I believe I meant to write amok…not amuck…but both are rather appropriate given what’s been going on… they’re pretty deep in the brown stuff as it is.

I’m glad to see that your local PBS station has some brains and integrity.

We do have a case in Albuquerque similar to that in Philadelphia. In order to catch bartenders over-serving patrons (selling drinks to people who are already drunk), the police have started administering breathalyzer tests to patrons exiting bars, even if they’re not the designated driver — the drinker isn’t supposed to be subject to a penalty, but the bar owners say this testing is discouraging bar patronage. A bar owner started to use his cell-phone camera to document the detainment. The police told the bar owner to stop doing that, and the bar owner refused. At this point, the police started to beat the bar owner up, claiming they needed to administer force because he was threatening the security of police operations. By this time, two other bar employees had come out, and they recorded the beating on their cell phones. The police tried to confiscate those phones, and by this time some bar patrons and also members of the band playing in the bar (one of whom had a day job at the local newspaper) also had their phones out and were taking pictures.

Yes, it is good to prevent drunk driving by screening drivers for alcohol. But what good does it do to scan non-driving bar patrons to check whether a bartender has served one drink too many? How the heck can a bartender tell what a particular customer’s blood-alcohol level is anyway? Some people get really tipsy with only one drink, while others hold their liquor well and can be well over the legal limit without showing it.

Gotta agree that an absentee father who has refused to take responsibility for a child while the child is alive shouldn’t have any claim to benefits from the child’s death.

On the FCC case, I note that our local PBS management is going to go ahead and run the documentary, with a disclaimer at the beginning but without any censorship. I applaud the decision. There’s a big difference between obscene, sexual, or otherwise offensive material that is just there gratuitously, and language that is, albeit offensive, an integral part of the message conveyed. We want to honor our veterans for all that they have gone through. That language is part of conveying exactly what those soldiers did and experienced. To cut it would mean downplaying the severity of the conditions they endured to preserve the ideals of freedom in the world. It would be really ironic if the sort of freedom they fought for were suppressed, just to preserve somebody’s standards of “decency,” in a documentary about the fight itself.