Watching the wheels go round and round.

Bluegill wrote these words yesterday:

The City Council, as a body, does not recognize logical argument. The lesson reinforced last night is that it's all politics and one-upmanship. Facts do not matter. They'll claim one thing when it's politically advantageous. They'll completely contradict that claim with a straight face when that's advantageous. There is nothing else.

A city council member recently suggested that my perceptions of the current aggregation are utterly mistaken. According to him, and contrary to the popular view, each of the members works very, very hard.

It took me a day or so to digest this. Certainly there have been conspicuous examples of newly elected council persons publicly confessing to ignorance as to the requirements of the job, and seeking to postpone decisions because he or she hadn't had time to consider information that unpaid community activists already knew by heart, word for word.

However, such examples don't necessarily imply that hard work is not taking place, and so I'll concede that many council members are working hard. But are they working smart?

Consider the lowly hamster spnning the wheel in his cage. As the revolutions per minute mount, it is obvious that he is working hard -- damned hard. At the same time, all the impressively hard work yields nothing in terms of concrete, comprehensive results, with the possible exception of a heightened pulse for the unfortunate animal, who remains trapped inside a cage.

Perhaps if he worked smarter, the hamster would be able to escape and go on holiday in the Bahamas ... or replace the bad water heater in his rental hole.

Simply stated, hard work sans context is a chimera unless it is directed toward a goal, structured toward results, and capable of producing a substantive yield. The current council's legislative record after fourteen months in one of sidestepping substantive issues while seeking the convey the notion that much hard work has occurred when it comes to smaller, unnecessary ones: Smoking bans, "adult cabaret" ordinances, novelty lighters, and the like.

This is why I have made the charge that as a body, it is intellectually lazy, something that pertains to cognitive habits of thought, not the speed with which one of them can dig a sewage trench to nowhere with a teaspoon made of plastic.

The fact that it took our city clerk, an obvious victim of Coffeyist sadism, forty minutes to read the adult cabaret ordinance aloud is the most obvious red flag suggesting that a council member -- an one of them -- with even the slightest interest in issues pertaining to freedom of speech and expression might ask one or two questions about it, ranging beyond the purely technical consideration of fee structures and distance between paying customer and pastie-clad dancer, and yet nine members sat passively throughout, apparently having determined to speed through ROCK's act of theocratic will as quickly as humanly possible and move on to the business of ignoring all the other daily threats to the well-being of children and families.

Afterwards, I asked four separate council persons whether they were aware that ROCK's fundamental argument, that children and families must be protected from the "threat" of an adult cabaret by any and all means, was precisely the same argument prefacing the establishment of Prohibition, with demon alcohol substituted for sex-crazed breasts. Each council member said nope, never really thought about it, and besides, if it upset me so much, why didn't I say something aloud about it during public speaking time?

That's where they'll be when the theocrats come gunning for the rest of us.

Apart from my having written about it again, again, and again, in places like this that are available to any literate adult, consider that on previous occasions, many of these same council members advanced the bizarre view that their right to be heard trumped the public's, because only they had deigned to undertake courageous runs for public office.

Now, presumably cowered by the presence of ROCK's vote-withholding lobby in the gallery, and unwilling to ask questions of their own, they point at me (at us) and say that it our responsibility to raise relevant points about legislation.

Well, which is it? And how many votes from ROCK's residential base in the exurb would be withheld, seeing as people like Mr. /Pastor Wickens don't even reside within the city limits?

I'll stop now. Being the conscience for the conscience-deprived is exceedingly hard work ... and smart work, too. My brain hurts.

Are we serving beer yet?

Game On: Frogs vs. ROCKs

As expected, the owners of the Rustic Frog are wasting no time getting to the core of the matter. That being said, can the City of New Albany really pass an ordinance that works?

Men's club to challenge New Albany law

So will ROCK be on hand to see that our city attorney gets showered, shaved, and to the courthouse on time?

Will Red Scott bring his employees along in their work uniforms to impress the court?

Will any and all be strip-searched upon entering the Federal Building to prevent guns, knives, autographed pictures of the performers & contraband bibles from being carried in?



Could any of these affect the judges ruling?

Will our press be present?

Good questions all for our breakfast coffee. We wait with bated breath!

To ogle pasties or not to ogle pasties: Adult cabaret ordinance vote.

Time now to consider the insidious threat of adult entertinament. Thanks again to the library for making live blogging possible. This is fun! Apologies for typing errors.

G-09-01 Live Adult Cabaret etc., etc.

CM Caesar notes the two changes and remains oblivious to the slippery slope. He does conceed that the Indiana ATC regulates drinking in the state. That's an incredible thing, really, so now the hours are extended to 3:00 a.m.

CM Benedetti now postures as defender of decency, thanking Vince Garmon for his support and pandering to the gallery. She voted for her brother's zoning ordinance, and has never recognized the conflict of interest inherent i this. How obscene is that? Chortle.

Marcey Wisman starts to read the ordinance, and I fear that the titillation will be too much for the crusaders. Red Scott and John Mattingly leave the room before the voting takes place. The lawsuit to come should be richly enjoyable.

"Not the intent of the ordinance to suppress free speech." Makes you wish we were talking about smoking and not smokers, or outlawing "deleterious" behavior by the Prices and Coffeys of the not so august body. Then again, we live in an irony-free zone. How is irony zoned here? Not sure. I'm glad a had a beer before I came (to the meeting) tonight.

Hey, wait -- that was fairly graphic. I'm blushing. Excretory function? Gads. Are ballet and theater still permitted in New Albany? Is artistic expression still permitted? Must we consult the Wickens Testament first?

It takes approximately forty minutes for the establishment of theocracy act to be read into the record by the clerk. It would have taken less time to ready the ten Commandments in Aramaic while suspended upside down in a dunking tank filled with cold Folgers. I know; that's just kinky ... and now presumably illegal unless you do it at home.

Will anyone have the courage to vote against the idiocy, just to make a lonely statement in favor of free expression? Probably not. There's not an ounce of it on display. None. Everyone's nicely respectable, and Bryan Wickens is as much a Torquemada as the grand inquisator himself.

Now we learn that the building commissioner will have the right to do inspections.

As soon as he finishes with the rental properties, I guess. You'd think that Mr Haeseley would be here tonight to defend the adult entertainment rentals.

Here's the vote.

Caesar

Price

McLaughlin

Benedetti

Gahan

Gonder

Messer

Zurschmiede

Coffey

"Aye" on all counts.

No on any interest in defending free speech.

Public speaking time rolls forward: ROCK and Red.

I'm doing this live, so forgive me for mistakes.

Red Scott is at the lectern. He is the manager of the former II Horseshoes. He says that out of 938 total checked entries in a recent weekend period, 557 were from Indiana. 212 of these were from Floyd County. 38% of the customers come from Floyd County. The rest were from outside the locality.

He now asks how many other joints draw this kind of trade from outside the county. Perhaps he hasn't been to Gravity Head, but I digress even if it annoys me.

"We sit way out in the middle of nowhere," says Red. He thinks that the council is expending much time and money on something that probably doesn't even matter. He says that the 212 doesn't include the regulars, and there were 84 couples. Presumably hetero, although he didn't qualify it further.

Red's wasting his time, because the council doesn't care about any viewpoint other than that of the organized lobby group.

Bryan Wickens now follows Red to the floor. The focus, according to Wickens, is not about a particular business. It is about protecting families from the negative secondary effects of adult businesses. He says we must remain focused on this. He thanks the council. Do decrepit rental properties have an effect on families and children? Wickens does not say, and never has, and never will, for as we have learned, ROCK is admittedly and unabashedly a single-issue group.

They are flagrant and eternal hypocrites. But I digress, again.

It's been building, for sure.

It's great to be sitting in a quiet room, away from the bedlam of the past two days. I'll begin the Sunday morning Tribune wrap with the newspaper's letters to the editor.

LETTERS: March 1, 2009

— Reader thanks city council for proposed adult ordinance

— Reader has something to say to landlords

The first reader is Vince Garmon, a member of Reclaim Our Culture Kentuckiana (ROCK), who thanks the New Albany City Council for being so very diligent in tackling the grievous threat to our community posed by adult entertainment, even as the same council congenitally refrains from tackling any of the other dozen (two dozen?) threats that don’t conveniently fall beneath the hot-button umbrella of evangelical preoccupation with sex to the exclusion of interest in all those “other” mundane threats, which after all, don't really affect life in the non-blighted exurb where the real church-goers live -- right, Gary?

Coincidentally, today's front page headline informs us: Adult ordinance faces changes with New Albany City Council.

The minute adjustments include extending the hours of operation and changing the no-contact distance between customers and dancers.

Sorry, but it's venting time for the Publican.

Perhaps well intentioned councilman Bob Caesar, who is quoted in the article, would do well to consider Terry Stalwar’s recent column about unintended consequences.

Bob, you’re permitting the Christian Right to frame the rules of the game, and you do so at the peril of us all. You are risking a slippery slope that will be greased when these (currently) one trick ponies declare victory over the current imaginary peril and change focus to another just as ephemeral, but as "defined" by a specifically religious outlook that jibes not one solitary jot with the secular legal tradition that we ostensibly observe in this country.

Their object is a theocracy, Bob.

Also, recall that every word currently devoted to depicting the damage inflicted by adult entertainment was once deployed to explain the need for the enforced sobriety of Prohibition. It's bad enough that so few of the newly elected council persons ever bothered to study the body and function of that which they wanted to become a member. It's even more depressing to conclude that none of them have read history, either.

The second letter comes from our own Highwayman:

However, don’t walk in the door with fairytales about how being a landlord is not being a business person.

Lloyd is referring to the latest instance of landlord gibberish, as reported by the Tribune last week:

“It’s just another tax. You cannot convince me that it’s anything other than that,” (Haeseley) said. “My biggest concern is that they’ve already established that we’re a business, and I disagree with that.”

He buys it and he resells it for a profit, making use of all available legal quantifications while doing so, and yet in the past, Brian Haeseley has referred to his rental properties as “products,” and echoed the current propaganda that he so freely rehashes that his chosen vocation should not be described as a business.

What is it, Brian? A xylophone? Girl Scout cookie? Cumulo-nimbus cloud?

That rumbling sound you hear is George Orwell doing somersaults six feet under, but perhaps Goebbels was right: The bigger the lie, the more likely that a benumbed public will swallow it.

Stray note to Pat Harrison: The preceding is an historically accurate reference to history in the context of the Gestapo.

Finally, something encouraging to balance the idiocy: New Albany on the Levee?, in which it is suggested that the experience of Newport, Kentucky, might have relevance to our own.

A jolt, to be sure. Believe it or not, there are people living in the city of New Albany who are capable of gazing upon a similar-sized river city less than two hours away and learning something.

I know, I know ... learning probably is illegal, and if so, it'd be the only ordinance we ever bother to enforce, but the point is that these people want to bring someone to New Albany for all of us to learn something.

That's positively subversive for the Open Air Museum.

Freedom to Screech almost certainly is against it, and the concerned troglodytes are preparing to self-immolate on the courthouse steps in protest of the government taking a penny more of their Wal-Mart shopping money -- you know, the cash that keeps Chinese sweat shops ticking.

I'd like to finish this essay, but there's a semi-trailer caught in a pothole outside my door. Gotta go hitch up the team of Dalmatians and go pull him out. Wish me luck. And if anyone finds one of the those anonymous letters circulating to the effect that I lack sufficient moral character to be permitted to do business here (alas, B, that's what I persist in calling it), please forward it to me.

Now more than ever, I could use a good laugh.

Benumbed copperheads, "I Wanna ROCK" and Joel Grey: Just another council Thursday.

As I eagerly await the arrival of the insurance adjuster, tonight’s city council meeting agenda is here.

Rest assured that we’ll be watching the head gavel to see if the effects of last meeting’s massive sedative dosage have yet worn off.

Also, ROCK has promised to turn out its Legion of the One Trick Pony to sit quietly past mundane considerations that range past its limited objectives and await the very last agenda item, New Albany’s new adult cabaret ordinance.

Tonight, instead of the Pledge of Allegiance, why not break out in precautionary song:

No use permitting
some prophet of doom
To wipe every smile away
Come hear the music play
Life is a Cabaret, old chum,
Come to the Cabaret!

The adult cabaret ordinance will be quickly approved, the “soldiers” will hastily decamp to return to their exurban homes for ritualistic soilings of the Constitution, and the rest of us can sit around the white-hot campfire in anticipation of the lawsuits to follow.

Go get ‘em, Guido.

There will be a higher level of controversy preceding, as the question of salary hikes for city employees returns after an earlier tabling and a legal cabal:

New Albany City Council attorney: Salary increases must come from council, by Daniel Suddeath (News and Tribune).

On a more cheerful note, my new municipal sewer bill arrived yesterday.

Looking ahead to March, I’m told that after some months of white water rafting amid the flotsam and jetsam of the credit collapse, the king of exurbia is returning with a zoning-approved proposal for dramatic, transformational economic revitalization (either the “threeconomy” or the “meconomy,” although I can’t recall which one) at precisely the same hallowed battle site where he was soundly spanked throughout the year of our ROCK, 2008.

That’s right: It seems that “The Gary” wants to build a Wendy’s on Charlestown Road, and after all, it’s not just fast food, it’s Wendy’s, and we can expect the neighborhood activists to be back for another thrilling round as the developer’s sister again fails to refrain from voting.

Can’t we have a progressive ordinance that restricts “The Gary” to the area past the beltway?

See you tonight.

Adverse secondary effects: Two problematic "cabarets" versus hundreds of unregulated rental properties.

Time now for the signature event of the evening: G-09-01, which would repeal the previous adult entertainment ordinance and enact a new one, which now describes the target as “adult cabarets.”

Why use a French word when “titty bar” is so richly descriptive … and American, to boot?

Discussion and questions follow. City attorney Shane Gibson takes the podium. There is one change in the draft copy. Steve Price asks whether the public speaker’s criticism of Constitutionality is valid. Gibson defers to a consultant lawyer, whose name I haven’t caught.

The legal expert now speaks. He explains Louisville’s 2004 ordinance, and how it was challenged by 22 adult businesses. The city won in the same year, and it was appealed to the Ky. Court of Appeals. The city won there, too. The new collection of rules is constitutionally sound.

Thisordinance follows a "road map" based on legislative records. Adult businesses cannot be banned outright, but can be stringently regulated to control adverse secondary effects.

The expert explains the data. The council has been given a massive package of findings that explain these adverse secondary effects. Includes anecdotal reports in addition to court findings and the like.

I don’t think much of this can be contested, but every single argument in favor of stringently regulating adult businesses because of adverse secondary effects applies just as concisely to unregulated rental properties, decrepit buildings in general, and the absence of enforcement that we’ve traditionally experienced.

Basically, we’re hearing that this is intentionally narrow and targets only one source of problems in the community to the exclusion of all others.

ROCK and the legal advisers are saying that we are justified in spending money and time to combat adverse secondary effects that are vastly fewer than the adverse secondary effects tolerated on a daily basis in other areas.

(five minutes of case law as I’ve tended to texts, and now I must use the restroom)

We’re to the last page. Recent examples cited. There is a summary of other expert witnesses. Somehow this is starting to sound curiously live the adverse effects of secondary smoke. No ciggies, no titties.

Tonight’s only the first reading, and as has become evident, the council’s postponed work session, which was postponed because the City-County Building was closed last week after the city failed to scrape its own sidewalks, is taking place now.

If anything out of the ordinary happens, I’ll be back.