Support Ted’s Work

LOS ANGELES TIMES CARTOON: Why is Gov. Moonbeam so afraid of legalized marijuana?

•
Ted Rall

Here is my cartoon this week for The Los Angeles Times:

Stay Alert!

 

The statewide legalization of marijuana in Colorado, for recreational as well as medicinal use, has prompted serious consideration of the drug’s health effects and socio-political ramifications. Well, that sure took awhile.

On the pro side, it’s been pretty much established that driving stoned isn’t nearly as dangerous as driving drunk. Since 7% of California motorists are cruising the state’s freeways with cannabis in their systems, that provides some comfort. (Sorry, no word on what percentage of the stoners are drunk as well.) Pot also has proven medical benefits; for example, parents of epileptic children are flocking to Colorado.

But the legalize hemp crowd’s timeless rant that pot is harmless is taking some hits.

A recent study claims to have documented the first two known cases of pot-related fatalities. Other studies find that beginning to smoke weed as a teenager — the most common age to start — can affect brain development, causing memory loss, permanently impaired judgment and even reduced IQ.

In musings that might surprise those who remember his “Moonbeam” period (but not those who have noticed there’s no squarer square than an old hippie), Gov. Jerry Brown took to Sunday morning TV to worry aloud that emulating Colorado could leave the state defenseless against (a) foreign business competition and (b) terrorism.

“How many people can get stoned and still have a great state or a great nation?” Brown mused. “The world’s pretty dangerous, very competitive. I think we need to stay alert, if not 24 hours a day, more than some of the potheads might be able to put together.”

The governor didn’t say whether his garbled grammar was attributable to pot or the shortcomings of his secondary education.

I’m always interested in policy appeals motivated by fear. Politicians have unleashed an awful lot of threats — a few real but mostly imagined — during the last decade and a half. And they haven’t exactly made us a better, stronger or more economically successful nation. Brown’s thoughts are nowhere close to the depraved paranoia of Dick Cheney; the idea that California will be morally and economically weakened, its security undermined, because a tiny minority of the state’s residents regularly indulge in the evil weed seems about as serious and substantial as a puff of smoke.

Stay alert? What’s going to happen if we don’t, governor? Are Chinese sweatshop workers going to take a fiscal victory dance on the bones of our stoner-sapped competitiveness? Will our collected stonedness open up the one big chance radical Islamists have been waiting for?

Californians won’t have the chance to vote for legalized pot until November 2016 — if they’re not too wasted to remember.

 

LOS ANGELES TIMES CARTOON: The Charming Old 911 Script

•
Ted Rall

Flipping the Script

 

“By early next year,” reports The Times’ Ben Welsh and Robert J. Lopez, the [Los Angeles Fire Department] expects its dispatchers to be using new, streamlined scripted questions that will help get LAFD ambulances en route seconds — even minutes — faster during cases of cardiac arrest and other time-critical emergencies.”

I won’t be so churlish as to greet this decidedly positive news with a question: Isn’t it a bit odd to announce that “time-critical emergencies” occurring between now and “early next year” will be treated like they’re not, well, time-critical?

If you could just hold off on your next heart attack until, say, April 2015, that’d be awesome.

More from the report: “The changes follow a barrage of criticism of the department’s 911 response system, including what experts say are sometimes lengthy and confusing pre-written questions that panicked callers must answer before dispatchers can get help on the way.”

If you’ve ever had to call 911, you’re nodding your head right now. The old/current/won’t change until 2015 system has long deployed a “what’s the rush” that belies the whole idea behind 911.

In the movies, emergency response is high-tech and manically efficient.

911 Operator: “911.”

Caller: “Oh my God — someone’s in the house! [Line goes dead.]

911 Operator to Police Dispatcher: “A woman is in trouble. Address: 422 Patterson, Unit 302.”

Dispatch: “Units due to arrive in 20 seconds. SWAT backup team on the way. Probably drones. Maybe Mel Gibson.”

911 Operator to Dispatcher: “For God sake, hurry ­— a woman may be in trouble, and she may be a hot starlet!”

When I call 911 in real life, the response is…efficient? Not so much .

911 Operator: “911.”

Me: “I just saw a car lose control on the 405 and flip over.”

911 Operator: “What’s your name?”

Me (thinking): “What difference does that make?”

911 Operator: “What is your phone number?”

Me (thinking):  “Can’t you ask the NSA? I mean, aren’t you supposed to know that? Or do you guys not have caller ID? And also, shouldn’t you first be asking me where the accident is?”

911 Operator: “Are there any injuries?”

Me (thinking): “Do you seriously think I’d be talking to you on the phone — i.e., not helping — if I’d pulled over to help?”

911 Operator (not thinking): OK, we’re sending someone out.

Me: Shouldn’t you have done that, like, three minutes ago?

So yeah, good on the LAFD for this change. The new 911 will save lives. Next year.

But who knows? We might miss the chit-chat.

LOS ANGELES TIMES CARTOON: Patient Dumping? I Have a Solution For That.

•
Ted Rall

Patient Dumping? We Can Fix That

 

I draw cartoons for The Los Angeles Times about issues related to California and the Southland (metro Los Angeles).

This week:

“In 2005 and 2006, patient dumping on L.A.’s skid row grabbed national headlines with images of mentally ill patients in hospital gowns, one holding a colostomy bag, being dropped off in ambulances, taxis and vans,” Richard Winton of The Times remembers. Major hospitals, including Kaiser Permanente, were forced to admit routinely driving indigent patients downtown, dumping them on the sidewalk and speeding off. “Hospitals don’t like dealing with homeless patients, who are often uninsured and sometimes unpleasant to treat. So they literally dump them on the streets of Skid Row, even if the patients come from other places in Los Angeles, and are in no condition to fend for themselves,” “60 Minutes” reported in 2007.

Most people thought the problem had abated since hospitals got slapped with major fines.

Alas, we were wrong.

“In a settlement announced Friday, the 224-bed Beverly Hospital in Montebello agreed to pay $250,000 in civil penalties and legal fees after it was accused of taking a patient by taxi to skid row and leaving her there without making any arrangements with a shelter,” Winton reports.

Charming.

So Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer says he’s going after this miscreants.

Which brings me into the picture. I want to help!

For a hospital like Beverly, a quarter million bucks is a drop in the bucket. It’s cheaper for them to pay the occasional penalty than to give proper care to every patient who walks or rolls through the ER doors. From now on, therefore, I humbly suggest that when cops and homeless shelters come across a case of patient dumping, they take the person to the hospital’s CEO. In Beverly Hospital’s case, that would be Gary Kipp.

I’m guessing that Kipp, with an annual salary of $400,000 that safely ensconces him in the top 1%, has a sweet crib with lots of spare room for sofa surfers. Maybe CEO Kipp can take in some of the nurses he is underpaying and refusing to let unionize, as well.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: You’ll Get Arrested Someday. Will You Survive?

•
Ted Rall

Are you male? The odds say you’ll be arrested by the police at least once.

What happens to Americans after the cops slap on the cuffs, therefore, is not an intellectual exercise, or a matter of liberal guilt. It doesn’t just happen to other people.

You. It could happen to you.

It’s happened to me twice in the United States, and more times than I can count in foreign dictatorships. (In Third World countries, it’s usually corrupt cops shaking you down for a bribe.) On each occasion, I was thunderstruck by an overwhelming sense of helplessness.

No one knew where I was.

I was trapped.  Think this is a democracy? Think again. Whether you’re in Turkmenistan or the United States, victims of arrest are every bit as “disappeared” as if they were living under Orwell’s dystopian Big Brother.

Your family doesn’t know where you are.

You don’t show up to work — so you might lose your job.

If you need medication to live, you may die because the cops won’t give it to you.

When I was arrested, the policemen could have done anything they wanted to me — beat me up, rape me, even murder me — and get away with it. They didn’t. But they could.

That’s not a good feeling.

It’s certainly not a feeling you should have to experience for trivial offenses. (My case #1: arrested for possession of marijuana. Not mine. My friend’s. Because he was in the same car as me when I got pulled over for forgetting to turn on my headlights at night. My case #2: pulled over for speeding. Arrested for a suspended license. Which had been suspended in error.)

This kind of thing should not be a death sentence. A Justice Department study found that more than 2,000 criminal suspects died in police custody over a three-year period. Fifty-five percent were ruled as homicides by police officers.

Christopher J. Mumola, who authored the study, notes that most people make it out physically unharmed. “Keep in mind we have 2,000 deaths out of almost 40 million arrests over three years, so that tells you by their nature they are very unusual cases,” said Mumola.

But that’s still too many. And jail is still a gratuitously terrible experience. Guaranteed constitutional rights — to legal representation, a speedy trial and to communicate with the outside world –are routinely denied. Detectives bully and harangue suspects past the limit of human endurance, frequently extracting false confessions from innocent men and women. Basic needs, including access to medication, are often ignored.

Some conservatives will counter that the police shouldn’t coddle suspects. That if you do the crime, be prepared to do the time. But that’s precisely the point: under U.S. law, suspects haven’t done any crime. Until a judge or jury delivers a guilty verdict, arrestees are innocent under the law.

The Miranda decision — the last major reform that improved life for those who get arrested — is a half-century old. It’s time to update the rules to bring the experience of getting arrested in line with the high-flying rhetoric of human rights enshrined under U.S. law and with common decency.

You have the right to communicate.

     Or you should. In New York City, for example, suspects being processed through Central Booking are supposed to be allowed to place three local phone calls for free. In New York and most other municipalities, this right is routinely delayed.

“Disappearing” people is unworthy of a modern nation-state. It’s also dangerous. What happens to children waiting for their parents to pick them up after school when they don’t show up?

“Prepare yourself and your family in case you are arrested. Memorize the phone numbers of your family and your lawyer,” advises the ACLU. But in the age of the cellphone, many people don’t know important phone numbers by heart.

Suspects should be permitted to keep their cellphones, and use them as much as they want, while waiting to be indicted or released.

     You have the right to your meds.

Cops are extraordinarily cavalier about the health of the people they arrest. Members of Occupy Wall Street arrested in 2011 reported that jail guards in Manhattan routinely jeopardized their health. “At one point,” wrote Dave Korn, “the cops wheeled out a stretcher holding one of our girls; she was lying motionless, oxygen tubes connected to her face.  She had been denied her medication and was now unconscious.  The stretcher was left in the hallways, and cops were either walking past or photographing her.” A 22-year-old Washington state man was arrested for misdemeanor marijuana possession and sent to jail. He told the authorities that he had an extreme food allergy. Cops fed him oatmeal anyway, and told him it was safe. “Over the next half hour, the video shows other inmates looking in Saffioti’s cell as he jumped up and down. The legal claim says he pressed his call button and was ignored,” reported local TV. He died.

Congress should pass a federal law guaranteeing Americans’ right to keep their medications with them if they’re arrested, as well as access to food conforming to their medical, dietary and religious needs.

You have the right to be speedily processed.

Anyone arrested in the U.S. is entitled to respect. Which includes the right to be charged or released quickly. In many jurisdictions, the 24-hour rule before seeing a judge is ignored — especially if you’re nabbed on a Friday night. Then it goes to 72 hours. Which is stupid. Jails don’t suspend business over weekends. Neither should the courts.

(Support independent journalism and political commentary. Subscribe to Ted Rall at Beacon.)

COPYRIGHT 2014 TED RALL, DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM

 

LOS ANGELES TIMES CARTOON: Dems Luv Cali

•
Ted Rall

Don't Do It

 

I draw cartoons for The Los Angeles Times about issues related to California and the Southland (metro Los Angeles).

This week:

According to a new poll, “Californians’ perceptions about living in the Golden State are fractured along political, geographic and generational boundaries.”

Is California one of the best places to live? 53% of Democrats say yes. Only 26% of Republicans do.

Even if you’re liberal, the knowledge that conservatives are bummed out about living in the same state that you consider paradise has to give you pause. After all, you’re liberal. You’re supposed to care about other people — especially other people who tell you that they don’t care about you.

Also, you might ask yourself: what if I’m wrong and they’re right? What if California really is hell on earth? Does that make me…crazy?

What I want to know, and the poll does not and cannot reveal, is why members of the two major parties view the state’s quality of life so differently. Is it political — are Republifornians chafing under Governor Jerry and a Sacramento dominated by his Dems? Or does it reflect different worldviews? When Republicans look at the sky, do they see a different hue? When they hear the words “Miley Cyrus,” do their hearts quiver at an alternate frequency?

What about third parties? How do Greens and Libertarians enjoy/hate living here?

Anyway, this cartoon falls into the “illustrative” category of the political toon genre — a piece that doesn’t take an editorial stance, but rather shows what’s going on for its own sake. I have often been critical of this type of cartooning, but I make exceptions (hey, to be human is to be a hypocrite) for cartoons that highlight minor blink-and-you’ll-miss-it stories that have, or may have, broad implications.

Which this one is.

Now that you know that right-wingers dislike living in California, maybe you should consider being nicer to the dude in the monster truck-sized SUV who cuts you off if it has a Tea Party bumper sticker. Chances are, he’s depressed enough us as it is without you honking at him.

Also, he’s more likely to be armed.

css.php