Looking for a reason to hate Texas?

Camping the driveway/cars parked on the street would be one thing but this is really Big Brotherish/Minority Reportesque.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

xpost ah no public transit doesn't necessarily mean stricter DUI laws, unfortunately. I'm glad TX is a state that has strict DUI laws (that also surprises me a little).

"Wow,” you’re probably thinking. “Good thing we live in America. Where’d that happen anyway? Iraq? China? F---ing Nazi Germany? Or is that nasty little episode from one of George Orwell’s anti-Utopian yarns?”

I got news for you, pal. That ugly scenario didn’t take place in some foreign tyranny, and it wasn’t dreamt up by some manic-depressive science-fiction novelist. It happened right here. Right now. In America.

In Fairfax, VA to be precise. The police there have decided that getting drunk in a bar is an arrestable offense worth enforcing. You don’t have to be starting trouble, getting in a fight, or climbing behind a wheel — the simple act of drinking in a bar gives them enough probable cause to harass and subject you to tests. And if you actually have the gall to have more than a couple beers while in that bar, you’re going to jail and getting fixed up with a nice criminal record.

“They drew attention to themselves by their actions,” Lt. Tor Bennett, assistant commander of the Reston District station, would later swear in an attempt to justify the raids. But since even stone-sober designated drivers were interrogated and tested, the actions he’s talking about apparently consist of stepping inside a business that sells liquor. Or singing karaoke. One of the dozen patrons arrested during the sweep says his only crime was wearing a Santa suit, having a couple beers and singing “Jingle Bell Rock” into a karaoke machine. The instant he hit the last note a cop took him to outside and moments later he was taking a sleigh ride to the slammer. And you have to ask yourself, If they’re willing to arrest goddamn Santa Claus for belting out a Xmas song with a beer in his hand, what chance do us regular drunks stand?

“We’re not talking about overzealousness here,” Bennett added, then, rather strangely, added that the uniformed policemen raiding the bars were accompanied by members of the police bicycle patrol clad in nylon pants and polo shirts. The only reason he would throw in that odd fact, it seems to me, is to somehow lend the impression that proper fascists eager to trample on basic rights would never dream of wearing bicycle shorts and polo shirts.

By now you’re probably wondering, “Why? Why the hell would they do this? How do they profit by arresting some guy having an after work beer in his local watering hole, minding his own business?”

My theory is the police chief went out and watched the Steven Spielberg film Minority Report and thought, “Hey, if futuristic cop Tom Cruise can use a trio of all-seeing mutant psychics to justify arresting people before they actually commit a crime, why the hell can’t we?”

The only problem is, the Fairfax PD doesn’t have three all-seeing mutant psychics on their payroll. The don’t even have one. So instead they decided to take a broader approach, arresting drinkers who they had a hunch might commit a crime. You know, the same principle as arresting poor people for being poor, because they’re most likely to steal things.

To be fair, the Fairfax PD didn’t just start sending out arrest teams to bars at random, they did a little investigating first. They infiltrated undercover cops and Alcohol Beverage Control agents into thirty or so bars during the holidays, searching for patrons who were having a little too good of a time. During the holidays.

Sure enough, these spies returned to the precinct with strange and terrible stories to tell: yes, these bar denizens were drinking more than a couple beers in a sitting. What’s more, they sometimes slurred their words, walked with strange, nearly inhuman gaits, and sometimes they would even laugh like lunatics at jokes a right-thinking sober citizen wouldn’t waste a grimace on. Alerted to this obviously deviant behavior, the chief decided he had but one responsible course of action: It was high time to crush those goddamn drunkards' groove.

Unsurprisingly, a firestorm of controversy erupted in the conservative press in the aftermath of the raids. What is surprising is that the Fairfax PD refused to apologize for their stormtrooper tactics. The chief considered the raids a great success, and bragged they would do it again, and soon.

“The enforcement of such laws is to clearly send a message to the community that we will not tolerate illegal use of alcohol,” the Fairfax PD’s statement to the press explained.

But what exactly is illegal use of alcohol? During the raids the policemen used a BAC standard of .08 as grounds for arrest. The thing is, .08 is the level at which it is illegal to drive a motor vehicle, not sit on a barstool. Virginia law doesn’t specify what level of blood alcohol constitutes public drunkenness. Virginia Code 18.2-388, which covers “Profane swearing and intoxication in public,” makes no mention of BAC at all. Rather, it states: “If any person profanely curses or swears or is intoxicated in public, whether such intoxication results from alcohol, narcotic drug or other intoxicant or drug of whatever nature, he shall be deemed guilty of a Class 4 misdemeanor.”

So, theoretically, they can lock you up after one beer. There is no word yet if the Fairfax PD will next crack down on those scofflaws who like to curse in public.

“You could be anybody, anywhere,” says one of the bar patrons swept up in the raids, “and they can take you out and throw you in jail. I didn’t do anything other than to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

And that place and time appears to be in a bar while it’s open for business.

“Good thing we have the ACLU on our side,” you’re probably thinking. “I mean, if they’re willing to defend Nazis and child molesters, surely they will leap to the defense of we oppressed drunks.”

Don’t hold your breath. When told of the raids, local ACLU lawyers quietly expressed “concern.” Enough concern to take legal action?

Uh, no.

The local liquor lobby’s reaction went a little beyond concern. “It does smack of a pending police state if law enforcement is going into establishments to monitor behavior,” said Lynne Breaux, executive director of the Metropolitan Washington Restaurant Association. Pending? Hey, Lynne, it’s already here.

For Fairfax is not an isolated incident. Reacting to the Princeton Review’s labeling Indiana University America’s top party school, campus police recently initiated a bellicose new program of arresting students for walking home drunk, even if they were steps away from the door of their dorms.

When confronted with possibility that the crackdown on walkers is likely to encourage drunk students to drive home from parties, Indiana University PD Lt. Jerry Minger stated, and I’m not making this up: “Alcohol abuse is the problem, not the issue of whether or not you are going to drive.”

It’s funny. Civil libertarians have recently started howling about eroding freedoms in the wake of 9/11 and the passing of the Patriot Act. It is unconstitutional, they say, to pull over someone just because he looks a little like a terrorist, and if such a law is passed, they will scream bloody murder.

Drinkers, on the other hand, will probably shrug it off. Why shouldn’t we, since we’ve been subjected to exactly that sort of treatment for nearly two decades. I’m talking about roadside sobriety checks, of course. Within the confines of that law, the police can stop you, shine a light in your eyes, demand to see your documentation, then, if they suspect you’ve had a few, have the right to conduct a roadside sobriety test.

Which begs the question: why are drunks so easily stripped of their rights? What or who created the environment that would allow unconstitutional sobriety checkpoints, bar raids and the incarceration of staggerers?

You know who. It’s those goddamn Mothers. The multi-million dollar corporation known as MADD has done more to erode civil liberties in this country than all the terrorist attacks in the world. And they’re not done. Not by half.

Faced with declining profits and waning public interest, MADD has launched a new campaign called Getting MADD All Over Again. Since they’ve accomplished all their early objectives, what’s on their agenda this time? Plenty. Here's a taste of some of their new goals:

A federal billion dollar a year fund earmarked for setting up and enforcing sobriety checkpoints across the entire nation. Who’s going to pay for it? You, the taxpayer.

New laws that will allow police to pull over drivers because they’re not wearing seat belts. Why? MADD quite openly states such a law could be used as an excuse to pull over motorists who might have drank but aren’t driving erratically.

Criminal charges for drivers who refuse to take Breathalyzer tests.

Alcohol advertisers are to be restricted from advertising on television unless 90 percent of the audience is over the age of 21. What programs would meet that standard? None.

Actors in beer commercials must be over the age of 30, cannot appeal to youth in any way, or have anything to do with music, sports, or any other subject that might appeal to young people. Essentially, the only commercial that would meet their criteria would be one with an unattractive, dour-faced, middle-aged male brooding in a dark, unfurnished room with a beer in his hand. With his evil mouth shut.

The Canadian branch of MADD is demanding a national law that would make a .05 BAC a criminal offense. Driving with a BAC of .05 is as statistically dangerous as driving three miles per hour over the speed limit. Is MADD pushing for the incarceration of people who drive three miles per hour over the limit? No. Why? Because everyone would be in jail.

Massive new excise taxes on beer. So people will buy less. It’s the same logic as raising the taxes on food, to prevent obesity.

The fact that MADD isn’t demanding higher taxes on hard liquor seems bizarre until you realize the liquor lobby pays off MADD with huge grants every year. The beer industry, to their credit, refuses to get in bed with the Mothers.

Up to now MADD has strutted around like a widowed queen, vacillating wildly between uncontrollable fits of weeping and paranoid barrages of cruel invectives, and no one in the kingdom dared challenge her.[*] But that’s starting to change. She has demanded so many executions, has restricted so many freedoms that even those in her entourage are starting to wonder if she’s gone too far. There are whispers that she has gone mad with power and bloodlust, and the media -- once her most loyal of henchmen -- is beginning to speak against her.

“I think MADD’s mission has shifted from getting and keeping drunk drivers off the road to attacking the product, point of sale, advertising and level of taxation paid on beer,” says David Rehr, president of the National Beer Wholesalers Association in Washington, D.C. “I think this neoprohibitionist agenda will ultimately catch up with MADD and destroy it, whether it’s five years from now, 10 or 15. You can’t sustain policies at odds with the behavior of the average American and continue to get support.”

This article, describing this actual event (NOT FICTION) is from "The Modern Drunkard," February, 2003---www.drunkard.com

I don't know that the problem is with ours being stricter, only that more people get busted (due to the lack of public transport). That's why I quit going to Deep Ellum and Greeneville clubs. Too much trouble to either spend the night without anything to drink or getting someone else to designated drive, etc..

Now, in ATX, we just never go downtown.

This is a bad era to be someone who peddles in minor sins, poor bar owners and restaurant owners.

xpost A YEAR IN JAIL?

Yeah, when I was, uh, in jail, the night I got processed there was a middle-aged divorced father who was going to spend 365 nights in jail. They let him out days on work release, but he had to be in the county jail from 8pm to 6am. His first DWI was in 1980, the second was 2001, I guess.

up to a $2,000 fine
72 hours to 180 days in jail
driver’s license suspension: 90 days to 1 year

Second Offense:

up to a $4,000 fine
30 days to 1 year in jail
driver’s license suspension: 180 days to 2 years

Third Offense:

up to a $10,000 fine
2 to 10 years in penitentiary
driver’s license suspension: 180 days to 2 years

And a smoking ban in tobacco country? No way. Not even in Arlington could they get away with it.

As I mentioned somewhere else I love the TABC (alcohol nazis) didn't think of pulling this shit last week during SXSW. I mean there are priorties and then there are priorities.

xpost,

I had a friend who had to do that! His last bust happened when he knew he was too drunk to drive so pulled over in a whataburger parking lot to sleep it off. He still got arrested. This was in Waco.

xpost he got arrested even though he WASN'T driving? And was sleeping? In his own car?? How does this happen?

whatever, it was long overdue. This is a guy who once snorted a line of ants.

http://dfe.goldenagecartoons.com/images/ant-aardvark/ant-aardvark3.jpg

He's also sober now.

There's a new sheriff in town.

Texas State Board of Education still promoting revisionism and ignorance in school textbooks

Don McLeroy is a balding, paunchy man with a thick broom-handle mustache who lives in a rambling two-story brick home in a suburb near Bryan, Texas. When he greeted me at the door one evening last October, he was clutching a thin paperback with the skeleton of a seahorse on its cover, a primer on natural selection penned by famed evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr. We sat down at his dining table, which was piled high with three-ring binders, and his wife, Nancy, brought us ice water in cut-crystal glasses with matching coasters. Then McLeroy cracked the book open. The margins were littered with stars, exclamation points, and hundreds of yellow Post-its that were brimming with notes scrawled in a microscopic hand. With childlike glee, McLeroy flipped through the pages and explained what he saw as the gaping holes in Darwin’s theory. “I don’t care what the educational political lobby and their allies on the left say,” he declared at one point. “Evolution is hooey.” This bled into a rant about American history. “The secular humanists may argue that we are a secular nation,” McLeroy said, jabbing his finger in the air for emphasis. “But we are a Christian nation founded on Christian principals. The way I evaluate history textbooks is first I see how they cover Christianity and Israel. Then I see how they treat Ronald Reagan—he needs to get credit for saving the world from communism and for the good economy over the last twenty years because he lowered taxes.”

Views like these are relatively common in East Texas, a region that prides itself on being the buckle of the Bible Belt. But McLeroy is no ordinary citizen. The jovial creationist sits on the Texas State Board of Education, where he is one of the leaders of an activist bloc that holds enormous sway over the body’s decisions. As the state goes through the once-in-a-decade process of rewriting the standards for its textbooks, the faction is using its clout to infuse them with ultraconservative ideals. Among other things, they aim to rehabilitate Joseph McCarthy, bring global-warming denial into science class, and downplay the contributions of the civil rights movement.

Battles over textbooks are nothing new, especially in Texas, where bitter skirmishes regularly erupt over everything from sex education to phonics and new math. But never before has the board’s right wing wielded so much power over the writing of the state’s standards. And when it comes to textbooks, what happens in Texas rarely stays in Texas. The reasons for this are economic: Texas is the nation’s second-largest textbook market and one of the few biggies where the state picks what books schools can buy rather than leaving it up to the whims of local districts, which means publishers that get their books approved can count on millions of dollars in sales. As a result, the Lone Star State has outsized influence over the reading material used in classrooms nationwide, since publishers craft their standard textbooks based on the specs of the biggest buyers. As one senior industry executive told me, “Publishers will do whatever it takes to get on the Texas list.”

Until recently, Texas’s influence was balanced to some degree by the more-liberal pull of California, the nation’s largest textbook market. But its economy is in such shambles that California has put off buying new books until at least 2014. This means that McLeroy and his ultraconservative crew have unparalleled power to shape the textbooks that children around the country read for years to come.

Heh, I read this earlier today. My fav part:

But the struggle did not end there. McLeroy piped up and chided his fellow board members, saying, “Somebody’s gotta stand up to (these) experts!” He and his allies then turned around and put forward a string of amendments that had much the same effect as the “strengths and weaknesses” language. Among other things, they require students to evaluate various explanations for gaps in the fossil record and weigh whether natural selection alone can account for the complexity of cells. This mirrors the core arguments of the intelligent design movement: that life is too complex to be the result of unguided evolution, and that the fossil evidence for evolution between species is flimsy. The amendments passed by a wide margin, something McLeroy counts as a coup. “Whoo-eey!” he told me. “We won the Grand Slam, and the Super Bowl, and the World Cup! Our science standards are light years ahead of any other state when it comes to challenging evolution!”

Dear lord keep even my sloughed unfertilized eggs away from that nightmare of a state.

Whatever, Houston just elected a lesbian mayor. Fuck this East Texas guy.

The Republicans continue to get their way with the textbook thing

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/education/13texas.html?hp

Just... pig-ignorant fuckheadedness all through that article.

In the field of sociology, another conservative member, Barbara Cargill, won passage of an amendment requiring the teaching of “the importance of personal responsibility for life choices” in a section on teenage suicide, dating violence, sexuality, drug use and eating disorders.

“The topic of sociology tends to blame society for everything,” Ms. Cargill said.

the best way to change America is to change high school textbooks

It's a damn good place to start, and conservatives know it.

The fact that no experts on any topic were at all consulted, and the statement that "Academia has skewed history to the left," just about says it all. (Although the list of enraging details goes on and on.) "We're conservatives, and we don't trust those eggheads who... know things. Let's just teach Jesus."

This is a matter of degree. Textbooks have always been full of lies.

“I reject the notion by the left of a constitutional separation of church and state,” said David Bradley, a conservative from Beaumont who works in real estate. “I have $1,000 for the charity of your choice if you can find it in the Constitution.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_church_and_state_in_the_United_States#Article_6_of_the_United_States_Constitution

am0n claim those thousand clams man! do it!!

And a smoking ban in tobacco country? No way. Not even in Arlington could they get away with it.

How times change.

am0n claim those thousand clams man! do it!!

― the most sacred couple in Christendom (J0hn D.), Saturday, March 13, 2010 2:26 PM

hmm charity of my choice, how about this one ;-)

http://www.catholiccharitiesdallas.org/Services/ImmigrationLegalServices/tabid/118/Default.aspx

The whole textbook controversy may be the absolute worst part about living here in Texas. It is unbelievable that textbooks used across the state (and in many parts of the country) are governed by this tiny group of assholes who want to teach some very wrongheaded lessons to kids who won't know any better. I am truly worried about the time when my son will be exposed to this bullshit.

ehhhh "normal" textbooks made me think pretty wrong stuff too. i feel like at least with this it's more obvious. i'm feeling morbsy tbh.

ha junior year of HS my history textbook was A People's History of the United States. i went to school in socialist new york tho

Yeah, I guess having grown up in the Boston area I had a similar experience. The changes that are happening with the Texan textbooks seem pretty extreme to me.

i went to school in new york too but i feel like i learned nothing in history, i dunno.

Page 20: James Madison described as "pious".

Page 133: Ethel Rosenberg casually called "pinko".

Chapter 14: "Guiliani Time: The Golden Age"

ch 1: how jesus invented democracy

my history textbook contained a sentence to the effect "Interestingly, the number of Africans saved by Western medicine and nutrition more than offset the number of slaves who died on the middle passage."

yes, if y'all ever have kids please educate em outside of school (by whatever means at hand)

“Let’s face it, capitalism does have a negative connotation,” said one conservative member, Terri Leo. “You know, ‘capitalist pig!’ ”

on the upside a dope old prof of mine won the dem primary to get onto this board and ppl hate the dude she's running against so she might actually pull it out

go becca <3 u

The board needs 3 more like her, it seems. McElroy is being replaced, isn't he? He's just making the sure to do as much damage before his term's over.

AUSTIN, Tex. — After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.
...
“We are adding balance,” said Dr. Don McLeroy, the leader of the conservative faction on the board, after the vote. “History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left.”
...
Battles over what to put in science and history books have taken place for years in the 20 states where state boards must adopt textbooks, most notably in California and Texas. But rarely in recent history has a group of conservative board members left such a mark on a social studies curriculum.

Efforts by Hispanic board members to include more Latino figures as role models for the state’s large Hispanic population were consistently defeated, prompting one member, Mary Helen Berlanga, to storm out of a meeting late Thursday night, saying, “They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist.”

“They are going overboard, they are not experts, they are not historians,” she said. “They are rewriting history, not only of Texas but of the United States and the world.”
...
Mr. Bradley won approval for an amendment saying students should study “the unintended consequences” of the Great Society legislation, affirmative action and Title IX legislation. He also won approval for an amendment stressing that Germans and Italians as well as Japanese were interned in the United States during World War II, to counter the idea that the internment of Japanese was motivated by racism.
...
Cynthia Dunbar, a lawyer from Richmond who is a strict constitutionalist and thinks the nation was founded on Christian beliefs, managed to cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone. (Jefferson is not well liked among conservatives on the board because he coined the term “separation between church and state.”)

“The Enlightenment was not the only philosophy on which these revolutions were based,” Ms. Dunbar said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/education/13texas.html

― Adam Bruneau, Sunday, March 14, 2010 12:44 AM (51 minutes ago)

this is seriously one of those things that's too fucked up to even be true, i'm going to wake up tomorrow and this will all be a joke

Texas Republicans express regret for officially opposing critical thinking skills (Kos link)

Texas Republicans are saying that their 2012 platform's opposition to "critical thinking skills" was a mistake—but that mistake is now the formal policy of the Republican Party of Texas until 2014.
The stated reasoning behind opposition to critical thinking skills was that such education programs "focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority."

Aiiiiiii