digitaljournal.com:

The Department of Public Health in Los Angelrs has recently banned the selling of bacon-wrapped hot dogs. Ah, the sweet, salty, taste of health regulation.

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Lawmaking bureaucrats in a St. Louis area town are considering passing a bill that will ban swearing in bars. Bureaucrat Richard Velt proposed the bill after hearing complaints about bad bar behavior.

The law would also ban table dancing, drinking contests and profane music.

Presumably, ground-level dancing will still be allowed which leads me to wonder why a dancers elevation makes a difference in the eyes of the state. Maybe table dancing is more dangerous because the distance to the ground is larger making a fall more likely to cause injury. At least the government is there to protect them now.

MSNBC reports:

The proposal would ban indecent, profane or obscene language, songs, entertainment and literature at bars.

It looks like the jukeboxes and playlists of many bars are going to need some revamping. Plenty of the songs played in bars have lyrics that someone will find undoubtedly “indecent, profane or obscene.” And that is the problem with this law: it is subject to interpretation.

If someone finds your words to be offensive you could be subject to punishment. So much for free speech on private property.

I also wonder how such a law would be enforced. Are we now going to have undercover police officers scouring bars for profane language, table dancing and offensive music? Would they be more useful to the public if they were out looking for real criminals?

It looks like those who want to use profane language will just have to step outside, but then again, shouldn’t the smokers also have the right not to be offended?

Apparently the ‘D’ in ‘DUI’ does not have meaning anymore. David Montalvo, 36, was arrested when he, in a responsible fashion, decided to sleep off his intoxication in the parking lot of the Market Place Deli. He was charged with DUI.

Monatlvo’s GMC pickup truck was running and in park while he was stopped at the parking lot. The reason the truck was running was because it was 25 degrees Fahrenheit that February morning and he was trying to keep warm.

Montalvo awoke at 5 am with a Hamburg Police Department patrolman standing over him. The cop claims he wanted to make sure Montalvo was okay. The officer then insisted that he take a breathalyzer test, a request that Montalvoe refused.

He was arrested and forced to make a conditional guilty plea, intending to challenge the officer in court on the grounds that his actions violated the fourth amendment.

A New Jersey appellate court upheld the decision and convicted Montalvo of Driving Under the Influence for sleeping in a parked car while intoxicated.

He now faces a ‘driver’s responsibility’ tax of $3000 and an assorted array of complimentary fines and fees that add up to at least an additional $1000.

theNewspaper.com reports:

“From the perspective of the officer on the scene, I don’t find at all that what he was doing was unreasonable,” Superior Court Judge Thomas Critchley Jr. said in his rejection of Montalvo’s argument. “In fact, I find it would have been unreasonable to have stopped his inquiries at any point short of what he did.”

The appellate court agreed that the officer was acting reasonably to render assistance to someone who may have been in distress.

“The officer wanted to make sure the driver was ‘okay,’ nothing was wrong with the businesses and that the truck was operating properly,” the appellate decision concluded. “We are convinced that under the facts as observed by Officer Aaronson defendant was lawfully subject to limited inquiry based upon an objectively reasonable exercise of the officer’s community caretaking function.”

Lesson learned. If you are intoxicated do not sleep in your car. Either drive home or find somewhere else to sleep. Sleeping Under the Influence charges can be pretty expensive.

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