just the 'American Way of Life!' Aren't you PROUD?
SLAIN AS HE SAVES HIS BRO
July 21, 2009
A beloved and "brilliant" Bronx businessman was shot dead trying to protect his older brother from an armed mugger, police and witnesses said yesterday.
The tragedy unfolded Sunday night after Eric Baxter, 53, parked his car in front of the three-story brick home he shared with his brother, Sydney, 51, in Williamsbridge and was confronted by a thug demanding money, witnesses said.
Eric ran into the house, "screaming out, 'Call the police! Call the police!' " said pal and tenant Jacob Adams, 71.
Eric was still trying to close the door when Sydney rushed past him, Adams said.
"Sydney pushed his brother aside" to safety, Adams said. "Eric fell, and Sydney jumped over him and confronted the man. That's when the shots came."
The gunman shot Sydney three times in the chest. He died minutes later at Jacobi Hospital.
"What a soul," Adams said of Sydney. "He was a spark. He was a brilliant mind."
Adams said Eric -- "the softer one of the two" -- was beside himself with grief.
"He said to me, 'Rather than going out, if only my brother had helped me push the door so that the man wouldn't come in,' " Adams said.
The brothers, who owned the house at Lavonia Avenue and East 216th Street, were born in Jamaica and grew up in London before coming to The Bronx.
They ran a used-car dealership.
Sydney, who went to college in Wales, got a master's degree in business administration from Baruch College.
He worshipped at the First Ghana Seventh Day Adventist Church and became assistant treasurer of the Northeast Conference of the Seventh Day Adventists.
Adams said Sydney had raised up to $10 million for the church.
"He was a very hardworking person, very intelligent," the tenant said. "He was well-liked, very honored."
Sydney was the youngest of five brothers. Two of his brothers live in London, and a third lives in Maryland.
Neighbor Edna Sterling, 65, said she was asleep when she heard the shots.
"I heard a 'Boom! Boom!' when I was in my bedroom, and I thought it was firecrackers," she said.
She said she last saw Sydney Saturday morning.
"He was dressed for church," she said. " 'What a beautiful day,' he said. "That was the last time I saw him."
July 21, 2009
A beloved and "brilliant" Bronx businessman was shot dead trying to protect his older brother from an armed mugger, police and witnesses said yesterday.
The tragedy unfolded Sunday night after Eric Baxter, 53, parked his car in front of the three-story brick home he shared with his brother, Sydney, 51, in Williamsbridge and was confronted by a thug demanding money, witnesses said.
Eric ran into the house, "screaming out, 'Call the police! Call the police!' " said pal and tenant Jacob Adams, 71.
Eric was still trying to close the door when Sydney rushed past him, Adams said.
"Sydney pushed his brother aside" to safety, Adams said. "Eric fell, and Sydney jumped over him and confronted the man. That's when the shots came."
The gunman shot Sydney three times in the chest. He died minutes later at Jacobi Hospital.
"What a soul," Adams said of Sydney. "He was a spark. He was a brilliant mind."
Adams said Eric -- "the softer one of the two" -- was beside himself with grief.
"He said to me, 'Rather than going out, if only my brother had helped me push the door so that the man wouldn't come in,' " Adams said.
The brothers, who owned the house at Lavonia Avenue and East 216th Street, were born in Jamaica and grew up in London before coming to The Bronx.
They ran a used-car dealership.
Sydney, who went to college in Wales, got a master's degree in business administration from Baruch College.
He worshipped at the First Ghana Seventh Day Adventist Church and became assistant treasurer of the Northeast Conference of the Seventh Day Adventists.
Adams said Sydney had raised up to $10 million for the church.
"He was a very hardworking person, very intelligent," the tenant said. "He was well-liked, very honored."
Sydney was the youngest of five brothers. Two of his brothers live in London, and a third lives in Maryland.
Neighbor Edna Sterling, 65, said she was asleep when she heard the shots.
"I heard a 'Boom! Boom!' when I was in my bedroom, and I thought it was firecrackers," she said.
She said she last saw Sydney Saturday morning.
"He was dressed for church," she said. " 'What a beautiful day,' he said. "That was the last time I saw him."
Industry Cash Flowed To Drafters of Reform
Key Senator Baucus Is a Leading Recipient
Dan Eggen Washington Post
As liberal protesters marched outside, Sen. Max Baucus sat down inside a San Francisco mansion for a dinner of chicken cordon bleu and a discussion of landmark health-care legislation under consideration by his Senate Finance Committee.
At the table on May 26 were about 20 donors willing to fork over $10,000 or more to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, including executives of major insurance companies, hospitals and other health-care firms.
"Most people there had an agenda; they wanted the ear of a senator, and they got it," said Aaron Roland, a San Francisco health-care activist who paid half price to attend the gathering. "Money gets you in the door. The only thing the other side can do is march around and protest outside."
As his committee has taken center stage in the battle over health-care reform, Chairman Baucus (D-Mont.) has emerged as a leading recipient of Senate campaign contributions from the hospitals, insurers and other medical interest groups hoping to shape the legislation to their advantage. Health-related companies and their employees gave Baucus's political committees nearly $1.5 million in 2007 and 2008, when he began holding hearings and making preparations for this year's reform debate.
Top health executives and lobbyists have continued to flock to the senator's often extravagant fundraising events in recent months. During a Senate break in late June, for example, Baucus held his 10th annual fly-fishing and golfing weekend in Big Sky, Mont., for a minimum donation of $2,500. Later this month comes "Camp Baucus," a "trip for the whole family" that adds horseback riding and hiking to the list of activities.
To avoid any appearance of favoritism, his aides say, Baucus quietly began refusing contributions from health-care political action committees after June 1. But the policy does not apply to lobbyists or corporate executives, who continued to make donations, disclosure records show.
Baucus declined requests to comment for this article. Spokesman Tyler Matsdorf said the senator "is only driven by one thing: what is right for Montana and the country. And he will continue his open process of working together with the president, his colleagues in Congress, and groups and individuals from across the nation to get this legislation passed."
Baucus's fundraising prowess underscores the enduring political strength of the health-care lobby, which led all other sectors in donations to federal candidates during the last election cycle and has shifted its giving to Democrats as the party has tightened its control of Congress.
The sector gave nearly $170 million to federal lawmakers in 2007 and 2008, with 54 percent going to Democrats, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks money in politics. The shift in parties was even more pronounced during the first three months of this year, when Democrats collected 60 percent of the $5.4 million donated by health-care companies and their employees, the data show.
Many of these contributions have been focused on Baucus, Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) and other senators in the moderate camps of their respective parties, whose votes could prove crucial in a final health-care reform deal, as well as the leaders of five key committees leading the debate. Grassley, the Finance Committee's ranking Republican, received more than $2 million from the health and insurance sectors since 2003. House Ways and Means Chairman Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.) took in $1.6 million from the health sector and its employees over the past two years; ranking Republican Dave Camp (Mich.) received nearly $1 million.
But Baucus, a senator from a sparsely populated and conservative Western state who is serving his sixth term, stands out for the rising tide of health-care contributions to his campaign committee, Friends of Max Baucus, and his political-action committee, Glacier PAC. Baucus collected $3 million from the health and insurance sectors from 2003 to 2008, about 20 percent of the total, data show. Less than 10 percent of the money came from Montana.
Top out-of-state corporate contributors included Schering-Plough, New York Life Insurance, Amgen, and Blue Cross and Blue Shield; individual executives such as Richard T. Clark, chief executive and president of drugmaker Merck, have also made regular donations. Most of these companies, particularly major insurers, strongly oppose a public insurance option, which is favored by President Obama and top House Democrats but has not received support from Baucus's committee.
Baucus is a longtime centrist in the Democratic caucus, and his committee chairmanship has made him a key broker in the health-reform debate. Many former Baucus staff members, including two chiefs of staff, lobby on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry and other health-care players and have been closely involved in negotiations on the legislation.
John Jonas, a Patton Boggs health-care lobbyist who has attended a Baucus fly-fishing event and other fundraisers, said the Montana senator is "key to getting anything done" when it comes to health-care legislation.
"This is not an overwhelmingly liberal Congress, and it's certainly not a liberal Senate," said Jonas, whose clients include Bristol-Myers Squibb, Pfizer and Northwestern Mutual. "I think Max is uniquely situated to try to accomplish that, because he's more of a centrist and moderate Democrat than others are."
But Jerry Flanagan, a health-care analyst with Consumer Watchdog, a California-based advocacy group, said the tide of campaign contributions amounts to "a huge down payment" by companies that expect favorable policies in return. "That is the cold reality of big-money politics," he said.
Baucus won easy reelection in the fall, but he has continued to hold fundraisers since then. In addition to the fly-fishing event, he held his "Eighth Annual Ski and Snowmobile Weekend" in Big Sky in February and celebrated the start of his sixth term with a $10,000-a-table dinner at the Washington Court Hotel later that month. Aides say another fundraiser scheduled for July 7 at Bistro Bis in Capitol Hill was scrapped.
Baucus's office declined to provide attendance and donation details about his fundraising events, and federal records laws do not require such disclosures. Starting in June, aides say, Baucus adopted an internal office policy to refuse contributions from health-care PACs and to continue doing so until after Congress passes reform legislation.
But new Federal Election Commission documents filed last week show that individual lobbyists and others with health-care connections continued to make contributions to Baucus committees throughout June. Examples from Baucus's Glacier PAC include $5,000 from the Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of America and $2,500 from lobbyists with U.S. Strategies, which represents numerous health-care firms. Overall, half of the $110,000 in donations to the PAC from April to June came from health-care firms and lobbyists, including Schering-Plough, Medtronic and New York Life.
Craig Holman, government affairs lobbyist for the Public Citizen advocacy group, said the continued fundraising by Baucus during the health-care debate is "very troubling."
"He's doing all this fundraising right in the middle of this effort to mark up a bill," Holman said. "When you put these events close to matters concerning these lobbyists, clearly it's a signal. You are expected to show up with a check."
Baucus and his aides strongly dispute any assertion that campaign contributions have an impact on the senator's policy views and proposals. Aides say he has frequently backed policies opposed by health-care companies, including support for greater availability of generic drugs, allowing drug imports from Canada and cutting payments to the Medicare Advantage plan.
During an interview earlier this year with the Missoulian newspaper, Baucus said that "no one gets special treatment." He added: "Your word is your bond back there."
Dan Eggen Washington Post
As liberal protesters marched outside, Sen. Max Baucus sat down inside a San Francisco mansion for a dinner of chicken cordon bleu and a discussion of landmark health-care legislation under consideration by his Senate Finance Committee.
At the table on May 26 were about 20 donors willing to fork over $10,000 or more to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, including executives of major insurance companies, hospitals and other health-care firms.
"Most people there had an agenda; they wanted the ear of a senator, and they got it," said Aaron Roland, a San Francisco health-care activist who paid half price to attend the gathering. "Money gets you in the door. The only thing the other side can do is march around and protest outside."
As his committee has taken center stage in the battle over health-care reform, Chairman Baucus (D-Mont.) has emerged as a leading recipient of Senate campaign contributions from the hospitals, insurers and other medical interest groups hoping to shape the legislation to their advantage. Health-related companies and their employees gave Baucus's political committees nearly $1.5 million in 2007 and 2008, when he began holding hearings and making preparations for this year's reform debate.
Top health executives and lobbyists have continued to flock to the senator's often extravagant fundraising events in recent months. During a Senate break in late June, for example, Baucus held his 10th annual fly-fishing and golfing weekend in Big Sky, Mont., for a minimum donation of $2,500. Later this month comes "Camp Baucus," a "trip for the whole family" that adds horseback riding and hiking to the list of activities.
To avoid any appearance of favoritism, his aides say, Baucus quietly began refusing contributions from health-care political action committees after June 1. But the policy does not apply to lobbyists or corporate executives, who continued to make donations, disclosure records show.
Baucus declined requests to comment for this article. Spokesman Tyler Matsdorf said the senator "is only driven by one thing: what is right for Montana and the country. And he will continue his open process of working together with the president, his colleagues in Congress, and groups and individuals from across the nation to get this legislation passed."
Baucus's fundraising prowess underscores the enduring political strength of the health-care lobby, which led all other sectors in donations to federal candidates during the last election cycle and has shifted its giving to Democrats as the party has tightened its control of Congress.
The sector gave nearly $170 million to federal lawmakers in 2007 and 2008, with 54 percent going to Democrats, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks money in politics. The shift in parties was even more pronounced during the first three months of this year, when Democrats collected 60 percent of the $5.4 million donated by health-care companies and their employees, the data show.
Many of these contributions have been focused on Baucus, Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) and other senators in the moderate camps of their respective parties, whose votes could prove crucial in a final health-care reform deal, as well as the leaders of five key committees leading the debate. Grassley, the Finance Committee's ranking Republican, received more than $2 million from the health and insurance sectors since 2003. House Ways and Means Chairman Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.) took in $1.6 million from the health sector and its employees over the past two years; ranking Republican Dave Camp (Mich.) received nearly $1 million.
But Baucus, a senator from a sparsely populated and conservative Western state who is serving his sixth term, stands out for the rising tide of health-care contributions to his campaign committee, Friends of Max Baucus, and his political-action committee, Glacier PAC. Baucus collected $3 million from the health and insurance sectors from 2003 to 2008, about 20 percent of the total, data show. Less than 10 percent of the money came from Montana.
Top out-of-state corporate contributors included Schering-Plough, New York Life Insurance, Amgen, and Blue Cross and Blue Shield; individual executives such as Richard T. Clark, chief executive and president of drugmaker Merck, have also made regular donations. Most of these companies, particularly major insurers, strongly oppose a public insurance option, which is favored by President Obama and top House Democrats but has not received support from Baucus's committee.
Baucus is a longtime centrist in the Democratic caucus, and his committee chairmanship has made him a key broker in the health-reform debate. Many former Baucus staff members, including two chiefs of staff, lobby on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry and other health-care players and have been closely involved in negotiations on the legislation.
John Jonas, a Patton Boggs health-care lobbyist who has attended a Baucus fly-fishing event and other fundraisers, said the Montana senator is "key to getting anything done" when it comes to health-care legislation.
"This is not an overwhelmingly liberal Congress, and it's certainly not a liberal Senate," said Jonas, whose clients include Bristol-Myers Squibb, Pfizer and Northwestern Mutual. "I think Max is uniquely situated to try to accomplish that, because he's more of a centrist and moderate Democrat than others are."
But Jerry Flanagan, a health-care analyst with Consumer Watchdog, a California-based advocacy group, said the tide of campaign contributions amounts to "a huge down payment" by companies that expect favorable policies in return. "That is the cold reality of big-money politics," he said.
Baucus won easy reelection in the fall, but he has continued to hold fundraisers since then. In addition to the fly-fishing event, he held his "Eighth Annual Ski and Snowmobile Weekend" in Big Sky in February and celebrated the start of his sixth term with a $10,000-a-table dinner at the Washington Court Hotel later that month. Aides say another fundraiser scheduled for July 7 at Bistro Bis in Capitol Hill was scrapped.
Baucus's office declined to provide attendance and donation details about his fundraising events, and federal records laws do not require such disclosures. Starting in June, aides say, Baucus adopted an internal office policy to refuse contributions from health-care PACs and to continue doing so until after Congress passes reform legislation.
But new Federal Election Commission documents filed last week show that individual lobbyists and others with health-care connections continued to make contributions to Baucus committees throughout June. Examples from Baucus's Glacier PAC include $5,000 from the Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of America and $2,500 from lobbyists with U.S. Strategies, which represents numerous health-care firms. Overall, half of the $110,000 in donations to the PAC from April to June came from health-care firms and lobbyists, including Schering-Plough, Medtronic and New York Life.
Craig Holman, government affairs lobbyist for the Public Citizen advocacy group, said the continued fundraising by Baucus during the health-care debate is "very troubling."
"He's doing all this fundraising right in the middle of this effort to mark up a bill," Holman said. "When you put these events close to matters concerning these lobbyists, clearly it's a signal. You are expected to show up with a check."
Baucus and his aides strongly dispute any assertion that campaign contributions have an impact on the senator's policy views and proposals. Aides say he has frequently backed policies opposed by health-care companies, including support for greater availability of generic drugs, allowing drug imports from Canada and cutting payments to the Medicare Advantage plan.
During an interview earlier this year with the Missoulian newspaper, Baucus said that "no one gets special treatment." He added: "Your word is your bond back there."
Monday, July 20, 2009
U.S. Withheld Data on Risks of Distracted Driving
Driven to Distraction By MATT RICHTEL
In 2003, researchers at a federal agency proposed a long-term study of 10,000 drivers to assess the safety risk posed by cellphone use behind the wheel.
They sought the study based on evidence that such multitasking was a serious and growing threat on America’s roadways.
But such an ambitious study never happened. And the researchers’ agency, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, decided not to make public hundreds of pages of research and warnings about the use of phones by drivers — in part, officials say, because of concerns about angering Congress.
On Tuesday, the full body of research is being made public for the first time by two consumer advocacy groups, which filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for the documents. The Center for Auto Safety and Public Citizen provided a copy to The New York Times, which is publishing the documents on its Web site.
In interviews, the officials who withheld the research offered their fullest explanation to date.
The former head of the highway safety agency said he was urged to withhold the research to avoid antagonizing members of Congress who had warned the agency to stick to its mission of gathering safety data but not to lobby states.
Critics say that rationale and the failure of the Transportation Department, which oversees the highway agency, to more vigorously pursue distracted driving has cost lives and allowed to blossom a culture of behind-the-wheel multitasking.
“We’re looking at a problem that could be as bad as drunk driving, and the government has covered it up,” said Clarence Ditlow, director of the Center for Auto Safety.
The group petitioned for the information after The Los Angeles Times wrote about the research last year. Mother Jones later published additional details.
The highway safety researchers estimated that cellphone use by drivers caused around 955 fatalities and 240,000 accidents over all in 2002.
The researchers also shelved a draft letter they had prepared for Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta to send, warning states that hands-free laws might not solve the problem.
That letter said that hands-free headsets did not eliminate the serious accident risk. The reason: a cellphone conversation itself, not just holding the phone, takes drivers’ focus off the road, studies showed.
The research mirrors other studies about the dangers of multitasking behind the wheel. Research shows that motorists talking on a phone are four times as likely to crash as other drivers, and are as likely to cause an accident as someone with a .08 blood alcohol content.
The three-person research team based the fatality and accident estimates on studies that quantified the risks of distracted driving, and an assumption that 6 percent of drivers were talking on the phone at a given time. That figure is roughly half what the Transportation Department assumes to be the case now.
More precise data does not exist because most police forces have not collected long-term data connecting cellphones to accidents. That is why the researchers called for the broader study with 10,000 or more drivers.
“We nevertheless have concluded that the use of cellphones while driving has contributed to an increasing number of crashes, injuries and fatalities,” according to a “talking points” memo the researchers compiled in July 2003.
It added: “We therefore recommend that the drivers not use wireless communication devices, including text messaging systems, when driving, except in an emergency.”
Dr. Jeffrey Runge, then the head of the highway safety agency, said he grudgingly decided not to publish the Mineta letter and policy recommendation because of larger political considerations.
At the time, Congress had warned the agency not to use its research to lobby states. Dr. Runge said transit officials told him he could jeopardize billions of dollars of its financing if Congress perceived the agency had crossed the line into lobbying.
The fate of the research was discussed during a high-level meeting at the transportation secretary’s office. The meeting included Dr. Runge, several staff members with the highway safety agency and John Flaherty, Mr. Mineta’s chief of staff.
Mr. Flaherty recalls that the group decided not to publish the research because the data was too inconclusive.
He recalled that Dr. Runge “indicated that the data was incomplete and there was going to be more research coming.”
He recalled summing up his position as, the agency “should make a decision as to whether they wanted to wait for more data.”
But Dr. Runge recalled feeling that the issue was dire and needed public attention. “I really wanted to send a letter to governors telling them not to give a pass to hands-free laws,” said Dr. Runge, whose staff spent months preparing a binder of materials for their presentation.
His broader goal, he said, was to educate people about the dangers of distracted driving. “Based on the research, there was a possibility of this becoming a really big problem,” he said.
But “my advisers upstairs said we should not poke a finger in the eye of the appropriations committee,” he recalled.
He said Mr. Flaherty asked him, “Do we have enough evidence right now to not create enemies among all the stakeholders?”
Those stakeholders, Dr. Runge said, were the House Appropriations Committee and groups that might influence it, notably voters who multitask while driving and, to a much smaller degree, the cellphone industry.
Mr. Mineta, who left as transportation secretary in 2006, said he was unaware of the meeting.
“I don’t think it ever got to my desk,” he said of the research. Mr. Ditlow, from the Center for Auto Safety, said the officials’ explanations for withholding the research raised concerns. He said the research did not constitute lobbying of states.
And he said it was consistent with the highway safety agency’s research in other areas, like seat belts.
Mr. Ditlow said that putting fears of the House panel ahead of public safety was an abdication of the agency’s responsibility.
“No public health and safety agency should allow its research to be suppressed for political reasons,” he said. Doing so “will cause deaths and injuries on the highways.”
State Senator Joe Simitian of California, who tried from 2001 to 2005 to pass a hands-free cellphone law over objections of the cellphone industry, said the unpublished research would have helped him convince his colleagues that cellphones cause serious — deadly — distraction.
“Years went by when lives could have been saved,” said Mr. Simitian, who in 2006 finally pushed through a hands-free law that took effect last year.
The highway safety agency, rather than commissioning a study with 10,000 drivers, handled one involving 100 cars. That study, done with the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, placed cameras inside cars to monitor drivers for more than a year.
It found that drivers using a hand-held device were at 1.3 times greater risk of a crash or near crash, and at three times the risk when dialing compared with other drivers.
Not all the research went unpublished. The safety agency put on its Web site an annotated bibliography of more than 150 scientific articles that showed how a cellphone conversation while driving taxes the brain’s processing power, reducing reaction time. But the bibliography included only a list of the articles, not the one-page summaries of each one written by the researchers.
Chris Monk, who researched the bibliography for 18 months, said the exclusion of the summaries took the teeth out of the findings.
“It became almost laughable,” Mr. Monk said. “What they wound up finally publishing was a stripped-out summary.”
Mr. Monk and Mike Goodman, a division head at the safety agency who led the research project, theorize that the agency might have felt pressure from the cellphone industry. Mr. Goodman said the industry frequently checked in with him about the project and his progress. (He said the industry knew about the research because he had worked with it to gather some data).
But he could offer no proof of the industry’s influence. Mr. Flaherty said he was not contacted or influenced by the industry.
The agency’s current policy is that people should not use cellphones while driving. Rae Tyson, a spokesman for the agency, said it did not, and would not, publish the researchers’ fatality estimates because they were not definitive enough.
He said the other research was compiled as background material for the agency, not for the public.
“There is no report to publish,” he said.
In 2003, researchers at a federal agency proposed a long-term study of 10,000 drivers to assess the safety risk posed by cellphone use behind the wheel.
They sought the study based on evidence that such multitasking was a serious and growing threat on America’s roadways.
But such an ambitious study never happened. And the researchers’ agency, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, decided not to make public hundreds of pages of research and warnings about the use of phones by drivers — in part, officials say, because of concerns about angering Congress.
On Tuesday, the full body of research is being made public for the first time by two consumer advocacy groups, which filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for the documents. The Center for Auto Safety and Public Citizen provided a copy to The New York Times, which is publishing the documents on its Web site.
In interviews, the officials who withheld the research offered their fullest explanation to date.
The former head of the highway safety agency said he was urged to withhold the research to avoid antagonizing members of Congress who had warned the agency to stick to its mission of gathering safety data but not to lobby states.
Critics say that rationale and the failure of the Transportation Department, which oversees the highway agency, to more vigorously pursue distracted driving has cost lives and allowed to blossom a culture of behind-the-wheel multitasking.
“We’re looking at a problem that could be as bad as drunk driving, and the government has covered it up,” said Clarence Ditlow, director of the Center for Auto Safety.
The group petitioned for the information after The Los Angeles Times wrote about the research last year. Mother Jones later published additional details.
The highway safety researchers estimated that cellphone use by drivers caused around 955 fatalities and 240,000 accidents over all in 2002.
The researchers also shelved a draft letter they had prepared for Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta to send, warning states that hands-free laws might not solve the problem.
That letter said that hands-free headsets did not eliminate the serious accident risk. The reason: a cellphone conversation itself, not just holding the phone, takes drivers’ focus off the road, studies showed.
The research mirrors other studies about the dangers of multitasking behind the wheel. Research shows that motorists talking on a phone are four times as likely to crash as other drivers, and are as likely to cause an accident as someone with a .08 blood alcohol content.
The three-person research team based the fatality and accident estimates on studies that quantified the risks of distracted driving, and an assumption that 6 percent of drivers were talking on the phone at a given time. That figure is roughly half what the Transportation Department assumes to be the case now.
More precise data does not exist because most police forces have not collected long-term data connecting cellphones to accidents. That is why the researchers called for the broader study with 10,000 or more drivers.
“We nevertheless have concluded that the use of cellphones while driving has contributed to an increasing number of crashes, injuries and fatalities,” according to a “talking points” memo the researchers compiled in July 2003.
It added: “We therefore recommend that the drivers not use wireless communication devices, including text messaging systems, when driving, except in an emergency.”
Dr. Jeffrey Runge, then the head of the highway safety agency, said he grudgingly decided not to publish the Mineta letter and policy recommendation because of larger political considerations.
At the time, Congress had warned the agency not to use its research to lobby states. Dr. Runge said transit officials told him he could jeopardize billions of dollars of its financing if Congress perceived the agency had crossed the line into lobbying.
The fate of the research was discussed during a high-level meeting at the transportation secretary’s office. The meeting included Dr. Runge, several staff members with the highway safety agency and John Flaherty, Mr. Mineta’s chief of staff.
Mr. Flaherty recalls that the group decided not to publish the research because the data was too inconclusive.
He recalled that Dr. Runge “indicated that the data was incomplete and there was going to be more research coming.”
He recalled summing up his position as, the agency “should make a decision as to whether they wanted to wait for more data.”
But Dr. Runge recalled feeling that the issue was dire and needed public attention. “I really wanted to send a letter to governors telling them not to give a pass to hands-free laws,” said Dr. Runge, whose staff spent months preparing a binder of materials for their presentation.
His broader goal, he said, was to educate people about the dangers of distracted driving. “Based on the research, there was a possibility of this becoming a really big problem,” he said.
But “my advisers upstairs said we should not poke a finger in the eye of the appropriations committee,” he recalled.
He said Mr. Flaherty asked him, “Do we have enough evidence right now to not create enemies among all the stakeholders?”
Those stakeholders, Dr. Runge said, were the House Appropriations Committee and groups that might influence it, notably voters who multitask while driving and, to a much smaller degree, the cellphone industry.
Mr. Mineta, who left as transportation secretary in 2006, said he was unaware of the meeting.
“I don’t think it ever got to my desk,” he said of the research. Mr. Ditlow, from the Center for Auto Safety, said the officials’ explanations for withholding the research raised concerns. He said the research did not constitute lobbying of states.
And he said it was consistent with the highway safety agency’s research in other areas, like seat belts.
Mr. Ditlow said that putting fears of the House panel ahead of public safety was an abdication of the agency’s responsibility.
“No public health and safety agency should allow its research to be suppressed for political reasons,” he said. Doing so “will cause deaths and injuries on the highways.”
State Senator Joe Simitian of California, who tried from 2001 to 2005 to pass a hands-free cellphone law over objections of the cellphone industry, said the unpublished research would have helped him convince his colleagues that cellphones cause serious — deadly — distraction.
“Years went by when lives could have been saved,” said Mr. Simitian, who in 2006 finally pushed through a hands-free law that took effect last year.
The highway safety agency, rather than commissioning a study with 10,000 drivers, handled one involving 100 cars. That study, done with the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, placed cameras inside cars to monitor drivers for more than a year.
It found that drivers using a hand-held device were at 1.3 times greater risk of a crash or near crash, and at three times the risk when dialing compared with other drivers.
Not all the research went unpublished. The safety agency put on its Web site an annotated bibliography of more than 150 scientific articles that showed how a cellphone conversation while driving taxes the brain’s processing power, reducing reaction time. But the bibliography included only a list of the articles, not the one-page summaries of each one written by the researchers.
Chris Monk, who researched the bibliography for 18 months, said the exclusion of the summaries took the teeth out of the findings.
“It became almost laughable,” Mr. Monk said. “What they wound up finally publishing was a stripped-out summary.”
Mr. Monk and Mike Goodman, a division head at the safety agency who led the research project, theorize that the agency might have felt pressure from the cellphone industry. Mr. Goodman said the industry frequently checked in with him about the project and his progress. (He said the industry knew about the research because he had worked with it to gather some data).
But he could offer no proof of the industry’s influence. Mr. Flaherty said he was not contacted or influenced by the industry.
The agency’s current policy is that people should not use cellphones while driving. Rae Tyson, a spokesman for the agency, said it did not, and would not, publish the researchers’ fatality estimates because they were not definitive enough.
He said the other research was compiled as background material for the agency, not for the public.
“There is no report to publish,” he said.
Liberal Suicide March DAVID BROOKS
It was interesting to watch the Republican Party lose touch with America. You had a party led by conservative Southerners who neither understood nor sympathized with moderates or representatives from swing districts.
They brought in pollsters to their party conferences to persuade their members that the country was fervently behind them. They were supported by their interest groups and cheered on by their activists and the partisan press. They spent federal money in an effort to buy support but ended up disgusting the country instead.
It’s not that interesting to watch the Democrats lose touch with America. That’s because the plotline is exactly the same. The party is led by insular liberals from big cities and the coasts, who neither understand nor sympathize with moderates. They have their own cherry-picking pollsters, their own media and activist cocoon, their own plans to lavishly spend borrowed money to buy votes.
This ideological overreach won’t be any more successful than the last one. A Washington Post-ABC News poll released Monday confirms what other polls have found. Most Americans love Barack Obama personally, but support for Democratic policies is already sliding fast.
Approval of Obama’s handling of health care, for example, has slid from 57 percent to 49 percent since April. Disapproval has risen from 29 percent to 44 percent. As recently as June, voters earning more than $50,000 preferred Obama to the Republicans on health care by a 21-point margin. Now those voters are evenly split.
Most independents now disapprove of Obama’s health care strategy. In March, only 32 percent of Americans thought Obama was an old-style, tax-and-spend liberal. Now 43 percent do.
We’re only in the early stages of the liberal suicide march, but there already have been three phases. First, there was the stimulus package. You would have thought that a stimulus package would be designed to fight unemployment and stimulate the economy during a recession. But Congressional Democrats used it as a pretext to pay for $787 billion worth of pet programs with borrowed money. Only 11 percent of the money will be spent by the end of the fiscal year — a triumph of ideology over pragmatism.
Then there is the budget. Instead of allaying moderate anxieties about the deficits, the budget is expected to increase the government debt by $11 trillion between 2009 and 2019.
Finally, there is health care. Every cliché Ann Coulter throws at the Democrats is gloriously fulfilled by the Democratic health care bills. The bills do almost nothing to control health care inflation. They are modeled on the Massachusetts health reform law that is currently coming apart at the seams precisely because it doesn’t control costs. They do little to reward efficient providers and reform inefficient ones.
The House bill adds $239 billion to the federal deficit during the first 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. It would pummel small businesses with an 8 percent payroll penalty. It would jack America’s top tax rate above those in Italy and France. Top earners in New York and California would be giving more than 55 percent of earnings to one government entity or another.
Nancy Pelosi has lower approval ratings than Dick Cheney and far lower approval ratings than Sarah Palin. And yet Democrats have allowed her policy values to carry the day — this in an era in which independents dominate the electoral landscape.
Who’s going to stop this leftward surge? Months ago, it seemed as if Obama would lead a center-left coalition. Instead, he has deferred to the Old Bulls on Capitol Hill on issue after issue.
Machiavelli said a leader should be feared as well as loved. Obama is loved by the Democratic chairmen, but he is not feared. On health care, Obama has emphasized cost control. The chairmen flouted his priorities because they don’t fear him. On cap and trade, Obama campaigned against giving away pollution offsets. The chairmen wrote their bill to do precisely that because they don’t fear him. On taxes, Obama promised that top tax rates would not go above Clinton-era levels. The chairmen flouted that promise because they don’t fear him.
Last week, the administration announced a proposal to take Medicare spending decisions away from Congress and lodge the power with technocrats in the executive branch. It’s a good idea, and it might lead to real cost savings. But there’s no reason to think that it will be incorporated into the final law. The chairmen will never surrender power to an administration they can override.
That leaves matters in the hands of the Blue Dog Democrats. These brave moderates are trying to restrain the fiscal explosion. But moderates inherently lack seniority (they are from swing districts). They are usually bought off by leadership at the end of the day.
And so here we are again. Every new majority overinterprets its mandate. We’ve been here before. We’ll be here again.
They brought in pollsters to their party conferences to persuade their members that the country was fervently behind them. They were supported by their interest groups and cheered on by their activists and the partisan press. They spent federal money in an effort to buy support but ended up disgusting the country instead.
It’s not that interesting to watch the Democrats lose touch with America. That’s because the plotline is exactly the same. The party is led by insular liberals from big cities and the coasts, who neither understand nor sympathize with moderates. They have their own cherry-picking pollsters, their own media and activist cocoon, their own plans to lavishly spend borrowed money to buy votes.
This ideological overreach won’t be any more successful than the last one. A Washington Post-ABC News poll released Monday confirms what other polls have found. Most Americans love Barack Obama personally, but support for Democratic policies is already sliding fast.
Approval of Obama’s handling of health care, for example, has slid from 57 percent to 49 percent since April. Disapproval has risen from 29 percent to 44 percent. As recently as June, voters earning more than $50,000 preferred Obama to the Republicans on health care by a 21-point margin. Now those voters are evenly split.
Most independents now disapprove of Obama’s health care strategy. In March, only 32 percent of Americans thought Obama was an old-style, tax-and-spend liberal. Now 43 percent do.
We’re only in the early stages of the liberal suicide march, but there already have been three phases. First, there was the stimulus package. You would have thought that a stimulus package would be designed to fight unemployment and stimulate the economy during a recession. But Congressional Democrats used it as a pretext to pay for $787 billion worth of pet programs with borrowed money. Only 11 percent of the money will be spent by the end of the fiscal year — a triumph of ideology over pragmatism.
Then there is the budget. Instead of allaying moderate anxieties about the deficits, the budget is expected to increase the government debt by $11 trillion between 2009 and 2019.
Finally, there is health care. Every cliché Ann Coulter throws at the Democrats is gloriously fulfilled by the Democratic health care bills. The bills do almost nothing to control health care inflation. They are modeled on the Massachusetts health reform law that is currently coming apart at the seams precisely because it doesn’t control costs. They do little to reward efficient providers and reform inefficient ones.
The House bill adds $239 billion to the federal deficit during the first 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. It would pummel small businesses with an 8 percent payroll penalty. It would jack America’s top tax rate above those in Italy and France. Top earners in New York and California would be giving more than 55 percent of earnings to one government entity or another.
Nancy Pelosi has lower approval ratings than Dick Cheney and far lower approval ratings than Sarah Palin. And yet Democrats have allowed her policy values to carry the day — this in an era in which independents dominate the electoral landscape.
Who’s going to stop this leftward surge? Months ago, it seemed as if Obama would lead a center-left coalition. Instead, he has deferred to the Old Bulls on Capitol Hill on issue after issue.
Machiavelli said a leader should be feared as well as loved. Obama is loved by the Democratic chairmen, but he is not feared. On health care, Obama has emphasized cost control. The chairmen flouted his priorities because they don’t fear him. On cap and trade, Obama campaigned against giving away pollution offsets. The chairmen wrote their bill to do precisely that because they don’t fear him. On taxes, Obama promised that top tax rates would not go above Clinton-era levels. The chairmen flouted that promise because they don’t fear him.
Last week, the administration announced a proposal to take Medicare spending decisions away from Congress and lodge the power with technocrats in the executive branch. It’s a good idea, and it might lead to real cost savings. But there’s no reason to think that it will be incorporated into the final law. The chairmen will never surrender power to an administration they can override.
That leaves matters in the hands of the Blue Dog Democrats. These brave moderates are trying to restrain the fiscal explosion. But moderates inherently lack seniority (they are from swing districts). They are usually bought off by leadership at the end of the day.
And so here we are again. Every new majority overinterprets its mandate. We’ve been here before. We’ll be here again.
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Skepticism on Health Reform Mounts
President Is Set to 'Take the Baton'
As Skepticism on Health Reform Mounts, He Will Intensify His Efforts
Washington Post By Michael D. Shear and Shailagh Murray
Six months into his presidency, Barack Obama may have no greater test of his ability to translate personal popularity into a successful legislative agenda than the upcoming two weeks.
With skepticism about the president's health-care reform effort mounting on Capitol Hill -- even within his own party -- the White House has launched a new phase of its strategy designed to dramatically increase public pressure on Congress: all Obama, all the time.
Senior White House aides promise "an aggressive public and private schedule" for Obama as he presses his case for reform, including a prime-time news conference on Wednesday, a trip to Cleveland, and heavy use of Internet video to broadcast his message beyond the reach of the traditional media.
"Our strategy has been to allow this process to advance to the point where it made sense for the president to take the baton. Now's that time," said senior adviser David Axelrod. "I don't know whether he will Twitter or tweet. But he's going to be very, very visible."
Another senior White House aide added: "It's time to raise the stakes on this."
But even as Obama returns to full-time campaign mode, he is facing increasing calls to show that his presidency can manage the tough, nitty-gritty of lawmaking by cutting deals with his allies to keep his health-care legislation moving in the House and Senate committees.
Conservative Democrats in the House are promising to vote against reform as it now stands, and are preparing two dozen amendments, including measures aimed at lowering the effort's long-term cost. In the Senate, members from both parties are urging the president to break his campaign promise to preserve the tax-free status of health benefits. And a chorus of weary voices from Capitol Hill is urging him to abandon his demand for passage of bills in the House and Senate by Aug. 7.
"I don't think we should be bound by a timetable that isn't realistic," Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine), a key swing-vote on health care, told Obama last week as she reminded him that President Lyndon B. Johnson took 1 1/2 years to pass Medicare.
Obama has not officially budged on the timetable, although he and aides notably have not mentioned the August deadline in recent remarks. But he is quietly working with conservative, Blue Dog Democrats in the House on an amendment to create an independent panel to govern Medicare reimbursement rates that could help reverse crippling health-care inflation.
Most difficult for Obama is the pressure to accept a tax on health benefits as a way of financing the massive insurance reform he wants.
Speaking on "Fox News Sunday," White House budget director Peter Orszag would not rule out support for the benefits tax, but he continued to promote Obama's preference for limiting deductions for wealthy taxpayers.
Some Democrats close to the negotiations say they think it is only a matter of time before Obama backs off. One proposal that has emerged would tax insurance companies, as opposed to beneficiaries, and is considered a potential compromise approach that he may be able to embrace.
Aides said Obama and his team plan a rapid response to new developments, as they did Thursday with a quickly arranged conference call to rebut assertions by the Congressional Budget Office that health-care costs would go up, not down, if the Democratic bills pass.
The effort began Friday with impromptu remarks by Obama from the Diplomatic Room, even as groups allied with the White House launched political ad campaigns this weekend aimed at wavering lawmakers. On Monday, his advisers say, he will do a round of interviews to drive the narrative for the week. Private meetings with lawmakers will become more frequent and urgent.
The decision to vault Obama to the front carries huge risks.
The decades-long drive to reform the health-care system now rests largely on Obama's ability to quell revolts among Democratic allies, many of whom have spent the past several weeks picking at pieces of his proposals.
If conservative House Democrats succeed in sowing fear of rising deficits, it will be seen as Obama's fault that he could not rein them in. If Democrats in the Senate do not agree on financing, Obama must explain the failure despite his party's majorities in both chambers.
The health-care debate was at the center of private discussions at the annual summer meeting of the National Governors Association over the weekend. The health-care legislation under consideration in Congress envisions a significant expansion in eligibility for Medicaid, whose costs are shared by Washington and the states. Their budgets squeezed by the recession, governors fear a costly mandate to cover the newly eligible. The governors devoted most of a private lunch to the issue Saturday and earlier voiced objections to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) over funding plans.
Obama's top strategists, including Axelrod and Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, have repeatedly defended the administration's ambitious agenda by saying that success breeds success -- each legislative victory makes the next one easier to accomplish, they insist. The flip side, then, is that a health-care failure could doom the rest of Obama's agenda.
Obama's advisers express confidence that the setbacks of the past week can be overcome, and they insist they have spent "no time" discussing the impact on his political fortunes if health-care reform does not pass this year.
"We don't do doom-and-gloom," Axelrod.
But the president's top advisers also recognize that the sense of optimism about health-care reform that existed in Washington several months ago has largely evaporated.
Cable news programs repeatedly declare the president's health care program is "teetering" or "embattled," despite a week in which Obama's proposals were endorsed by the doctor and nurses associations and committees in both legislative chambers passed major bills.
"We're swimming upstream against a culture of failure on health care in Washington," said one adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the administration's strategy.
The White House decided early in the year on a hands-off approach to health-care legislating.
"Had we put a plan out, the entire debate would have been changes to the plan," said Emanuel, a veteran of the failed Clinton health battle. "It would have been how the president is failing or succeeding."
But even as he shifts into a more active role, Obama must be mindful of his legislative allies. Rather than strong-arming these old bulls, the White House must tiptoe around them.
Baucus was a veteran lawmaker in 1994 when the Clinton plan ran aground. House Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) is a leading health-care expert. Senate health committee Chairman Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), who is battling brain cancer, voted to create Medicare in 1965.
For health-care reform to succeed, Obama will have to carefully navigate between paying the appropriate respect to those men while exerting the leadership that many are demanding.
"It's getting hotter, and there are bumps, but we are closer to health-care reform than ever before," Emanuel said.
Staff writer Alec MacGillis contributed to this report.
As Skepticism on Health Reform Mounts, He Will Intensify His Efforts
Washington Post By Michael D. Shear and Shailagh Murray
Six months into his presidency, Barack Obama may have no greater test of his ability to translate personal popularity into a successful legislative agenda than the upcoming two weeks.
With skepticism about the president's health-care reform effort mounting on Capitol Hill -- even within his own party -- the White House has launched a new phase of its strategy designed to dramatically increase public pressure on Congress: all Obama, all the time.
Senior White House aides promise "an aggressive public and private schedule" for Obama as he presses his case for reform, including a prime-time news conference on Wednesday, a trip to Cleveland, and heavy use of Internet video to broadcast his message beyond the reach of the traditional media.
"Our strategy has been to allow this process to advance to the point where it made sense for the president to take the baton. Now's that time," said senior adviser David Axelrod. "I don't know whether he will Twitter or tweet. But he's going to be very, very visible."
Another senior White House aide added: "It's time to raise the stakes on this."
But even as Obama returns to full-time campaign mode, he is facing increasing calls to show that his presidency can manage the tough, nitty-gritty of lawmaking by cutting deals with his allies to keep his health-care legislation moving in the House and Senate committees.
Conservative Democrats in the House are promising to vote against reform as it now stands, and are preparing two dozen amendments, including measures aimed at lowering the effort's long-term cost. In the Senate, members from both parties are urging the president to break his campaign promise to preserve the tax-free status of health benefits. And a chorus of weary voices from Capitol Hill is urging him to abandon his demand for passage of bills in the House and Senate by Aug. 7.
"I don't think we should be bound by a timetable that isn't realistic," Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine), a key swing-vote on health care, told Obama last week as she reminded him that President Lyndon B. Johnson took 1 1/2 years to pass Medicare.
Obama has not officially budged on the timetable, although he and aides notably have not mentioned the August deadline in recent remarks. But he is quietly working with conservative, Blue Dog Democrats in the House on an amendment to create an independent panel to govern Medicare reimbursement rates that could help reverse crippling health-care inflation.
Most difficult for Obama is the pressure to accept a tax on health benefits as a way of financing the massive insurance reform he wants.
Speaking on "Fox News Sunday," White House budget director Peter Orszag would not rule out support for the benefits tax, but he continued to promote Obama's preference for limiting deductions for wealthy taxpayers.
Some Democrats close to the negotiations say they think it is only a matter of time before Obama backs off. One proposal that has emerged would tax insurance companies, as opposed to beneficiaries, and is considered a potential compromise approach that he may be able to embrace.
Aides said Obama and his team plan a rapid response to new developments, as they did Thursday with a quickly arranged conference call to rebut assertions by the Congressional Budget Office that health-care costs would go up, not down, if the Democratic bills pass.
The effort began Friday with impromptu remarks by Obama from the Diplomatic Room, even as groups allied with the White House launched political ad campaigns this weekend aimed at wavering lawmakers. On Monday, his advisers say, he will do a round of interviews to drive the narrative for the week. Private meetings with lawmakers will become more frequent and urgent.
The decision to vault Obama to the front carries huge risks.
The decades-long drive to reform the health-care system now rests largely on Obama's ability to quell revolts among Democratic allies, many of whom have spent the past several weeks picking at pieces of his proposals.
If conservative House Democrats succeed in sowing fear of rising deficits, it will be seen as Obama's fault that he could not rein them in. If Democrats in the Senate do not agree on financing, Obama must explain the failure despite his party's majorities in both chambers.
The health-care debate was at the center of private discussions at the annual summer meeting of the National Governors Association over the weekend. The health-care legislation under consideration in Congress envisions a significant expansion in eligibility for Medicaid, whose costs are shared by Washington and the states. Their budgets squeezed by the recession, governors fear a costly mandate to cover the newly eligible. The governors devoted most of a private lunch to the issue Saturday and earlier voiced objections to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) over funding plans.
Obama's top strategists, including Axelrod and Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, have repeatedly defended the administration's ambitious agenda by saying that success breeds success -- each legislative victory makes the next one easier to accomplish, they insist. The flip side, then, is that a health-care failure could doom the rest of Obama's agenda.
Obama's advisers express confidence that the setbacks of the past week can be overcome, and they insist they have spent "no time" discussing the impact on his political fortunes if health-care reform does not pass this year.
"We don't do doom-and-gloom," Axelrod.
But the president's top advisers also recognize that the sense of optimism about health-care reform that existed in Washington several months ago has largely evaporated.
Cable news programs repeatedly declare the president's health care program is "teetering" or "embattled," despite a week in which Obama's proposals were endorsed by the doctor and nurses associations and committees in both legislative chambers passed major bills.
"We're swimming upstream against a culture of failure on health care in Washington," said one adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the administration's strategy.
The White House decided early in the year on a hands-off approach to health-care legislating.
"Had we put a plan out, the entire debate would have been changes to the plan," said Emanuel, a veteran of the failed Clinton health battle. "It would have been how the president is failing or succeeding."
But even as he shifts into a more active role, Obama must be mindful of his legislative allies. Rather than strong-arming these old bulls, the White House must tiptoe around them.
Baucus was a veteran lawmaker in 1994 when the Clinton plan ran aground. House Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) is a leading health-care expert. Senate health committee Chairman Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), who is battling brain cancer, voted to create Medicare in 1965.
For health-care reform to succeed, Obama will have to carefully navigate between paying the appropriate respect to those men while exerting the leadership that many are demanding.
"It's getting hotter, and there are bumps, but we are closer to health-care reform than ever before," Emanuel said.
Staff writer Alec MacGillis contributed to this report.
Saturday, July 18, 2009
MAUREEN DOWD Pharisees on the Potomac
Like cats that have lost their whiskers, the Republicans seem off balance now that they have lost their talent for hypocrisy.
They are still practicing the ancient political art of Tartuffery, of course, just without their former aplomb.
Who can forget the glory years, when the Gipper invoked God but never went to church? When Arlen Specter accused Anita Hill of perjury to distract from Clarence Thomas’s false witness? When Newt Gingrich and other conservatives indulged in affairs with young Washington peaches as they pushed to impeach Bill Clinton?
No one had more flair than W. and Cheney, crowing about making us safe as they made the world more dangerous, and bragging about fiscal restraint while they spent us into oblivion.
Now when Republicans get caught flouting the principles they dictate, they are not able to practice hypocrisy with such impunity.
Loverboy Mark Sanford’s career continued to go south last week as news organizations exposed his two-faced tactics on travel expenses. When he ran for South Carolina governor in 2002, he attacked the Democratic incumbent for “lavish spending” on hotels and planes. Once elected, he asked state employees to bunk together in hotel rooms when they traveled and chastised staffers who spent more than the $208 federal rate.
But, as Politico reports: “He routinely billed taxpayers for high-end airline seats, racking up more than $44,000 on business and first-class tickets. He often stayed in pricey hotels that far exceeded the rates he imposed on other state employees.” On a trade mission to China, Sanford spent $12,000 on business-class tickets, leaving aides in economy for about $1,900.
The religious boardinghouse in Washington where Sanford sought succor from fellow conservatives, where he agonized to pals about his tango with the enticing MarÃa, is also back in the news. Affiliated with a secretive Capitol Hill group known as the Fellowship — which also sponsored Bible study and prayer circles attended by Hillary Clinton when she was a senator — the pious dwelling is becoming a tourist attraction, a monument to Republican hypocrisy.
The C Street house, as the flag-flying brick rowhouse near the Capitol is known, serves as a residence and Bible study retreat for many Christian conservative lawmakers. But it looks as if what these guys were praying for was a chance to get lucky.
John Ensign, the Promise Keeper who broke all his promises, resides there. As The Washington Post reported, Senator Tom Coburn, who lives there, had an emotional meeting about forgiveness at the house with Doug Hampton, the husband of Ensign’s mistress. (Forgiveness plus bribery can often do the trick.) Coburn says he would not talk to a court or the Senate ethics committee about the episode because he was counseling Ensign partly as a doctor. (Coburn is an ob-gyn.)
Last week, The Associated Press revealed that the estranged wife of a former Republican congressman, Chip Pickering of Mississippi, had filed an alienation of affection lawsuit seeking damages against her husband’s gal pal, a wealthy former college sweetheart named Elizabeth Creekmore Byrd.
The suit charges that as a lawmaker, Chip used C Street as a divine love nest. “Ultimately,” it says, “Creekmore Byrd gave Pickering the option to remain a public servant or become a private citizen and continue relations with her.”
Republican hypocrisy fell flat at the Sotomayor hearings. After railing all week against the “empathy standard,” as Senator Jeff Sessions called it, the Republicans tried to play the empathy card by calling in two New Haven firefighters, one white and one Hispanic, who were on the losing end of Sonia Sotomayor’s ruling. Wearing their dress uniforms, the pair told their heart-tugging tales of studying for an exam that got thrown out after they scored high. Frank Ricci, who studied hard to overcome his dyslexia, used his finger to trace under the words as he read his testimony.
But the Republican complaint against Sotomayor in that case boiled down to wanting her to be more activist. They were upset that she sided with elected officials and precedent rather than intervening to strike down a result that many people, including me, found unfair.
Sotomayor’s syntax was unfathomable, but the Republicans’ language sounded positively archaic: dire warnings against activist judges, when the conservative majority on this Supreme Court has ignored or upended precedent in a slew of cases.
Judge Sotomayor kept her feelings in check, while her white male Republican interrogators dissolved into whining about wanting to keep their guns and nunchakus and wishing they could get back some sway over what women do with their bodies.
If they are so interested in women’s bodies, maybe they should just move to C Street.
They are still practicing the ancient political art of Tartuffery, of course, just without their former aplomb.
Who can forget the glory years, when the Gipper invoked God but never went to church? When Arlen Specter accused Anita Hill of perjury to distract from Clarence Thomas’s false witness? When Newt Gingrich and other conservatives indulged in affairs with young Washington peaches as they pushed to impeach Bill Clinton?
No one had more flair than W. and Cheney, crowing about making us safe as they made the world more dangerous, and bragging about fiscal restraint while they spent us into oblivion.
Now when Republicans get caught flouting the principles they dictate, they are not able to practice hypocrisy with such impunity.
Loverboy Mark Sanford’s career continued to go south last week as news organizations exposed his two-faced tactics on travel expenses. When he ran for South Carolina governor in 2002, he attacked the Democratic incumbent for “lavish spending” on hotels and planes. Once elected, he asked state employees to bunk together in hotel rooms when they traveled and chastised staffers who spent more than the $208 federal rate.
But, as Politico reports: “He routinely billed taxpayers for high-end airline seats, racking up more than $44,000 on business and first-class tickets. He often stayed in pricey hotels that far exceeded the rates he imposed on other state employees.” On a trade mission to China, Sanford spent $12,000 on business-class tickets, leaving aides in economy for about $1,900.
The religious boardinghouse in Washington where Sanford sought succor from fellow conservatives, where he agonized to pals about his tango with the enticing MarÃa, is also back in the news. Affiliated with a secretive Capitol Hill group known as the Fellowship — which also sponsored Bible study and prayer circles attended by Hillary Clinton when she was a senator — the pious dwelling is becoming a tourist attraction, a monument to Republican hypocrisy.
The C Street house, as the flag-flying brick rowhouse near the Capitol is known, serves as a residence and Bible study retreat for many Christian conservative lawmakers. But it looks as if what these guys were praying for was a chance to get lucky.
John Ensign, the Promise Keeper who broke all his promises, resides there. As The Washington Post reported, Senator Tom Coburn, who lives there, had an emotional meeting about forgiveness at the house with Doug Hampton, the husband of Ensign’s mistress. (Forgiveness plus bribery can often do the trick.) Coburn says he would not talk to a court or the Senate ethics committee about the episode because he was counseling Ensign partly as a doctor. (Coburn is an ob-gyn.)
Last week, The Associated Press revealed that the estranged wife of a former Republican congressman, Chip Pickering of Mississippi, had filed an alienation of affection lawsuit seeking damages against her husband’s gal pal, a wealthy former college sweetheart named Elizabeth Creekmore Byrd.
The suit charges that as a lawmaker, Chip used C Street as a divine love nest. “Ultimately,” it says, “Creekmore Byrd gave Pickering the option to remain a public servant or become a private citizen and continue relations with her.”
Republican hypocrisy fell flat at the Sotomayor hearings. After railing all week against the “empathy standard,” as Senator Jeff Sessions called it, the Republicans tried to play the empathy card by calling in two New Haven firefighters, one white and one Hispanic, who were on the losing end of Sonia Sotomayor’s ruling. Wearing their dress uniforms, the pair told their heart-tugging tales of studying for an exam that got thrown out after they scored high. Frank Ricci, who studied hard to overcome his dyslexia, used his finger to trace under the words as he read his testimony.
But the Republican complaint against Sotomayor in that case boiled down to wanting her to be more activist. They were upset that she sided with elected officials and precedent rather than intervening to strike down a result that many people, including me, found unfair.
Sotomayor’s syntax was unfathomable, but the Republicans’ language sounded positively archaic: dire warnings against activist judges, when the conservative majority on this Supreme Court has ignored or upended precedent in a slew of cases.
Judge Sotomayor kept her feelings in check, while her white male Republican interrogators dissolved into whining about wanting to keep their guns and nunchakus and wishing they could get back some sway over what women do with their bodies.
If they are so interested in women’s bodies, maybe they should just move to C Street.
Iraq Restricts U.S. Forces
Iraq Restricts U.S. Forces
American Officials See Link Between Limits, Spate of Attacks
WASHINGTONPOST By Ernesto Londoño and Karen DeYoung
BAGHDAD, July 17 -- The Iraqi government has moved to sharply restrict the movement and activities of U.S. forces in a new reading of a six-month-old U.S.-Iraqi security agreement that has startled American commanders and raised concerns about the safety of their troops.
In a curt missive issued by the Baghdad Operations Command on July 2 -- the day after Iraqis celebrated the withdrawal of U.S. troops to bases outside city centers -- Iraq's top commanders told their U.S. counterparts to "stop all joint patrols" in Baghdad. It said U.S. resupply convoys could travel only at night and ordered the Americans to "notify us immediately of any violations of the agreement."
The strict application of the agreement coincides with what U.S. military officials in Washington say has been an escalation of attacks against their forces by Iranian-backed Shiite extremist groups, to which they have been unable to fully respond.
If extremists realize "some of the limitations that we have, that's a vulnerability they could use against us," a senior U.S. military intelligence official said. "The fact is that some of these are very politically sensitive targets" thought to be close to the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
The new guidelines are a reflection of rising tensions between the two governments. Iraqi leaders increasingly see the agreement as an opportunity to show their citizens that they are now unequivocally in charge and that their dependence on the U.S. military is minimal and waning.
The June 30 deadline for moving U.S. troops out of Iraqi towns and cities was the first of three milestones under the agreement. The U.S. military is to decrease its troop levels from 130,000 to 50,000 by August of next year.
U.S. commanders have described the pullout from cities as a transition from combat to stability operations. But they have kept several combat battalions assigned to urban areas and hoped those troops would remain deeply engaged in training Iraqi security forces, meeting with paid informants, attending local council meetings and supervising U.S.-funded civic and reconstruction projects.
The Americans have been taken aback by the new restrictions on their activities. The Iraqi order runs "contrary to the spirit and practice of our last several months of operations," Maj. Gen. Daniel P. Bolger, commander of the Baghdad division, wrote in an e-mail obtained by The Washington Post.
"Maybe something was 'lost in translation,' " Bolger wrote. "We are not going to hide our support role in the city. I'm sorry the Iraqi politicians lied/dissembled/spun, but we are not invisible nor should we be." He said U.S. troops intend to engage in combat operations in urban areas to avert or respond to threats, with or without help from the Iraqis.
"This is a broad right and it demands that we patrol, raid and secure routes as necessary to keep our forces safe," he wrote. "We'll do that, preferably partnered."
U.S. commanders have not publicly described in detail how they interpret the agreement's vaguely worded provision that gives them the right to self-defense. The issue has bedeviled them because commanders are concerned that responding quickly and forcefully to threats could embarrass the Iraqi government and prompt allegations of agreement violations.
A spate of high-casualty suicide bombings in Shiite neighborhoods, attributed to al-Qaeda in Iraq and related Sunni insurgent groups, has overshadowed the increase of attacks by Iran-backed Shiite extremists, U.S. official say.
Officials agreed to discuss relations with the Iraqi government and military, and Iranian support for the extremists, only on the condition of anonymity because those issues involve security, diplomacy and intelligence.
The three primary groups -- Asaib al-Haq, Khataib Hezbollah and the Promised Day Brigades -- emerged from the "special groups" of the Jaish al-Mahdi (JAM) militia of radical Iraqi Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, which terrorized Baghdad and southern Iraq beginning in 2006. All receive training, funding and direction from Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force.
"One of the things we still have to find out, as we pull out from the cities, is how much effectiveness we're going to have against some of these particular target sets," the military intelligence official said. "That's one of the very sensitive parts of this whole story."
As U.S. forces tried to pursue the alleged leaders of the groups and planned missions against them, their efforts were hindered by the complicated warrant process and other Iraqi delays, officials said.
Last month, U.S. commanders acquiesced to an Iraqi government request to release one of their most high-profile detainees, Laith Khazali. He was arrested in March 2007 with his brother, Qais, who is thought to be the senior operational leader of Asaib al-Haq. The United States thinks they were responsible for the deaths of five American soldiers in Karbala that year.
Maliki has occasionally criticized interference by Shiite Iran's Islamic government in Iraqi affairs. But he has also maintained close ties to Iran and has played down U.S. insistence that Iran is deeply involved, through the Quds Force, in training and controlling the Iraqi Shiite extremists.
U.S. intelligence has seen "no discernible increase in Tehran's support to Shia extremists in recent months," and the attack level is still low compared with previous years, U.S. counterterrorism official said. But senior military commanders maintained that Iran still supports the Shiite militias, and that their attacks now focus almost exclusively on U.S. forces.
After a brief lull, the attacks have continued this month, including a rocket strike on a U.S. base in Basra on Thursday night that killed three soldiers.
The acrimony that has marked the transition period has sowed resentment, according to several U.S. soldiers, who said the confidence expressed by Iraqi leaders does not match their competence.
"Our [Iraqi] partners burn our fuel, drive roads cleared by our Engineers, live in bases built with our money, operate vehicles fixed with our parts, eat food paid for by our contracts, watch our [surveillance] video feeds, serve citizens with our [funds], and benefit from our air cover," Bolger noted in the e-mail.
A spokesman for Bolger would not say whether the U.S. military considers the Iraqi order on July 2 valid. Since it was issued, it has been amended to make a few exemptions. But the guidelines remain far more restrictive than the Americans had hoped, U.S. military officials said.
Brig. Gen. Heidi Brown, the commander overseeing the logistical aspects of the withdrawal, said Iraqi and U.S. commanders have had fruitful discussions in recent days about the issue.
"It's been an interesting time, and I think we've sorted out any misunderstandings that were there initially," she said in an interview Friday.
One U.S. military official here said both Iraqi and American leaders on the ground remain confused about the guidelines. The official said he worries that the lack of clarity could trigger stalemates and confrontations between Iraqis and Americans.
"We still lack a common understanding and way forward at all levels regarding those types of situations," he said, referring to self-defense protocols and the type of missions that Americans cannot conduct unilaterally.
In recent days, he said, senior U.S. commanders have lowered their expectations.
"I think our commanders are starting to back off the notion that we will continue to execute combined operations whether the Iraqi army welcomes us with open arms or not," the U.S. commander said. "However, we are still very interested in and concerned about our ability to quickly and effectively act in response to terrorist threats" against U.S. forces.
American Officials See Link Between Limits, Spate of Attacks
WASHINGTONPOST By Ernesto Londoño and Karen DeYoung
BAGHDAD, July 17 -- The Iraqi government has moved to sharply restrict the movement and activities of U.S. forces in a new reading of a six-month-old U.S.-Iraqi security agreement that has startled American commanders and raised concerns about the safety of their troops.
In a curt missive issued by the Baghdad Operations Command on July 2 -- the day after Iraqis celebrated the withdrawal of U.S. troops to bases outside city centers -- Iraq's top commanders told their U.S. counterparts to "stop all joint patrols" in Baghdad. It said U.S. resupply convoys could travel only at night and ordered the Americans to "notify us immediately of any violations of the agreement."
The strict application of the agreement coincides with what U.S. military officials in Washington say has been an escalation of attacks against their forces by Iranian-backed Shiite extremist groups, to which they have been unable to fully respond.
If extremists realize "some of the limitations that we have, that's a vulnerability they could use against us," a senior U.S. military intelligence official said. "The fact is that some of these are very politically sensitive targets" thought to be close to the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
The new guidelines are a reflection of rising tensions between the two governments. Iraqi leaders increasingly see the agreement as an opportunity to show their citizens that they are now unequivocally in charge and that their dependence on the U.S. military is minimal and waning.
The June 30 deadline for moving U.S. troops out of Iraqi towns and cities was the first of three milestones under the agreement. The U.S. military is to decrease its troop levels from 130,000 to 50,000 by August of next year.
U.S. commanders have described the pullout from cities as a transition from combat to stability operations. But they have kept several combat battalions assigned to urban areas and hoped those troops would remain deeply engaged in training Iraqi security forces, meeting with paid informants, attending local council meetings and supervising U.S.-funded civic and reconstruction projects.
The Americans have been taken aback by the new restrictions on their activities. The Iraqi order runs "contrary to the spirit and practice of our last several months of operations," Maj. Gen. Daniel P. Bolger, commander of the Baghdad division, wrote in an e-mail obtained by The Washington Post.
"Maybe something was 'lost in translation,' " Bolger wrote. "We are not going to hide our support role in the city. I'm sorry the Iraqi politicians lied/dissembled/spun, but we are not invisible nor should we be." He said U.S. troops intend to engage in combat operations in urban areas to avert or respond to threats, with or without help from the Iraqis.
"This is a broad right and it demands that we patrol, raid and secure routes as necessary to keep our forces safe," he wrote. "We'll do that, preferably partnered."
U.S. commanders have not publicly described in detail how they interpret the agreement's vaguely worded provision that gives them the right to self-defense. The issue has bedeviled them because commanders are concerned that responding quickly and forcefully to threats could embarrass the Iraqi government and prompt allegations of agreement violations.
A spate of high-casualty suicide bombings in Shiite neighborhoods, attributed to al-Qaeda in Iraq and related Sunni insurgent groups, has overshadowed the increase of attacks by Iran-backed Shiite extremists, U.S. official say.
Officials agreed to discuss relations with the Iraqi government and military, and Iranian support for the extremists, only on the condition of anonymity because those issues involve security, diplomacy and intelligence.
The three primary groups -- Asaib al-Haq, Khataib Hezbollah and the Promised Day Brigades -- emerged from the "special groups" of the Jaish al-Mahdi (JAM) militia of radical Iraqi Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, which terrorized Baghdad and southern Iraq beginning in 2006. All receive training, funding and direction from Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force.
"One of the things we still have to find out, as we pull out from the cities, is how much effectiveness we're going to have against some of these particular target sets," the military intelligence official said. "That's one of the very sensitive parts of this whole story."
As U.S. forces tried to pursue the alleged leaders of the groups and planned missions against them, their efforts were hindered by the complicated warrant process and other Iraqi delays, officials said.
Last month, U.S. commanders acquiesced to an Iraqi government request to release one of their most high-profile detainees, Laith Khazali. He was arrested in March 2007 with his brother, Qais, who is thought to be the senior operational leader of Asaib al-Haq. The United States thinks they were responsible for the deaths of five American soldiers in Karbala that year.
Maliki has occasionally criticized interference by Shiite Iran's Islamic government in Iraqi affairs. But he has also maintained close ties to Iran and has played down U.S. insistence that Iran is deeply involved, through the Quds Force, in training and controlling the Iraqi Shiite extremists.
U.S. intelligence has seen "no discernible increase in Tehran's support to Shia extremists in recent months," and the attack level is still low compared with previous years, U.S. counterterrorism official said. But senior military commanders maintained that Iran still supports the Shiite militias, and that their attacks now focus almost exclusively on U.S. forces.
After a brief lull, the attacks have continued this month, including a rocket strike on a U.S. base in Basra on Thursday night that killed three soldiers.
The acrimony that has marked the transition period has sowed resentment, according to several U.S. soldiers, who said the confidence expressed by Iraqi leaders does not match their competence.
"Our [Iraqi] partners burn our fuel, drive roads cleared by our Engineers, live in bases built with our money, operate vehicles fixed with our parts, eat food paid for by our contracts, watch our [surveillance] video feeds, serve citizens with our [funds], and benefit from our air cover," Bolger noted in the e-mail.
A spokesman for Bolger would not say whether the U.S. military considers the Iraqi order on July 2 valid. Since it was issued, it has been amended to make a few exemptions. But the guidelines remain far more restrictive than the Americans had hoped, U.S. military officials said.
Brig. Gen. Heidi Brown, the commander overseeing the logistical aspects of the withdrawal, said Iraqi and U.S. commanders have had fruitful discussions in recent days about the issue.
"It's been an interesting time, and I think we've sorted out any misunderstandings that were there initially," she said in an interview Friday.
One U.S. military official here said both Iraqi and American leaders on the ground remain confused about the guidelines. The official said he worries that the lack of clarity could trigger stalemates and confrontations between Iraqis and Americans.
"We still lack a common understanding and way forward at all levels regarding those types of situations," he said, referring to self-defense protocols and the type of missions that Americans cannot conduct unilaterally.
In recent days, he said, senior U.S. commanders have lowered their expectations.
"I think our commanders are starting to back off the notion that we will continue to execute combined operations whether the Iraqi army welcomes us with open arms or not," the U.S. commander said. "However, we are still very interested in and concerned about our ability to quickly and effectively act in response to terrorist threats" against U.S. forces.
Drivers Dismiss Risks of Multitasking on the Road
NYTimes By MATT RICHTEL
OKLAHOMA CITY — On his 15th birthday, Christopher Hill got his first cellphone. For his 16th, he was given a used red Ford Ranger pickup, a source of pride he washed every week.
Mr. Hill, a diligent student with a reputation for helping neighbors, also took pride in his clean driving record. “Not a speeding ticket, not a fender bender, nothing,” he said.
Until last Sept. 3. Mr. Hill, then 20, left the parking lot of a Goodwill store where he had spotted a dresser he thought might interest a neighbor. He dialed her to pass along news of the find.
Mr. Hill was so engrossed in the call that he ran a red light and didn’t notice Linda Doyle’s small sport utility vehicle until the last second. He hit her going 45 miles per hour. She was pronounced dead shortly after.
Later, a policeman asked Mr. Hill what color the light had been. “I never saw it,” he answered.
Extensive research shows the dangers of distracted driving. Studies say that drivers using phones are four times as likely to cause a crash as other drivers, and the likelihood that they will crash is equal to that of someone with a .08 percent blood alcohol level, the point at which drivers are generally considered intoxicated. Research also shows that hands-free devices do not eliminate the risks, and may worsen them by suggesting that the behavior is safe.
A 2003 Harvard study estimated that cellphone distractions caused 2,600 traffic deaths every year, and 330,000 accidents that result in moderate or severe injuries.
Yet Americans have largely ignored that research. Instead, they increasingly use phones, navigation devices and even laptops to turn their cars into mobile offices, chat rooms and entertainment centers, making roads more dangerous.
A disconnect between perception and reality worsens the problem. New studies show that drivers overestimate their own ability to safely multitask, even as they worry about the dangers of others doing it.
Device makers and auto companies acknowledge the risks of multitasking behind the wheel, but they aggressively develop and market gadgets that cause distractions.
Police in almost half of all states make no attempt to gather data on the problem. They are not required to ask drivers who cause accidents whether they were distracted by a phone or other device. Even when officers do ask, some drivers are not forthcoming.
The federal government warns against talking on a cellphone while driving, but no state legislature has banned it. This year, state legislators introduced about 170 bills to address distracted driving, but passed fewer than 10.
Five states and the District of Columbia require drivers who talk on cellphones to use hands-free devices, but research shows that using headsets can be as dangerous as holding a phone because the conversation distracts drivers from focusing on the road.
Fourteen states have passed measures to ban texting while driving, and the New York State Assembly sent such a bill to the governor on Friday.
The states that rejected any efforts to limit distracted driving this year include Oklahoma.
“I’m on the phone from when I leave the Capitol to when I get home, and that’s a two-hour drive,” said Tad Jones, the majority floor leader in the Oklahoma House, who helped block the legislation. “A lot of people who travel are used to using the phone.”
Scientists who study distracted driving say they understand the frustrations of colleagues who publicized the dangers of tobacco. Like cigarettes, they say, gadgets are considered cool but can be deadly. And the big device companies even offer warnings that remind them of labels on cigarette packs.
Verizon Wireless, for instance, posts instructions on its Web sites not to talk while driving — with or without a headset. But neither Verizon nor any other cellphone company supports legislation that bans drivers from talking on the phone. And the wireless industry does not conduct research on the dangers, saying that is not its responsibility.
Some researchers say that sufficient evidence exists to justify laws outlawing cellphone use for drivers — and they suggest using technology to enforce them by disabling a driver’s phone. “Just outlawing the behavior cannot possibly go very far toward getting people not to do it,” said Robert D. Foss, senior research scientist at the Highway Safety Research Center at the University of North Carolina. “The behavior is too ingrained and compelling.”
For his part, Mr. Hill rarely talks when he drives now. His mother gave him a hands-free headset two months after the accident. She thought it would create less distraction. He tried it once, and found his mind wandering into his phone call so much that “I nearly missed a light,” he said.
He pleaded guilty to negligent homicide, a misdemeanor, for the death of Ms. Doyle. Now, when he is a passenger in a car, it makes him nervous when the driver starts talking on the phone. But Mr. Hill, who is polite and deferential, said he doesn’t want to badger drivers about the risks.
“I hope they don’t have to go through what I did to realize it’s a problem,” he added.
Dangerous Overconfidence
Sgt. Matthew Downing, a tough-talking 11-year veteran on the Oklahoma City police force, drives a car with no lights on the roof. That way, drivers are less likely to notice him as he waits for speeders.
Increasingly, he sees erratic behavior — swerving across lanes, running red lights — that looks just like drunken driving. Instead, he sees drivers talking on their phones, or texting. “A ton of people pass me literally unaware of their surroundings,” he said.
Sergeant Downing, who often handles traffic fatalities, arrived at the scene of Mr. Hill’s crash after paramedics had extracted Ms. Doyle, who was 61, from her car. He found Mr. Hill sitting on a fire truck, acting “hysterical.”
There was no mystery about the accident’s cause; the roads were dry. “He told me he was talking on the phone and didn’t see the light,” Sergeant Downing said.
“He’s a nice kid,” he said of Mr. Hill. But he said he felt angry, both at Mr. Hill and at what he sees as an epidemic of multitasking on the road. “Driving and talking are automatic,” he said.
Over all, cellphone use has soared. From 1995 to 2008, the number of wireless subscribers in the United States increased eightfold, to 270 million, and minutes talked rose 58-fold.
Last year, the federal agency dealing with road safety, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, published a study, based on researchers’ observations of drivers, suggesting that at any time during daylight hours in 2007, 11 percent — or 1.8 million drivers — were using a cellphone.
And in a survey of 1,506 people last year by Nationwide Mutual Insurance, 81 percent of cellphone owners acknowledged that they talk on phones while driving, and 98 percent considered themselves safe drivers. But 45 percent said they had been hit or nearly hit by a driver talking on a phone.
“When we ask people to identify the most dangerous distraction on the highway today, about half — correctly — identify cellphones,” said Bill Windsor, associate vice president for safety at Nationwide. “But they think others are dangerous, not themselves.”
He and others who favor restrictions say drivers regularly make what amount to ill-informed analyses of cost-benefit tradeoffs, often deciding that the value of constant communication outweighs any risks.
Seven years ago, when cellphones and services like texting were less common, federal researchers estimated that drivers using cellphones caused about 1,000 fatalities and played a role in 240,000 crashes. (In 2007, drunken driving caused 13,000 fatalities.)
By other measures, American roads are becoming safer. According to the highway safety agency, the number of driving fatalities has remained around 42,000 a year for most of the last decade, though it fell to 37,261 in 2008, when gas prices rose sharply and Americans drove less.
From 1997 to 2007, the number of reported accidents fell to 6 million a year from 6.7 million, according to the highway safety agency. “There are more drivers, more talking drivers,” said John Walls, spokesman for the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association. “If it’s so risky, then logically one would think there would be more accidents.”
The association, a trade group, fought rules to ban phone use while driving until January, when it shifted to a neutral position on the issue. “I wouldn’t say, ‘Talk on the phone more and have fewer accidents,’ ” Mr. Walls added. “I’m just saying, ‘How does this square?’ ”
Some scientists say this argument is flawed. “We’ve spent billions on air bags, antilock brakes, better steering, safer cars and roads, but the number of fatalities has remained constant,” said David Strayer, a psychology professor at the University of Utah and a leading researcher in the field of distracted driving.
“Our return on investment for those billions is zero,” he added. “And that’s because we’re using devices in our cars.”
Better data would help settle the debate. But 21 states do not include a box on accident forms for police to mark electronic devices as a cause. Those that now account for it started doing so only recently. Mr. Windsor of Nationwide Mutual said that such data, while valuable, would greatly underestimate the problem because it relies on driver confessions. Sometimes drivers say they just finished a call. Cellphone records are not much help because of the difficulty of establishing the precise time of an accident.
“By the time you get to a crash, it’s very, very difficult to determine whether someone was talking on the phone and whether the phone caused the crash,” said Rae Tyson, a spokesman for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
For Mr. Windsor and many scientists who study the issue, accident figures are not necessary to prove the risks.
“The research is just so strong,” Mr. Windsor said.
Risks of Multitasking
In a windowless room at the University of Utah, Professor Strayer has spent a decade studying driver distraction.
On a recent afternoon, Anne McLaren, 19, who just finished her freshman year studying dental hygiene and who gets class credit for volunteer work, climbed behind the wheel of Mr. Strayer’s $100,000 driving simulator. Her task was to closely follow a white car that often slowed abruptly. A voice on a speaker phone asked Ms. McLaren questions like, “When you do a pull-up, do your palms face toward you?” and “Can you touch your elbow to your ear?”
For the most part, she ably multitasked. But sometimes she took her hands from the wheel when trying to answer a question, like, “True or false: A peanut butter jar opens clockwise.” And she was so focused on her call that she seemed to miss surprises, like a body at the side of the road.
Texting while driving was more difficult; she soon slammed into the virtual car in front of her.
Mr. Strayer’s research, using a small camera to track his volunteers’ eye movements, shows that texting drivers regularly focus on their screens for stretches of more than five seconds.
“I should pay attention to the road,” she said afterward. But sometimes it’s hard to ignore the phone, she added, like when her parents want to reach her. “My dad gets more mad if I don’t have the phone than if I’m talking and driving.”
Mr. Strayer’s research, showing that multitasking drivers are four times as likely to crash as people who are focused on driving, matches the findings of two studies, in Canada and in Australia, of drivers on actual roads.
The highway safety administration estimates that drivers using a hand-held device are at 1.3 times greater risk of a crash or near crash, and at three times the risk when dialing, compared with others who are simply driving. The agency based its conclusions on research from the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, which placed cameras inside cars to monitor drivers for more than a year. The study found cellphones to be the most common cause of driver distraction.
Research also shows that drivers conversing with fellow passengers do not present the same danger, because adult riders help keep drivers alert and point out dangerous conditions and tend to talk less in heavy traffic or hazardous weather.
Scientists note that there are limits to how much the brain can multitask. The brain has trouble assessing separate streams of information — even if one is visual and the other aural, said Steve Yantis, professor of psychological and brain sciences at Johns Hopkins University.
Further, he said, when people talk on the phone, they are doing more than simply listening. The words conjure images in the mind’s eye, including images of the person they are talking to. That typically doesn’t interfere with driving. The problem starts when a car swerves unexpectedly or a pedestrian steps into traffic, he said, and the mind lacks the processing power to react in time.
“There is zero doubt that one’s driving ability is impaired when one is trying to have a cellphone conversation — whether hands-free or hand-held, it doesn’t matter,” said David E. Meyer, professor of psychology at the University of Michigan.
In fact, some scientists argue that hands-free laws make driving riskier by effectively condoning the practice. As early as July 2003, researchers at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reached that conclusion based on what they referred to, in a proposed draft of a cellphone policy for the agency, as “a significant body of research worldwide.”
The draft policy said: “We are convinced that legislation forbidding the use of handheld cellphones while driving will not be effective since it will not address the problem. In fact, such legislation may erroneously imply that hands-free phones are safe to use while driving.”
The agency’s current advice is that people should not use cellphones while driving and that hands-free devices do not eliminate the risks of distracted driving.
Scientists are grappling, too, with perhaps the broadest question hanging over the phenomenon of distracted driving: Why do people, knowing the risk, continue to talk while driving? The answer, they say, is partly the intense social pressures to stay in touch and always be available to friends and colleagues. And there also is the neurological response of multitaskers. They show signs of addiction — to their gadgets.
John Ratey, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard University and a specialist on the science of attention, explained that when people use digital devices, they get a quick burst of adrenaline, “a dopamine squirt.” Without it, people grow bored with simpler activities like driving. Mr. Ratey said the modern brain is being rewired to crave stimulation, a condition he calls acquired attention deficit disorder.
“We need that constant pizzazz, the reward, the intensity,” he said. He largely dismisses the argument that people need the time in the car to be productive. “The justification for doing work is just that — a justification to be engaged,” he said.
In many legislatures, including Oklahoma’s, the concerns of such scientists have made little impression.
Concerns About New Rules
In February, five months after the accident that killed Ms. Doyle, Sue Tibbs was in Tulsa undergoing one of her regular seven-hour chemotherapy treatments for ovarian cancer.
As an Oklahoma state representative, Ms. Tibbs was finishing a bill to require hands-free devices for drivers and to ban texting while driving. She had developed an interest in the issue last fall, after hearing about a growing number of crashes like the one involving Mr. Hill and Ms. Doyle, and after an Oklahoma state trooper told her he was increasingly concerned about multitasking behind the wheel.
As Ms. Tibbs sat in the cancer center, she overheard a conversation that sealed her resolve. A woman nearby talked of how her husband often became so engrossed in his cellphone calls he would miss the turn for the road to their home. The cellphone, Ms. Tibbs decided, isn’t like other distractions. “When you’re eating, you’re not concentrating like when you’re on the cellphone,” she said.
On Feb. 19, the public safety committee voted 8 to 4 to send Ms. Tibbs’s bill to the full legislature. She was thrilled. But on March 12, the last day her bill could be considered, the majority floor leader, Mr. Jones, hadn’t brought up her bill. That night, she asked Mr. Jones, a fellow Republican, why. He explained that there was too much opposition, she said. Later, Ms. Tibbs said, he added another reason: she was fragile from cancer and he didn’t want her to go through a long-shot battle for the bill.
Mr. Jones, in an interview, said he and his colleagues needed more evidence of the dangers before they considered restricting the freedom to talk while driving. “We’re concerned about going into the cellphone realm at this point,” he said, adding that he was not lobbied by any companies that make money from the use of devices in cars.
But he said he recognized from using his phone while driving that it could be dangerous, particularly when dialing. “There’s definitely a time when you’re looking at your cellphone,” said Mr. Jones, who uses a hands-free device. “If you’re going to do it, you have to be extremely cautious.”
Like Oklahoma, many states have resisted legislating against multitasking behind the wheel because there is no long-term data on crashes caused by distracted driving, said Anne Teigen, a policy specialist with the National Conference of State Legislatures. But she also acknowledged the shortcomings of any such studies. “It mostly relies on self-reporting, and for insurance reasons people don’t want to admit they were on the phone,” she said.
Others cite more fundamental reasons to block any such legislation. “To me, the death of freedom is far worse than the risk of talking on the phone while driving,” said Carl Wimmer, a state representative in Salt Lake City who successfully fought a bill this year to ban talking while driving. “Why pick on cellphones?” he asked, noting that distraction comes in many forms. “You can’t legislate against stupidity.”
Some states have overcome opposition to pass restrictions. Joe Simitian, a state senator in California, managed to get his hands-free legislation, an effort he began in 2001, passed in 2006. He argued, based on data collected by the California Highway Patrol, that drivers using cellphones caused more fatalities than all the drivers distracted by eating, children, pets or personal hygiene.
In each previous year, the bill was killed — after lobbying by cellphone carriers, including Sprint, AT&T and T-Mobile. Mr. Simitian said that in the first two years, he would visit the offices of his colleagues on the Transportation Committee on the day of the vote and “find three cellphone industry lobbyists sitting in the legislator’s office,” Mr. Simitian said. “They’d just smile.”
He said they fought him even though their brochures said that distracted driving was dangerous. The exception was Verizon Wireless, which supported his efforts from the start.
Opposition gradually eased, and his bill requiring use of headsets while driving took effect in July 2008. In the first six months the California law was in effect, a preliminary California Highway Patrol estimate showed that fatalities dropped 12.5 percent — saving 200 lives. Mr. Simitian said it was too soon to determine whether the law or other factors caused the drop.
Mr. Simitian said one reason political opposition eased was that fellow legislators saw the dangers firsthand. “They’d come to me and say: ‘You may be bringing me around. I almost got creamed at the corner,’ ” he recalled.
For its part, the cellphone industry trade group said it had dropped its objection to restricting cellphone use by drivers — it now is neutral on the subject — because it decided the industry should play no role in trying to shape public policy on the issue. “The change came after we had an epiphany that, if you will, we’re in the business of providing service, and how they use that service is at their discretion,” said Mr. Walls, the industry spokesman.
But Mr. Windsor from Nationwide Mutual and others are skeptical of the cellphone industry’s explanation. They believe its position changed because its business has changed to rely less on total minutes that people spend talking. Cellphone companies’ growth is coming more from customers surfing the Internet, downloading games and using other data services — things that people typically do less of behind the wheel.
Mr. Simitian believes that a ban on talking on cellphones while driving would save even more lives. But he hasn’t proposed one, and has no plans to. “It’s a political nonstarter,” he said. “It’ll be a cold day in hell before people give up their phones altogether in cars.”
Not to mention other devices.
An Array of Distractions
Mr. Hill now owns a silver Chevrolet Silverado pickup that he bought with help from his grandmother. When he drives, he keeps his cellphone tucked in a space in the dashboard, and has set strict rules not to use it — rules he acknowledges he sometimes breaks.
He is also careful to keep his eyes on the road as he searches for his Nickelback, Christian rock or other CDs to play on his stereo.
His dashboard is relatively primitive compared with those of many other vehicles. Sales of multimedia systems for cars — with audio, video and GPS — were up 46 percent in the first four months of this year from a year earlier, according to the research firm NPD Group. More such systems also now come with a dock for MP3 players.
Scientists say they are frightened by each new device, giving drivers more reasons to look away from the road — like searching through song titles on the small screen of an iPod.
To device makers, it’s a big and growing market, though they say they are keenly aware that drivers can become distracted. “We have a chance to create what I call the ‘digital car,’ ” said Glenn Lurie, an executive at AT&T, the service provider for iPhones. “There are phenomenal opportunities.”
For instance, he said, new wireless technology could allow better real-time services, like maps that point to the closest, cheapest gas station. Mr. Lurie said devices would be developed foremost with “safety and security” in mind.
But other corporations emphasize just how engrossing their in-car entertainment can be. A recent ad from Audible.com, which sells audio books, says, “you just might miss your exit on the turnpike.”
Automakers also see a market for new features. Ford, for example, offers in most of its cars a $395 Sync system, which lets drivers use phones and music players with voice commands. The company says it is working to develop the product so drivers might even surf the Internet through voice commands and hear responses.
Joe Berry, Ford’s director of business and product development, said Sync enhances safety by providing a hands-free experience. But he said that not using a device is still safer.
The bottom line is that Ford is catering to consumer interests, Mr. Berry said, using an argument that car makers have made when the safety and fuel economy of sport utility vehicles are questioned, and used by tobacco companies as health concerns grew. The Sync product, he argues, makes drivers safer because its voice-command features let them keep their hands on the wheel and eyes on the road.
“It’s not as if you are going to be able to take this away from people,” he said of phones and other devices in cars. “They simply won’t give it up.”
Mr. Berry compared the situation to eating unhealthy foods. “We, as people, don’t want to stop doing things that aren’t in our best interest,” he said.
And so the fight against in-car distraction has fallen to a small band of activists, notably those who have lost a loved one. They argue that, unlike eating unhealthy foods — or for that matter, not wearing a seat belt — mobile multitasking can cost someone else’s life.
The Resistance
When Linda Doyle was hit by Mr. Hill’s truck, she was on her way to pick up cat food. She volunteered at the Central Oklahoma Humane Society, and drove every day without fail to nearby Lake Overholser, where she fed abandoned cats.
She would sometimes talk on the phone in her car. “If she was driving and I called, she would answer,” said Jennifer Smith, 35, Ms. Doyle’s daughter. “If my sister called, she would answer.”
Ms. Smith, who lives in Grapevine, Tex., and is a real estate agent, says she, too, once talked incessantly while driving. “We’re all guilty of it,” she said. “I’m the first to admit it.”
In her case, no longer. Ms. Smith almost always ignores the ring of an incoming call. And she has become one of the cellphone era’s answers to Mothers Against Drunk Driving. She devotes half her time to her uphill battle — contacting legislators in Texas and Oklahoma, filing a complaint with the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission and reaching out to other victims and their families.
She has talked to a handful of class-action lawyers. “They tell me this is the tobacco or asbestos case of our generation,” she said. But she says they also tell her the case would be too time-consuming and expensive.
David Teater of Spring Lake, Mich., is also fighting distracted driving; he works for the National Safety Council on transportation issues. His son Joe was killed on Martin Luther King’s Birthday in 2004, hit by a young woman talking on the cellphone to someone from her church, where she volunteered. Even after the accident, Mr. Teater said, he had trouble breaking his cellphone habit.
“With all the motivation in the world I couldn’t do it,” he said, adding that he eventually took more decisive action: “I put the cellphone in the trunk.”
Some drivers who caused accidents themselves have become activists, too. Mr. Hill, as part of his misdemeanor charge, must devote 240 hours to community service — talking about the risks of distracted driving, as well as working with animals, as Ms. Doyle’s family said she would have liked.
He spoke to a classroom of fellow students about his experience, sparing no details.
“Their jaws just dropped,” he said. “They couldn’t believe they had someone standing in front of them who was talking on the cellphone and killed someone.”
OKLAHOMA CITY — On his 15th birthday, Christopher Hill got his first cellphone. For his 16th, he was given a used red Ford Ranger pickup, a source of pride he washed every week.
Mr. Hill, a diligent student with a reputation for helping neighbors, also took pride in his clean driving record. “Not a speeding ticket, not a fender bender, nothing,” he said.
Until last Sept. 3. Mr. Hill, then 20, left the parking lot of a Goodwill store where he had spotted a dresser he thought might interest a neighbor. He dialed her to pass along news of the find.
Mr. Hill was so engrossed in the call that he ran a red light and didn’t notice Linda Doyle’s small sport utility vehicle until the last second. He hit her going 45 miles per hour. She was pronounced dead shortly after.
Later, a policeman asked Mr. Hill what color the light had been. “I never saw it,” he answered.
Extensive research shows the dangers of distracted driving. Studies say that drivers using phones are four times as likely to cause a crash as other drivers, and the likelihood that they will crash is equal to that of someone with a .08 percent blood alcohol level, the point at which drivers are generally considered intoxicated. Research also shows that hands-free devices do not eliminate the risks, and may worsen them by suggesting that the behavior is safe.
A 2003 Harvard study estimated that cellphone distractions caused 2,600 traffic deaths every year, and 330,000 accidents that result in moderate or severe injuries.
Yet Americans have largely ignored that research. Instead, they increasingly use phones, navigation devices and even laptops to turn their cars into mobile offices, chat rooms and entertainment centers, making roads more dangerous.
A disconnect between perception and reality worsens the problem. New studies show that drivers overestimate their own ability to safely multitask, even as they worry about the dangers of others doing it.
Device makers and auto companies acknowledge the risks of multitasking behind the wheel, but they aggressively develop and market gadgets that cause distractions.
Police in almost half of all states make no attempt to gather data on the problem. They are not required to ask drivers who cause accidents whether they were distracted by a phone or other device. Even when officers do ask, some drivers are not forthcoming.
The federal government warns against talking on a cellphone while driving, but no state legislature has banned it. This year, state legislators introduced about 170 bills to address distracted driving, but passed fewer than 10.
Five states and the District of Columbia require drivers who talk on cellphones to use hands-free devices, but research shows that using headsets can be as dangerous as holding a phone because the conversation distracts drivers from focusing on the road.
Fourteen states have passed measures to ban texting while driving, and the New York State Assembly sent such a bill to the governor on Friday.
The states that rejected any efforts to limit distracted driving this year include Oklahoma.
“I’m on the phone from when I leave the Capitol to when I get home, and that’s a two-hour drive,” said Tad Jones, the majority floor leader in the Oklahoma House, who helped block the legislation. “A lot of people who travel are used to using the phone.”
Scientists who study distracted driving say they understand the frustrations of colleagues who publicized the dangers of tobacco. Like cigarettes, they say, gadgets are considered cool but can be deadly. And the big device companies even offer warnings that remind them of labels on cigarette packs.
Verizon Wireless, for instance, posts instructions on its Web sites not to talk while driving — with or without a headset. But neither Verizon nor any other cellphone company supports legislation that bans drivers from talking on the phone. And the wireless industry does not conduct research on the dangers, saying that is not its responsibility.
Some researchers say that sufficient evidence exists to justify laws outlawing cellphone use for drivers — and they suggest using technology to enforce them by disabling a driver’s phone. “Just outlawing the behavior cannot possibly go very far toward getting people not to do it,” said Robert D. Foss, senior research scientist at the Highway Safety Research Center at the University of North Carolina. “The behavior is too ingrained and compelling.”
For his part, Mr. Hill rarely talks when he drives now. His mother gave him a hands-free headset two months after the accident. She thought it would create less distraction. He tried it once, and found his mind wandering into his phone call so much that “I nearly missed a light,” he said.
He pleaded guilty to negligent homicide, a misdemeanor, for the death of Ms. Doyle. Now, when he is a passenger in a car, it makes him nervous when the driver starts talking on the phone. But Mr. Hill, who is polite and deferential, said he doesn’t want to badger drivers about the risks.
“I hope they don’t have to go through what I did to realize it’s a problem,” he added.
Dangerous Overconfidence
Sgt. Matthew Downing, a tough-talking 11-year veteran on the Oklahoma City police force, drives a car with no lights on the roof. That way, drivers are less likely to notice him as he waits for speeders.
Increasingly, he sees erratic behavior — swerving across lanes, running red lights — that looks just like drunken driving. Instead, he sees drivers talking on their phones, or texting. “A ton of people pass me literally unaware of their surroundings,” he said.
Sergeant Downing, who often handles traffic fatalities, arrived at the scene of Mr. Hill’s crash after paramedics had extracted Ms. Doyle, who was 61, from her car. He found Mr. Hill sitting on a fire truck, acting “hysterical.”
There was no mystery about the accident’s cause; the roads were dry. “He told me he was talking on the phone and didn’t see the light,” Sergeant Downing said.
“He’s a nice kid,” he said of Mr. Hill. But he said he felt angry, both at Mr. Hill and at what he sees as an epidemic of multitasking on the road. “Driving and talking are automatic,” he said.
Over all, cellphone use has soared. From 1995 to 2008, the number of wireless subscribers in the United States increased eightfold, to 270 million, and minutes talked rose 58-fold.
Last year, the federal agency dealing with road safety, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, published a study, based on researchers’ observations of drivers, suggesting that at any time during daylight hours in 2007, 11 percent — or 1.8 million drivers — were using a cellphone.
And in a survey of 1,506 people last year by Nationwide Mutual Insurance, 81 percent of cellphone owners acknowledged that they talk on phones while driving, and 98 percent considered themselves safe drivers. But 45 percent said they had been hit or nearly hit by a driver talking on a phone.
“When we ask people to identify the most dangerous distraction on the highway today, about half — correctly — identify cellphones,” said Bill Windsor, associate vice president for safety at Nationwide. “But they think others are dangerous, not themselves.”
He and others who favor restrictions say drivers regularly make what amount to ill-informed analyses of cost-benefit tradeoffs, often deciding that the value of constant communication outweighs any risks.
Seven years ago, when cellphones and services like texting were less common, federal researchers estimated that drivers using cellphones caused about 1,000 fatalities and played a role in 240,000 crashes. (In 2007, drunken driving caused 13,000 fatalities.)
By other measures, American roads are becoming safer. According to the highway safety agency, the number of driving fatalities has remained around 42,000 a year for most of the last decade, though it fell to 37,261 in 2008, when gas prices rose sharply and Americans drove less.
From 1997 to 2007, the number of reported accidents fell to 6 million a year from 6.7 million, according to the highway safety agency. “There are more drivers, more talking drivers,” said John Walls, spokesman for the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association. “If it’s so risky, then logically one would think there would be more accidents.”
The association, a trade group, fought rules to ban phone use while driving until January, when it shifted to a neutral position on the issue. “I wouldn’t say, ‘Talk on the phone more and have fewer accidents,’ ” Mr. Walls added. “I’m just saying, ‘How does this square?’ ”
Some scientists say this argument is flawed. “We’ve spent billions on air bags, antilock brakes, better steering, safer cars and roads, but the number of fatalities has remained constant,” said David Strayer, a psychology professor at the University of Utah and a leading researcher in the field of distracted driving.
“Our return on investment for those billions is zero,” he added. “And that’s because we’re using devices in our cars.”
Better data would help settle the debate. But 21 states do not include a box on accident forms for police to mark electronic devices as a cause. Those that now account for it started doing so only recently. Mr. Windsor of Nationwide Mutual said that such data, while valuable, would greatly underestimate the problem because it relies on driver confessions. Sometimes drivers say they just finished a call. Cellphone records are not much help because of the difficulty of establishing the precise time of an accident.
“By the time you get to a crash, it’s very, very difficult to determine whether someone was talking on the phone and whether the phone caused the crash,” said Rae Tyson, a spokesman for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
For Mr. Windsor and many scientists who study the issue, accident figures are not necessary to prove the risks.
“The research is just so strong,” Mr. Windsor said.
Risks of Multitasking
In a windowless room at the University of Utah, Professor Strayer has spent a decade studying driver distraction.
On a recent afternoon, Anne McLaren, 19, who just finished her freshman year studying dental hygiene and who gets class credit for volunteer work, climbed behind the wheel of Mr. Strayer’s $100,000 driving simulator. Her task was to closely follow a white car that often slowed abruptly. A voice on a speaker phone asked Ms. McLaren questions like, “When you do a pull-up, do your palms face toward you?” and “Can you touch your elbow to your ear?”
For the most part, she ably multitasked. But sometimes she took her hands from the wheel when trying to answer a question, like, “True or false: A peanut butter jar opens clockwise.” And she was so focused on her call that she seemed to miss surprises, like a body at the side of the road.
Texting while driving was more difficult; she soon slammed into the virtual car in front of her.
Mr. Strayer’s research, using a small camera to track his volunteers’ eye movements, shows that texting drivers regularly focus on their screens for stretches of more than five seconds.
“I should pay attention to the road,” she said afterward. But sometimes it’s hard to ignore the phone, she added, like when her parents want to reach her. “My dad gets more mad if I don’t have the phone than if I’m talking and driving.”
Mr. Strayer’s research, showing that multitasking drivers are four times as likely to crash as people who are focused on driving, matches the findings of two studies, in Canada and in Australia, of drivers on actual roads.
The highway safety administration estimates that drivers using a hand-held device are at 1.3 times greater risk of a crash or near crash, and at three times the risk when dialing, compared with others who are simply driving. The agency based its conclusions on research from the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, which placed cameras inside cars to monitor drivers for more than a year. The study found cellphones to be the most common cause of driver distraction.
Research also shows that drivers conversing with fellow passengers do not present the same danger, because adult riders help keep drivers alert and point out dangerous conditions and tend to talk less in heavy traffic or hazardous weather.
Scientists note that there are limits to how much the brain can multitask. The brain has trouble assessing separate streams of information — even if one is visual and the other aural, said Steve Yantis, professor of psychological and brain sciences at Johns Hopkins University.
Further, he said, when people talk on the phone, they are doing more than simply listening. The words conjure images in the mind’s eye, including images of the person they are talking to. That typically doesn’t interfere with driving. The problem starts when a car swerves unexpectedly or a pedestrian steps into traffic, he said, and the mind lacks the processing power to react in time.
“There is zero doubt that one’s driving ability is impaired when one is trying to have a cellphone conversation — whether hands-free or hand-held, it doesn’t matter,” said David E. Meyer, professor of psychology at the University of Michigan.
In fact, some scientists argue that hands-free laws make driving riskier by effectively condoning the practice. As early as July 2003, researchers at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reached that conclusion based on what they referred to, in a proposed draft of a cellphone policy for the agency, as “a significant body of research worldwide.”
The draft policy said: “We are convinced that legislation forbidding the use of handheld cellphones while driving will not be effective since it will not address the problem. In fact, such legislation may erroneously imply that hands-free phones are safe to use while driving.”
The agency’s current advice is that people should not use cellphones while driving and that hands-free devices do not eliminate the risks of distracted driving.
Scientists are grappling, too, with perhaps the broadest question hanging over the phenomenon of distracted driving: Why do people, knowing the risk, continue to talk while driving? The answer, they say, is partly the intense social pressures to stay in touch and always be available to friends and colleagues. And there also is the neurological response of multitaskers. They show signs of addiction — to their gadgets.
John Ratey, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard University and a specialist on the science of attention, explained that when people use digital devices, they get a quick burst of adrenaline, “a dopamine squirt.” Without it, people grow bored with simpler activities like driving. Mr. Ratey said the modern brain is being rewired to crave stimulation, a condition he calls acquired attention deficit disorder.
“We need that constant pizzazz, the reward, the intensity,” he said. He largely dismisses the argument that people need the time in the car to be productive. “The justification for doing work is just that — a justification to be engaged,” he said.
In many legislatures, including Oklahoma’s, the concerns of such scientists have made little impression.
Concerns About New Rules
In February, five months after the accident that killed Ms. Doyle, Sue Tibbs was in Tulsa undergoing one of her regular seven-hour chemotherapy treatments for ovarian cancer.
As an Oklahoma state representative, Ms. Tibbs was finishing a bill to require hands-free devices for drivers and to ban texting while driving. She had developed an interest in the issue last fall, after hearing about a growing number of crashes like the one involving Mr. Hill and Ms. Doyle, and after an Oklahoma state trooper told her he was increasingly concerned about multitasking behind the wheel.
As Ms. Tibbs sat in the cancer center, she overheard a conversation that sealed her resolve. A woman nearby talked of how her husband often became so engrossed in his cellphone calls he would miss the turn for the road to their home. The cellphone, Ms. Tibbs decided, isn’t like other distractions. “When you’re eating, you’re not concentrating like when you’re on the cellphone,” she said.
On Feb. 19, the public safety committee voted 8 to 4 to send Ms. Tibbs’s bill to the full legislature. She was thrilled. But on March 12, the last day her bill could be considered, the majority floor leader, Mr. Jones, hadn’t brought up her bill. That night, she asked Mr. Jones, a fellow Republican, why. He explained that there was too much opposition, she said. Later, Ms. Tibbs said, he added another reason: she was fragile from cancer and he didn’t want her to go through a long-shot battle for the bill.
Mr. Jones, in an interview, said he and his colleagues needed more evidence of the dangers before they considered restricting the freedom to talk while driving. “We’re concerned about going into the cellphone realm at this point,” he said, adding that he was not lobbied by any companies that make money from the use of devices in cars.
But he said he recognized from using his phone while driving that it could be dangerous, particularly when dialing. “There’s definitely a time when you’re looking at your cellphone,” said Mr. Jones, who uses a hands-free device. “If you’re going to do it, you have to be extremely cautious.”
Like Oklahoma, many states have resisted legislating against multitasking behind the wheel because there is no long-term data on crashes caused by distracted driving, said Anne Teigen, a policy specialist with the National Conference of State Legislatures. But she also acknowledged the shortcomings of any such studies. “It mostly relies on self-reporting, and for insurance reasons people don’t want to admit they were on the phone,” she said.
Others cite more fundamental reasons to block any such legislation. “To me, the death of freedom is far worse than the risk of talking on the phone while driving,” said Carl Wimmer, a state representative in Salt Lake City who successfully fought a bill this year to ban talking while driving. “Why pick on cellphones?” he asked, noting that distraction comes in many forms. “You can’t legislate against stupidity.”
Some states have overcome opposition to pass restrictions. Joe Simitian, a state senator in California, managed to get his hands-free legislation, an effort he began in 2001, passed in 2006. He argued, based on data collected by the California Highway Patrol, that drivers using cellphones caused more fatalities than all the drivers distracted by eating, children, pets or personal hygiene.
In each previous year, the bill was killed — after lobbying by cellphone carriers, including Sprint, AT&T and T-Mobile. Mr. Simitian said that in the first two years, he would visit the offices of his colleagues on the Transportation Committee on the day of the vote and “find three cellphone industry lobbyists sitting in the legislator’s office,” Mr. Simitian said. “They’d just smile.”
He said they fought him even though their brochures said that distracted driving was dangerous. The exception was Verizon Wireless, which supported his efforts from the start.
Opposition gradually eased, and his bill requiring use of headsets while driving took effect in July 2008. In the first six months the California law was in effect, a preliminary California Highway Patrol estimate showed that fatalities dropped 12.5 percent — saving 200 lives. Mr. Simitian said it was too soon to determine whether the law or other factors caused the drop.
Mr. Simitian said one reason political opposition eased was that fellow legislators saw the dangers firsthand. “They’d come to me and say: ‘You may be bringing me around. I almost got creamed at the corner,’ ” he recalled.
For its part, the cellphone industry trade group said it had dropped its objection to restricting cellphone use by drivers — it now is neutral on the subject — because it decided the industry should play no role in trying to shape public policy on the issue. “The change came after we had an epiphany that, if you will, we’re in the business of providing service, and how they use that service is at their discretion,” said Mr. Walls, the industry spokesman.
But Mr. Windsor from Nationwide Mutual and others are skeptical of the cellphone industry’s explanation. They believe its position changed because its business has changed to rely less on total minutes that people spend talking. Cellphone companies’ growth is coming more from customers surfing the Internet, downloading games and using other data services — things that people typically do less of behind the wheel.
Mr. Simitian believes that a ban on talking on cellphones while driving would save even more lives. But he hasn’t proposed one, and has no plans to. “It’s a political nonstarter,” he said. “It’ll be a cold day in hell before people give up their phones altogether in cars.”
Not to mention other devices.
An Array of Distractions
Mr. Hill now owns a silver Chevrolet Silverado pickup that he bought with help from his grandmother. When he drives, he keeps his cellphone tucked in a space in the dashboard, and has set strict rules not to use it — rules he acknowledges he sometimes breaks.
He is also careful to keep his eyes on the road as he searches for his Nickelback, Christian rock or other CDs to play on his stereo.
His dashboard is relatively primitive compared with those of many other vehicles. Sales of multimedia systems for cars — with audio, video and GPS — were up 46 percent in the first four months of this year from a year earlier, according to the research firm NPD Group. More such systems also now come with a dock for MP3 players.
Scientists say they are frightened by each new device, giving drivers more reasons to look away from the road — like searching through song titles on the small screen of an iPod.
To device makers, it’s a big and growing market, though they say they are keenly aware that drivers can become distracted. “We have a chance to create what I call the ‘digital car,’ ” said Glenn Lurie, an executive at AT&T, the service provider for iPhones. “There are phenomenal opportunities.”
For instance, he said, new wireless technology could allow better real-time services, like maps that point to the closest, cheapest gas station. Mr. Lurie said devices would be developed foremost with “safety and security” in mind.
But other corporations emphasize just how engrossing their in-car entertainment can be. A recent ad from Audible.com, which sells audio books, says, “you just might miss your exit on the turnpike.”
Automakers also see a market for new features. Ford, for example, offers in most of its cars a $395 Sync system, which lets drivers use phones and music players with voice commands. The company says it is working to develop the product so drivers might even surf the Internet through voice commands and hear responses.
Joe Berry, Ford’s director of business and product development, said Sync enhances safety by providing a hands-free experience. But he said that not using a device is still safer.
The bottom line is that Ford is catering to consumer interests, Mr. Berry said, using an argument that car makers have made when the safety and fuel economy of sport utility vehicles are questioned, and used by tobacco companies as health concerns grew. The Sync product, he argues, makes drivers safer because its voice-command features let them keep their hands on the wheel and eyes on the road.
“It’s not as if you are going to be able to take this away from people,” he said of phones and other devices in cars. “They simply won’t give it up.”
Mr. Berry compared the situation to eating unhealthy foods. “We, as people, don’t want to stop doing things that aren’t in our best interest,” he said.
And so the fight against in-car distraction has fallen to a small band of activists, notably those who have lost a loved one. They argue that, unlike eating unhealthy foods — or for that matter, not wearing a seat belt — mobile multitasking can cost someone else’s life.
The Resistance
When Linda Doyle was hit by Mr. Hill’s truck, she was on her way to pick up cat food. She volunteered at the Central Oklahoma Humane Society, and drove every day without fail to nearby Lake Overholser, where she fed abandoned cats.
She would sometimes talk on the phone in her car. “If she was driving and I called, she would answer,” said Jennifer Smith, 35, Ms. Doyle’s daughter. “If my sister called, she would answer.”
Ms. Smith, who lives in Grapevine, Tex., and is a real estate agent, says she, too, once talked incessantly while driving. “We’re all guilty of it,” she said. “I’m the first to admit it.”
In her case, no longer. Ms. Smith almost always ignores the ring of an incoming call. And she has become one of the cellphone era’s answers to Mothers Against Drunk Driving. She devotes half her time to her uphill battle — contacting legislators in Texas and Oklahoma, filing a complaint with the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission and reaching out to other victims and their families.
She has talked to a handful of class-action lawyers. “They tell me this is the tobacco or asbestos case of our generation,” she said. But she says they also tell her the case would be too time-consuming and expensive.
David Teater of Spring Lake, Mich., is also fighting distracted driving; he works for the National Safety Council on transportation issues. His son Joe was killed on Martin Luther King’s Birthday in 2004, hit by a young woman talking on the cellphone to someone from her church, where she volunteered. Even after the accident, Mr. Teater said, he had trouble breaking his cellphone habit.
“With all the motivation in the world I couldn’t do it,” he said, adding that he eventually took more decisive action: “I put the cellphone in the trunk.”
Some drivers who caused accidents themselves have become activists, too. Mr. Hill, as part of his misdemeanor charge, must devote 240 hours to community service — talking about the risks of distracted driving, as well as working with animals, as Ms. Doyle’s family said she would have liked.
He spoke to a classroom of fellow students about his experience, sparing no details.
“Their jaws just dropped,” he said. “They couldn’t believe they had someone standing in front of them who was talking on the cellphone and killed someone.”
Friday, July 17, 2009
Charting a misleading course on health care
July 17, 2009
Media Matters: Charting a misleading course on health care
Nothing sends media conservatives off the deep end quite like the issue of health care reform. This week was certainly no exception.
This Wednesday on his nationally syndicated radio show, Fox News' Glenn Beck blew up on a caller who dared to challenge his unyielding, misleading war against health care reform. After patronizing the angry caller for several minutes, Beck "los[t]" his "mind," screaming at the caller: "Get off my phone you little pinhead!" Since then, the disturbing exchange has been burning up YouTube and is currently ranked the #5 video overall with more than 350,000 views. MSNBC's David Shuster and Tamron Hall even highlighted the clip as an example of how conservative "anger" has "intensified." Capping things off, Beck's screaming fit spawned a hilarious YouTube user-generated remix titled: "Glenn Beck 'Get Off My Phone' Radio Freak Out (Twilight Vampire Metal Remix)."
Coverage of health care, though, has been anything but funny of late.
This week, the Drudge Report, Fox News Channel, Fox Business and CNBC's The Kudlow Report ran with a chart released by congressional Republicans that day - just one day after House Democrats introduced their health care reform bill -- that purported to show "the complex health care reform proposal by Democratic congressional leaders." The release from Rep. Kevin Brady (TX) about the chart, titled "BAFFLING FLOW CHART; Public Gets Peek at Complicated Bureaucracy in Democratic Health Care Plan," stated that the chart "depicts how the health care system would be organized at the national level if the Democrats' plan became law. These new levels of bureaucracy, agencies, organization and programs will all be put directly between the patient and their health care."
Fox News' Sean Hannity hosted Bill O'Reilly ambush-producer-extraordinaire Griff Jenkins, who described the chart as "Candyland," noting that "whatever it is, it's a lot of government between you and your doctor," while syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer, also on Fox, touted the chart by saying it makes the health care bill "look like an absurd Rube Goldberg device."
The conservative media's promotion of the House Republican chart harkens back to the media attention devoted in 1994 to a similar misleading chart -- distributed by the office of then-Republican Sen. Arlen Specter -- that then-Senate Republican leader Bob Dole claimed illustrated "what the health care bureaucracy would look like under" President Clinton's health care reform plan.
It really was a textbook example of how the right-wing noise machine operates. Media Matters produced a chart of its own documenting the media's web of misinformation on the subject, illustrating the disturbingly common pattern of conservative spin making its way from a Republican politician's press release to the Drudge Report to Fox News and other outlets on the right. Additionally, I discussed the subject as a guest on MSNBC Live noting, in part, that the conservative movement has been using the media to attack health care reform efforts for more than 70 years.
Not to be left out in the world of insane health care claims, an editorial by the conservative Investor's Business Daily actually claimed that the House tri-committee health-care reform bill includes "a provision making individual private medical insurance illegal." The claim is false, of course, but that didn't stop Rush Limbaugh, the Media Research Center or a host of other media conservatives from advancing the delusional line of attack on reform.
Other Major Stories This Week:
Crazy uncle Pat goes after Sotomayor
Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings took place this week, which provided one final opportunity for her conservative critics to dust off the same set of attacks they unsuccessfully employed shortly after her nomination was announced. It also provided MSNBC's Pat Buchanan with an opportunity to once again test how much vitriol and hatred the peacock-branded cable network is willing to broadcast under the label of "political analysis."
In the span of a few days, Buchanan declared Sotomayor to be a "militant liberal Latina" of limited intellect who had never written any law review articles and who harbored "a lifelong resolve to discriminate against white males." (White men are never prejudiced, in case you were wondering.) After again explaining how Sotomayor is nothing more than an "affirmative action" pick who had been "appointed because she's a Latina, and a Hispanic, and a woman," Buchanan said he didn't "understand" the idea of affirmative action for Hispanics, seeing as they had never suffered through slavery. "This has been a country built, basically, by white folks," he finally told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, for which she roundly rebuked him. "You're playing with fire," she said during a heated exchange, adding, "[Y]ou're living in the 1950s."
Which brings us back to the question Media Matters' Jamison Foser posed just six short weeks ago: What would Pat Buchanan have to say to get himself fired from MSNBC?
And what, you might ask, of Sotomayor's testimony itself? Fox News' Glenn Beck was so anxious to deride the proceedings that he began criticizing the questioning of the nominee a day before questioning had actually begun. Seriously. Fox News, meanwhile, wasn't particularly intent on showing what the Democratic members had to say, explaining that they might skip one "here or there" because the large Democratic majority meant there were more Democrats on the committee than Republicans. At Fox News, elections just don't have consequences. And why would they care, what with the "all-stars" on the Republican side of the ledger "scuffing ... up" the witness, as Carl Cameron put it. But in the sake of fairness, not everyone at Fox agreed. Sen. Lindsey Graham's airing of sexist, anonymous gripes about Sotomayor were too much even for anchor Megyn Kelly to accept -- although they sounded perfectly acceptable to a host of other reporters at the "fair and balanced" network.
It was perhaps Sen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III who led the most charmed life this week. Not only did Fox fawn over his line of questioning, the New York Times quoted his statement that there is "no place in the courtroom" for empathy without mentioning his support of Justice Samuel Alito, who spoke at length about his compassion for people involved in immigration and discrimination cases during his own confirmation hearings. Numerous media outlets also reported Sessions' statement that "I will not vote for -- and no senator should vote for -- an individual nominated by any president who believes it is acceptable for a judge to allow their personal background, gender prejudices, or sympathies to sway their decision in favor of, or against, parties before the court," without noting the crucial Alito context. Major broadcasts ignored conservative hypocrisy on empathy, too, although CNN's Kyra Phillips seemed to get it about right. But this pales in comparison to the fact that major newspapers failed to report on Sessions' alleged history of racial insensitivity in stories discussing his questioning of Sotomayor. Compare this to the endless discussion and distorted versions of Sotomayor's "wise Latina" comment, and you'll come away from the whole thing shaking your head.
Darth Cheney and the CIA controversy
As details continue to trickle out about Dick Cheney's reported role in keeping Congress in the dark about a CIA counterterrorism program, Liz Cheney, the former veep's daughter, took to the airwaves yet again to mount his defense.
MSNBC's Morning Joe hosted the younger, less scary Cheney to discuss recent reports that her father instructed the CIA not to disclose to Congress an intelligence program that CIA director Leon Panetta recently discontinued. Cheney repeatedly defended her father during the interview, and at one point stated, "[Dick Cheney] doesn't comment on classified programs, and obviously I'm not going to comment on classified programs on his behalf." Of course, the Morning Joe crew never asked her to explain what conversations she's had with Dick Cheney about CIA practices and policies during the Bush administration, or whether her father did in fact provide her with classified information that he reportedly withheld from Congress.
Then again, why would anyone ask such tough questions? After all, just last weekend Fox's Chris Wallace was asking whether he was "overly cynical" in thinking Democrats "just trot[ted] out" Dick Cheney because he's always a pretty good "whipping boy."
Media Matters: Charting a misleading course on health care
Nothing sends media conservatives off the deep end quite like the issue of health care reform. This week was certainly no exception.
This Wednesday on his nationally syndicated radio show, Fox News' Glenn Beck blew up on a caller who dared to challenge his unyielding, misleading war against health care reform. After patronizing the angry caller for several minutes, Beck "los[t]" his "mind," screaming at the caller: "Get off my phone you little pinhead!" Since then, the disturbing exchange has been burning up YouTube and is currently ranked the #5 video overall with more than 350,000 views. MSNBC's David Shuster and Tamron Hall even highlighted the clip as an example of how conservative "anger" has "intensified." Capping things off, Beck's screaming fit spawned a hilarious YouTube user-generated remix titled: "Glenn Beck 'Get Off My Phone' Radio Freak Out (Twilight Vampire Metal Remix)."
Coverage of health care, though, has been anything but funny of late.
This week, the Drudge Report, Fox News Channel, Fox Business and CNBC's The Kudlow Report ran with a chart released by congressional Republicans that day - just one day after House Democrats introduced their health care reform bill -- that purported to show "the complex health care reform proposal by Democratic congressional leaders." The release from Rep. Kevin Brady (TX) about the chart, titled "BAFFLING FLOW CHART; Public Gets Peek at Complicated Bureaucracy in Democratic Health Care Plan," stated that the chart "depicts how the health care system would be organized at the national level if the Democrats' plan became law. These new levels of bureaucracy, agencies, organization and programs will all be put directly between the patient and their health care."
Fox News' Sean Hannity hosted Bill O'Reilly ambush-producer-extraordinaire Griff Jenkins, who described the chart as "Candyland," noting that "whatever it is, it's a lot of government between you and your doctor," while syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer, also on Fox, touted the chart by saying it makes the health care bill "look like an absurd Rube Goldberg device."
The conservative media's promotion of the House Republican chart harkens back to the media attention devoted in 1994 to a similar misleading chart -- distributed by the office of then-Republican Sen. Arlen Specter -- that then-Senate Republican leader Bob Dole claimed illustrated "what the health care bureaucracy would look like under" President Clinton's health care reform plan.
It really was a textbook example of how the right-wing noise machine operates. Media Matters produced a chart of its own documenting the media's web of misinformation on the subject, illustrating the disturbingly common pattern of conservative spin making its way from a Republican politician's press release to the Drudge Report to Fox News and other outlets on the right. Additionally, I discussed the subject as a guest on MSNBC Live noting, in part, that the conservative movement has been using the media to attack health care reform efforts for more than 70 years.
Not to be left out in the world of insane health care claims, an editorial by the conservative Investor's Business Daily actually claimed that the House tri-committee health-care reform bill includes "a provision making individual private medical insurance illegal." The claim is false, of course, but that didn't stop Rush Limbaugh, the Media Research Center or a host of other media conservatives from advancing the delusional line of attack on reform.
Other Major Stories This Week:
Crazy uncle Pat goes after Sotomayor
Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings took place this week, which provided one final opportunity for her conservative critics to dust off the same set of attacks they unsuccessfully employed shortly after her nomination was announced. It also provided MSNBC's Pat Buchanan with an opportunity to once again test how much vitriol and hatred the peacock-branded cable network is willing to broadcast under the label of "political analysis."
In the span of a few days, Buchanan declared Sotomayor to be a "militant liberal Latina" of limited intellect who had never written any law review articles and who harbored "a lifelong resolve to discriminate against white males." (White men are never prejudiced, in case you were wondering.) After again explaining how Sotomayor is nothing more than an "affirmative action" pick who had been "appointed because she's a Latina, and a Hispanic, and a woman," Buchanan said he didn't "understand" the idea of affirmative action for Hispanics, seeing as they had never suffered through slavery. "This has been a country built, basically, by white folks," he finally told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, for which she roundly rebuked him. "You're playing with fire," she said during a heated exchange, adding, "[Y]ou're living in the 1950s."
Which brings us back to the question Media Matters' Jamison Foser posed just six short weeks ago: What would Pat Buchanan have to say to get himself fired from MSNBC?
And what, you might ask, of Sotomayor's testimony itself? Fox News' Glenn Beck was so anxious to deride the proceedings that he began criticizing the questioning of the nominee a day before questioning had actually begun. Seriously. Fox News, meanwhile, wasn't particularly intent on showing what the Democratic members had to say, explaining that they might skip one "here or there" because the large Democratic majority meant there were more Democrats on the committee than Republicans. At Fox News, elections just don't have consequences. And why would they care, what with the "all-stars" on the Republican side of the ledger "scuffing ... up" the witness, as Carl Cameron put it. But in the sake of fairness, not everyone at Fox agreed. Sen. Lindsey Graham's airing of sexist, anonymous gripes about Sotomayor were too much even for anchor Megyn Kelly to accept -- although they sounded perfectly acceptable to a host of other reporters at the "fair and balanced" network.
It was perhaps Sen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III who led the most charmed life this week. Not only did Fox fawn over his line of questioning, the New York Times quoted his statement that there is "no place in the courtroom" for empathy without mentioning his support of Justice Samuel Alito, who spoke at length about his compassion for people involved in immigration and discrimination cases during his own confirmation hearings. Numerous media outlets also reported Sessions' statement that "I will not vote for -- and no senator should vote for -- an individual nominated by any president who believes it is acceptable for a judge to allow their personal background, gender prejudices, or sympathies to sway their decision in favor of, or against, parties before the court," without noting the crucial Alito context. Major broadcasts ignored conservative hypocrisy on empathy, too, although CNN's Kyra Phillips seemed to get it about right. But this pales in comparison to the fact that major newspapers failed to report on Sessions' alleged history of racial insensitivity in stories discussing his questioning of Sotomayor. Compare this to the endless discussion and distorted versions of Sotomayor's "wise Latina" comment, and you'll come away from the whole thing shaking your head.
Darth Cheney and the CIA controversy
As details continue to trickle out about Dick Cheney's reported role in keeping Congress in the dark about a CIA counterterrorism program, Liz Cheney, the former veep's daughter, took to the airwaves yet again to mount his defense.
MSNBC's Morning Joe hosted the younger, less scary Cheney to discuss recent reports that her father instructed the CIA not to disclose to Congress an intelligence program that CIA director Leon Panetta recently discontinued. Cheney repeatedly defended her father during the interview, and at one point stated, "[Dick Cheney] doesn't comment on classified programs, and obviously I'm not going to comment on classified programs on his behalf." Of course, the Morning Joe crew never asked her to explain what conversations she's had with Dick Cheney about CIA practices and policies during the Bush administration, or whether her father did in fact provide her with classified information that he reportedly withheld from Congress.
Then again, why would anyone ask such tough questions? After all, just last weekend Fox's Chris Wallace was asking whether he was "overly cynical" in thinking Democrats "just trot[ted] out" Dick Cheney because he's always a pretty good "whipping boy."
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