It’s understandable that communities would want to reduce the sleaze factor of sex-oriented businesses. But our editorial today argues that legislative and city efforts to restrict their signs, tax their products, and rezone their locations could be doomed to legal failure.
The reaction of local lawyer Steve Joseph to these efforts is revealing: “Oh, make me some money. I’m loving it.”
Lawyers might be the ones who benefit the most from these laws. Like it or not, sex businesses have First Amendment rights, and they have a record of successfully defending them in court.
Posted by Randy Scholfield
There has been a lot of talk about how our society’s morals are in steep decline. So it was interesting to learn in The New York Times’ pop quiz on marriage that there are more long-term marriages today than in the past and that “aside from a huge spike in divorce after World War II, the divorce rates in the 1950s were higher than in any previous decade aside from the Depression.” The quiz — which included a lot of surprising answers — also noted that divorce rates have fallen by more than 25 percent since 1981. Of course, marriage rates have also declined.
Posted by Melissa Cooley
Radical anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr is the power broker in Iraqi politics — about the last person the Bush administration wanted in that role, Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Trudy Rubin noted in an op-ed piece on today’s opinion page. “U.S. officials mistakenly believed Iraqi secular parties would do well in the elections,” she wrote. Instead, Sadr now controls more than 30 seats in the assembly and was responsible for the weak Ibrahim Jaafari keeping his job as prime minister. That hurts us, Rubin wrote, because “America’s ability to withdraw troops from Iraq will depend on whether a new, four-year government can prevent the country from sliding further toward chaos.” And after Wednesday’s bombing of a golden-domed Shiite shrine, chaos and civil war seem increasingly likely.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Lawrence Summers, who announced his resignation this week as president of Harvard University, showed how many professors don’t support critical thinking when it challenges their orthodoxy. Summers had several high-profile confrontations during his tenure, including when he demanded that professors do more scholarly work and be more politically diverse, and when he pondered whether there might be some innate gender differences that helped explain why more men than women go into science and engineering fields. As a result, a group of faculty has been campaigning for his ouster, including forcing no-confidence votes. But as a Washington Post editorial noted: “University professors, of all people, should not require mollycoddling; they should be willing to embrace leaders who ask hard questions about how well they are doing their jobs.”
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
President Bush acknowledged that his administration is sending “mixed signals” on alternative energy research. That’s putting it mildly. Bush was referring to how a renewable energy laboratory he toured Tuesday in Colorado laid off 32 employees earlier this month because of lack of federal funding. But then last weekend, the Energy Department transferred $5 million back into the laboratory’s budget so that it could quickly rehire the employees before Bush’s visit. After all, it isn’t much of a photo op when there aren’t workers.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Money may not buy love. But in Jack Abramoff’s America, it’s got to be buying something. Otherwise, the total lobbying dollars would be going down, right? The Web site PoliticalMoneyLine reported this month that a record $1.1 billion was spent in the first half of 2005 lobbying the White House and Congress, 8 percent more than the previous six months. That 2005 lobbying pace averaged nearly $6.5 million a day or more than $540,000 an hour. The 27,000 registered lobbyists from 2,700 firms represented 13,500 unique clients, with the biggest spenders representing health care ($173.2 million). Uh — and exactly how are those of us out here in one-man-one-vote America supposed to compete with those passing out all this cash?
Posted by Rhonda Holman
The new visitors center under construction at the U.S. Capitol has become a money pit. Big surprise. The project was supposed to cost $265 million. Now estimates are as much as $584 million, or about $1,000 a square foot. That prompted The New York Times to suggest in an editorial that the center deserves a more candid title: “The Big Debt Dig, perhaps, as the center’s cost overruns mount apace with the egregious mass of deficit, debt and interest run-ups that will mark the larger budget folly of the Bush era for generations to come.”
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
