That’s not the worst part, from my point of view. The “M” is the worst part. Which they share with the WCTU.

(founded in Illinois, from which come both Hillary and Barack. I hate Illinois Nazis.)

I think that xx people don’t (in general) want us xy people to drink because:

A. They can’t handle the juice as well as we can (scientifically proven), and

B. When we’ve had a few, we might tell them _exactly_ what we think of them.

Suppose your polling firm was hired to take a poll on which political party Democrat or Republican was most favored in a community. Where would you place your poll takers and when would you gather your information? If you wanted an impartial poll you would gather your samples at varied locations and at various times of day.

Say you were hired by an affliliate of the Democratic Party and if they didn’t like your results you might not be hired to do any more polls. Where would you place your poll takers and when would you gather your information? You might try malls and grocery stores from 9AM to 11AM and 2PM and 4PM. You might also try to take your poll at the beginning of the month. The reasoning is that statistically people who work unconventional hours and people on Social Security tend to favor the Democrats. If you were hired by a Republican affiliate you would try to gather your sample in the evenings or in the middle of the day, because statistically people who work conventional hours tend toward the Republican point of view.

In the situations mentioned above it is easy to skew the results in the desired direction. MADD has taken it one step further. The have influenced the government agency responsible for gathering this information into changing the information collected to benefit MADD. This is the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA)

What used to be a fatality caused by alcohol is now an alcohol related incident. It used to be that the driver causing the fatality had to be legally intoxicated for it to be counted. Now it is if anybody involved in the accident has a measurable amount of alcohol in their system. If someone has two beers and WALKS out in front of you and you break their leg, it is counted. If you are a completely sober designated driver and a deer runs out in front of you, it is an alcohol related incident because your passengers were drinking.

In the end, as usual it all comes down to money. MADD went from being a true grass roots organization to a multi million dollar lobbying business. Don’t let the non-profit bit fool you. MADD’s top people are pulling down six figure salaries with perks and benefits. NHTSA like any other government agency has to supposedly show a need to get their share of the Federal budget and is a willing participant in skewing the statistics to make the problem look worse than it is. Let’s not forget the insurance companies who make contributions to MADD and donate things like flashlights with built in alcohol sensors and breathalyzers to local police departments and then use these inflated statistics to justify higher premiums on auto insurance. Last but not least let’s not forget local police departments who apply to MADD and NHTSA for grants to fund their DUI roadblocks. (There is a local town that only has two officers patrolling during the week, but can field fifteen officers on Friday and Saturday nights for their checkpoints. The majority of these are part time officers who are retired augumenting their income. These are the people who check that little box on the accident report marked “alcohol related”. I have it from a good source that there are seminars on creative “grant proposal writing” availible from some police unions.

Currently 1.5 million people are arrested for DUI’s every year, with the majority not hurting a single person. This is one of the biggest problems with an organization such as MADD, they treat social drinkers like the hardcore drinkers (who cause the majority of alcohol-related (another crappy term) deaths. Makes a nice little circular funding arrangement. Arrest more people on the fringe, means that we need more cops and money, now you can arrest more, and the problem is even more, hire more and need more money, and on, and on it goes. Before long everyone will have a DUI.

From what I know of the interlock things, is that they will drop down and randomly want to test your breath, now I know every machine is infallible (sarcasm) and always works 100% (never any errors). So you’re driving down the road, the machine signals that you need to blow into this thing, you do and it doesn’t register or says that you have had alchol. You have a short amount of time to pull over or the car will turn off. I live in Northern VA, could you imagine if this happened on the belt-way at rush hour.

As long as we’re fudging the numbers: I say that if a 30% of fatal accidents were as a result of alcohol, I can also say that you’re more likely to be killed by a sober driver than a drunk one.

When are we going to stop giving violent criminals a revolving door so that we can afford to lock up non-violent societal and economic contributors?

Are the companies that make the interlocks making fat donations to MADD (like they were the UT legislator that brought the law up in the first place)?