A year after Washington made driving while celling illegal, anyone who spends any amount of time out on the road can tell you the law is having little effect. Plenty of drivers are still trying to juggle their phone and the wheel (and sometimes a stick shift and a breakfast sandwich to boot).

NPR reporter Austin Jenkins reports that the State Patrol is also not impressed. It wrote 1,600 tickets for talking on a cell phone and another 230 for texting while driving during the past year. But troopers say drivers are still largely ignoring the law.

That's largely because the ban is only a secondary offense. Police have to catch drivers doing something else first before they can pull them over and write a ticket for talking on a cell phone.

The Legislature seems to prefer to ease the driving public into new rules by enacting them piecemeal. It took 16 years before the seat-belt law was promoted from a secondary to a primary offense. Let's hope for everyone's sakes that it doesn't take that long to give the cell phone law some teeth.

This editorial will appear in Tuesday's print edition.

Tacoma police say this is the year that they really will get tough with the pyromaniacs who turn neighborhoods into war zones.

Law-abiding city residents who already have spent too many nights worrying about stray rockets and too many mornings searching for their terrified cats want to believe them.

Past experience would advise against holding out too much hope. Despite the Tacoma City Council’s declaration in 2007 that the city was serious about its fireworks ban, the police department’s follow-through has been disappointing.

Ten tickets were issued that first year, and 25 in 2008 – progress to be sure, but not the kind of crackdown that fireworks-frazzled Tacomans know it will take to quiet the nightly barrage.

Now, Capt. Mike Miller, who oversees the city’s fireworks enforcement, says police hope to make this the breakthrough year. They’re aiming for “a lollapalooza type of change,” he says.

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This editorial will appear in tomorrow's print edition.

If you were starting from scratch designing a 911 system for Pierce County, you’d never get the system the county is saddled with.

To devote every possible dollar to fast action on emergency calls, any needless duplication of overhead costs would be ruthlessly cut. Not a penny would be spent perpetuating local fiefdoms that actually hurt the efficiency of the overall system.

In Pierce County, however, piecemeal decisions over the years have produced five “primary call centers” – Puyallup, Sumner, Buckley, Fife and the giant Law Enforcement Support Agency. LESA – which is already strained and facing further budget cuts – handles the police calls from about 90 percent of the county.

Even that understates the duplication. Because LESA doesn’t handle fire and emergency medical dispatching, any calls for those emergency services are transferred elsewhere. The Tacoma Fire Department, for example, is a “secondary” center that handles that city’s fire and EMS calls. According to a recent performance audit, the TFC does so at much higher cost than LESA – $31.61 per call as opposed to $11.10.

That’s $31.61 in addition to $11.10 for any calls that first go to LESA.

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Disclaimer: This writer is an anti-communist. Well, actually, this writer is an anti-socialist, because there aren’t any communists left any more (except in Cuba, North Korea, and on American college campuses).

Each time I hear some erstwhile progressive ask “Why can’t we have socialism like they do in Scandinavia?,” I am a little less than supportive….

First of all, not even the Scandinavians “have socialism like they do in Scandinavia.” From 1945-1989, Scandinavians, like other western European nations, boasted large social welfare bureaucracies, 50 percent taxation rates and a healthy number of capitalists they allowed to exist in order to pay for the whole mess. “Progressive” western Europeans were too smart to kill off the capitalist goose that lays golden eggs. Like Franklin D. Roosevelt, they kept capitalists around to pay the price tag of their social experimentation.

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A consultant's report offered a road map to fixing the inefficiencies of emergency dispatch in Pierce County – including the plethora of fiefdoms. Lives are at stake; let's use our tax dollars to best effect.

Tacoma's plan to really crack down on fireworks this year is welcome, as is news that the Puyallup tribe is cooperating with police. Washington's Indian tribes could be doing more to control the dissemination of illegal fireworks outside their reservations.

If you have comments or questions about these topics, please email them to patrick.ocallahan@thenewstribune.com. Editorials represent the consensus view of The News Tribune's editorial board.

Want to sit in on a daily ed board meeting? Email cheryl.tucker@thenewstribune.com to make an appointment.

Last week Dan Choi, a Lieutenant in the Army National Guard, sent out a mass email asking for help, a character reference to be exact. Hard to believe Choi, a West Point graduate who majored in Arabic studies, needs a character reference from his fellow citizens but according to his letter, he does.

In spite of the fact that Choi speaks Arabic, Farsi, and is passionate about serving in the Middle East, he is about to lose his job for disregarding the don’t ask don’t tell policy, or D.A.D.T., circa President Clinton. Wanting to live by the West Point honor code, Choi was honest with the military and told them he was homosexual, saying he did not want to spend his career, or his life, hiding that truth.

Unfortunately for Lt. Choi, those three little words “I am gay” are grounds for dismissal.

Approximately 13,000 service men and women have been fired for the same reason, fired not for conduct unbecoming, but for who they are as people. Many of them, like Choi, spoke Arabic. The loss of this personnel seems like a brain drain the military can little afford, especially at a time when recruitment standards are said to be lowered, i.e. the military has allowed high school dropouts, former drug users, and former white supremacists.

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The people at C-Span are making a good argument – see below – for televising U.S. Supreme Court oral arguments. Naturally, we agree.

With U.S. Senate hearings on Judge Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court beginning shortly – July 13 – we're hoping your editorial page might endorse the idea of televising Supreme Court oral arguments.

C-SPAN has long argued for opennesss and transparency in the Judicial Branch. If the Supreme Court does open its oral arguments to cameras, C-SPAN will carry all of the approximately 75 one-hour oral arguments in their entirety.

A milestone in transparency was reached during the Court's 2000 hearing of George W. Bush v. Palm Beach County Canvassing Board when C-SPAN requested televising the arguments. In response, the Court granted instant audiotape release of that case's oral arguments - and since then the Court has allowed selected same-day oral argument audio be released in response to subsequent C-SPAN requests.

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