Lowering the Bar

The Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission has been cracking down on public intoxication recently. So what’s the problem, you say? Well, they’ve actually been going into bars and clubs to arrest people. In Texas this is the equivalent of taking away a person’s guns or saying high school football is stupid. Thus the TABC has been flowed with complaints, and not just from yours truly for a change.

State Rep. Kino Flores heads an oversight committee that is looking into the matter. Flores had asked the TABC to halt the crackdown, but his request was denied because he wrote it on a cocktail napkin. “We are proud of the work our men and women do for Texas, but are equally concerned when we hear complaints from the Legislature, I mean public,” TABC Administrator Alan Steen wrote Monday in a letter to Flores.
Houston Sen. John Whitmire, who used to chair the Senate Criminal Justice Committee, also supports a review of the program. “I do believe, if run properly, with good judgment, it can be a public safety program that a majority of Texans would support,” he said. And by ‘majority of Texans’ he meant ‘Baptists.’

An incident in Irving involving two patrons arrested in a hotel bar sparked much of the public outcry. A check of the arrest report showed that those two had been overserved, a concept I don’t quite understand myself, but so be it. The woman was ‘taking her shirt off and shaking her bikini-clad breasts at customers.’ Oh the horror?!?

The male patron “spoke up loudly to encourage the female taking her shirt off” and then said, ‘I’ve seen better tits on a blogger!’ That’s just mean. Other behavior included men finding women more attractive than they actually were, and women holding their friends’ hair while they puked.

The crackdown has led to more than 2,200 arrests over the past 7 months. When asked if the TABC planned to target The Cloak Room during the upcoming special session, Steen replied, “Are you f*cking crazy?”