In Anticipation
Hope Amid Terror

I switch my radio to NPR at about 6 p.m. tonight (Thursday, Mar. 11) to catch the news as I drive toward the grocery store after taking one of my co-workers to his home. Melissa Block reports tonight and I begin my usual smug head shaking as I listen to the same frustrating news that plagues me like an unquenchable thirst. American jobs are being exported overseas at alarming rates and the big corporations do not give a damn.
But then, suddenly, I stop shaking my head, and instead drop my jaw and gasp as Melissa informs me that for Madrid, Spain today is 9/11. Al Qaeda claims responsibility (via a London newspaper) for the bombing of several commuter trains today during Madrid's morning work rush. 192 people are killed and at least 1400 wounded. The Prime Minister of Spain believes ETA, a Basque resistance group whose terrorist actions against Spain are long-standing, might be responsible. But NPR notes that ETA has not killed more than 21 people in a single bombing in nearly 35 years. NPR concludes, "America has September 11. Now Spain has March 11."
I am starting to feel sick. My eyes cry, but I still breathe, I still listen, I still drive. I pull into the parking lot at the grocery store, unsure now of why I'm there. My eyes still cry. I turn off the engine.
There is a part of me that screams and demands an explanation for the murder of these innocent people. I'm angry and I'm sad. And yet, I feel I've processed these feelings before. There is also a part of me that sympathizes with those who are enraged at a system that does not work, does not listen and does not care.
So where does that leave me?
I am not a political analyst or a spiritual leader, but I am a believer in people and in their amazing capacities for kindness. In the face of this tragedy, my spirit seeks a window of hope from which to view the unfolding scene.
I do not believe that giving up on our neighbors or our community should ever be an option. Nor do I believe that giving up on our nation is an option (no matter how angry we may be at its leaders and their decisions). Keep educating, keep working.
Barbara Kingsolver, in her newest collection of essays entitled, Small Wonder, writes (speaking of TV news in America): "We see so much, understand so little, and are simultaneously told so much about What We Think, as a populace polled minute by minute, that it begins to feel like an extraneous effort to listen at all to our hearts."
That may be true. And to this I say: do NOT stop trying to listen! When I look out that window of hope my soul finds, I see a world that may one day be bathed in peace and joy, love and light.
As Shirin Ebadi said to close her acceptance speech for the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize, "In anticipation of that day."

Elizabeth House

Elizabeth House is office manager at Flagpole.

NPUs Here?
Neighbors Help Plan

At their first-Tuesday meeting two ACC Commissioners spoke up for NPUs.
"I hope we won't forget the importance of NPUs" said Commissioner States McCarter. Commissioner Kathy Hoard wanted to know when the mayor was going to appoint a citizens committee on NPUs. Mayor Heidi Davison says she is "still committed" to NPUs.
So what's an NPU? In Atlanta, Savannah and some cities in other states, neighborhood groups get early notification of building projects and other proposals planned for their area, and are involved in the planning process. These citizen groups represent particular districts known as "Neighborhood Planning Units." Burt Sparer of ACC's Federation of Neighborhoods - a group of over 20 neighborhood associations - has for years pushed for Athens to adopt NPUs.
"I gather it works very well in Atlanta" he told Flagpole. Sparer, a retired planner, believes it would "improve the quality of development in most cases." Presently, he said, neighbors often don't know about proposals "until it's too late."
In ACC, signs are posted on a site for at least 15 days if a rezoning is requested. However, if the land is already zoned for the desired use, no public notification is necessary. According to Commissioner David Lynn, there is no way for neighbors to learn that a project is planned unless they ask the planning department on a regular basis. Lynn has asked county staffers to consider notifying adjacent property owners or neighbors by mail of proposed projects before they are reviewed by county staff, and hopes the county can eventually put such information onto a map on the county website.
In a recent letter to the daily newspaper Commissioner McCarter said he could "testify to the positive aspects of early neighborhood involvement" in a couple of eastside developments. He said the developers of Cedar Pointe and Ansonborough sought input from neighbors as they were being planned, and "not one person spoke against either development" at public hearings. NPUs, he said, are the way some cities have "formalized developer-neighborhood negotiations."
Mayor Davison thinks NPUs could "put citizens on the front end of changes in their neighborhoods," but planning staffers are too busy right now to work on a proposal. She would like to locate grant money to fund outside staff or overtime pay.

John Huie

John Huie is, well, you know.

More SPLOST?
Citizens: Yes, But

The citizens committee charged with advising Commissioners on whether to extend the expiring sales tax - and what to spend the money on - has spoken.
They haven't said much, yet - mostly they've listened to other citizens in public hearings talk about whether to extend the tax, and what they've been hearing is "yes, but."
Georgia has a four-percent state sales tax and allows counties to collect an extra one percent for schools and two percent for other uses. One of these taxes - the "SPLOST," or special purpose local option sales tax - must be renewed (or not) by voters every five years. It must be used for "capital" projects - major one-time costs like parking decks, parks, fire stations - as opposed to ongoing costs like salaries.
Local sales taxes are politically attractive. They help keep county property taxes down, and are paid partly by out-of-towners who shop here, but can't vote here. Who could object?
No one really - but residents of lightly populated areas in northern Clarke County are threatening to hold November's SPLOST election hostage.
"You need things, we need things," Lacy Johnson told Commissioners at their March 2 meeting. Many north Clarke residents feel they were promised county water connections back in 1990 when the vote was taken to combine the city and county governments. For many residents, that hasn't yet happened. The county has run water lines down major roads, and will run them down the streets of a subdivision, too, if 60 percent of the homeowners want it, but the cost will be added to the subdivision's tax bills.
So far, only two subdivisions have done that, and many homes remain on wells and have limited fire protection as well. Where there's no water, there are no fire hydrants, and a planned fire station for northern Clarke County was cut - along with a work-release center for jail inmates - when the last SPLOST tax failed to collect enough money to fund them.
To get water along all of Clarke County's subdivision streets will cost $11 million, according to ACC Utilities Director Gary Duck. That project appears likely to make it into the SPLOST proposal that will be voted on in November, as citizens have been giving committee members an earful about broken promises.
The five-year tax could collect around $90 million. A proposed new jail might cost $55 million.
The SPLOST committee is accepting proposals for other projects from county departments, citizens, and interested groups. Proposals require detailed information and cost estimates, and must be submitted by April 16. Forms for submitting proposals are available at www.athensclarkecounty.com/documents/word/splost_2005_form.doc

John Huie

John Huie is a tall drink of water.

Animal Control
Last Week's Scorecard

Athens-Clarke County Animal Control responded to 52 calls:

7 complaints of animal cruelty
1 bite case
2 complaints of barking dogs
2 citations for ordinance violations
15 animals impounded
14 dogs
1 raccoon
14 dogs placed
11 adopted
2 reclaimed
1 turned over to another agency

ACC Animal Control press release for the week of March 4 to March 9.

Radical Voice
Katha Pollitt Here

In this time of timid corporate journalism Katha Pollitt is a bracing tonic for the mind, a refreshing breeze of reason to blow away the newsspeak that clouds our brains and a courageous, funny writer to snap us back into focus on the real issues that confront us. She is a prolific essayist in The Nation, The New Yorker and The New Republic and she also has a book of poems, Anarctic Traveler. Her essays have been compiled in two books: Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism; and Unconventional Wisdom.
Katha Pollitt will speak at 7:30 p.m. in the Chapel on campus Thursday, March 18. Her appearance is sponsored by the Ideas and Issues division of the University Union, the Women's Studies Department, Center for Humanities and Arts and the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. Tickets are free for students and $2 for non-students and are available at the Tate Center cashier's window.
Pete McCommons

Pete McCommons tries to write like Katha Pollitt.

Shocked Jock
Censoring Howard Stern

During the '50s, actors and screenwriters sympathetic to progressive causes found it nearly impossible to get work. Though they couldn't prove it, blackballed Hollywood talent knew why their telephones had stopped ringing. Somewhere behind the scenes, someone powerful, someone who believed that America was composed only of communists and right-thinking souls like themselves, was working to silence them.
We tell our kids that America learned from McCarthyism, but the Red Scare has been revised for a new century. Powerbrokers connected to what Hillary Clinton clumsily called the "vast right-wing conspiracy" - the Bush-Cheney neoconservative war profiteers, the Christian Right and their media allies at Fox News and Clear Channel Communications - operate out in the open. Their goal: to crush personalities whose influence and eloquence threaten their plan to recast the United States in their white, heterosexual, pro-business image.
Ironically two of the hard right's recent high-profile speech martyrs, Bill Maher and Howard Stern, are libertarians - a group whose distrust of big government traditionally prompts them to vote Republican. ABC, a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Company - a major political contributor to Bush's 2000 presidential campaign and the campaigns of other Republicans - canceled Maher's "Politically Incorrect" TV show after 9/11.
Now, over on AM radio, the Bush-controlled Federal Communications Commission has targeted Howard Stern for trumped-up decency violations. In a classic tag-team move, Clear Channel Communications, the thousand-station-plus behemoth so closely allied with the White House that it organized pro-Bush "Rallies for America" during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, declared Stern in violation of a brand-new "zero tolerance" policy for on-air indecency. "Clear Channel drew a line in the sand today with regard to protecting our listeners from indecent content, and Howard Stern's show blew right through it," Clear Channel Radio president John Hogan said before dropping Stern's popular syndicated program from its stations. Clear Channel is willing to lose money to promote its political agenda.
Citing three separate FCC sources, Stern says he expects to be hit by a huge fine - then fired. "It's over for me as a broadcaster," he said last week. "I'm checkmated. All they gotta do is fine [Infinity Broadcasting, Stern's employer] and then we're gone. And there's nothing we can do about it." On March 5, he added: "I'm guessing that sometime next week will be my last show on this station. There's a cultural war going on. The religious right is winning. We're losing."
If Clear Channel truly had a true zero tolerance policy on decency, Stern points out, it wouldn't have hired foul-mouthed right-wing Republican Michael Savage at its KPRC-AM in Houston. (Savage infamously shouted that homosexuals should "get AIDS and die" on MSNBC.) The real reason he's being attacked, Stern says, is that he dared criticize George W. Bush.
"If you don't think me going after Bush got me thrown off those stations, you got another thing coming," says the "shock jock." "My days here are numbered because I dared to speak out against the Bush Administration and say that the religious agenda of George W. Bush concerning stem cell research and gay marriage is wrong. And that what he is doing with the FCC is pushing this religious agenda. And also the fact that the guy takes more vacation than any President ever... I don't think we can stop it, short of me calling up President Bush and saying 'Look man, I'm going to support you, so don't do this.'"
The New McCarthyism doesn't always flow from the top down. The New York Times, which has published my editorial cartoons for 13 years through three presidents, suddenly excised them from its website on March 1 - leaving a Soviet-style hole on its comics page. In an Orwellian twist, it even deleted the archives.
"After two years [sic] of monitoring cartoons by Ted Rall we decided that, while he often does good work, we found some of his humor was not in keeping with the tone we try to set for NYTimes.com," stammered a Times Digital spokesperson to Editor & Publisher magazine when anti-censorship complaints began coming in. "We... recognize an obligation to assure our users that what we publish... does not offend the reasonable sensibilities of our audience."
To his credit, the paper's ombudsman wrote that he disagreed with the decision.
Those "reasonable sensibilities," a Times insider tells me, have less to do with tone than political content: as the most liberal cartoonist in a group of 10, my work drew a disproportionate number of emails from annoyed Republicans - adding to an already short-staffed department's workload. "It wasn't tone. [Times Digital] were sick of the hassle," my source says. "They kept other cartoons that were far more objectionable."
Cowardice, meet laziness. Time magazine was so afraid of the possibility of right-wing hate mail that after 9/11 it dropped all political cartoons.
The Internet has become the tool of choice for the previously powerless. Email forwarding, hyperlinks and blogs - a genre dominated by right-wingers - allow anyone with a used Gateway computer and a dial-up connection to rally hundreds of like-minded individuals to point and click, instantly firing off fiery letters to the bosses of radio talk show hosts, cartoonists and columnists who offend their sensibilities.
"Here's the feedback form for Yahoo!'s opinion syndicate," a blog called "The Agitator" suggests. "Write and tell them it's time to drop Ted Rall's column." "No paper should ever run Rall again," howls Andrew Sullivan, a Time magazine columnist who also writes the country's most prominent extreme-right blog. "I urge all of our readers to write to the NY Times," urges another hate site. "Here is their Contact page. I wrote to the publisher this morning."
A few liberals try to censor conservatives, but most opponents of the First Amendment reside on the right.
Unlike Congressional staffers accustomed to the phenomenon of mass letter-writing campaigns, aging editors at old-school print outlets like the Times don't comprehend that they're being fooled by fringe interest groups - most of whose members don't even buy their newspaper - into believing such correspondence reflects genuine reader outrage. And so the bullies get their way.
The Right is running scared. Their wars and economic schemes turned out to be as fraudulent as their fake president, whose poll numbers are plummeting as he turns to face uncharacteristically unified Democrats. Because they have no record worth defending and no ideas anyone will believe, the new McCarthyites have only one line of defense left: censoring their opponents. The question this time is, will anyone stand up for free speech?

Ted Rall

Ted Rall is the author of Wake Up, You're Liberal: How We Can Take America Back From the Right, coming in April.