Gin & Skin
Nearly Nude, Dude

You enter through the opaque glass door, pay a small fee to a large man, then stroll down a corridor until you reach the lair. First you notice the music, the lights. Then flesh - lots of it, head to toe, atop a sleek plateau lit along its border like an airport runway. And over there, more of it, seductively swaying on a table in the corner. Men gaze, lean back in their chairs, suck without mercy on fast-burning cigarettes. Stilettos clack as dollar bills dive into garters.
Behold the mutations of culture. Is it entertainment? Objectification?
Some men (and women) appear amused by the show. To others, it is serious.
Don't bother me, I'm watching this. And to others still, this lecherous aberration is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad thing: société grotesque, like Ned Flanders thrust into a William Burroughs novel.

citypages-chelseas.jpg

Personal mores aside, what are the actual social effects of these unclothed actions? Can such effects be accurately measured? Furthermore, what happens when alcohol is stirred into the mix?
It has long been argued that nude dancing, especially in conjunction with alcohol, can increase crime in a community, decrease property value, diminish quality of life for nearby residents and aggravate the burden on local law enforcement and judicial systems.
The brief paragraph of Georgia's state constitution titled Regulation of Alcoholic Beverages seems as concerned with nudity as with alcohol. It gives law-making authority to "counties and municipalities of the state for the purpose of regulating, restricting, or prohibiting the exhibition of nudity, partial nudity, or depictions of nudity in connection with the sale or consumption of alcoholic beverages."
Counties all across Georgia have heeded this loose instruction by drawing up ordinances of varying strictness to regulate nude dance clubs, and several have banned alcohol completely. Many clubs, of course, have filed lawsuits against their local governments, hoping to continue pouring. In their view, local officials are trying to impose personal moralities on their right to showcase nude dancing. The courts have ruled, though, that Athens-Clarke County has the authority to ban alcohol from places that feature nude dancing.
Toppers and Chelsea's have since required their dancers to don minimal clothing (pasties and G-strings), which allows them to serve alcohol again.

Tanner Brown
Tanner Brown is a local freelance writer.

It's Your Budget
Getting And Spending

ACC budget figures show that Athens-Clarke County property taxes are significantly lower than other Georgia cities for homes of similar value - but that property values in Clarke County keep going up. ACC's tax digest - the total value of taxable property - has been going up about nine percent a year, as new homes are built and older ones increase in value. ACC tax assessor Kirk Dunagan says homes in new subdivisions tend to rise quickly in value for a few years as soon as they are built, and home values in some intown areas and subdivisions along the rivers have gone up too.
But ACC's property tax rate - the millage rate - has actually come down about 14 percent since 1996. Another reason taxes are low here for a given value of home is ACC's homestead exemption. At $10,000, it is larger than all but two other counties in Georgia, according to ACC's on-line budget. This means the first $25,000 of a home's total value is not taxed, provided the owner lives in that home.
According to ACC figures, the county government and school system together will spend some $246 million dollars this year - or about $2400 per citizen. Thirty-seven percent of that money goes to schools; 13 percent to water and sewer service; about seven percent to internal government operations; seven percent to courts and the county jail; six percent to police; four percent to firefighters; two percent to parks, arts and recreation; two percent to local streets and drainage (numbered routes excluded); two percent for capital projects and about one percent each for transit, trash collection and the landfill, and for grants to social programs.
There are smaller expenditures for tourism and the Classic Center, for the airport, 911 phone equipment, the library, legal aid, and the health department.
Only about a third of this money comes from property taxes, and another 21 percent comes from local sales taxes. About 19 percent comes from the state and federal governments - mostly for schools.
Some county departments cover their own expenses, according to Chris Caldwell of the county's finance department. By selling gasoline, the airport covers its costs, and so does the landfill with its fees. Water and sewer fees more than cover current expenses, he said, allowing investment in infrastructure. Bus fares cover about a third of transit expenses.
Local governments have limited ways of raising money; for example, property tax rates cannot exceed maximums set by state legislators. But counties are allowed to sell bonds to finance expensive long-term building projects. These "municipal" bonds can be attractive to investors because they are tax-exempt; still, ACC Commissioners have managed to keep the county's level of debt and interest payments low, according to Caldwell.
One concern with SPLOST (sales-tax funded) projects has been that, while the sales tax pays for building certain projects, they still must be staffed and maintained over the years. ACC Commissioners have resisted adding permanent jobs to the county payroll, which now totals over 1400 people, but this year they added 29 new positions. Fifteen of these are firemen, and six are ordinance enforcement personnel. All county employees received a two percent raise last year. According to the on-line budget, the number of county employees is not increasing any faster than the county population.
ACC's 200-page budget document is available on-line at athensclarkecounty.com or at the ACC Library and contains much information about county government programs, departments, and taxes. There is also a shorter summary document.

John Huie
John Huie can be reached at jphuie@athens.net after he finishes doing his taxes.

Animal Control
Last Week's Scorecard

Athens-Clarke County Animal Control responded to 86 calls:

3 complaints of animal cruelty
2 reported bite cases
2 complaints of barking dogs
6 ordinance violations
58 animals impounded
52 dogs
2 cats
2 chickens
1 opossum
1 squirrel
18 dogs placed
7 adopted
7 reclaimed
4 turned over to other agencies

ACC Animal Control press release for the week of Jan. 15 to Jan. 21.

Patriots Decry Act
Conservatives & Liberals

As the nation stumbles to its senses years after the largest terrorist attacks in its history, liberals no longer speak alone against laws like the Patriot Act.
"What if Janet Reno had these powers?" asks Chris Ahmuty, executive director of the Wisconsin chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. "That just scares conservatives to death."
Starting January 12, leaders from across the political spectrum met in Milwaukee for a week of politics and art in a forum called the Dossier Project. Pro or con, privacy or not, panel members and the audience of 80 people discussed trends of weakened liberty and impending attacks.
U.S. Attorney Steven Biskupic and Special Agent David Mitchell, leader of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Wisconsin, argued that the Patriot Act gives law enforcement the ability to share intelligence and use tools necessary in the information age. Their colleagues have most of these powers to prosecute bank fraud and health care cases, they said.
"The law has not changed," Mitchell said. "The standards that the FBI and all law enforcement have to meet still exist. We still have to have probable cause when it comes to obtaining criminal warrants." Too often, he said, people claim search warrants are obsolete.
The Patriot Act passed 45 days after the September 11 attacks. It expands powers of federal, state and local law enforcement agencies in terrorism investigations and in investigations relevant to criminal activity. The presumption of guilt is no longer a prerequisite for many government inquiries. The checks and balances tipped further away from individual privacy and liberty, both for criminals and terrorists and for regular citizens.
For instance, the record of what everyone has checked out from every library in the country is now open to federal investigators, with librarians forced to comply and served with a strict gag order about the search. Even before the Patriot Act, Biskupic said a grand jury could always collect those records. Now that process is expedited. "Suppose somebody checks out a book on bomb-making and then later on they blow up the federal building. Shouldn't you be able to go back and see that?" he asked.
National President of the American Civil Liberties Union Nadine Strossen lamented the dwindling importance of checks like grand juries. "By the way, there are a lot of people who check out books on bomb-making who do not blow up federal buildings," she said. "They include farmers who are using it to blow up trees... Too many provisions of that law are, in fact, the worst of both worlds. They do demonstrably make all of us less free without demonstrably making any of us more safe."
On Strossen's side of the argument sat former Congressman Bob Barr, a Republican who represented the 7th District in Georgia from 1995 to 2003, where he was senior member of the Judiciary Committee. He's also 21st Century Liberties Chair for Freedom & Privacy for the American Conservative Union. "I think that [Biskupic and Mitchell] could have done their job, and if they had been in charge, they could have stopped those terrorists prior to September 11 without the Patriot Act."
New powers aren't needed and weren't needed to prevent those attacks, he said, if agencies did their jobs efficiently without inter-agency bickering. Instead of focusing on improved job performance, the government is putting its energy against fundamentals of American freedom, Barr said. "Even back in the heyday in the war against mind-altering drugs, we always had the 4th Amendment which came back and was a bulwark against executive government power."
Barr said the great danger of the Patriot Act "is that it represents a fundamental philosophical shift away from that and in the direction of telling the people of this country that the government can invade your privacy; they can gather evidence to be used against you without any probable cause whatsoever, without any suspicion that you have done anything wrong, simply because the government says it is necessary to fight the war against terror."
The fear of being soft on terrorism has too many politicians and citizens afraid of openly criticizing these new laws, Barr said, adding that Congress may not be influenced to act for preservation of personal liberties until 2005, but he is glad to keep the discussion active.
"I don't think that we will win the battle to preserve our civil liberties in the war against terror unless we bring all the different groups together: Republicans, Democrats, conservatives, liberals, very involved, uninvolved. It's absolutely essential, because the power of government is so large to begin with that these little incremental steps aren't seen by many in the public. It doesn't even register on their radar screen," Barr said.
Each day after the forum, a new event was hosted, from a teach-in by the National Lawyers Guild to performance art. The Dossier Project also presented a juried art show as part of a larger gallery walk in Milwaukee. "I believe that visual artists often have the capacity to communicate ideas more powerfully and effectively than the print media," said attorney and Dossier Project organizer Peter Goldberg.
"Attorney General John Ashcroft has been barnstorming the nation to defend it and promote new changes proposed in Patriot II," Goldberg said, "although always behind closed doors so as not to have to confront the press or the public."

J. Decker
J. Decker is a Wisconsin-based freelance writer.

Reflections From France
Hatred Bush Hath Wrought

Why do they hate us? And where do they get their hatred from?
These questions haunted me and three other American visitors as we studied a huge display of cartoons drawn by local schoolchildren assigned to convey their impressions of the United States. Panel after grisly panel depicted the United States, George Bush and those ubiquitous symbols of American commercial culture - McDonald's and Coke - as murderous, predatory and gleefully vicious. Obese Uncle Sams chopping up Iraqi children with a knife, their blood gushing across construction paper. A leering Statue of Liberty holding a hamburger in one hand while firing missiles at dying Afghan civilians across the ocean. The American flag, its bars transformed into prisons for the child inmates of Guantánamo. A baseball bat painted red, white and blue poised to smash a ball - which is a globe. The juxtaposition between the artwork's ferociously angry imagery and the childish drawing styles of the third graders would disturb the most jaded reader.
I didn't see a single positive portrayal of the United States.
Organizers of Carquefou's annual cartoon art festival had invited four American artists - Steve Benson of The Arizona Republic, David Horsey of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Kal of The Baltimore Sun and yours truly - to this industrial town in conservative western France to discuss the deteriorated state of Franco-American relations. We've all used our cartoons to convey our dim opinion of the Bush Administration's domestic and foreign policy agenda. We oppose the war in Iraq. We despise the French bashing ("freedom fries," wine boycotts, high schools that have stopped teaching French) that has arisen since the Chirac government threatened to veto Bush's Iraq war resolution in the U.N. I even have dual French-American citizenship. We're a pretty liberal group; that's probably why they chose us.
We don't take issue with most of the cartoons' messages. They see Bush as a vicious, thoughtless warmonger with fascist tendencies, Americans as arrogant brutes who don't give a passing thought to the innocent people who die at the hands of their government and rapacious corporations as hegemonic steamrollers that crush cultural distinctiveness and independence in their ceaseless quest for the almighty dollar. They can't believe that we feel more entitled to use military force than Luxembourg or Monaco.
What must Palestinian kids think of us?
It would be nice to see these opinions expressed with more subtlety and nuance. But their opinions are more right than wrong. Americans believe they're exceptional. A Republican is someone who believes that we were right to invade Iraq. A Democrat is one who thinks we should have gone into Rwanda.
Still, walking past those drawings these past few days felt like getting slugged in the stomach. Part of it was the sheer scale - there were more than 700 pieces on display. But the level of rage and vitriol against America and everything related to it (one kid even trashed Tropicana orange juice) surpassed prewar propaganda in Saddam's Iraqi press. And these are kids. What a difference a hundred years makes: the Statue of Liberty, France's second great gift to America after freeing us from England, was funded by millions of centimes collected by French schoolchildren.
It hurts to see what Bush has done to our international reputation.
We repeatedly explained that there's more to the United States than George Bush. We pointed out that most voters supported Gore in the last election, that hundreds of thousands of Americans marched against the war. We argued that Americans are kind, big-hearted people. French attendees listened politely, and we were treated with the utmost kindness and hospitality, but their kids' cartoons screamed: we hate you. That hurt.
Children get their politics from their parents and teachers, who form their impressions from the media. The European media has covered a different war than the one you've seen on CNN and Fox News. A 14-year-old Iraqi boy, shot by U.S. troops in Baghdad, was interviewed for five minutes on the evening news. "They did it on purpose," he said. "They were laughing." The bloody corpses of Iraqi civilians are standard TV fare in Europe. The Bush Administration is routinely portrayed as greedy, stupid and mean.
Americans can find the truth about our nasty, unwinnable oil war, but they have to dig a little deeper. "The United States is using excessive power," Ghazi Ajil al-Yawar, a moderate, pro-American member of the Iraqi Governing Council, told The New York Times Magazine on January 11. "They round up people in a very humiliating way, by putting bags over their faces in front of their families. In our society, this is like rape. The Americans are using collective punishment by jailing relatives. What is the difference from Saddam? They are demolishing houses [of insurgents' family members] now. They say they want to teach a lesson to the people. But when Timothy McVeigh was convicted in the bombing in Oklahoma City, was his family's home destroyed?"
It's striking that al-Yawar knows McVeigh's name. How many Americans can identify any Iraqi other than Saddam Hussein? Most foreigners know more about us than we know about them. Of course, many of us don't give a damn whether French schoolchildren or anyone else think Bush's United States is a land of butchers and thugs. Whether or not we care, however, it matters.

Ted Rall
Ted Rall is the editor of the new anthology of alternative cartoons Attitude 2: The New Subversive Social Commentary Cartoonists.