October 31, 2004

• But why stop quoting there? It gets so much better... The case started Friday, the last day of Georgia's early voting period, when Dodds' wife went to vote accompanied by an infant wearing a Kerry-Edwards shirt. Poll workers asked the woman to turn the child's shirt inside out so she could remain and vote, but she allegedly refused and left. Later that day, Kevin Dodds went to the polling place saying he wanted to protest the objection to the baby's shirt. A police report said Dodds stood outside screaming, sometimes using foul language, and refused requests to take off his mask. I don't think the law against protesting or campaigning in/outside a polling place is such a bad idea. For damn near a year now the American public has been harassed with television ads, newspaper articles, a flood of blog posts, and every talk show across the nation analyzing the last detail of each candidate. A person should be able to vote in peace, without being intimidated or bombarded with yet more political propaganda.
• I dislike the KKK as much as the next guy, but that's a shitty law. Let people wear costumes, Georgia. The "special occasions" clause is vague enough to fight the charge. There's all kinds of reasons to say it was a special occasion. Voting is a special occasion, so is getting arrested. What constitutes campaigning? Having a bumper sticker on your car? Answering an exit poll? What constitutes "outside [a] polling place?" Sitting in my apartment, I'm outside a polling place. Most of the planet is outside polling places.
• What constitutes campaigning? Having a bumper sticker on your car? Answering an exit poll? What constitutes "outside [a] polling place?" If only the article had contained a paragraph such as "State law prohibits campaigning within 150 feet of a polling site. Signs outside polling places explain the law, which even bans voters from wearing stickers promoting a candidate." That would have made it much clearer. Oh, hang on.... ;-)
• Alright, I'll conceed: the mask law is pretty stupid. But they clearly defined "outside a polling place" as within 150 feet. And instead of trying to read the nuance of what constitutes campaigning, they've just decided that anything partisan at all is off limits. Seems like they're painting with a pretty broad stroke, but I don't think you can label it biased. Really, if American politics has one sacrament, then it is the election. The rest of the world already laughs at our pre-election mess; can't we at least offer the actual event some of the decorum it deserves? Protesting is fine. But getting drunk, and then screaming obsenities at the voters is not.
• I did read the article, I swear. I'm just kinda retarded, that's all. The law is still vague enough to bust every person drivng past the front of the building with a bumper sticker, and to bust someone for answering an exit poll. Especially when they had plenty of better reasons to bust him. I'm really frickin' bummed that people are showing up drunk to vote.
• Not so much "Which candidate would you rather have a drink with?", more "Which candidate do you genuinely believe you have been drinking with for the past 36 hours?"...
• I wonder what this means about the candidates themselves. Shouldn't actually being a candidate be the ultimate form of a 'sticker'? As in the upper layer of your epithelium is stuck on to the rest of you ...
• A Georgia law aimed at the Ku Klux Klan makes it illegal to wear masks except on "holidays and special occasions." Smmmmmmokin'. Or not, rather.
• Title should have been "Early Voter Arrested for Being a Drunken, Beligerent Ass While Wearing a Costume."
• Texas has a similar law against masks. It was passed in the 1930s under Governor "Ma" Ferguson. I think it's actually a really cool law. It's a way to bust Klan members while still respecting their 1st amendment right to assemble. Sure, they can assemble. They're just going to have to show their faces and let the whole neighborhood know they're racist assholes. 99% of the time, cops enforce the law sensibly.
• Okay then. How about, the spirit of the law says you shouldn't be advocating for a particular candidate around voting booths? Under this new criterion, bumper stickers on passing vehicles would be allowed, and babies wearing Kerry/Edwards t-shirts would not. And drunken idiots trying to prove a point? Absolutely not. I suppose, then, that it's ironic that I'm writing this while drunk. But seriously, my first thought a couple of hours ago when reading this was, "Man Acts Like Big Jackass, film at 11."
• Is there a election somewhere?
• I think that the 150 feet law is usually enforced pretty well, too. No one is going to try to bust the cars going by with bumperstickers, but they are going to get the guy who's trying to scare/bribe/beg you to vote for candidate X. I've actually had this happen to me once when I tried to vote: this guy was standing on the sidewalk outside the polling place handing out literature and telling people that if we didn't vote for his guy, we were stupid. Well, all of us stupid people reported him and he had to leave. Good law :)
• Texas has a similar law against masks. It was passed in the 1930s under Governor "Ma" Ferguson. I think it's actually a really cool law. It's a way to bust Klan members while still respecting their 1st amendment right to assemble. Sure, they can assemble. They're just going to have to show their faces and let the whole neighborhood know they're racist assholes. 99% of the time, cops enforce the law sensibly. Meredithia, what are the specifics of the law? I have never heard of it.
• 99% of the time, cops enforce the law sensibly I call bullshit. I, too, live in Georgia (Atlanta), and last Sunday I got a call from a friend who needed a ride from some party. All she could give me was the address, 88 park place, which ,though it gave me a vague idea of where to go, still meant I spent half an hour wandering around Downtown Atlanta at 4 in the morning. When I finally did reach the what I assumed was the place, people were filing out of the building, there were a few cop cars parked along the street, lights on, but no officers at ground level. There was a cop at the top of a flight of stairs leading into the building. Lost, and worried for my friend, I approached the officer and said, "Excuse me Officer, a friend called me and said she needed a ride, is this 88 park place?" He ignored me except to wave me on and mutter "move along." Since moving on wouldn't exactly help me I asked him again, and got the same response. So I asked him again, still using a perfectly polite, if a bit insistent, tone. At that point he grabbed me by my arm, said "You just don't learn," threw me up against the railing and cuffed me.
• I then got to spend the next day in the Atlanta jail and at Grady Hospital (at one point they got tired of me badgering them about how I thought this arrest was nonsense and got shoved to the floor, where I got a gash on my chin). What was I charged with? Well despite the fact that the officer originally told me my charge was "murder" (funny guys, those APD) I later found out that I was being charged with "Disorderly while under the Influence" and "Obstruction by physical acts." Turned out that my friend had called me from an after hours club (last call in ATL is 3am) and that shortly after she called for a ride the cops busted it up (I knew none of this, I had to read it in the paper 2 days later).
• So how does this relate to Mask-Guy? Well, on my citation, and I'm sure on the officer's official report, I am quoted as being obviously and severly intoxicated (which I was not), smelling of alcohol (I was arrested and then placed on the floor not 10 feet from a full bar in a club), and was quoted as saying, "Fuck you dumbass, I don't have to leave," something I definately, absolutely, did not say. Reading the report of Mask-Guy's arrest is like reading my own citation, and I'm sure its just as full of bullshit by the cops.
• Apologies for the novel length comment, but coming so soon after my arrest, and being so similar to my own experiences, I felt I had to share.
• Sorry about that, Spooky. That sucks. I'm not saying there aren't asshole cops out there using the law to enforce their own asshole-ish agenda. There are, and I have run into them. (A friend of mine -- who is, btw, Indian and thus "middle eastern looking" -- got arrested for pausing too long at a green light. They tried to bust him for being a terrorist.) I'm just saying that there are good reasons for these laws (perhaps particularly in the South) and we shouldn't just throw them out.
• I agree about the laws. Its not the laws I have had a problem with, its their enforcement by police officers who are just as petty and irrational as the next guy. But mainly I wanted to point out that its rather quick to write off Mask-Guy as some belligerent drunk; it wasn't his side of the story we heard, it was the cops' side. I mean, when they led me out of club there were news cameras in the parking lot, and I'm sure that had this bust been a bigger story I might have seen myself, handcuffed and with a busted chin, on the news. Possibly I might have even been captioned by something like "Drunken reveler who resisted arrested is led from illegal nightclub," because that is the official story.
• there are good reasons for these laws Bull. These laws are a blatant pretext for selective enforcement and should have been scrapped decades ago. It's like vagrancy laws: if the cops don't like you, they use them against you; otherwise they ignore them.
• Spooky: I am sorry to hear about your experience with the A.P.D., which sounds shitty but all too common. (And just to note, that new-ish law about all the bars having to shut down at 3AM is BULLSHIT!) I did have a question, though. If they charged you with drunkeness, don't they have to give you a breathalizer to see how drunk you are? By the way, I'm ask this out of curiosity rather than doubt, so please don't take it that way.
• ...rather, I'm asking this...
• TinfoilSortingHat, I too, can attest to the fact that cops can and do charge a person with being drunk, even when a breathalizer doesn't register the alcohol content at the level that is considered to indicate intoxication. It happened to me also, in a similar situation, although not as traumatic as what hqappened to Spooky. I was called by a friend who needed a ride home from the bar she was at. After picking her up, I was pulled over by a cop for not having tail lights, which was clearly untrue, as I could plainly see when the officer asked me to step out of my car. I then proceeded to point this out, he got a smart ass attitude and one thing led to another and he took me in for a DUI. And sent my intoxicated friend off in my car. The charge was thrown out of court, and eventually that officer was asked to leave the force. He had a habit of harrassing others the same as he had me. His mistake was going after the local judge for a bogus DUI charge.
• hqappened=happened
• If they charged you with drunkeness, don't they have to give you a breathalizer to see how drunk you are? Actually that's what I thought too, which is why I requested a breathalyzer several times. But I guess bratcat is correct in that an officer can charge you with being drunk without one. Of course, as bratcat's story also illustrates, getting that charge to stick later with no evidence except "I smelled it," is a bit harder. That's why I'm not too worried about this charge, it seems like a pure and simple punative arrest, the cop just didn't like my attitude, or the cut of my jib, or something. Hopefully he won't even show up in court and the whole thing will blow over. Then I'll be able to get out of having to be the guy who asks for directions for at least my next 3 roadtrips.