The Editor's Desk

What happens when a political organization forgets that its job is to represent its constituents and instead assumes that its the job of its constituents to represent them? Loyalty oaths.

Apparently, according to The Roanoke Times, the Virginia GOP is requiring those who wish to vote in the Republican primary there to sign an oath that they’ll vote for the Republican candidate for president in 2008, regardless of whom it might be.

What an insult to the Republican voter in that state — and to the very idea of freedom and liberty.

Right now the Republican candidates for president are noteworthy for the diversity of their positions in a number of areas. They all stand on different places on the Republican platform. It is extremely insulting and unbelievably inappropriate for a political party to attempt to demand its members vote for somebody for whom they do not ultimately support.

Last week I mentioned in a commentary to coincide with the birthday of Freedom Communications founder R.C. Hoiles that I would never vote for a presidential candidate who would permit the use of torture to interrogate prisoners. So if I were a Republican in Virginia, I may want to vote for Ron Paul or John McCain in the primary and express my concern that the GOP return to its commitment to the rule of law. But what if Rudy Giuliani landed the ultimate nomination? I will not vote for that man. He doesn’t even understand the concept of “limited government.”

I don’t know what to say. I’ve never been a Republican, so I don’t know what it’s like, but I’ve read a number of traditional conservatives who have stated that they feel the party is abandoning them and its principles. This is a good example. I can’t imagine any political organization that purports to uphold liberty and freedom demanding loyalty oaths from its members. It’s like something that would be required at a worker’s meeting in the old Soviet Union.

I used to pay a lot more attention to upcoming movies than I do these days, and somehow the film “Redacted,” which opened this weekend (but is not playing in Barstow), slipped by me.

“Redacted,” directed by Brian De Palma, is a fictionalized retelling of the rape and murder of an Iraqi teen and the killing of her family by a group of U.S. soldiers.

The inspiration should be known to those in Barstow who follow the news. Former Barstow resident Sgt. Paul E. Cortez was one of the men who was responsible for the real-world incident on which De Palma is basing his film. Cortez pleaded guilty to rape and several counts of murder and was sentenced to 100 years in prison.

From what I’ve read through various stories and reviews of the movie, De Palma put his account together based on a number of different sources. I’m curious as to whether he included some of the information about Cortez’s difficult life here in Barstow we uncovered while reporting the story.

Reviews are extremely mixed and critics seem to be pretty polarized, not unexpected when dealing with a fictional telling of a real-world story. I want to see the movie and judge it for myself (based on reading some of the reviews, I think I can tell which character is meant to be Cortez), but I don’t think it’s likely to come here. I’ll be visiting Los Angeles at the end of the month, and if it’s still playing, I’ll see if I can’t find a way to see it.

The courts cast a pretty wide net to put together a jury for the upcoming lengthy Barstow Truck Parts embezzlement trial.

They managed to snag both myself and Jon Prince, who works in the Desert Dispatch advertising department.

I’ve actually reported one of the stories (more than a year ago) about the progression of the case, so there was no way I would ever be seated on that jury, but there’s no bubble to fill in on the jury form explaining as such, so I had to go through the process anyway today. Ultimately we were excused.

I understand from the newspaper’s history that being in the press doesn’t always mean people in the newsroom won’t have to serve on the jury. I was told that a general manager years ago did ultimately end up on a jury for a case. I imagine if the case involved were one that the Desert Dispatch was not covering, I might end up there in the jury. I don’t assume the accused in any of our crime stories are guilty, so being in the media isn’t necessarily a free pass out.

We have two other newsroom folks with pending jury service notices within a month. This seems to happen every fall — we all seem to get summoned for jury in a staggered group. I’ve gotten summons four of the five years I’ve lived here. This was the first time I actually had to go sit in for jury selection.

Apparently reporter Jason Smith got a rather chilly reception from BarWest Spokesman Tom Shields at Monday’s City Council meeting following his reporting of internal troubles with the BarWest/Los Coyotes/Big Lagoon casino project.

Ah well — I’m not sure if there’s anybody left for us to alienate on the casino project. I’ll probably write an editorial using this as a reason why the city needs to step back and make the tribes and developers fight for the project themselves. I’m sure that will endear me further to them.

I must confess, despite the leaking of internal information, I’m not exactly sure what BarWest is so angry about. To me, they come off as the victim in this conflict. They’ve committed all this money and it turns out there’s an internal struggle among the Los Coyotes about who to partner with and people trying to cut BarWest out. On the other hand, it does show how fragile this agreement is, which undercuts their PR campaign of solidarity. Frankly, I think they need to think up a new message now that the cat’s out of the bag there. The amount of money they’ve spent already is a sign of their commitment to the project, so letting folks like Larry Halstead try to spin it like it’s bad for a developer to put their money behind a project is a bit strange.

We get calls every couple of months from anonymous folks who want us to “investigate” the Michigan bankrollers of the project, who have a less-than-gleaming reputation back home. I’m guessing for some, that we haven’t done so is a sign that we support them as the developer.

Editorially we support the project as we support pretty much any legal business that wants to come to Barstow. It’s not a judgment call over the worth of anybody involved with the efforts. I’m not going to make a decision over who would be the best developer (we’ll leave that for the people involved to decide, like any marketplace decision), and I don’t care who is the most “deserving” (an irrelevant distinction).

However, on the news side, when the casino was first announced — long, long ago when the only opposition was religious leaders who objected to gambling — we sat down and decided how we would go about covering the casino, given our limited resources as a small community newspaper. Once we learned about the lengthy process of actually getting this casino built, we decided that we would focus on the stages as they came to pass (or did not, as the case may be).

So, our first coverage was focusing on the city level for the agreements with the tribes, and then the state level to get the compacts approved. Our reasoning here was pretty simple: If the tribes couldn’t get permission from the state for the off-reservation casino, nothing else mattered. The BarWest backers’ reputations as developers weren’t particularly important if the tribes couldn’t get past the opposition from the other gaming tribes.

If the compacts ever did finally get approved, we actually discussed plans to send a reporter all the way to Michigan to explore the relationship between the developers and their home community. But if the casinos never move beyond the legislative stage, we can’t exactly justify all that work and expense.

So that’s the explanation why we don’t have more about Michael Malich and the Ilitches. It’s not time to take a look at them until the casino moves forward. Some folks want to claim it’s because we received ad money opposing Measure H from these folks in 2006. However, the reality is that gaming tribes have spent far, far more money in our newspapers advertising their events in our Weekender section, long before a casino was ever even announced for Barstow. (For that matter, the Chemehuevi advertised in our newspaper in 2004 as part of a PR campaign). If my views were for sale (which they’re not), the existing gaming tribes would have owned them long ago. We’ve jeopardized more advertising money by going against the Southern California tribes than we stand to gain from this one project.

It looks like I spent too much time thinking about what the Supreme Court might say about rental inspections and didn’t bother to look to see if lower courts had already addressed the matter.

They have. Attempts to implement rental inspections in Illinois and Texas have been successfully fought off as Fourth Amendment violations. The description of how the inspections bore out in Garland, Texas, is especially eye-opening. Those who voluntarily participated ended up having to deal with improvement demands that went far above and beyond the safety of the tenant. And of course, the landlords who were actually the cause of the problems didn’t even bother to register.

This rental inspection proposal is doomed. I know that a number of folks are planning to come forward to speak out against it. We can only hope the city listens before it brings an ordinance into play that will likely cost the city a lot of money when it’s inevitably challenged in court.

Incidentally, I rent my home, and I already warned a city staffer that I’m not going to agree to an inspection unless my landlord wants it.