Scrapbook
Joan Ctaybrook, Ptg-kttier First as federal traffic-safety czarina for Jimmy Carter, and today as president of the Naderite outfit Public Citizen, Joan Claybrook has spent an entire career accusing...
...Who's up there...
...Hmmmm...
...It pays more...
...As this one does...
...Huizenga is a pal of George Bush, whose presidency Mitchell gutted...
...The presidency's historical "first tier" was probably out of reach, Clinton decided...
...He argued that he shouldn't be suspended because NFL examiners had broken the "chain of custody" (a Johnnie Cochran-esque defense-lawyering turn of phrase) during the tests of Lett's urine sample...
...By 2000, after they become standard on all new vehicles manufactured in the United States, airbags are projected to kill children at a rate of one each week...
...Clinton appointees have (again) declined to request the appointment of an independent counsel to investigate prima facie evidence of felony campaign fund-raising violations by the Democratic National Committee and former Commerce Department aide and Lippo Group functionary John Huang...
...And now, of course, Volvo's pig film (like earlier research by General Motors) has been vindicated...
...Let's see if we get this straight...
...Clinton's gaining on you...
...Wayne Huizenga, owner of the Florida Marlins, for instance...
...Mtghty George at Bat An unintended consequence of Bill Clinton's decision to pass up George Mitchell, the former Senate majority leader, as secretary of state: Mitchell is likely to be the new baseball commissioner...
...It's amazing what paper-shredding technology can do these days, you know...
...So what does she do...
...The facts, you might say, have blown up in her face and pinned her to her seat...
...Consider the latest episode...
...Lett, Jones, and the Cowboys think that the NFL, like Cochran's LAPD, is little more than a nest of white supremacists on a mission to frame innocent football stars...
...And what about Detroit's warnings—which have turned out to be spectacularly prescient—that airbags would put children and small adults at risk of serious head injuries or even death...
...Don't look back, Gen...
...With a straight face, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones denied for days that Lett had tested positive and supported Lett in his complaint...
...He can travel with his wife...
...As recently as last year, Claybrook was still bemoaning to a reporter for the Washington Monthly Detroit's failure to "see the human cost of not implementing the airbag...
...Nixon, Harding, and Grant excepted, no other presidency stinks nearly so bad with scandal...
...An occasion for humility and contrition from Joan Claybrook, you would expect...
...Under federal law, such requests are supposed to be triggered by a criminal allegation that would appear to involve the Department of Justice in a conflict of interest...
...That would be film from a 1974 study commissioned by Volvo, "Possible Effects of Airbag Inflation on a Standing Child...
...Gamaliel Milhous Clinton In a private conversation with his toe-sucking consultant Dick Morris, you may recall, President Clinton once played an earnest game of "rank the presidents...
...And she is accustomed to playing the hero, particularly on the question of airbags...
...NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue has wisely rejected the appeal...
...It's the job he wanted anyway...
...they think she's already appointed too many independent counsels...
...So any future Lippo investigation will now be supervised further up the Justice food chain...
...In the absence of an independent counsel, jurisdiction over the Lippo matter falls to Justice's Public Integrity unit...
...Joan Claybrook still doesn't get it...
...Lett is best remembered for fumbling his own fumble recovery while strutting into the end zone in the fourth quarter of Dallas's blowout of Buffalo in the 1993 Super Bowl...
...Her enemies weren't lying, after all...
...As front pages all over the country have reported, passenger-car airbags are killing twice as many children as they save each year...
...U.S...
...Airbags are dangerous...
...Can these people be trusted to find the truth and punish the guilty...
...Simpson defense—the garbage-in-garbage-out, cesspool-of-contamination, if-it-doesn't-fit-you-must-acquit page...
...She blames Detroit...
...Twelve percent of the pigs survived without injury...
...Two months have now gone by since John Huang first came to public notice...
...Keeney's son, John Jr., is John Huang's defense attorney...
...In a similar fit of ostentation, he took a page out of the O.J...
...Grasping at straws," the Monthly article reported, "the car companies . . . even circulated an old film showing pigs being gravely injured by inflating airbags...
...We look forward to seeing this one in court...
...Mitchell has been ready to take the post for years, all the while awaiting a new contract between owners and players...
...Trouble is, they don't have the sway they did a year ago, when the odds overwhelmingly favored Mitchell...
...Mitchell is the choice for commissioner of two bigwigs, acting commissioner Bud Selig and Jerry Reinsdorf, owner of the Chicago White Sox...
...The O.J.-tzatton of Everything Dallas Cowboys defensive lineman Leon Lett has been suspended for a year without pay, after testing positive for cocaine in the last week of November...
...A third of them died...
...Well, that second term hasn't even begun yet, and Clinton already seems headed for a different tier entirely...
...Justice's number-two official, Jamie Gorelick, wants to replace Janet Reno as attorney general in the second Clinton administration...
...White House aides don't like Reno...
...Public Integrity, for its part, ordinarily reports to the acting head of Justice's criminal division, one John Keeney...
...But with a strong showing in his second term, he guessed he could still earn a place high in the "second tier...
...More than half were badly hurt...
...Ordinary people were not supposed to give them credence, since in the Naderite worldview warnings from car companies can only be self-serving nonsense...
...Now there is one, but only after a bitter struggle among owners...
...Those pigs died in vain...
...Anesthetized baby pigs were placed four to six inches from a dashboard airbag in simulated minor collisions...
...Grant...
...Not one...
...How many FBI agents have been deployed to interview principals and witnesses in the scandal...
...Some owners want a businessman for the job...
...How many documents have Justice investigators requested and secured...
...Not one...
...Despite the knowledge of the performance of the air bags they designed, promoted and are selling to the public," Claybrook wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Post last week, "the auto companies until now have not explicitly warned occupants with an obvious and unequivocal label on the dashboard...
...And it turns out she probably knew it all along...
...Joan Ctaybrook, Ptg-kttier First as federal traffic-safety czarina for Jimmy Carter, and today as president of the Naderite outfit Public Citizen, Joan Claybrook has spent an entire career accusing automakers of scrimping on safety because it costs money—in other words, of profiting from death and injury...
Vol. 2 • December 1996 • No. 14
