August 4, 2009, 7:06 am
Hat tip to Radley Balko, from 1150 WDEL
And, the leader of an anti-drunk driving group hopes those images don't send the wrong message to the millions of young people who saw the president drinking on TV.
Nancy Raynor is president of the Delaware chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving.
She says her group isn't "prohibitionist," but it is is concerned about what teens and childrens take away from seeing the president drinking on TV.
Kids would have seen the President drinking a very modest amount of alcohol, and then not driving. And this has what to do with drunk driving? Answer: nothing. Because despite her protestations, MADD has become a prohibitionist organization.
April 24, 2009, 11:17 pm
Per Overlawyered:
Mothers Against Drunk Driving is anything but an uncontroversial organization, as the Washington Times, Radley Balko, and our own archives make clear. Among the bad, sometimes awful ideas with which it has been identified are a reduction of the blood alcohol limit to 0.4 (meaning that for some adults a single drink could result in arrest), blanket police roadblocks and pullovers, the 55 mph speed limit, traffic-cams, and the imprisonment of parents who knowingly permit teen party drinking, to name but a few. Of particular interest when it comes to the policies of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), it has backed proposed legislation demanding that costly breathalyzer-ignition interlock systems be foisted on all new cars, whether or not their drivers have ever committed a DUI offense; it's also lined up with the plaintiff's bar on various dubious efforts to expand liability.
Now President Obama has named MADD CEO Chuck Hurley to head NHTSA. Drivers, car buyers, and the American public had better brace themselves for a season of neo-Prohibitionist rhetoric, nannyist initiatives, and efforts to criminalize now-lawful conduct. It won't be pretty.
Olson has tons of history linked on his site.
September 10, 2007, 9:08 pm
Increasingly MADD and the tea-totaling Nazis are after parents who allow kids to drink alcohol at home.
Research published in the Journal of Adolescent Health in 2004 found
that adolescents whose parents permitted them to attend unchaperoned
parties where drinking occurred had twice the average binge-drinking
rate. But the study also had another, more arresting conclusion:
Children whose parents introduced drinking to the children at home were
one-third as likely to binge....
In fact, the American Medical Association has actually put out press releases
lamenting the fact that most teens get their first sip of alcohol from
their parents. I'd say that's exactly who ought to be giving it to them.
While I have no intention of throwing wild parties and getting my kids' friends drunk, I do intend to introduce alcohol as well as a respect for it at the dinner table, just as my parents did. I am a firm believer that letting you kids drink a bit in the very controlled home environment is the best possible way to take the edginess and mystery out of drinking -- after all, how cool can it be if you do it with your parents.
