You know, let's bitch about something we care about...

Paranoid Faith Based Consumer Safety.
Carbon fiber, steel, alloy, or baby spleen construction?

Corporations are really concerned about what people who work for them will say, because it might reflect adversely. On the stock price. I was quoted in Jared Sandberg's column on Monday, for example, but rather than give a plug even in passing to monolithic defense contractor magnissumus that I work for, we made me a generic type of guru. (By the way, the Journal Links are screwy and I didn't feel like screwing with them. But, if you have access to the Wall Street Journal, Jared's column on Cubicle Culture  is a reflective techie's Dilbert. Some of the Journal is a guilty pleasure, a lot of it is just guilty, but Jared's column like Stephen Fastis and Joe Morgenstern and the Daily Fix and the guy who writes about cars is always a well-written and worth reading piece of journalism.) You see, to let them use my name and the name of the thing I work for, I'd have to get clearance from a suit in DC...as Michael says about pissing off Fiona in Burn Notice , "Not worth it, trust me."

there actually are valid reasons for this, and our particular suit is a reasonable guy who generally makes sense. However, the government is a different deal One of my brothers referred us to a post on Wonkette this morning at the electronic Defeatist Bat Cave cum day care center (they are all so young, and so sweet...I posted Agi earlier this week in his Cthulu suit with his wife...the Significant Other admitted while she was bitching at me metaphysically that AGI was just adorable and the green brought out his eyes...) and I was impressed enough to read, bookmark and then wander through some other parts of the blog, which referred me to this bit of absolute Bushian inanity:

"If you want to know something as simple as who heads the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, don’t bother to ask the safety agency’s communications office. Without special permission, officials there are no longer allowed to provide information to reporters except on a background basis, which means it cannot be attributed to a spokesman.

Without such attribution, there are few circumstances under which most reporters will report such information. This makes for interesting dealings with the office charged with providing information about the nation’s top automotive safety agency.

So, I will end the suspense about the boss’s identity. The administrator is Nicole R. Nason, who took over on May 31, 2006, after she was appointed to the post by President Bush."

OK. So you're writing an article for Car and Driver about the rumor that Priuses are made of baby spleens harvested in Bangaladesh and will just burst apart and bleed in front end collisions at 15 MPH, and you have to get on Nason's column because, well, she's a lawyer and was the PR Flack for Transportation so she's obviously the only one who can tell you that this is absolute bullshit, it's baby Panda spleens and they're calcified and anyway, any one who drives a Prius is such a wimp that they won't go above 15 MPH...Nason worked for the late, great unlamented Porter Goss of CIA and Florida election fame when he was a Congressperson. Unlike most of the Bush political appointees to second echelon stuff, she's well educated, BA American U and JD, Case Western. She's a fucking lawyer, goddamnit. When I want to know about cars, I want to talk to, oh, I don't know, a goddamn engineer maybe? I might have some questions that can't be answered by someone who knows less about metal fatigue and stopping ratios than I do. Lawyers, like accountants and rodeo clowns should not be put in charge of any goddamn thing that serves the public.

But NHTSA probably doesn't serve the public. I'm sure that in Bush-Cheney world, NHTSA wouldn't exist. We'd let the market decide what cars were safe, and we'd all read the reviews in Murdoch's Auto Test Nudes. She's not an unattractive woman, for a Republican lawyer and looks almost as fetching in safety glasses and pearls as Dubya Say Wha looked in the flight suit and peals, so... As the Times Blog so elegantly explained...

"When I said I would like to talk to Ms. Nason on the record about her no-attribution policy, she was not available. The agency’s new policy effectively means that some of the world’s top safety researchers are no longer allowed to talk to reporters or to be freely quoted about automotive safety issues that affect pretty much everybody....Ms. Nason felt it was necessary for N.H.T.S.A. to have a “central spokesperson” and “we were finding a lot of stuff did not need to be on the record,” David Kelly, her chief of staff, told me. He also insisted, after our telephone conversation, that he did not want to be quoted and had intended to speak only on background. (My notes show no such request.)...If she has any experience in keeping a Congressman from skidding out of control, that could come in handy now that she is speaking for an entire agency of seasoned safety experts." 

 

Comments

[the serrach]

heh. bangladeshian baby spleens.

good one axe.