In his recent post Regarding K-Lo’s snark on Blagojevich: Right Wrong Again, Figleaf provides a poignant reason why the downfall of Gov. Blagojevich should not be cause for celebration:

And that’s right around the point where I part company with K-Lo: my heart is not warmed by the scandal. There are two little kids, roughly my kid’s ages, who are looking at growing up while their dad (who richly deserves it) and (ditto depending on how involved she was) maybe their mom are in jail.

Not convinced? Allow me to present another reminder of a scandal presented by Jonah Goldberg of the National Review:

Another name Republicans could have mentioned if they’d fought back better would have been Mel Reynolds — the Democratic Congressman who went to jail for, among other things, having sex with a 16 year-old campaign volunteer, soliciting child pornography and various and sundry corruption charges. He was convicted on 12 counts of sexual assault, obstruction of justice and solicitation of child pornography. He was subsequently convicted on unrelated bank fraud charges. Bill Clinton commuted Reynolds’ convictions on bank fraud, letting him out of jail early. One does not remember the hothouse of Democratic righteousness about “the children” back then. 10/06 01:03 PM

As Figleaf points out, that’s not the end of the story.

In an interview with the Chicago Reporter in 2001, Mel Reynolds described how his conviction and imprisonment affected his family.

...I wonder if any of the prosecutors in my state case as well as my federal case and especially the federal case, if they ever think about the fact that my children were homeless at times.

My wife tells me that not one prosecutor, even people that she, you know, initially helped the prosecution, they never once called her to help her with our children when they were homeless, when they didn’t have any place to go. They were the cold heartedness people that ever lived.

When, when this guy [FBI mole John] Christopher, whatever his name was, the alderman, they gave him over 300 and some thousand dollars. Now I’m not suggesting that they should have given my wife any money but they should have at least been sensitive. She wrote a letter to the judge, Judge Norgle, begging him to allow me to go to a halfway house so I could help her with the children. She never even, he never even paid her the common decency to write her back. She wrote [U.S. Attorney] Scott Lassar asking the same thing. He wrote her back saying, well, you know these are, this is misfortunate, misfortunate, and the, the children have to be the, have to suffer, but he didn’t offer any solution. So, you just wonder perhaps they think it is normal for black children to suffer, I don’t know.

And I’m not making any excuses for Mel Reynolds as far as what I did and what I didn’t do and the mistakes that I made. I made mistakes and I regret those mistakes tremendously because, the real reason that I regret those mistakes is because they brought a lot of wrath down on my family. My three babies had to suffer and had I not made the mistakes that I made they would not have suffered. But once a person makes a mistake he does not lose his right as a United States citizen to be treated fairly. And race and poverty should not come into any punishment when it comes to someone who had made mistakes. I think in my case it came into it. And it’s not fair.

The entire interview can be found here.

I think it appropriate to quote Figleaf’s concluding statement:

Nor will the stork tidily take them away in time for her [Lopez’s] next vapid snark.
If the Blagojevich children do end up fostered to others let us hope that as well as providing comfort, stability, and love those grown-ups, unlike Lopez, have the capacity to understand, and communicate, both basic decency and the differences between right and wrong.
Heart-warming my ass.

Note:
The campaign volunteer, who was nineteen when Reynolds was indicted based on her initial accusations, recanted her sexual abuse charges three times, refused to testify, and, as a result, spent 13 days in jail until she agreed to testify. At the trial which took place in 1995, she explicitly stated that her relationship with Reynolds was consensual. It should be noted that Reynolds would have succeeded Congressman Dan Rostenkowski as Chairman of the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee. Rostenkowski was indicted on corruption charges in 1994 and resigned his office in 1995 following his conviction.

Image: Schoolboy by István Nagy, Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest

Imagine that you are a young boy. Your tenth birthday is less than two months away. It is late fall and those few days are gone, when the leaves turned yellow and scarlet and the sun was so hot that the chilly autumn breeze felt refreshing. The rainy cold that precedes winter has arrived, her suitcase filled with grey wet things.

You are late for your music lessons, so you walk, then run until what you see and hear makes you stop. You see a crowd of people along Bajcsyezsilinszky Ut, the east-west thoroughfare that crosses the city of Miskolc. It is also the street that serves as the major artery between Hungary and the northeastern territories of the U.S.S.R. It is not unusual to hear the roar and drone of Soviet trucks as they traveled through the city, certainly not so unusual to form a crowd that is oddly silent. But what you hear does not sound like trucks.

You are not tall enough to see above the shoulders of the grown-ups, so you slip in to the crowd, minnow through the overcoats until you emerge in the first row, face to face with the steel hide of a Soviet tank as it rolls past. The next tank approaches but does not move past you. It groans, then stops. No one speaks, but something akin to a warning moves through the crowd, not unlike the awareness of a predator that is felt instantly throughout a herd. You do not need to look around you to know that the crowd is backing away from the tank. Your eyes remain fixed on the flank of the beast but your feet are moving of their own volition, inching backwards until the first rifle shot cracks the air. Then you run and run and all you want is to get back to your home.

You run up the stairs of the apartment building where you live with your mother and father. You do not know that your mother was watching from the window as you ran back, even though the bullets arrived before you did. You rush into the apartment, calling for her and are too stunned to say anything when she pushes you face down onto the floor of the sitting room. She is on top of you, cradling your head with her arms. From the corner of your eye you see the floor is littered with broken glass and plaster.

When the gunfire subsides, your mother warns you not to move. She crawls past the broken window, to the sofa and pulls a thick down comforter to the floor before the sound of gunfire resumes. She crawls back, wraps you in a cocoon of down and places your body beneath hers. Then, like an insect that has taken its young back into its belly, she crawls beneath the bullets, out of the apartment, through the hallways to the safety of the inner courtyard.

Two nights later you are wrapped in that same comforter, lying between your mother and father in the hayloft of a deserted barn. You fall asleep before your mother finishes tucking the down around you. Two days spent walking , hiding then more walking to escape the fighting in the city.

“Rope! Remember to bring rope!” Years later, when you introduce me to your mother, you tell me about those nights spent in hiding and poke fun at your mother’s insistence about the rope: “Apparently my mother thought we might have time for mountain climbing during our extended holiday.” Your mother does not laugh at your joke but turns and looks at me across the room. In that moment, when I look into her eyes and see a sadness so deep, I understand why you joke, poke fun, do anything to avoid looking into those depths. For hanging was and is the last resort for the poor, for those without money for a gun or time for poison. For those who lived through one Holocaust, but doubt their chances of surviving a second. And in that moment I realize that I never would have known you if the sounds outside that barn had been footsteps and gunshot instead of rain, wind and the scratching of mice.

More than fifty years have passed from that night when you slept between mother and father, between life and death. You rarely sleep as deeply as you did on that night. Each night sleep eludes you until the moment when you reach for the comforter and burrow into a cocoon of silk-covered down.

Image: Cafe Risque courtesy of Online Athens

The city of Lavonia, Georgia decided that $997,000 was not too great a price to pay to stage its own Bonfire of the Vanities. Using the subterfuge of an unnamed third-party, the city officials succeeded in purchasing the Cafe Risque, a local strip club which the council has tried to shut down since it opened in 2001.

According to the City Council, Jerry Sullivan, the deceased owner of Cafe Risque, had obtained their approval for a family-style restaurant. However, once the establishment opened, it was advertised as Cafe Risque and seven years of legal proceedings by the town could not put the club out of business. When the owners of Cafe Risque announced their intention to sell the property, it was no secret that the owners refused to sell the property back to the city. Fearing that the weaknesses in the zoning ordinances would allow another adult business to operate in the same location, the city officials decided to buy the land and building through the guise of a third party. When the first transaction was completed, the city immediately purchased the property from the third party.

By that night, Lavonia’s council members were having a victory party at the cafe, burning the business’ signs in a parking lot bonfire. On Wednesday, Fesperman and city officials giddily began gutting the building

“We all took turns daring each other (to slide down the strippers’ poles),” Fesperman said. “But nobody would actually go through with it.”

You can read the entire article in OnLine Athens here

While the residents of Lavonia are celebrating the demise of Cafe Risque, here are some facts to consider.

• The population of Lavonia is less than 2,000.

• For 2003 Lavonia’s crime statistics, according to city-data.com, were: 1 murder, 4 rapes, 4 robberies, 23 assaults.

• With a population of less than 2,000, Lavonia has a small tax base to support its annual expenditures of $1.8 million (based on the 2004 budget).

• The financial statements for the year ended December 31, 2002, which are the most recent statements available online on the city’s website, indicate that Lavonia held $1.9 million in cash and certificates of deposit in the fund established for its water treatment operation. The water treatment facility had been financed through the issuance of long-term bonds totaling $4.1 million. According to City Manager Gary Fesperman, the $997,000 used to purchase the Cafe Risque came from the city’s reserve fund which was slated to pay off those 1997 bonds used to build that water treatment plant.

The investors who hold the debt securities issued by Lavonia and the bond rating agencies will not be as jubilant as its citizens when they learn that $1.0 million of the liquid funds set aside for retirement of those obligations had been used to invest in an illiquid asset, i.e., real estate, during one of the worst markets in over a decade. While I do not know the specifics of Lavonia’s debt covenants, I hope that this city will be able to meet its obligations to investors and creditors. But in the event that Lavonia defaults on its scheduled debt repayments, I would not be surprised if the city’s use of those funds earmarked for the retirement of the long-term debt could be construed as fiscal mismanagement.

After looking at this information, I have to ask this question. What was so abhorrent about the Cafe Risque, its employees and patrons? Why would the public officials of Lavonia, a town with a very low crime rate and a small tax base, spend the money to file five lawsuits in the span of seven years and then jeopardize their town’s bond rating just to get rid of a strip club?

Seems a shame, doesn’t it?

Image: Detail from “The Hunt by Night” by Paolo Uccello, courtesy of The Yorck Project, Wikimedia Commons

I know the truth — give up all other truths!
No need for people anywhere on earth to struggle.
Look — it is evening, look, it is nearly night:
what do you speak of, poets, lovers, generals?

The wind is level now, the earth is wet with dew,
the storm of stars in the sky will turn to quiet.
And soon all of us will sleep under the earth, we
who never let each other sleep above it.

1915 by Marina Tsvetaeva

For the members of the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church.
For those who share their beliefs.
For those who oppose their beliefs.