Ticket for not speaking English?

The Dallas Police Department seems to be in a heap of trouble. Not for Tazing someone unnecessarily, nor even for beating someone. No, the men in blue find themselves under fire for a ticket one of their rookies wrote to a woman for not being able to speak English. Keep in mind that the City of Dallas has an ordinance that requires taxi drivers to speak passable English. Note also that Federal law requires commercial truck drivers to do so as well. The onboard computer on his cruiser provided that this was a legitimate offense.

Apparently this woman made an illegal u-turn in front of the officer. When he pulled her over, she not only was unable to communicate with him; she also was unable to provide a drivers license. Apparently she didn’t feel compelled to keep it with her.

The city and the police chief have apologized, but that doesn’t seem to be sufficient. You see, it seems that she was so distressed over getting a ticket that she had to spend several days in the hospital, and now she wants Dallas to pay for her stay.

That stay originally was reported to be "nearly $5,000" but has since been inflated to "over $8,000". You decide why that may have changed. My guess is that high-powered lawyers aren't cheap. But that is seriously just a guess.

I have a message for that woman. Be glad, be VERY glad that I am not a cop, and was not the one that pulled you over. Once it became apparent to me that you couldn’t converse in English, and that you also did not have a license to operate a motor vehicle, I would have washed my hands of you. I would have called I.C.E. and let "la migra" take care of you. With any luck, they would have noticed that you supposedly are legal to be here before they dropped you off south of the border.

Distressed by a ticket? Seriously, anyone who has ever got a ticket they didn’t feel they deserved has been distressed. How many of us took ourselves to the hospital?

I very rarely get pulled over, but I got pulled over not long ago. I got a ticket, in essence, for buying a car on a Saturday. Yes, I said I got a ticket for buying a car on Saturday.

Back in September, my doctor told me that, due to some unfortunate problems in my groin area, I would be unable to ride my motorcycle until late December at the earliest. Well, at that time, my bike and my wife’s car were my family’s only transportation. Since our work schedules are so different, it is not possible for us to carpool. So, I had to go out and buy a car. That has got to be the most expensive doctor visit I have ever suffered that didn’t involve surgery.

Did I mention that I bought the car on a Saturday? August 29th, to be precise. Around 2 p.m. we concluded the beating, I mean negotiations, with the dealer. I didn’t buy a new car, but it is new to me and it came from a new car dealer, so there was no front plate and no registration sticker. Actually, there was no rear plate either, unless you count the paper one they issue you at the car lot.

Anyway, at 2 on a Saturday afternoon, my insurance company is inaccessible except for emergencies. No biggie, I thought, I have the insurance card from my wife’s car to cover me, and I can call Monday and have them send a card for the new one.

Monday, August 31, I woke up went out to run some errands. One of my chores took me to Arlington, and when I was headed back into Fort Worth I got pulled over. The road I was on (Pioneer for those from the area) has a 55mph speed limit. As it enters Fort Worth it changes name to Rosedale, and drops speed limit to 40mph. Now, for those who have never driven it (or those who have and haven’t noticed) the city limits sign is just over the top of a hill, and the new, lower speed limit sign is so close behind it as to be obscured until you are right on top of it.

As soon as I saw the sign, I braked to slow down. Apparently not quickly enough, because the motorcycle cop at the bottom of the hill stepped out into the road and waved me to the side. I rolled the window down as he came up, and the first thing he said to me was "where is your front plate".

We have front and back license plates in Texas.

Those who know me will be unsurprised by my answer of "probably the same place as my rear plate and registration sticker. In the mail. I just bought this car Saturday".

He told me that the reason he pulled me over was my speed, and when I pointed out to him that the other side of the hill is 55 and I was braking when he clocked me at 48, he decided to drop the idea of a speeding ticket in favor of a no insurance ticket.

Never mind the fact that you can’t get insurance (from a reputable agency, anyway) on a Saturday. Never mind that you have several days grace to add a new car onto your policy. Apparently, it being the last day of the month, he hadn’t made that quota they don’t have.

So, eleven days later, I had to take off work early, go downtown and waste a couple of hours of my time to get the ticket dismissed.

Do I want compensation? Heck yeah. Do I think I deserve it? Well, yeah. I doubt that I really do deserve it, but I at least think I do. Maybe I should call that Mexican lady’s lawyer.

Health care, some more.

There seems to be a lot of talk about insurance coverage portability. This talk comes from the same folks who are adamantly against any kind of single-payer coverage, let alone the so-called public option. I have to say, the idea of portability WITHOUT a single-payer plan is just smoke. If you work for a company that provides you with coverage from Humana, and you leave that job to work for a company that uses Humana, then should be able to reasonably expect to get some kind of portability. You don’t have it now. If the company you work for has 2000 employees and the company you move to only has 50, you will pay more for the same coverage, even though it is from the same company. They have some kind of convoluted explanation for why this is, but you have to live in a fantasy world to begin to believe it. If you, however, move to a company that uses Aetna for coverage, you cannot expect to be able to carry your same coverage with you. The two different insurance providers are not going to offer the same plans or the same prices. The only possible way we can remove the ties between our insurance coverage and our jobs is to go with a single-payer plan, like most of the rest of the industrialized world has.
Consider, also, that the only real way to provide health care fairly, as a right, is to do away with the for-profit health insurance companies. I know, that would put a lot of people out of business. But, I don't remember anyone crying when Texas Instruments invented the calculator and put numerous abacus companies out of business. How do we pay for it? I'm glad you asked. My family pays just over 5 thousand dollars a year to my health insurance provider. It then pays out dividends to its shareholders, 18 million dollars a year to its CEO, and who knows how much more to the rest of its executives. Far far more than any government worker makes, you can be sure. Then, to ensure that their bottom line is nice and healthy, they deny me services like the (apparently) recreational colonoscopy my doctor wanted me to have.
If we take that 5 grand a year and instead pay it to the federal health care plan, we can probably push a lot of that 5k back into my bank account. There are no government employees pulling down an 18 mil a year salary. Nor are there any making anywhere near what probably the top 20 execs at just my insurance company make.
If my insurance provider can make the kind of profit required to justify the salary of its top executives by charging me 5000 a year, then I have to assume that the government can provide me with coverage for far less. Of course, it would also require that they hire honest people to administer. Maybe I am living a fantasy, too.
Some will say that this reeks of socialism. Yes, it does. So do public schools and hospitals, police forces, fire departments, military, and any number of other benefits we have that most of us pay for and all of us use.

Presidential Intelligence

So I just had a chat argument with a guy over him calling President Obama "retarted". His spelling, not mine. So we started off on a good foot, because those who know me know that I didn’t let that one pass. I also pointed out to him that calling arguably our most intelligent president in years retarded, especially in light of the mental acuity of our previous president, was moronic. He argued that Bush got blamed for a lot that wasn’t really his fault. Of course he did, that’s what happens to presidents. Like Barack Obama being blamed for the record debt America holds right now. Never mind that George W. came into office with cash surpluses that Clinton left him and quickly turned them into record deficits that made even Reagan’s look mild. Never mind that G.W. got us embroiled in a war we never should have even considered.
He argued that we HAD to attack Iraq, due to 9-11. Again with the "retarted". Apparently he forgot that even Bush eventually admitted that Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11. He was also unaware, until I pointed it out to him, that no one from Iraq was involved in the attacks. A whole bunch of Saudis were, but hey, they are our buddies, our pals, our friends.
But wait, he argued. Iraq had nukes; we had to stop them. What? By this time my head is spinning like I just finished drinking a case of beer alone. Nukes? Iraq didn’t even have the wmd’s we accused them of having at the time, let alone nukes.
I once saw a quote, I can’t remember who it was credited to. "While it would not be true to say that all conservatives are stupid, it would be true to say that most stupid people are conservative."
What kind of uneducated, uninformed people do we really have in this country? And these folks vote. Usually straight Republican ticket.