Month: December 2008

As the world surely knows by now, the lame duck President George W. Bush himself had to duck yesterday in Baghdad when an Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at him during a press conference. Bush later remarked to journalists:

“I didn’t know what the guy said, but I saw his sole.”

… which is pretty funny if you like puns. As much as I have disliked the president’s policies I have to admit he does have a pretty irreverent sense of humor that I appreciate.

Meanwhile, shoe-thrower Muntadar al-Zaidi has become a folk hero in the Arab world where the symbolism of throwing shoes and calling Bush a dog makes a bigger splash than it otherwise would in the West. I do remember a State Department fact sheet before my ship pulled into Indonesia some 30 years ago explaining that in the Islamic faith the soles of the feet are seen as unclean. Later, while some shipmates and I visited in the Jakarta home of the guy who became our unofficial “taxi driver,” we were all self-conscious about crossing our legs so as to not show our soles. It brought a laugh from our driver who said he was Christian and not Muslim thus it didn’t really matter to him.

Bush, rightly, looked frozen as the reporter threw his shoes. I can’t blame him. If I was as soundly disliked as him around the world and especially in Iraq, I would have still been shaking. After all, one doesn’t know what’s in or on those shoes. It could be a shoe bomb or it could be shoes filled with dung, as in if the foo s**ts wear it. That is not to mention that a couple of shoes might not feel very good when they hit you upside the head. I once saw a 25-pound chair flying through the air toward me in a courtroom when an armed robbery defendant hurled the chair at the crime victim who sat near me. Luckily, no one was injured. So, softy that I am, I feel sorry for Bush as far as that incident goes.

The press, whose job it is to make mountains out of molehills, are now asking why the Secret Service allowed this to happen. But I don’t see how it could have been prevented. Backgrounds checks are run on reporters who attend presidential press conferences and are in press pools — I was in something like 3 or 4 presidential pools — but I have no idea how stringent the background checks are. It’s not like how the feds would check you out if you were being appointed to the Supreme Court. I would suspect it is more on the order of looking up criminal histories on Public Data.com., or when you are stopped for a traffic violation by police.

Short of a psychological profile of each reporter — which I would imagine as something so scary they’d never let journalists near the president — it beats me as to how something like that could be prevented. Reporters and camera people get scanned for weapons so I don’t know. Perhaps the only thing to stop it would be to take the journalists’ shoes and belts away and maybe their tape recorders as well as pens and notepads. I suppose I shouldn’t give the presidents’ folks any ideas though.

This started off as a really s**tty day. It is one of those kind of days where you start out screaming at some customer service moron in Bangalore or wherever and it just goes downhill from there.

But the trend has reversed itself somewhat this afternoon as things and myself begin to calm down. For the past three years during which I have had a half-assed freelance writing career I have always had the constant of, no matter how crappy my day was, pulling up the blog In the Pink Texas and getting a laugh or a bunch of laughs to lift my spirits.

It isn’t just that ITPT blogger Eileen Smith is a wit. Rather it’s that wit plus her hilarious following who provide their input on the majestic and the not-so-grand who have drawn me to ITPT for these years like onlookers at a car wreck. Hmmm, okay, maybe not the best example but it’s Friday for God’s sake.

Nonetheless, ITPT only moved to Texas Monthly.com it turns out. That’s something in of itself, but I don’t have the time to nor really want to examine the implications of such move and the state of today’s media. For those of you who haven’t read ITPT regularly, it’s not really that far-fetched that something like that would happen since Eileen is editor of TM-dot-com.

So that helped improve my day.

Then I learn from the Office of the Press Secretary in College Station, Texas, (Say what?) that my good ol’ buddy Gee Dubya, that ol’ presidential piss ant (and I say that in a somewhat less-than-spiteful way) has given federal employees Friday, Dec. 26, (Boxing Day in UK-like countries)the day off. Working part-time for the gub’mit I now get paid for not working Christmas Day and the day after instead of just Christmas. I like very much that concept of not working and getting paid for it. It seems like that should have been my major in college instead of journalism.

So now Gee Dubya toward the end of his almost eight-year reign of bulls**t did something which additionally helped make my day a brighter one.

So now it’s time to quit while I am ahead.

Law enforcement and groups such as MADD are always on the lookout for new ways to get drunk drivers off the highway. While such efforts may be well-intentioned they often end up walking the fine line between what does and what doesn’t violate constitutional rights.

Law officers in Jefferson County (Texas), where I reside, announced yesterday that they will adopt a plan which has provided some controversy in other parts of the state. The concept is called “No Refusal Night.” The “no refusal” refers to a DWI suspect being taken to jail where a judge is on hand to sign a warrant for a blood test in the event the suspect refuses a breath test.

A 2002 Texas Court of Criminal Appeals case opened the door for “blood search warrants” in DWI cases in which suspects refused a Breathalyzer. More recently Texas counties have been trying the “no refusal” approach to varying degrees. Some areas such as in Collin County, north of Dallas, want to expand the no refusal plan to more holidays and perhaps each weekend.

What is wrong with such a program if it gets drunks out from behind the wheel? Well for one thing, it raises search and seizure issues. This is especially true when looking at who actually performs the blood test. While it might be legal for law enforcement personnel without adequate medical training to draw blood for the blood tests, the matter is far from settled. And some medical facilities have questions as to whether their medical personnel should perform the test on someone when the sample is taken without the subject’s consent. That makes sense, given one has to sign a consent form before a hospital will treat you. The one news story I saw on this announcement in Southeast Texas didn’t really make it clear who would be performing these blood tests.

And I am certainly not a lawyer nor do I play one on television. But I would have to question whether having a justice of the peace or county court-at-law judge on standby to sign a warrant willy-nilly at the police agency’s request is exactly how the whole search warrant “thing” was meant to be.

I do have to say that this is a pretty gusty move both legally and politically for Jefferson County law officers and judges given the reputation for this area being a plaintiff’s heaven or, if you are a tort-reformista, “a judicial hellhole.”

It will be interesting to see how it turns out. The best way to avoid the confrontation is to not drink and drive. Unfortunately, not everyone will choose to do that.

A nice old-fashioned snow in Southeast Texas.

My poor, cold, little Tacoma became blanketed in snow overnight. This happening in Beaumont, Texas, only 45 miles north of the Gulf of Mexico.

It doesn’t snow very often here. I heard on television that this was the first measurable snowfall in about four years. And the snow set an all-time record here for December at a whopping 2-3 inches. Nope, it doesn’t snow here very much but nonetheless, my sentiments can only be summed up on the hood of my Toyota pickemup:

The Weather Channel shows the pink of mixed frozen precipitation on its local radar inching its way into the western edge of Jefferson County, almost at the most southeastern edge of Texas. A little snow is behind it.

Nevertheless, I don’t expect to wake tomorrow to a Winter wonderland. I will be surprised if my pickup’s roof is covered with snow rather than the rain which is falling outside right now with temperatures hovering around 33 degrees.

In reality and, somewhat to my wonderment, it is not unusual for this part of eastern Texas to get a blast of cold and even snow-sleet accompanied air this time of the year even though it isn’t even officially winter on the Texas Gulf Coast.

I am sure there probably is some meteorological reason for it but spending as many years in this portion of Texas as I have — ranging from birth to my early 50s with some time off in Central and North Texas, Southern Mississippi, southern California and the Southern Pacific — I have noticed that this corner of the state quite often gets a super blast of Arctic air a week or two before Christmas.

Several times I can remember pre-Christmas snow and sleet storms where I grew up deep in the Pineywoods. Later I remember colder ‘n hell pre-Christmases in Dallas — specifically the week of Christmas 1983 and the week before or near Christmas in 1989. And there have been other instances. I don’t know why we get these chunks o’ cold at these particular times, yet, I have never seen it snow, sleet or come a talcum powder flurry on Christmas Day in my life. Not that it really matters. I have drawn some confused looks from my black friends when I told them I never saw a white Christmas. They said: “Bro, where the hell did you grow up, in Kenya?”

It is just as I mentioned in the earlier post today, the Texas Gulf Coast is hardly your typical winter wonderland. And it’s still raining outside here in Beaumont. And you know something? I like it.