Thursday, May 08, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Letters

Rhodes' sales pitch doesn't add up

Mr. Rhodes' pre-construction home tour has an amazing sales pitch: I'm doing you a BIG favor by taking on this dump. Where is truth in advertising?

Pitch #1: You won't see the homes from the scenic loop. Fact: You will see the homes from every pull-out on the scenic loop and from the Willow Springs picnic area, Bonnie Springs and Spring Mountain Ranch.

#2: I'll restore this wasteland for you. Fact: Jim Rhodes is already legally required to restore all the visible areas even if a single house is not built. We don't need Rhodes to "restore" nature by building homes.

#3: All of the land is already destroyed. Fact: At most, half of the land was mined. The other land remains beautiful and natural. It doesn't need any "makeup" to enhance it.

#4: If you let me put 5,000 homes up here, I'll let you come up and visit. Fact: With county ownership, the current mine road could provide access to all with hiking and biking trails, walking paths and picnic areas that have fabulous views of Red Rock and Las Vegas. Without houses, it would be a better escape!

#5: Why use your tax dollars to fix up this place? Fact: No tax dollars; BLM land sale money is designated for the purchase and development of parks, trails and natural areas in Clark County.

Questions? E-mail protectredrock@yahoo.com.

--Karen Hunt,

Chair, Red Rock Committee,

Southern Nevada Group of the Sierra Club

Democrats need to tackle core issues

I enjoyed the article "Donkey Business" [May 1] with the political consultants stating that the Democrats need to plan ahead because Nevada is a pivotal state for the '04 elections. Well, duh!

I am so furious with the Democrats for their lack of planning in the past. The Republicans were so organized and had so much planning done that when Bush entered the White House he had much of his agenda in place before the Democrats even got over the fact that they hadn't won. And even during the election Gore promised me nothing. He was supposed to be pro-choice, pro-environmentalism. Maybe he might even talk a bit about overpopulation and its effect on the environment. Maybe he might say that forcing a 14-year-old girl to have a baby is not good. Naw. Mr. Nice Guy tried to out-religion Bush and made me sick!

Hello, Mr. Dan Hart and Gary Gray, Democratic strategists. If Nevada's so important, what are they promising us? Maybe that we won't become the nuclear dump of the nation? Maybe that it's stupid to ship the stuff from the East Coast across the nation to a state that has never produced nuclear power? Are any of our brilliant candidates going to say anything relevant?

Gephardt is a big union man. Will he court the Culinary Union and help the Wal-Mart and 99-cent store employees get health care? Or will he shine up to the big casino owners who can give him the big bucks and comps? How about some rent control for us poor middle-classers who live in mobile home parks where the owner of the park raises the rent each year just for fun. And how about speaking up for the gays, or is that a no-no?

All the planning in the world won't help if the candidates don't address the issues--the core Democratic values. All is not well, but do our candidates care? It's going to be an interesting year.

--Shirley Braverman

Drug czar uses dishonest tactics

The Marijuana Policy Project has good reason to question drug czar John Walters' use of tax dollars to conduct an illegal campaign against Question 9 ["Quit Blowing Smoke," May 1]. It's no coincidence that the drug czar began his nationwide reefer madness revisited ad campaign just months before a November election that featured numerous marijuana ballot initiatives, the most ambitious being Nevada's Question 9. Among the more dishonest ads were commercials linking the war on terror to the war on drugs. The illicit drug of choice in America is domestically grown marijuana, not Colombian cocaine or Afghan heroin.

The drug czar's misleading drug-terror propaganda may have led Nevadans to mistakenly conclude that marijuana smokers are somehow responsible for the tragic events of Sept. 11. That's likely no accident. Taxing and regulating marijuana would render the drug war obsolete. As long as marijuana remains illegal and distributed by organized crime, consumers will continue to come into contact with hard drugs like cocaine and heroin. For obvious reasons, government bureaucrats whose jobs depend on a never-ending drug war prefer to blame the plant itself for the alleged "gateway" to hard drugs.

--Robert Sharpe, M.P.A.,

Program officer,

Drug Policy Alliance,

Washington, D.C.

Felons don't deserve voting rights

In their op-ed of May 1, Paul Brown and Liz Moore attack Nevada's current law, which bars felons from voting. The law makes sense, however, and the arguments they make against it are unpersuasive.

People who are not willing to follow the law should not claim they have the right to help make the laws for everyone else. We don't let everyone vote. Children, noncitizens and people who are mentally incompetent are not allowed to vote, because we have certain minimum standards of trustworthiness and loyalty. It's reasonable to assume that felons don't meet this standard, and to make exceptions only carefully, on a case-by-case basis.

Brown and Moore assert that "felons have paid their debt," and so they should all have the same rights as everyone else. But the cliche about having paid one's debt to society doesn't mean that society has to forget about someone's criminal record. For instance, there are federal laws against felons possessing firearms and serving on juries, which seem reasonable. Even though we allow felons equal status in some ways, in others we do not.

Every state but two--Vermont and Maine--disenfranchises felons to some extent. Brown and Moore are wrong to imply that the origins of felon disenfranchisement laws are invariably Jim Crow. The practice has ancient origins, there are states outside the old Confederacy that have laws like Nevada's and there are states in the old Confederacy that don't have them.

Indeed, the people who will be hurt the most if felons are allowed to vote will be the law-abiding citizens in high-crime areas--citizens who are disproportionately African-American or Latino. They tend to be the victims of crime, and will suffer most from its destigmatization. And it is they who will have their voting rights diluted the most if the felons in their neighborhoods are allowed the same say in making the law that they are.

--Roger Clegg,

Vice president and general counsel,

Center for Equal Opportunity,

Sterling, Va.