Ban texting while driving

South Dakota's neighbors have gotten the message. Now Citizens for Cell Phone Safety While Driving are taking that same message to the Sioux Falls City Council. It's a message that the South Dakota Legislature has ignored. Since the State won't take the lead, it's up to Sioux Falls to do what's right. Ban texting while driving. Citizens for Cell Phone Safety While Driving are presenting a proposal to the City Council's Public Services Committee calling for a ban on all texting while driving within the city's limits. Further, the measure would ban the use of any handheld device while driving in a school zone while children are present, with exceptions for law enforcement, fire rescue and emergency personnel. This measure has the backing of 16 area corporations and institutions, including Avera McKennan, Sanford Health, Augustana College, Vern Eide Motorcars, AAA South Dakota, and South Dakota Voices for Children. And since the State is balking at putting a halt to this dangerous practice, Sioux Falls can take the lead in promoting safety. For the last two years the South Dakota Legislature has rejected a statewide ban on texting while driving. In 2011, House Speaker Val Rausch thought lawmakers could write a better bill to encompass other forms of distracted driving. Further, some argue that this measure would be difficult to enforce. Does that make it no less the right thing to do? Studies show drivers who text are 23 times more likely to be in an accident. And young drivers are at much greater risk. Some 21 percent of fatal car accidents involving drivers 16 to 19 involved some type of cell phone usage. That makes this more a question of “when” it will happen than “if.” Reading a text message while driving has been at the center of at least one accidental death trial in South Dakota. And in Idaho in January, 18-year-old Taylor Sauer was texting a friend via Facebook when her car crashed into a tanker truck at 80 miles per hour, killing her instantly. Ironically, phone records indicated she had been texting about the dangers of texting and driving. They further showed she had been posting to Facebook about once every 90 seconds. Here's some statistics from the law firm Edgar Snyder & Associates: About 6,000 deaths and a half a million injuries are caused by distracted drivers every year... While teenagers are texting, they spend about 10 percent of the time outside the driving lane they’re supposed to be in... Talking on a cell phone while driving can make a young driver’s reaction time as slow as that of a 70-year-old... Answering a text takes away your attention for about five seconds. That is enough time to travel the length of a football field... Talking on a cell phone causes nearly 25% of car accidents... One-fifth of experienced adult drivers in the United States send text messages while driving. The statistics go on and on, and they spell out the problem in black and white. Thirty-seven states ban texting while driving, including North Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska and Wyoming. Take a look around. That leaves us virtually alone. Even dozens of cities have banned the practice, and the federal government has prohibited texting while driving and all handheld cell phone use for commercial truck and bus drivers. The Argus Leader today supported the local group in its effort to stop texting while driving in Sioux Falls. "We've heard the arguments against it and yes, it probably is hard to enforce," the editorial states. "But you have to start somewhere, and specifically outlawing texting and driving sends an important message." And as the editorial points out, a new law making such practice illegal will prompt some to avoid the texting-driving mix. It may take a while to catch on, but it's a start. Then the State needs to the follow the lead of its largest city and not delay in following suit.

Integrity and sports -- strange bedfellows

Integrity is a trait in short supply nowadays. Reading news stories these days, there are a lot of folks showing a shocking lack of integrity. Even more shocking is our willingness to let people "off the hook" as easily. Not only people in supervisory positions but the general public. "What he does in his private life is his business." Hey, as long as coach keeps winning ball games, who cares if he a) cheats on his wife; b) pads his account with illegal money; c)smokes/shoots/snorts drugs; or d) sets up a "bounty system" to make a sporting event a 'life-altering' experience? Is integrity missing from the job description? The latest case involves University of Arkansas head coach Bobby Petrino, who came under scrutiny last week after crashing his motorcycle with 25-year-old Jessica Dorrell on board; she is a university employee that he had hired and was formerly a member of the Razorback volleyball team. Petrino reportedly first lied to athletic director Jeff Long and said he was alone on the motorcycle. But later when it was about to be publicly announced that he had had a passenger, "Petrino released a statement ...(that) he didn’t want to admit the female passenger was with him on the bike because it was an 'inappropriate relationship,'” according to one news report. Petrino is married with four children. "My concern was to protect my family and a previous inappropriate relationship from becoming public,” he had said. Long placed Petrino on administrative leave just as spring football practice were drills were set to begin. What is the greatest mistake here? Is it Petrino's for an embarrassing accident involving a 25-year-old university employee not his wife? For lying to his athletic director and withholding the truth? Or is it ours for giving sports a free pass on the integrity issue? A Fox Sports Poll asked "Should Bobby Petrino be fired at the University of Arkansas?" As I write this, 52 percent of the 59,142 voters say "yes." Thirty-two percent say "no" and 17 percent say it's too early to tell. Pete Fiutak writes: "To be totally honest, after all the horrors of last year, as long as a college football controversy doesn’t involve the alleged sexual assault of children, I’m good. But beyond that, as long as the University of Arkansas and athletic director Jeff Long conduct a thorough investigation and aren’t kowtowing to the element that cares only about a winning football team, this should be a matter between Petrino, his family, Jessica Dorrell and her friends and family." Yes, and if integrity isn't a trait to be valued at the University of Arkansas, they can just sweep this under the rug. "Compared to recent college sports scandals, what Petrino did is a Petrino problem," Fiutak wrote. "While he represents the University of Arkansas, most of the parts of the story don’t and shouldn’t affect the school and are of a more personal nature than on a football coach level." Yes, consider it a "Petrino problem" and go on with the work of building the Hawgs' top-tier Division I football program. Integrity was already left bloodied on the professional field. Some 22 to 27 members of the New Orleans Saints National Football League team were found to have participated in a slush fund that paid bonuses or "bounties" for deliberately injuring opposing players or knocking them out of games. Former defensive coordinator Gregg Williams was suspended indefinitely for his role in "Bountygate," and head coach Sean Peyton received a year-long suspension without pay. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell also levied an eight-game suspension of General Manager Mickey Loomis and it's six games out for Assistant Head Coach Joe Vitt. Punishment for the players is yet to be announced. Maybe they should take the opportunity to hire themselves a good lawyer. Yes, football is a violent game. Picture the menacing Bears linebacker Dick Butkus or the gap-toothed Packers' Ray Nitschke, uniforms covered in blood, and know that violence is synonymous with the game itself. But deliberately trying to injure others is a crime, and paying to hurt others is a mob tactic. Remember Oakland Raiders cornerback Jack Tatum, known as "The Assassin," whose hit on New England Patriots receiver Darryl Stingley in a 1978 preseason game left Stingley paralyzed from the chest down. And after ending Stingley's NFL career, Tatum went on to write three best-selling books narcisistically titled "They Call me Assassin" (1980); "The Still Call Me Assassin" (1989); and "Final Confessions of NFL Assassin Jack Tatum" (1996). Maybe the 'win-at-all-costs" pressure is just too great to expect coaches and players to be angels. Ohio State University head coach Jim Tressel resigned in 2011 after the NCAA investigated multiple violations. They included several players selling memorabilia to a tattoo parlor, a suspicious connection between football players and Columbus-area car dealers, and Tressel himself admitting he withheld information concerning ineligible players in 2010. Last year, Yahoo! Sports investigated University of Miami booster Nevin Shapiro's claims of dealings with Hurricane players, which reportedly involved cash, prostitutes, entertainment in his multimillion-dollar homes and yacht, paid trips to high-end restaurants and nightclubs, jewelry, bounties for on-field play (including bounties for injuring opposing players), travel and more. Oh, but the list goes on and on. Carl Sandusky at Penn State (and JoPa's passive role). O.J. Simpson. And baseball's Barry Bonds. Mark McGwire. Sammy Sosa. Roger Clemens. Skating's Tonya Harding. The PGA's Tiger Woods. But all is not lost. There are exceptions and I wish they were the rule. Take Tim Tebow, now of the New York Jets, who was featured in a Super Bowl ad a couple years ago emphasizing the importance of human life. On Easter Sunday, a crowd estimated at 15,000-20,000 heard Tebow at the Celebration Church's Easter on the Hill prayer service in Georgetown, TX. He encouraged worshipers to share their Christian faith publicly. “My biggest prayer is to kind of make that cool again, for a high school kid to get on a knee and pray and it’s not something that’s unique or different and that it’s O.K. to be outspoken about your faith,” Tebow said. Wow. A fresh voice. A voice linking integrity and faith to sports that are so lacking and thirsting for it, especially when our younger generation is playing the game, yearning for role models and watching our every move. Posted by nigel77 at 8:43 AM 1 comments

Local news is where it's at

There may be no clearer industry example of ‘Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde’ than the newspaper business.
Ask the editor of a large daily newspaper how business is going and the typical response is, “We’re hoping it’s bottomed out and we’re clawing our way back up.” Ask a weekly newspaper editor and you may hear, “What? There’s a problem?”
That’s because this information business is like two ships at sea. The large dailies have already hit the iceberg and are grabbing for the lifeboats. Meanwhile, the weeklies are floating by under their own power, wondering what all the fuss is about.
Local newspapers flourish because of their local content -- births, deaths, engagements, weddings, lunch menus, school news and such. The emphasis is on local news. The late Charles Kuralt said their mandate is to be “relentlessly local.” And editor-author Jock Lauterer borrowed that phrase for the third edition of his book Community Journalism – Relentlessly Local. Because local is where it’s at.
Robert M. Myers, publisher of the Lapeer (MI) County Press, took weekly newspapers to task in a 1962 Time magazine article that proclaimed “The American rural weekly is valueless, lily-livered and moribund. It is run by ‘printers’ who stuff their pages with syndicated hayseed features and eke out a precarious living on job-printing contracts….” Well, Mr. Myers, “hayseed features” and “who went where” must be what people want, because local weekly newspapers are holding their own while the large newspapers are calling for the lifelines.
To be fair, large daily newspapers are waging battle against several forces. Radio and television have cut into what was once a print monopoly of news. In 2007 the New York Times reported that national newspaper circulation peaked back in 1984 with 1,600 morning and afternoon dailies with 63 million circulation. But in the last 30 years those numbers slipped to 1,452 newspapers and 53.5 million circulation despite, as Thad McIlroy reports, nearly a doubling in the size of the national population. But the biggest threat, by far, is the Internet and its features that appeal to the fast-paced, changing lifestyles of today’s on-the-go consumer. Meanwhile, the dailies have arrived late to the dance, and are now trying to catch up on the dance steps. This is taking a variety of forms from free online content to paid portals to all-paid content.
In contrast, the Suburban Newspapers of America reported in 2010 that “Suburban and community newspapers executives report optimism and growth.” According to McIlroy, “The beta results showed that 2007 was a growth year for the community newspaper industry with advertising revenue up .5 percent as compared to the overall industry decline of 7.9 percent” reported by the Newspaper Association of America.
And this growth is not limited to the United States. “Community newspapers are a growing medium across Canada,” reports Community Media Canada. “As circulation at daily newspapers declines, community newspapers are growing, since they maintain their monopoly on truly local content.”
Yes, Charles Kuralt said it best. “Relentlessly local.”
Back in 1951, Wilbur Schramm and Merritt Ludwig wrote, “The extraordinary hold which weekly newspapers have on their readers and the important part these newspapers play in socializing their communities have long been recognized.” And in 2003 Richard Fusco wrote, “Weeklies are a part of the community and readers have an emotional bond with their hometown paper. They see their friends and family and even themselves. Their letters to the editor on local issues are printed regularly. Weeklies are more a living thing and less an institution than dailies.”
And if you don’t believe that, watch the crowd form at the post office each week when the newspaper comes out.

We can't afford to wait

The South Dakota Legislature missed its chance this year to outlaw the dangerous practice of texting while driving. The House Local Government Committee rejected the bill, 8-5. House Speaker Val Rausch thought lawmakers could write a better bill to encompass other forms of distracted driving.
How long should we wait before someone is killed by this dangerous practice? Or has it happened already? Reading a text message while driving was at the center of at least one recent accidental death trial in South Dakota.
Will a life or lives be taken by this dangerous practice while we’re waiting for that “better bill” to be introduced and passed? Studies show drivers who text are 23 times more likely to be in an accident. That makes this more a question of “when” than “if.”
The state legislature should act on this measure before it is enacted by Congress, just as the blood alcohol limit was lowered by mandate in order to accept federal highway funds. The Governors Highway Safety Association reports that 30 states already ban texting while driving. Alabama will be number 31 if the measure, which passed their House by an 86-2 vote on March 31, is passed by their state senate. South Dakota should step up and be #32.
South Dakota shouldn’t wait. Let’s not wait another year for someone to be killed by this practice and lives to be destroyed before we take action. I don’t want this to happen to someone you or I know. There’s too much at stake. It’s too likely to happen.
David L. Stoltz

Think before you act

The Muslim world is reacting with anger and violence over the burning of the Quran by a small Florida church. Recent protests in Afghanistan left 20 dead, hundreds injured and thousands protesting and rioting.
The Taliban claimed Western countries excused this action in defense of “freedom of speech,” while Afghans “cannot accept this un-Islamic act.” NATO officials, meanwhile, have reiterated their condemnation of the Quran burning.
According to reports, about 30 people attended the “mock trial” for the Quran outside the Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, FL on March 20. Pastor Terry Jones is quoted as saying, “We had a court process. We tried to set it up as fair as possible, which you can imagine, of course, is very difficult.” And after six hours of deliberating by the 12-person jury, the verdict was delivered. This followed the church’s much-publicized threats last 9-11 to burn copies of the Quran in protest of plans to build an Islamic community center near Ground Zero.
According to USA Today, Jones said that burning the book was chosen over shredding, drowning or facing a firing squad by a vote tallied on the organization’s Facebook page.
How democratic.
The end result: innocent people dead (including several UN employees), arrests, injuries and violence. And more venom directed at the United States.
But the big question remains. Is this free speech or incendiary action? And if it’s protected speech, is that blanket authority to say it, or in this case, do it? Does the fact it’s protected make it the right thing to do?
Columnist Rick Sanchez offers General David Petraeus’ view that there was nothing brave about burning the Quran over here when US troops will suffer the consequences over there. Add to that some innocent UN employees and others as well – 20 and counting.
Just because the First Amendment guarantees a right to freedom of speech isn’t carte blanche to act before we think. Years ago the U.S. Supreme Court established that prohibited speech must present a “clear and present danger that [the words] will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.” And Congress has the right to outlaw certain forms of conduct that are harmful to the nation. But in 1927 Justice Louis Brandeis opined that to find that “clear and present danger” the speech must be shown “either that immediate serious violence was to be expected or was advocated….” Pastor Jones’ actions didn’t openly advocate violence. But serious violence was certainly highly probable.
Still, this is not to excuse the acts of violence perpetrated by offended Muslims on Afghans, UN workers, and, potentially, US troops. But sometimes making a statement just because one can is foolhardy, dangerous and counterproductive. Several have died already because of this action, which has thrown more gasoline on what is already a burning hatred.
Under the First Amendment, Pastor Jones had the right to do what he did.
Now he should explain that to the families of the dead.