Ray LaHood Has Another Bright Idea
“I think it will be done… I think the technology is there and I think you’re going to see the technology become adaptable in automobiles to disable these cell phones. We need to do a lot more if were going to save lives.”
To paraphrase Leslie Ann Phillips on her fabulous Martinis and Bikinis album, however, Ray says “save” when he means “control”.
The Daily Caller reports that Ray LaHood went on at some length to the fawning hosts on MSNBC “Morning Joe” about his crusade to forcibly jam cellphone signals in automobiles. Apparently, his plan is for the Federal Government to force automakers to install cellphone jammers in every new car sold, as soon as possible.
LaHood is launching the Faces Of Distracted Driving website, which exploits pictures of sexually attractive teenaged girls who are now dead in an effort to “bring the problem home”. In addition to slandering the memory of dead children by claiming the often-unproven fact that they were directly responsible for their own deaths and/or the deaths of their friends, the site features interviews with people who were in no way involved with the incidents in question. Naturally, MSNBC was all too happy to give him a platform to promote this hideously offensive site and the rest of his less-than-scientifically-rigorous ideas.
A chimpanzee pressing hieroglyphs on a laboratory chimp communication board could point out a half-dozen staggering difficulties with the implementation of this mobile jamming requirement, and I’d encourge all of you to think of as many as you can. The frightening aspect to all of this is that Ray-Ray hasn’t seemingly devoted five minutes of thought to any of those problems before shooting his mouth off on national television.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is your government in action.
UPDATE: Ray LaHood fires back at his Fastlane blog, writing
A story in The Daily Caller this morning inaccurately characterized my response to a question I was asked on MSNBC earlier this week, specifically about whether I believed we should employ a specific technology that would block cell phone signals in cars to prevent drivers from talking or texting behind the wheel.
What I actually said was:
“There’s a lot of technology out there now that can disable phones and we’re looking at that. A number of [cell technology innovators] came to our Distracted Driving Summit here in Washington and presented their technology, and that’s one way. But you have to have good laws, you have to have good enforcement, and you have to have people take personal responsibility. That’s the bottom line.”
Again, personal responsibility – that’s the bottom line. When you get behind the wheel of a 5,000 pound automobile, you have a personal responsibility to drive that vehicle safely. That means, put away cell phones and other devices that take your focus off of the road.
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I triple-dog dare the Obama adminsitration to mandate cell phone jamming in automobiles. Then instead of losing the next election by 10%, he will lose it by 20%. Young, cell phone using voters were a very large section of his voter base in 2008.
I hate people who have conversations while driving as much or more than most people, but what LaHood is advocating is the equivalent of forcing every car to have a breathalyzer to stop drunk driving. It's just a violation of people's freedom. What if you want to run the car (in park) to charge your phone while you talk in a parking lot? What if you are being chased by some crazy stalker and need to call 911? What if you're trapped in a snowstorm in your car and need to call out? People have the right to make choices, good or bad. If they get in an accident from being on a cell phone, punish that. Otherwise, there is no reason to intrude on people's lives like this. Anyhow, we already know the Obama administration hates technology that gives people choices, thanks to his reckless statements condemning iPhones, etc. This is just about control.