Industrial Road is "Las Vegas' Amsterdam"? (Cover story, last week.) I think not. Comparing Industrial Road to Amsterdam is a big ol' slap in Amsterdam's face. I freely admit that our city rocks harder and is more glamorous, but Amsterdam has its act together when it comes to prostitution. Las Vegas does not.
Your Lieutenant Steve ought to visit Amsterdam some time. Amsterdam's red-light district is easily found and has legal, inexpensive and health-tested sex workers readily on display. According to Damon Hodge's article, Industrial Road is a maze of shadowy, barely-legal businesses specializing in parting fools from their money.
Perhaps if the city wasn't hell-bent on "slamming girls with jail time" and took some steps toward legalizing the industry (which isn't going away anytime soon), we'd free up police resources, generate more tax revenue and might eventually achieve Amsterdam's healthier, saner, legitimate approach to sex. Actually, we should already have it, if we call ourselves "The Land of The Free."
I read the Weekly every chance I get. However, I missed the piece by Launce Rake on actor Edward Asner (As We See it, October 7). But I can't overlook the response by the lunatic reader John Tabor (Letters, October 14). Tabor is the worst example of a paranoid, jingoistic, idiotic defender of the Bush Republican Party. This impressionable moron thinks we really don't live in a democracy, and went further by trashing the greatest president of the modern era, FDR. He further added; Frankie (Roosevelt) "did more harm to this country moving it towards communism than any other president." Tabor also added that Social Security and the New Deal were somehow an FDR plot to move us toward communism.
He goes on to add we live in the "Republic of the United States"; this to underscore his right-wing leanings. As a history graduate, I know we live in both a democracy and a republic. Webster's dictionary defines a democracy as: rule by the people. It defines a republic as, sovereign power vested in representatives chosen by the people and responsible to them!
Tabor calls anyone with progressive ideas "commies." With his blanket generalization, he demeans and disparages any veteran who happens to be a Democrat and served in Vietnam or Korea, myself included. Robert Kennedy Jr. sums it up best: "When government controls business it is called communism. When business controls government it is call fascism." Other root words to ponder: society and liberty—as in social change. And I'm a liberal because I'm liberated from the conservative dogma of yo mama, Tabor!
In November, the people of Nevada will have the opportunity to vote on a sales-tax increase to fund the hiring of more police officers. The need to increase the police force is due to the fact that the cops on the streets today are wasting valuable crime-stopping time on menial and trivial noncrime- related house calls, such as domestic disputes and/or arguing neighbors, while crime spreads rampant throughout the Valley.
This being the case, there's no need to hire more police officers and increase the sales tax that will come right out of our own pockets, when all we really need is more security officers paid for by the private sector.
This would create thousands of new jobs in Nevada, and cost us (the taxpayers) nothing. The police then could concentrate on what they were hired for: fighting crime, instead of chasing down some kid on a skateboard who's making too much noise!
Editor's note: Which mythical "private sector" is going to pay for "security officers" to handle domestic disputes? Probably the same private sector—Fantasyland Inc.—that, if forced to hire thousands of security officers, would kindly refrain from passing the costs along to us.
The highest praise I can give a piece of writing is, "This could have sucked, and it didn't."
"I, Zombie" (September 16 and 22, by Geoff Carter), in the hands of a less talented and imaginative writer, could have REALLY sucked.
But it totally didn't.
It was an extraordinary article, funny and moving and even suspenseful, for cryin' out loud. Thanks for running it.