Ah Texas. I’ve said it before, with the exception of Austin and a few other alcoves of sanity in the state, we may as well hand Texas back over to Mexico; they seem to want it more than we do. Kidding aside though, Texas manages to ram some really incredibly stupid and mind-boggling laws down the throats of its citizens, most of whom are so conservative or libertarian enough that they don’t really care because the rules will never apply to those with privilege – the moment they do, however, you can expect them to rally with their guns in the air outside of the state capital.
In this case, Texas’ new drinking laws give police the discretion to cuff you and lock you up regardless of where or how you’re drinking. This is how it works:
Late on a balmy Saturday night last June, six Fort Worth cops and two officers from the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission went looking for trouble. They had just raided two Hispanic bars in an industrial stretch of town and nine detainees now sat in the paddy wagon (pdf), hands bound with plastic ties. The rest of the city’s bars would soon shut down. It seemed like the night was over, except for the paperwork. Then Sergeant Richard Morris had an idea. “Hey,” he said. “Let’s go to the Rainbow Lounge.”
A half-dozen police cruisers, an unmarked sedan, and the prisoner van slid to a stop in front of the Rainbow Lounge, Fort Worth’s newest gay club, at about 1:30 a.m. on June 28, 2009 — 40 years, almost down to the minute, after New York City police raided the Stonewall Inn with billy clubs and bullhorns. Inside the bar, the officers fanned out, grabbing and arresting six patrons for public intoxication. Benjamin Guttery, a 24-year-old Army vet, says an officer told him to put down his drink, then “bulldozed” him through the crowd to the paddy wagon but then let him go. “I’m 6’8″, 250 pounds, and I had just finished my second drink,” Guttery told a local reporter. “I might have had enough to have a loose tongue, but not a loose walk or anything like that.” Another man alleges that he was slammed against a wall, elbowed, and fell on the ground, landing him in intensive care for a week with bleeding in his brain. He was charged with public intoxication and assault.
That’s right – arrested for “public intoxication” inside of a bar. Only in Texas.
But here’s the clincher – these guys aren’t going to rootin’ tootin’ cowboy bars with blasting country music and confederate flags on the walls; they’re headed to gay bars and latino night spots, so they can make sure they round up, harass, and arrest the people they dislike the most: minorities and gays. It’s racial profiling at its finest, and the law enables them to do it.
The finest quote on the matter comes from a defense attourney in Dallas:
The public intoxication standard, backed by the Texas-based Mothers Against Drunk Driving, is so broad that you can be arrested on just a police officer’s hunch, without being given a Breathalyzer or field sobriety test. State courts have not only upheld the practice but expanded the definition of public intoxication to cover pretty much any situation, says Robert Guest, a criminal defense attorney in Dallas. “Having no standard allows the police to arrest whoever pisses them off and call it PI,” he says, adding, “If you have a violent, homophobic, or just an asshole of a cop and you give him the arbitrary power to arrest anyone for PI, you can expect violent, homophobic, and asshole-ic behavior.”
Yup – that sounds about right.
The point of these laws, and the intention I’m sure that Texas’ MADD arm had, was to keep drunken people off of the roads and streets where they can cause harm to themselves or others. But good intentions paving the road to hell and all that, the statute doesn’t include the appropriate checks and balances against the inevitable abuse of police power, especially in a state like Texas; deep in the heart of Red America.
There is hope though – as with any group of cockroaches (I love this metaphor, which is why I use it so often) as soon as you shine the light on them, they scatter and try to get away:
After community activists took to the streets and airwaves, Irving’s arrest rate for Hispanics plummeted. (Dallas and Irving are no longer part of the federal program.) In Fort Worth, protests over the Rainbow Lounge raid elicited a quick apology from the police chief and promises to review the PI policy. But the arrests have continued elsewhere, and no one is targeting the public intoxication law itself. Many people don’t care, Novello says, “because they can’t vicariously experience this injustice.” The Houston attorney puts it more bluntly. “As long as police are going out there fucking with the blacks and the Mexicans, until it hits the people with the power, they won’t care.”
And that brings me back to the original point. Until the white, privileged majorities are affected, there likely won’t be any real change here – and if there is real change because of the outcry, it’ll be a step-by-step struggle against that privileged majority who doesn’t see anything wrong with the rules only because they’re not the target of their enforcement.
[ Drinking While Brown (or Gay) in Texas Will Get You Arrested ]
Source: AlterNet
Now this is the President we elected; the President that can stand up in front of a crowd and call out the opposition for what they are: obstructionist, reactionary, and in the pockets of their own special interests and a party gone mad.
The President demanded an up-or-down vote on health care; a phrase that Republicans used to use whenever they felt they couldn’t get a bill to the floor against Democratic opposition. He also trashed the same old GOP lies and talking points that we’ve seen for the past several months levvied against health care reform – all which are clearly designed not to make health care reform more palatable to Republicans and conservatives, but instead to just kill the initiative outright, completely forgetting the fact that the status quo simply isn’t acceptable.
Watching President Obama’s speech this afternoon on the way forward on health care reform, I noticed something I haven’t seen from the always-cool chief executive in a while: real passion.
It was unmistakable — this president wasn’t just making the case for reform, he was practically demanding it. Forget any rumors you may have heard about half-measures or additional compromises. President Obama is going all in.
From the outset, the president reminded his audience why the notion of reform being “rammed through” is silly. Referencing last week’s summit, Obama noted:
“This meeting capped off a debate that began with a similar summit nearly one year ago. Since then, every idea has been put on the table. Every argument has been made. Everything there is to say about health care has been said and just about everyone has said it. So now is the time to make a decision about how to finally reform health care so that it works, not just for the insurance companies, but for America’s families and businesses.”
The president noted several areas of agreement with Republicans, and presented his plan as a middle ground between the left (which wants single-payer) and the right (which wants to let insurance companies do as they please).
He also spent some time outlining exactly what his proposal is all about, including the notion that reform would give Americans “more control over their health care,” while building on the existing system. Obama presented his package in three parts: (1) ending insurance company abuses; (2) creating a marketplace for uninsured individuals and small business owners; and (3) bringing down costs. All of this would be paid for, and would bring down the deficit.
At that point, the president started knocking down GOP talking points — forcefully.
The article goes on to outline some of the GOP’s common strawman arguments and lies about health care reform – and then the President’s response to each and every one of them. If I could I would forward the article to every person who’s ever said that reform is being “rammed down our throats,” for example.
[ Fired-Up President Demands "Up or Down" Vote on Health Care ]
Source: The Washington Monthly
While it’s absolutely no surprise that the GOP would take the opportunity to be on TV to blubberingly try to talk over the President and denounce health care reform as if the alternative – millions of Americans in the US without access to health care or health insurance and thousands dying every year as a result of that fact – and while it’s no surprise that the GOP is completely out of ideas and instead would rather simply roadblock any congressional action entirely, it was a little surprising (although it shoudln’t be, I suppose) that they chose to get on national television and continue to just lie about the nature of health care reform in America, lie about how much it’ll cost, (and how it’ll actually save us money in the long run, and the amount of money required to fund it is actually a smaller figure than the amount of money we’ll spend in the same time period to keep funding health care the way we have up to this point) and lie about what the bills entail as though they’d never read any of them.
That’s the entertaining thing about the GOP – they lie and they lie, and when they’re finally called out on their lies, they backtrack and claim that they’re just the little guy being pushed around by a Democratic majority, thus rousing the hackles of their fringe Tea Party compatriots and their Ronulan allies (did you hear that their straw poll at the CPAC for the next person they should champion for the White House is Ron Paul? That’s hilarious – and I’ve explained why on at least one occasion.)
So then, we should completely have expected that they’d be out in force again, lying their faces off so badly that if the GOP were actually the pinnochio party, their collective noses would be in the way of the cameras:
The President has been charitable thus far in claiming that there are “philosophical” differences between the parties. From out here, it looks more like a visceral hatred for government on the part of Republicans rather than a real intellectual argument. That’s a divide that can’t be bridged. Because the Republicans continue to just lie, whether it’s about process (see reconciliation) or the CBO reports on the existing plan. Ezra:
Lamar Alexander and Barack Obama just had a contentious exchange on this point, so it’s worth settling the issue: Yes, the CBO found health-care reform would reduce premiums. The issue gets confused because it also found that access to subsidies would encourage people to buy more comprehensive insurance, which would mean that the value of their insurance would be higher after reform than before it. But that’s not the same as insurance becoming more expensive: The fact that I could buy a nicer car after getting a better job suggests that cars are becoming pricier. The bottom line is that if you’re comparing two plans that are exactly the same, costs go down after reform.
And the Republican plan, such as it is, and what happens to premiums under it? Jon Cohn:
So, yes, the Republican health care bill will lower premiums overall. But many people in poor health will see their premiums go up. And many people will get lower premiums only because they’re getting inferior coverage. Meanwhile, more than 50 million people will have no insurance whatsoever.
There. Can we just settle on the fact that the Republicans have absolutely no credibility, on this issue or just about any other, and be done with it? Let’s move forward with or without them.
[ GOP Lies at the Health Care Summit ]
Source: AlterNet (courtesy of The Daily Kos)
