The election of two additional black lawmakers to the Assembly Nov. 5 has pushed Nevada ahead of all other states when it comes to black representation in state Legislatures.

Seven of the 63 state legislators who will assemble in Carson City on Feb. 3 are black, representing 11 percent of the Legislature. According to the 2000 census, blacks made up 6.8 percent of the state's population.

"It is a lot of progress for a state that used to be known as the Mississippi of the West," said Chuck Bremer, consultant to the National Black Caucus of State Legislators, where he also was executive director. "We are pleasantly surprised."
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None of Nevada's black lawmakers was elected in districts where blacks are the majority.

Sen. Maurice Washington, R-Sparks, won a third term as senator in a Northern Nevada district that has a 2 percent black population. Sen. Bernice Mathews, D-Reno, earned a third term in a district with a 4 percent black population.

Horne's District 34 in Las Vegas is 5 percent black, while Atkinson's District 17 is 10 percent black.

Lurking within each one of us is a facet of our personality that we continually try to suppress. Deep down, there's a part of us we're not too proud of and don't want others to see. Perhaps you're a member of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and have always wanted to walk down the runway in a leopard-skin coat. Maybe you're a feminist who fantasizes about stripping at Cheetah's.

I, on the other hand, have always secretly dreamed of becoming a liberal. Jennifer Weaver, the war-loving, Bush-supporting, pro-life winner of the prestigious opinion section "Bill O'Reilly Seal of Approval" award -- a liberal? Why? What would make me, a Republican, want to turn to the dark side and declare myself a Democrat? The answer is simple -- because its so damned easy to be a liberal.

I'm basically uninterested in, and seriously unenthused about, Kwanzaa because it is a holiday to which I am uninvited because of an accident of birth. I could convert to Islam and celebrate Ramadan. I could convert to Judaism and celebrate Passover. I can celebrate the secular side of Christmas no matter what my religion (and no matter how many Christians that makes unhappy). I can attempt to become a British citizen so I can celebrate Guy Fawkes day (and they'd probably love it if I celebrated it as an American anyway). But I can't celebrate Kwanzaa because my skin isn't the right color.
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I know a lot of blacks, and many of them celebrate Christmas. One wished me a Happy Hanukkah a few weeks ago. I wished him a Merry Christmas. We both grinned. (Yes, there are black Jews.) If he'd wished me a Happy Kwanzaa I'd have responded the same way, and he could like it — or not. That's America, Ann, we all celebrate what we like. Live with it. The President isn't damnable for recognizing a holiday some enjoy. Even if many of us think it's nonsense.

Just a quick reminder that 7-11 and Texacos are almost always open for Christmas. A can of Chef-Boyar-dee's Ravioli with a pop-top, some Cool Ranch Doritos, a Twix bar and a "40" of Colt 45 could probably top the Christmas lists of any of your loved ones.

It's one thing to be a hawk and have your hawkishness rooted in a cold-eyed realism and a willingness to use force, quite another to have it stem from emotional impulses arising from the fact that you grew up as a pencil neck and constantly had your lunch money stolen from you by the cool kids.

I can't give you the precise lunch money victimization statistics for various civilian political appointees at the Pentagon, for staffers in the Office of the Vice-President, Richard Perle or even Frank Gaffney. But I suspect most folks who are familiar with these guys will know what I'm getting at. This isn't about blaming America first. It's about making sure America is as smart as she can be in her own interests, about managing the realities of the unipolar world system in ways that most benefit our long-term interests rather than simply doing what we can force through in the near-term. What we're learning is that there's a price you pay for telling everyone else in the world they can #$%& themselves and trying to govern the globe by sporadic applications of blunt force.

I went back to Frist's 1994 campaign in search of evidence for the race-baiting theory. Instead, I found good evidence against it—evidence that the Associated Press, New York Times, and Los Angeles Times didn't include in stories mentioning the Barry remark. In July 1994, three months before he brought up Barry, Frist aired a TV ad that depicted Sasser's face on Mount Rushmore alongside the faces of Bill Clinton, Ted Kennedy, and Dan Rostenkowski. The ad called them "tax and spend career politicians." Rostenkowski was under indictment and was eventually jailed for misappropriating government funds.

You can argue that Rostenkowski, like Barry, had little to do with Tennessee. But that's the point. Racism requires differential treatment. Frist reached for every villain he could hang on Sasser. Black or white, he didn't care.

Rolon would assign gang members fluent in English and Spanish to do door-to-door work. They'd canvass the neighborhood to see how many residents supported their candidate. Those residents were counted as "plus votes." On Election Day, his crew of gang members--a dozen per precinct--would descend on buildings with the most plus votes and urge the residents to go to the polls. If an elderly or disabled person needed a ride, it would be arranged.

Rolon paid his workers $75 to $100 for the day and made them dress respectably in white oxford shirts and ties. "Larry Hoover liked that," Rolon said of the imprisoned Gangster Disciples chairman. "The Gangster Disciples started passing out shirts and ties to their guys on the South Side."

Not that Rolon's workers always behaved respectably. They weren't above such minor dirty tricks as tearing down opposing candidates' signs. That work was often left to "shorties"--very young gang members who wouldn't be missed if they were picked up by the police.

"I learned it from the mob," Rolon said of politics, "and then I used it for the Spanish aldermen. . . . In gang neighborhoods, a precinct guy's got to be connected to the gangs or have a gang member or leader working under him. That's the only way you're going to win your precinct in a hotly contested gang neighborhood. If the gangs don't work for you, they work against you."

The Blob’s new game, at work now in Illinois, is to pay lip service to charter schools by allowing them for special ed or disruptive students. Then the school boards get to boast that the test scores of their own conventional schools have gone up (because they don’t have to average in the weakest kids who’ve been put in charters), but the charter school scores have not. When some of these charter schools close, the establishment can say, “See! They don’t work!” Of course the fact that six percent of charter schools have been shut down, cited by critics as a sign of failure, is actually an indication that the idea is working. Unlike most conventional schools, charters actually have to perform to survive.

The freeway chase was the first sequence the Wachowskis tackled for the sequels, and they spent months searching for the perfect location. The brothers wanted their freeway to have a sense of doom about it; not surprisingly, most urban planners try to avoid that. So the search came up empty. The brothers’ solution was a tad unconventional: they dumped the idea of shooting on an existing freeway and built their own. In February 2001, they hired a construction crew to erect a two-mile loop—complete with exit signs, dividers, an on ramp and an overpass—on an old U.S. naval base in Alameda, Calif. When they first heard the idea, the construction guys nearly keeled over. “They actually said to us, ‘We’re not doing this’,” recalls executive producer Grant Hill. “They couldn’t believe it was for a movie. They said, ‘Do you realize how much this costs?’ ” Correct answer: $300,000 per quarter mile. “We just looked at each other and said, ‘OK, we can do that’.”

Ran into a girlfriend that I used to date
She got married back in April but she said she couldn't wait
cause she had a newborn baby six months after that day
and she said a debt to life is a debt you gotta pay

Hometown friends mean a lot to me
but the longer I'm here, the less of them I see
and the further I get it seems the longer I'm away
I guess time equals distance that way
-Phil Pritchett

If you think record companies want nothing to do with Napster clones such as Morpheus and Kazaa--or with the listeners who download free music off the web--well, you're wrong. With help from BigChampagne, a market research startup that tracks file-sharing sites, record labels have found a silver lining in music theft.

BigChampagne, with offices in Atlanta and L.A., can gather a slew of raw customer feedback by hanging out on the highways that make up peer-to-peer networks. Record labels then buy that data to learn whether, say, Eminem or Faith Hill is hotter this week, which single off Ja Rule's album might be the next runaway hit, or whether a little-known artist is more popular than predicted. BigChampagne, which is already profitable, can also break down the information geographically and demographically.

While it's an open secret in the music industry that most of the major labels use BigChampagne--some spending millions a year--none will fess up (at least not on the record). "The prevailing attitude at the labels is an ostrich mentality when it comes to downloading," explains David Adelson, executive editor of Hits Magazine. "BigChampagne supplies a nonpartisan vision of what the downloading community is doing. It's incredibly valuable information, whether you believe they are your friends or your enemies."

[Former State Senator Steve] Peace is famous for two things: he’s fabulously temperamental, and as far as I know, not widely loved in the Legislature (I’ll go to Ann Salisbury for confirmation), but even better, he was the main water-carrier for the corporate energy interests that demolished the budget with their ill-planned (from the state, utility, and consumer’s point of view) deregulation of the energy markets.

While many cultures provide men more leeway than women to be unfaithful to their spouses, Americans surveyed responded overwhelmingly to that double standard -- nearly eight of ten (78%) said that an unfaithful woman is no worse than an unfaithful man. As far as forgiveness, the survey's participants were divided. Two in five (38%) said they would forgive their spouses if they discovered their infidelity, while the same number (38%) said they would be unable to forgive an unfaithful spouse, and 20% were unsure.

On a more personal level, a heartening majority -- 67% of those surveyed -- have not experienced infidelity in their own marriages. One in five (20%) of middle-aged participants (45-64 years old) have experienced infidelity in their marriages, compared to one in ten Americans under the age of 45 (12%) or over the age of 65 (10%).

Without any detailed statistical evidence, I suppose the most compelling notion that homosexual unions attack is that marital unions exist and are promoted by the State so that the State can promote procreation. The State has an interest, albeit a conflicted one, given abortion laws, in encouraging its citizenry to procreate. However, this interest is satisfied, in most states, by homosexual unions through the rights of homosexuals to adopt, to obtain artificial insemination (and for the non-biological parent to also adopt in such circumstances), and to become parents through various means. See V.C. v. M.J.B. (New Jersey Supreme Court). Thus, the concern that homosexual unions are destructive to the State’s traditional interest in having its citizenry bear fruit, so to speak, is moot.

What other possible State interest exists with regard to marriage that would be damaged by homosexual unions? Well, let’s speak of the one no one would like to admit exists: the religious interest. Marriage, for the most part, is promoted by the State in a manner that is no different from the promotion of marriage by religions. In fact, the language of a civil marital ceremony is basically a watered-down version of the Anglican/Protestant/Catholic marriage ceremonies. Fortunately, unlike the Catholic ceremony, the civil one is only an hour long and omits the incense. However, the underpinnings of marriage, the values that require the ceremony to be constructed as it is, have no basis in law and public policy. The ceremony exists as it does because most Judeo-Christian religions demand that of marriage.

This religious basis for the format of the ceremony has worked its way into the policy arguments in favor of traditional, heterosexual (only) marriage. “It’s a sacred event.” Civil marriage is sacred? Really. I was always of the belief that nothing was sacred to the State, and that the State left the sacred to the people (and their respective faiths). “It would be damaged by homosexuals having the right to marry.” Why? From where does this attitude concerning homosexuals stem? I can think of plenty of places (i.e., the Old Testament, which is a wonderful work, but not quite part of the founding documents, last time I checked). From cultural tradition? Hmm… Well, we don’t want to go down that road. Based on cultural tradition, miscegenation (inter-racial marriage) should be banned. From economics? Not quite. Most economists find that homosexuals, and homosexual communities especially, are quite beneficial to a region. They have low crime rates, high rates of spending, and moderate to high income rates.

"I am the son of a shipyard worker from Pascagoula, Mississippi. I have had to fight all of my life and I am not stopping now," Lott declared.

Lott made the comments in an interview with ABC News between reaching out to colleagues for their support with a series of telephone calls from his state office in Pascagoula.

McDonald's Corp. warned Tuesday the protracted sales slump that already has forced it to change CEOs and reverse expansion plans will result in the first quarterly loss in its 47-year history.

The announcement, which came 12 days after a management shake-up, sent shares in the burger giant tumbling to a nearly eight-year low.

What they do tend to support is known as "close relationship theory," the idea that sexual and emotional satis- faction comes from intense, fragile, and often short-term relationships that aren't necessarily going anywhere. One advocate calls them "microwave relationships," cooked up fast, served, and consumed, presumably with other similar meals to come. It all seems like the dream world of a randy adolescent chasing cheerleaders. Marriage is knocked off its pedestal, and the family itself fades away. Children tend to fade away, too, in close-relationship theory, as emphasis comes down hard on adult fulfillment.

In 1983, both Lott, then in the House, and Nickles opposed a new federal holiday for the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. Lott said the holiday would cost the government too much money and that there were other Americans "more deserving." Nickles unsuccessfully pushed alternatives to a paid holiday.

That same year both Lott and Nickles backed a Jesse Helms amendment that would have preserved the tax-exempt status of private schools, such as Bob Jones University, which then banned interracial dating. The measure was defeated.

In 1990, the two senators both voted to uphold the first President Bush's veto of legislation to amend the 1964 Civil Rights Act to ban workplace discrimination.

If this were June, Lott might not survive. He'd have to be in Washington every day, getting hit and picked at. But it's December; everybody will leave that hateful place and go to their homes for Christmas. When they reconvene in January, Trent Lott will still be there for one good reason: The Republican senators don't want him to go.

And so the rural character-filled county becomes another squishy suburb of pallid yups who can't put air in their own tires. The rugged rural individualists become cogs in somebody else's wheel. Their children grow up as libidinous mall monkeys drugging themselves to escape boredom. The county itself is a hideous expanse of garish low-end development . People's lives are run from afar.

What it comes to is that the self-reliant yeoman's inalienable right to dispose of his property as he sees fit (which I do not dispute) will generally lead to a developer's possession of it. The inalienable right to reproduce will result in crowding, which leads to dependency, intrusive government, and loss of local control.

I'd like to live again in Mr. Liddy's world. Unfortunately it is self-eliminating. Freedom is in the long run inconsistent with freedom, because it is inevitable exercised in ways that engender control. As a species, we just can't keep our pants up. But it was nice for a while.

What bothers me, I suppose, is the subliminal romanticization of a way of life that hasn't gone anywhere and is still available to anyone with the perverse gumption to go out and get it. How much of our vast continent, exactly, has been turned into suburban spiritual wasteland? Do you suppose it is as much as two, three percent of the surface area? If you want to live in the bush--and I'll put this in bold letters so it can't be missed--go there. There are plenty of Mosquito Coasts left where a man can, by and large, live free of dog licenses and zoning boards. There is always federal tyranny of various sorts to be considered, but that's not the kind Fred is talking about in his column. He's concerned with the inevitability of local tyranny. And, in fact, his account of how local tyranny comes about is not inaccurate, but at least a local tyranny can be fled. Why don't people do that? Why don't we do that, you and I and Steve and the Blowhards? Is it because we lament the loss of a way of life we're not willing for one second to participate in? I've always regarded such laments mostly as childish noise, I'm afraid.