Towson, Md. (August 14, 2008) - Baltimore County's Department of Public Works is alerting homeowners to an illegal and unnecessary house number painting service which is being advertised door-to-door through official-looking green notices. 

For a fee of $20 Community Curb Painters (a company of no known address and reachable only through a toll-free, leave-a-message-after-the-beep number) promises to paint a resident's address on the fronting curb - ostensibly to help police and fire personnel locate the property if summoned in an emergency. The advertising implies that Community Curb Painters is working in cooperation with local police and fire departments. It is not.

Such curb painting is illegal. Curbs are public property, in the public right-of-way, and unauthorized painting is prohibited under the County code.(1) Moreover, this house number "service" does not satisfy the code requirement for posting addresses required for police and fire protection in Baltimore County. On logical grounds alone, note officials, the painting makes little sense since parked cars frequently block the view of curbs. (2)

Notes: (1) If something is "public property," it belongs to everyone/no-one, and thus a member of the public ought to be able to do what he damned well pleases. To say that painting "public property" is illegal is to imply that everything not specifically permitted by law is an illegal act. While that is rapidly becoming the case in Baltimore County, we have yet to see a Charter amendment that makes it so. The more rational explanation is that curbs are county property (as are road signs), and that there is a specific law that prohibits defacing county property. This law, for example, would prohibit me from spray-painting "Jim Smith is a jackass" on the wall of the county office building.

(2) If we are attempting to argue logically that curb numbers are useless because the view of them is frequently blocked, it makes sense to ask whether having them ought to be an illegal act. If I've painted something on my curb and no one can see it, what earthly difference does it make to Towson?

This little veiled threat from the county also neglects to take into account that in many HOA-governed subdivisions, and nearly all condominiums, the sidewalks, curbs, gutters and streets are owned by the homeowners' association, not the county. In which case, a resident is not answerable to the county, but to the local arbiters of good taste.

I can't help wondering whether this curb-painting deal became an issue only because the outfit doing it has not paid the requisite licensing and registration fees to the county, and is presumably not coughing up county, state and federal taxes on its income.

Since there are existing curb numbers all over the county, and since Mr. Smith and his cronies have declared them "illegal" (without citing chapter and verse of the law), some other entrepreneur needs to pop up and offer to bring residents into full compliance with the law by sandblasting away the illicit curb numbers. As long as they pay the mandatory tributes to the government, they should be OK.

*Smith's surgery occurred more than a month ago, and he is yet unable to get fully back to his job, which seems to be making grip-and-grin appearances while fobbing off bad-news announcements to his henchman Don Mohler. Yet I know of people engaged in hard physical labor who have gone back to work the week following bypass surgery. Draw your own conclusions.

Has it never occurred to you that the largest source of the hard economic times you harp on in your constitutent newsletter is the government itself?

Take the so-called foreclosure crisis as the first example. It was the federal government, through encouraging lenders to make risky loans under the guise of encouraging people to realize the "American dream" that got so many people in over their heads on mortgages? Thirty-five years ago when I bought my current residence, the maximum allowable ratio of mortgage debt (P.I.T.I.) to gross income was 46 percent. We bought our house at a far lower cost, knowing that 46 percent was an unacceptable risk. Nowadays, I understand that lenders--with the complicity of Fannie Mae and other federal agencies--have increased that ratio to 64 percent or higher. Moreover, lenders were allowed to offer loans that no sensible person would make--zero down payments; loans with negative amortization; adjustable rate mortgages without caps; teaser rates that were completely unpredictable on expiration of a three- or five-year period.

Now you are expecting those of us who have spent their lives being financially prudent to bail out not only the citizens foolish enough to make such loans, but the financial institutions greedy enough to have offered them. Last I checked, there were very few mortgage lenders or brokers being held responsible for practices that can only be called usurious.

As to fuel prices, you have steadfastly supported laws that drive up the cost of owning and maintaining an automobile, refused to consider drilling in the tiny section of ANWR that would produce oil, and even proposed gasoline tax increases in the hope of deterring consumption.

Months ago, I inquired what happened to the moneys earmarked for renovating the auditorium at Woodlawn High School, which has yet to occur. (Not to mention that the school itself has no performing arts programs requiring an auditorium.) Neither you nor Mr. Weglein (the school principal) have given me the courtesy of a reply.

Last but not least, your current newsletter crows about the $28,642,207 in "earmarks" and pork-barrel grants in your district.

You have come up with six million dollars for JHU, which has recently been the beneficiary of more than 100 million from Michael Bloomberg alone, not to mention other private sources. Trust me, those people at Hopkins are swimming in money, and they certainly do not need or deserve involuntary contributions from the public.

Three million six to WEB DuBois High School, which has only 738 students. That's nearly a thousand a year per student for the next four years. For what, if I might ask specifics?

Two million three to Baltimore County to assist low-income home buyers. Aren't these the same people who have generally ended up in foreclosure, creating the "crisis" you are so worried over?

Nine million for Head Start programs in Baltimore City. Can anyone show evidence that these programs have helped since their inception? The number of city children dropping out of school, getting involved in drugs and other crime, becoming pregnant out of wedlock, and being murdered has done nothing but increase over the life of Head Start. It is long past time to pull the plug on this program, not continue funding it.

I could go on, but I suspect I have already lost your attention.

Presumably buying votes has worked for you in the past, since you continue to do so.

I am committed to exposing this sort of fraud, waste and rent-seeking, and removing from office the people who are responsible for it.

So my message to you, Mr. Cummings, is shape up or be prepared to ship out after November 4th.

Stan Modjesky

Baltimore tax lien sale could lead to foreclosures

Advocates say a plan by Baltimore officials to sell liens for back taxes and overdue utility bills to private investors could lead to more home foreclosures. City officials plan to auction up to $70 million in liens next month to private investors, who would collect the debts as well as fees and interest, or foreclose. More than 20,000 property owners have liens on their properties. The liens are mostly for delinquent property taxes but also include water and sewer bills and charges for sidewalk and alley repair, as well as fines for trash violations. Louise Carwell, an attorney for the Legal Aid Bureau, says she would like to see the city keep water bills and fees for alley paving out of the auction.

From under what rock did this news reporter just crawl out into the daylight?

Of course selling the liens could lead to foreclosure. How else would anyone--whether it's the city or a private investor--stand a chance of collecting on the debts, other than by the threat of foreclosure?

Consider the alternatives: forgive the debts, or carry them on the city's books forever. Shoot, if the county and state didn't have that foreclosure sword hanging over you, would YOU pay YOUR property taxes and water bills? I didn't think so. Me, either.

But Berry may just find herself an unwitting hero, in the same sense that Rosa Parks did the day she had her fill of being sent to the back of the bus.

Ironically, it was the Monday after the attack on Berry that Mayor Dixon and her yes-man, Police Commissioner Bealfeld, held a press conference to boast about the reduction in the murder rate for the first quarter of the year. Only 50 people were murdered, a reduction of "thirty percent" over the first quarter of last year. But that reduction amounts to only 21 fewer murders, a number that Baltimore's thug element has demonstrated that it can rack up on its scoreboard in no more than a weekend or two.

A change in the number of murders over as short a period as three months is too statistically insignificant to be a bragging point. Moreover, if the mayor wants to credit Bealfeld's tough new policies and new efficiencies in Prosecutor Jessamy's office, she had better be prepared to demonstrate a direct correlation between the policy changes and the number of murders.

Outrageously, this announcement came scarcely twelve days after the death of Zach Sowers, who had been in a coma since a beating he took last summer. In its zeal to close the case, the city cut deals with the four perpetrators that closed out the case in November, and precluded the possibility that any of them will be tried for the murder of Sowers. They will likely be out of jail before they are 30, and it's a sucker bet to say none of them will commit more violent crimes.

That's where the attack on Berry becomes important. Dixon will have to face the fact that irrespective of the number of people who actually died, the number of violent crimes has not been reduced. Nor, I suspect, has Jessamy's dismal record of obtaining convictions. Dixon can stamp her foot all day and utter platitudes such as "This might sound harsh, but I believe we have to come up with some very stern discipline action. Young people now feel, some feel, that it's acceptable, and it's not acceptable." But she cannot escape the statistics, provided ALL the statistics are revealed. And in the aftermath of Berry's attack, it will probably turn out that violent crime is being grossly under-reported. The president of the city teachers' union has said that administrators (read: principals and superintendents) routinely avoid reporting student assaults on teachers, out of a fear that more city schools will be declared "persistently dangerous" under the federal No Child Left Behind law. We can only hope that the union president has kept careful records of her own, and will reveal them.

The city will sooner or later have to face the fact that its main source of violence is black children of school age. Unlike the beat-down of Sarah Kreager, nobody will have the luxury of claiming that Berry used a racial slur against her attacker. Because Ms. Berry herself is black, and by all appearances is not one of that stiff-necked sort that black thugs like to characterize as "Oreos," traitors to the race.

Bealfeld told the press conference that citizens should play a greater role in reporting crimes. Perhaps now he will amend that statement to include school administrators. Notably, neither he nor Dixon have made any measurable progress against the witness intimidation and jury nullification that plague the city; that might be a motivator. 

The Baltimore Sun provides a useful database for tracking murders in the city. You can see a map showing the locations where murder victims have been found, and can filter the victim population by age, gender, race, and cause of death, going back as far as January 1, 2007. One thing you quickly discover is that among the hundreds murdered last year, only thirteen were white. That's provided you don't count Sowers, who was murdered last year but didn't die until this year; or the two white would-be witnesses who were tracked into the county and killed. 

The conclusion is inescapable that it's far more dangerous to be a black person in Baltimore City than to be a white, Asian or Latino, and few, if any, black Baltimoreans have recently been murdered by people of another race. Unfortunately, none of the local rabble-rousers (such as "Doc" Cheatham, Larnell Custis Butler, Dwight Pettit and his cohort of black defense lawyers,  or the myriad "reverends" around the city, not to mention those fierce-looking Nation of Islam guys selling bean pies on the street corners) have enough spine to point this out. They are too busy trying to blame some outside influence, primarily white people.

• The Dr. Spock philosophy. Parents are forbidden any kind of physical discipline beyond sending the kid to his "naughty spot." The argument is that spanking a child is violent. And the result of that has been that the children themselves have grown exponentially more violent.
• This is probably the third generation of children raised in day care. At home, a child is under constant supervision of Mom, and has contact with other children only as she permits it. In day care, there are fewer adults than children, and thus no close supervision. The children learn from each other rather than from the adults, and apparently what they learn is the baser part of human instinct. Certainly nothing polite, noble or altruistic. I don't think many of us are born with those characteristics. 
• Black people seem to lack the will to take the next step beyond complaining these days. Most of the murders in the city are black people killing other black people. But when someone like Bill Cosby shows up and reminds people that they have only themselves to blame, for not having disciplined their offspring, he is viewed as having sold out his race. Yes, the audience will nod and applaud in agreement. Then they will go back home to the status quo.

“’There is (a) class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs. … There is a certain class of race-problem solvers who don't want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public.’"

Having sent written testimony in favor of the school's plan, I received a copy of the summary of the hearing and the decision. I'm almost sorry I blew off attending the hearing, because it must have been a real circus. For one thing, the changes proposed at the school property are nowhere near as radical as they have been represented to be. And for another, the opposing neighbors appear, collectively, to be dumber than a box of hammers.

THE OPPOSITION AND ITS CASE

Graystone Community Association - an association without a community

Among the objectors were people claiming to represent two community associations, each of them suspicious in its own unique way. The Graystone Community Association claims to represent more than 100 households in the immediate neighborhood. Neglecting the minor detail that there is no such community as "Graystone," a few soreheads in this neighborhood whose plat is officially recorded as "Broadacres" incorporated early last December. During the time interval conveniently created for them by the undue and potentially unethical influence of two local politicians. The Association's web site describes the neighborhood thus:

Where is this development and when was it built?
Graystone is located in Woodlawn and built about the 19xxs. Homes in this area include a mix of mid-size single family homes and attractive townhomes.

Aside from the fact that there's not a "townhome" within half a mile of the residence of the association President, the members were too stupid or too lazy to know when their own houses were built. A thirty-second check on the Web revealed that the association president's house was erected in 1956, along with much of the surrounding neighborhood.

The Woodlawn Community Education & Development Association

What exactly does this group do? 

The other organization objecting calls itself the Woodlawn Community Education and Development Association, Inc. This outfit, a federal non-profit, was established in 2002, with the wife of a local Baptist preacher at its head. According to its corporate charter, this outfit was established for the following purpose:

"Establish a community based entity, formed to maintain a strong alliance between schools, police departments and our community. In addition, to strive to assure an active participative relationship with politicians through a focused, productive, educational and developmental agenda."

Now, having benefited from a privileged education at a public high school in a blue-collar neighborhood across town, it would be unfair of me to criticize the bad syntax of this statement of objectives, or to point out that it is a meaningless abstraction, so I will move on to other things. The officers of this corporation are listed as "V. Ross, D. Griffin, I. Zachary, C. Hayes, A. Truitt, M. Bowden and G. Jones," which makes them all but impossible to identify.

At the hearing, the preacher (husband of the Association president) spoke on their behalf. He "described his association as an umbrella organization representing a number of community groups on behalf of approximately 1,800 households."  That number represents approximately ten percent of the total number of households in the entire community known as "Woodlawn," and one would think that with such high participation and lofty goals, you'd be constantly hearing of the good works done under the auspices of the Association.

(Here again, let's ignore my personal experience: I've lived in the area this association purports to represent for 32 years, and have not heretofore heard of it. This, in spite of the fact that I was a regular contributor for several years to a community newspaper here, and spent more than six years canvassing the area as a real estate salesman.) As far as I can see, the Association has no presence on the Worldwide Web, in an era when Joe Sixpack might have two or three websites of his own.

There is a scant record of the Association's works. The county school board minutes from June 2006 note:

Dr. Manuel Rodriguez, Assistant Superintendent, Southwest Area, recommended that Woodlawn High School auditorium be renamed to the "Woodlawn Community Education and Development Association (WCEDA), Inc. Community Auditorium." ...

Ms. Shillman asked whether the funds for the auditorium had been donated by WCEDA, Inc. Dr. Rodriguez responded this group has applied for, and received a federal grant to renovate the auditorium.

Sure enough, Congressman Elijah Cummings managed to wangle a $65,000 federal grant for auditorium renovations. Exactly what role Rev. Ross' organization played in the process is not clear. But the Cummings "earmark" occurred in fiscal year 2004 [that's the year ending July 1, 2004], and according to a cached web page from the Association of School Business Officials of Maryland and the District of Columbia, a request for bids on the work was let only this year. That bid, number JMI-632-08 remains in limbo, the due date having passed on March 31st.  

Later that same year (October, 2006) the Reverend Ross testified as an "expert" on the idea of a light rail line connecting Woodlawn and Dundalk, tentatively named the Red Line. As the Daily Record reported [emphasis added],

The expansion of light rail and bus services on state government's Red Line was addressed by Daniel Pontious, regional policy director of the Baltimore City-based Citizens Planning and Housing Association, and Rev. Ezio Ross, a Baltimore County clergyman who heads the Woodlawn Community Education and Development Association.

One of the major points made by both men is that transit projects need to be better coordinated with economic development. Both said they saw transit as a way to boost commerce by creating "town centers" and "urban villages."

"It can bring developers into an area by creating amenities," Ross said, following a 15-minute review of transit projects in cities such as Boston, Denver and Los Angeles.

Transit establishes routes, something vital to fostering trade, they noted.

"A sense of permanence is important to economic development," Pontious said.

The Red Line is expected to create a transit corridor starting in Woodlawn and running through Baltimore City and out to Dundalk on the eastern side of Baltimore County, the presenters said, although the state Department of Transportation Web site labels it a 10.5- mile project that will only go as far as Fells Point/Patterson Park. The portion to be addressed within the next few months by state and local leaders is a section that will run from Woodlawn to Canton, Pontious and Ross said.

The article went on to say that even this truncated route would cost  between $525 million (for a surface rail line) and $2.6 BILLION for an underground line. And apparently nobody bothered to address the little complication posed by the fact that the route would probably not be allowed to run through the Leakin Park, owing to the same deed restriction that prevented I-70 from continuing eastward several decades ago, and resulted in the Interstate Highway to Nowhere, connecting Schroeder Street with Greene Street, a mere 45/100 of a mile distant, and through some of the most downtrodden housing in the city.

CONCLUSION: I still have no idea what the WCE&DA has been doing for the past five years, or what qualifies Rev. Ross as an expert on "development," since he is by profession (and presumably by education) a theologian.

The School's Proposal, and the arguments against it

The main part of the proposal was to create a dormitory to house 20 to 30 young male students. It was revealed only at the hearing that they'd be housed in the existing buildings, nearly all the changes would be invisible from the outside. A couple of neighbors made a great fuss over whether cars had been parked on the grass on this property. Bear in mind, it's slightly over an acre of land, and on a knoll overlooking the surrounding area, so while you can see whether or not there are cars parked, you can't tell where they are parked without trespassing on to the place.

Other neighbors contended they were worried that the tavern across the street and downhill from the school property would be a horrible temptation. Apparently this sub-group is so ignorant of Islam that they don't realize that alcohol consumption is strictly verboten to Muslims. And the bar is such a redneck joint that I can't imagine anyone looking remotely like a Middle Easterner, or even an American Jew, walking into the place and surviving. Not to mention that the students will all be between the ages of 12 and 20 years old. The protestors did note that police had to be called to break up brawls at the bar 21 times in the last six months of last year.

Still more protests focused on the miserable academic record and perpetual violence at the public high school about half a mile away. Nobody mentioned that there's a lot of parking-on-the-grass whenever the high school has a football game, and apparently nobody brought up the fact that this school is at the very bottom of the academic ranking in the county, despite the county's having dumped $13 million into it to graft a "pre-engineering magnet school" on to this otherwise ghettoized school, in the hope that the magnet school students would pull up the average numbers for the entire school. Which they didn't.

It was also revealed at the hearing that, in addition to the $628,500 the school's owners paid for the property being discussed, the man who will be its headmaster spent $380,000 on a new house built just across the street. Without enrolling a single student, this father-and-son team has invested more than a million dollars in a neighborhood where the average sale prices were below $150,000 before they nearly doubled during the short-lived boom experienced here in 2006.

The objectors weren't done yet, though. Besides the high school and the redneck bar, they noted that a commercial building across the street from the school houses a day school for what were described as "75 disruptive children." Now seeing that this bunch started out their opposition with the allegation that Darul Uloom would be yet another unwanted "group home" for the developmentally disabled, and that they subsequently brought up this day school, someone should have asked how many of them favored euthanizing problem children, since neither of these quite opposite alternatives satisfy them.

Yet somewhere along the line, they missed complaining about the "Adult Day Care" center for the elderly in another commercial property on the same intersection. Can you imagine the detrimental influence on young Muslim boys of seeing some Alzheimer's-addled geezer wheeling himself down the street, having escaped from day care? It boggles the mind.

For the county's part, they have managed to wipe away any public reference to the fact that the original hearing for Darul Uloom was pulled off the docket last October, due to the arguably unethical intervention of a state senator and a county councilman who is now under investigation for misusing his campaign fund as a personal bank account.

The Decision

Finally, on March 28, the Commissioner made his decision. The school will be allowed to operate, but with a few caveats:

• The size of the student population is limited to 20
• A privacy fence must be erected between the school property and the property to its immediate north, a place that has long been used for the storage of heavy contractor's equipment.
• The school will need to provide landscaping to screen its property from the three houses across the street to its east, one of which is owned by the headmaster!
• Parking will be permitted only in the designated (paved) spaces shown on the site plan. [How the county intends to enforce this without aerial surveillance, illegal search or surveillance, or further trespassing by disaffected neighbors remains to be explained.]
• The driveway into the place will need to be widened from 10 feet to 20 feet.
• [This is the one that makes me laugh] Petitioner shall use similar architecture and building material where applicable to assure compatibility with the surrounding neighborhood.*

* I will need to post some photos to illustrate the absurdity of this requirement. The Bauhof House, which is the site of Darul Uloom, was built as the home of the local baker, back in the twenties, and has a style of its own. The rest of the neighborhood is a mash-up of stuff, much of which Malvina Reynolds described as "little boxes made of ticky-tacky." There are a handful of the original farm houses predating the residential development of the area, ordinary little Cape Cods, a handful of stuccoed split levels, two faux-Spanish-mission houses, the general run of stuff built before World War II, and a couple of freshly-built split foyer disasters.

Then there's the real killer-diller: "Petitioner shall not utilize the property to perform religious services for the general public." Aside from the fact that this requirement appears to violate the First Amendment to the US Constitution, there again arise several questions: (a) How does one define "general public?" I don't believe you will find the "general public" at any religious service; only members of that particular religious denomination and prospective members. (b) Who is going to enforce this, and how? Does the county plan to station someone at Darul Uloom's entrance to "card" people going in and out of the place.

I maintain, and challenge anyone to convince me otherwise, that this matter would never have seen the light of day had the proposal been for a Pentecostal Christian church, like so many of the jump-up congregations operating in storefronts, converted warehouse space, and rented hotel conference rooms around this neighborhood.

This entire matter is shameful and un-American, but alas, it's business as usual in Baltimore County, where we have The Best Government Money Can Buy.

Maryland's Constitution, Article 13, states: …every man hath a right
to petition the Legislature for the redress of grievances… .

Inherent in that declaration is an expectation that such a petition
will receive a proper hearing.

Such is not the case regarding the people's plea for relief from the
State's discriminatory handgun permit law.

Every year a bill is introduced which guarantees the people's right of
self-protection. Every year such bills are ignored by the judiciary
committee chairmen.

No committee vote, no floor debate. No floor debate, no proper hearing.

House Bill 2 is in committee now. Even though hundreds of folks
showed up to support it, HB2 still sits in Chairman Vallario's desk
drawer (the Assembly adjourns April 7th).

One person should not be able to stymie the people's will. Chairman
Vallario should call for an up or down vote and report HB2 out
(favorably or unfavorably) for a House floor debate.

What good is representative government if representatives don't
represent us?

If you are among those who think Maryland's current policy on concealed -carry permits needs no revision, may I suggest that you read this account of a well-trained applicant's travails in getting a permit, and take a look at the Maryland Shall Issue web site.

To keep yourself current on HB2, here's the state's information page. As you will see, Don Pollock is right: the bill has been languishing for two months now, and there is no sign of any change.

Suggested action: look up the members of the judiciary committee (see the link above) and contact every last one of them. Fax, telephone calls and snail-mail letters have a greater impact than emails, as all those modes of communication require staff time and create office clutter for the representatives' staff, whereas emails are readily deleted unread.

A spokeswoman for the county prosecutor says the charge was dropped because Snowden had no knowledge of a presence of a firearm in the vehicle.

Snowden had plead guilty in December to possession and intent to distribute marijuana and is awaiting sentencing on those charges. Nonetheless, he is a convicted felon, making it a crime under both state and federal laws for him to be in possession of a firearm. His defense was that the gun belonged to the other guy who was riding in the car, and he did not know it was there. Now, if ever there was an issue that cried out to be heard by a judge and jury, this would be one. Young Snowden should have been placed under oath and grilled along the now-classic  lines of what did he know and when did he know it. For the matter to have simply been dropped by administrative decision smacks of favoritism and unequal treatment under the law. It would be interesting if someone in the MSM took the time to look up statistics and outcomes on past arrests of this kind, because it immediately raised several questions in my mind:

Question #1: Suppose this had been some convicted felon other than the son of someone politically well-connected?

Suffice it to say that Lovell "Artie" Wheeler was not treated so generously a few years ago in Baltimore, and the crime he was accused of was a mere misdemeanor. It just happened that Wheeler is an impolitic old whiteguy, and Kojo Snowden is the son of a "prominent civil rights activist." I have no patience with white supremacists like Wheeler, but I think professional racists on both sides of the issue deserve equal treatment.

You might remember that another "prominenent civil rights" type, Carl T. Rowan, drew a "walk" some years ago when he shot an teenager found swimming in the pool in his Washington DC backyard. That incident occurred in 1988, long after the District had enacted (in 1975) the gun control law that almost completely banned firearms possession. (N.B. this is the law that is being challeneged in the Heller case.)

Question #2: Did Kojo get a "walk" due to some intervention from O'Malley? Those of you who know of Frank Weathersbee, the Anne Arundel County State's Attorney, know that he is a pretty hard-nosed prosecutor, especially compared to some of his cohorts in other Maryland counties. It seems pretty unlikely to me that Weathersbee would have backed away from this case without coercion.

Question #3: [Irrelevant, but interesting nonetheless] What sort of person would name a child "Kojo," which sounds more like the name you would hang on a zoo animal or household pet? Unless perhaps the name is intended to have been a blend of "Kojak" and "Tojo." That's possible, but unlikely...

A recent issue of The Jeffersonian carried an article about a bill introduced in the state legislature that would change the way Baltimore County's school board members are selected.

The school board has twelve members, who under current law are appointed by the governor. Considering that Maryland's governor is the same person under whose watch the Baltimore City school system not only went into the toilet academically, but lost track of tens of millions of dollars, Martin O'Malley might just be among the least qualified people to appoint school board members. In any case, how is something related purely to the governance of a single county under the control of the state?

The problem is that this bill (House Bill 954) seems as though it will make matters worse than they already are. The proposed change would "establish a nominating commission to recommend three names to the governor."  But get this: the 13-member nominating commission would be made up of three members appointed by the governor, three appointed by the Baltimore County Executive, with the remaining six membership slots reserved for representatives from a select group of, ahem, community organizations. These members would represent the county teachers' union, the county PTA council, chamber of commerce, county-wide student council, and local chapters of the League of Women Voters and the NAACP.

There's no explanation why these particular seven entrenched interest groups should get a reserved spot on the nominating committee. Most of the League of Women Voters members I've encountered are old enough to be great-grandmothers, and pretty well out of the flow of things. Giving the teachers' union a say in who runs the system is a move that could best be described as "novel," and more truthfully is a matter of hiring a fox to guard your henhouse. And as far as the NAACP involvement is concerned, why is that bunch any more deserving of a place at the table than the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, The B'nai Brith, the Sons of Italy, the Polish National Alliance, or for that matter, the Ku Kluxers?

Now, all this fuss will apparently result in the nomination of only three potential members, with no requirement that the governor appoint them anyway. The remaining nine school board members will be political friends of the governor that he has not yet found a way to reward. I don't even believe the county executive is qualified to name members to this committee, considering that he has been part of a scheme to create a new $90,000 a year county job for the governor's little brother, whom he described (with no further elaboration) as "uniquely qualified." Indeed.

The common-sense solution would be to have the entire school board elected by the voting (read: taxpaying) public. This works in countless jurisdictions across the country, and is one hell of a lot less complicated than this goofy scheme that is being proposed.

But we Marylanders do have this unfortunate habit of electing, and re-electing politicians who do what they damn well please to line their own pockets and spread favors among their bedfellow, and to Hell with what the People might actually want.

But then, that's life under an essentially single-party system where the opposition has been browbeaten into silence by a governor who values "solidarity" more than healthy discussion of alternatives.

CORRECTIONS: My sincere apologies for having depended solely on the reporting of The Jeffersonian in drafting the above. Today, I had an opportunity to read the text of HB954, which can be found on the web in PDF form.

1. Terhune's article omitted the fact that the bill proposes reducing the size of the school board from 12 members to 10. No explanation is given as to the rationale behind the change.  As the law currently stands, the board includes one member from each of the seven county council districts. Under the proposed change, these seven will be replaced by five members, one representing each of the five "administrative areas of the Baltimore County Public School System." *

2. Contrary to the newspaper article, the nominating commission will give the governor a choice among three nominees for each school board seat. However, the governor has the right to reject any and all of these and order the commission to nominate other candidates. In short, he can continue refusing nominations until he obtains a list of candidates that suit his personal agenda. Therefore, the entire nominating-commission process is a sham.

3. The six members of the nominating commission appointed by the Governor and the County Executive "SHALL BE MADE WITH CONSIDERATION OF THE GEOGRAPHIC, RACIAL, ETHNIC, CULTURAL, AND GENDER DIVERSITY OF THE COMMISSION." [reference page 3, lines 16-19.] Read this requirement however you will--I think it's meant to give O'Malley and Smith the power to "stack the deck" racially. Among the parties not automatically invited to the table are Asians, Middle Easterners and Latinos. And it goes without saying that nobody will be appointed to appoint "white interests." That would comprise racial prejudice, since there are only "black" and other ethnic interests. I question the constitutionality of this requirement.

* Not solely related to this bill, I have to question why the taxpayers of Baltimore County have been so willing to tolerate a political system that divides the county into 5 public school districts, but incorporates 7 county council districts and ten police precincts. Would it not make sense to have one set of boundary lines common to these government functions?

I promise that if I receive a phone call from your campaign, whether it's a live person or one of those robot callers, you can count on my casting a vote for someone other than you.

If election day rolls around and all of you have pissed me off, I intend to write in myself in lieu of voting for one of you SOBs.

vershteht?

While most of the other 49 states are enacting sensible legislation that recognizes a citizen's right to defend his person, family and property, here in Maryland things are moving in the opposite direction. Our governor (may he rot in Hell) has expressed the intent to abolish the death penalty for criminals here. At the same time, he is doing nothing about the death penalty so often imposed upon crime victims.

Worse still the National Rifle Association of America, although hated by many as an extremist organization devoted to encouraging wholesale bloodletting in our cities, has badly dropped the ball here in Maryland. NRA's political arm, the Institute for Legislative Action, periodically emails a briefing on the status of legislation, nationally and state-by-state. The Association has become so intent upon money-raising to perpetuate itself that it has taken to skewing these news briefs, and the latest one is a prime example.

Friday, Maryland NRA members received an e-mail with the breathless title "Maryland House of Delegates to Consider Four Pro-Gun Bills!"  The little fly in the ointment is that one of these four bills is not "pro-gun." In fact, it's not a paranoid delusion to imagine how it can be used as a further means of oppressing legal firearms owners. And worse still, the NRA news releases have completely ignored a handful of egregiously anti-gun bills in the hopper.

Start with the bill NRA-ILA promotes as "pro-gun", HB-1061. This bill would "require the Secretary of Police to refund the application fee for a permit to carry, wear, or transport a handgun to an applicant whose application is denied. Because Maryland is a 'may-issue' state, the police are not required to give law-abiding citizens a permit to carry, yet under current law people are not allowed to recover their denied application fees."

The NRA news release completely ignores the existence of HB-2, which would turn Maryland into a "shall-issue" state. This is the holy grail of the pro self-defense community. Instead, NRA thinks we should congratulate ourselves if we persuade the authorities to refund our application fee when they arbitrarily deny a concealed-carry permit. Not only is that ridiculous, I do not think it's paranoia to consider 1061 a back-door registration scheme, or worse.

Consider the following scenario:

Many pro-RKBA activists have been urging Marylanders to apply for a CCW permit, knowing it is likely to be denied. The rationale behind this is sound: at the moment, the Maryland State Police report that they deny relatively few permits. This is because the average gun owner knows he's not going to get a permit, and has enough sense not to waste the application fee, which runs more than $100. If this refund-upon-denial law passes in the absence of a shall-issue provision (HB-2) the number of permit applications is likely to increase exponentially. And while that may prove the activists' point about the difficulty of obtaining a permit in Maryland, it will provide a bigger data bonanza for the state government.

As far as I know, there is nothing prohibiting the MSP from maintaining a list of people who have applied for and been denied handgun permits. The police departments already have at their disposal a little-known tool called the "M-Gun" database. Adding to the database the names of those who unsuccessfully apply for a permit, provides the police a handy list of people whom they might suspect of carrying a concealed firearm without the permit. M-Gun is available on the in-car computers of police officers. Once your driving license information has been entered, a few more key strokes provide access to information about the guns you own and whether or not you have a CCW permit. (Just how much information it provides is a closely guarded secret.)

Now imagine this: you are pulled over for a burnt-out tail light. In the process of checking to make sure you are the legal owner of the vehicle, the cop sees that you applied for a CCW permit but were denied. Now he has "probable cause," or at least "reasonable suspicion" (which is the reduced standard they are now using) to search your vehicle and person, figuring you are packing without a permit. Whether or not you are in possession of a firearm at that moment, you will have been subjected to a search that was hitherto not permitted. In short, one more bit of freedom and privacy down the dumper.

And there are yet other anti-self-defensebills in the hopper. There's HB-108, which would prohibit the possession of an "electronic weapon." If you're näive enough to think that would simply prevent "civilians" from owning Tasers and stun guns, think again. Once such a law is on the books, anything, including a loud battery-powered noisemaker, could be added to the list of prohibited electronic weapons.

There's HB-640, which would require anyone placed under a temporary restraining order to surrender any firearms he or she owns. Aside from the obvious problem this creates for the subject to re-acquire his guns at some future date, it does nothing to protect the potential victim from attack by knife, automobile, blunt instrument, incendiary device, poison, or an endless list of other readily available means.

HB-655 would deny youth hunting licenses to people under the age of 13, thus depriving parents of the opportunity to pass along this sporting tradition to their children at the earliest practicable age.

But the worst of all the bills ignored by NRA-ILA is HB-517, the "encoded ammunition" law. Among the provisions of this bill are requiring each shell casing and bullet base to be stamped with an "indelible" serial number that can be traced, requiring all non "encoded" ammunition to be destroyed or surrendered by a certain date, and imposing a tax of 5 cents per round on the "encoded" ammo, assuming that any manufacturer is willing to produce such stuff, and without regard to the increased cost of producing this ammo, which will be passed on to the consumer.

Now, if you are a recreational shooter, this tax becomes a big burden. Cowboy Action shooters, for example, may attend two, or even three matches each weekend. The average cowboy match consists of six stages, in the course of which about 120 rounds of this more expensive ammo is used. So, without even considering how much Winchester, Remington or CCI is going to sock you at retail, every time you take those cowboy guns out of their cases to use them, it's going to cost you six dollars more than it does now. For an active cowboy shooter, the tax alone will add up to $500 a year or more.

Even this isn't the entire story about the 2008 legislative session in Maryland, but in the interest of (relative) brevity, it should be enough to frighten you into action.

First order of business: log on to the Maryland Shall Issue web site for a comprehensive look at what the lawmakers are trying to do to us. If you have more time on your hands, have a look at the Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership web site, or that of Gun Owners of America, to gain a perspective on the way the NRA is neglecting its members in Maryland, which we still jokingly call The Free State.

The first three of these attacks have been black predators attacking white victims. Altogether too many words have already been said about that, none of them the right ones. In a city where blacks are in the majority, only a fool would be shocked at this information. Not only do these kids harbor a lot of unwarranted anger-even allowing for the ordinary hormonally surge-but they have somehow been conditioned to see impoverished whites (such as Sarah Kreager) and the elderly as attractive prey.

Dixon and the others act as though this is a recent phenomenon, and peculiar to the MTA's buses. Refusing to believe there is such a thing as black prejudice towards non-blacks, the Powers That Be see no connection between the attack on Kreager and-for example--the attack earlier this year on Zach Sowers. In the name of expedience, the state's attorney has done a grave disservice to Sowers (who remains comatose) by bargaining away the right to charge this monster with murder, should Sowers eventually die. This, despite the willingness of the co-attackers to testify on the prosecution's behalf.

MTA officials appear in deep denial over the long history of nasty behavior aboard their vehicles, at their bus stops, and in other public places. A few years ago on the SunSpot news forum, a woman reported having witnessed a young (black) man openly masturbating aboard a subway. Others followed in close order, saying they'd seen similar stuff. My own wife rode MTA buses to work for more than a decade, and every day I waited breathlessly until she'd gotten safely home, wondering whether the assault du jour would be merely a groping or verbal insult, a purse snatching, or something unimaginably worse. And that was more than fifteen years ago.

The city's self-anointed black authority figures have addressed their remarks not to the young generation responsible for the violence, but to their shocked parents and grandparents. They know from whose pockets their money flows, at it's from the elders who feel ashamed and powerless about the kids.

It has been at least two generations since any city has seen an activist with the courage and "street cred" to go out amongst the youngsters and work directly with them. The result is a generation of children who know that adults fear them, and use that fear to great effect. Nobody has managed to teach them that this same fear, from which they derive a transitory thrill today, will tomorrow deter someone from hiring them, for example. They have, by their own efforts, de-humanized themselves.

Meanwhile, the Deep Thinkers in the city and state government will grasp at any cockamamie notion, knowing that it will fail, but praying that it won't fail until someone else is at the helm. Kurt Schmoke, as mayor, attempted placating the thug element with silliness such as midnight basketball. Martin O'Malley attempted, during the brief period he was paying attention, to have the city arrest its way out of the problem. That bit of folly only clogged the court system so badly that many serious crimes went unprosecuted because of speedy-trial rules, or were plea-bargained away to nothing. Sheila Dixon has proven herself worse than incapable of ameliorating the violence; she's actually made herself a laughing stock. And from his new seat of power, O'Malley is about to make matters exponentially worse by abolishing officially the death penalty in this state, thus removing any genuine negative consequences for predatory violence.

This problem will not be solved by any number of people safely ensconced behind bulletproof glass watching the violence unfold on video screens, by any amount of political oratory, however sincere, or by any number of "gun buy-backs."  In this city, countless firearms have been "bought back," nearly always in violation of federal laws. Pellet guns, most knives, knuckle dusters, pepper spray, stun guns and nearly every category of improvised defensive weapon has been declared verboten. The violence grows more frequent and random, and the Deep Thinkers continue along the same course that has steadily proven itself counterproductive.

There is a reason that jackals prey upon antelopes, rather than tigers and elephants. The simple fact is that thugs, punks and other miscreants are less likely to attack victims if there is any certainty that one of their potential targets may be armed.

It is past time that governments admit they can seldom protect anyone, but only pick up the broken pieces after a tragedy has occurred. People will remain at risk until they demand that the governments quit condemning them for defending themselves.

By this, I refer to the legal name-change notices in The Jeffersonian, our county's newspaper of legal record. Most of the change of name docket is done pro se, and the reasons that petitioners give for requesting a change are often funnier than the name changes themselves, some of which are downright hilarious.

Since the last installment of this entry, I've seen a number of petitions that have been filed by transgendered people in the process of completing the change to their desired gender. I don't think it fair to make fun of most of these, as I find the entire matter of "gender reassignment" just imponderable. Suffice it to say, that it always surprises me to see someone apply for a name change on these grounds, where the initials of the new name do not match those of the old. Don't these folks own a single monogrammed item?

Still, there was this one:

Trevean Raynard Lee wants a name change to Treashay Renee Lee on the following grounds: "I am a transexually [sic] live[sic] as a female but still living by male and I don't feel since I'm living female why still be call Trevean."

Aside from the fact that Trevean/Treashay must have been too excited to proofread the application, I have to ask how many people would know that "Trevean" is a man's name, while "Treashay" is that of a woman?

Aside from that, I have collected these gems:

 Olivine Hinds Angela Alain Tchuigoua Tchapda has applied for a name change to Olivine Chaps Angela Alain Chaps. Grounds given for the request are "I do not like the meaning of my name." God knows, if ever something needed further explanation, this does.

Felicia Nwakaego Ezimora applied for a name change to Nwakaego Felicia Ezimora. The rational: "Petitioner's recent application to the Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates to be allowe to take the examination that will qualify her to practice medicine in the United states was denied because she used the [desired name] in the application and her medical degree and manuscript [sic] from her school in Russia shows the petitioner's name as Ezimora Felicia Nwakaego [which, you will note, is the third permutation of these names]. The Board has advised the petitioner that she will only be cleared to take the examination if the court issues an order that both [sic] names refer to one person, the Petitioner.

I just hope she gets things sorted out before writing any prescriptions or performing surgery.

Allow me to start:

"What's as useless as the teats on a boar?"

A bill sponsored by Councilman Kevin Kamenetz would penalize store owners up to $500 for selling cigarettes to anyone under the age of 18.

Kamenetz, a Democrat who represents the 2nd District , which includes Owings Mills, Pikesville and Ruxton, said civil penalties are needed because of the ease with which underage smokers can purchase tobacco and tobacco-related products.

"If you don't see anyone getting pulled over, you won't respect the speed limit signs*," Kamenetz said.

"There are a lot of underage smokers out there," he said. "This sends the message that this is a law that should be respected."

***

State law already prohibits the sale of tobacco and related products to anyone under the age of 18.

***

Police departments in each jurisdiction are responsible for enforcing the law.

"I don't think it's high enough on the priority list for them to enforce," Kamenetz said.

... Kamenetz said the benefit is that it is streamlined and would make the Health Department responsible for enforcing the new law and issuing the civil citations.

Kamenetz said he envisions teenagers working with the department in undercover operations.

The cost of such a program is not known. Kamenetz said he would like to use money given to the county from the state's portion of the cigarette restitution lawsuit settlement. He did not expect the cost of the program to substantially increase the department's budget. ...

The highlighted passages above give you an idea of the intellectual paucity at work here. Kamenetz apparently has no particular fear of creating a double-jeopardy situation, in which a single act can be prosecuted under both county and state laws. And apparently he lives in little universe of his own, if he believes that (a) speed limits are actually enforced in this county, and (b) we have violent crime under such control that the coppers have nothing better to do than bust convenience store clerks for selling smokes to underaged kids.

And sending teenagers "undercover" to enforce this law--that's incredibly stupid. How does he propose to motivate teens to become sellouts? Perhaps he'd offer them free cigarettes as a reward.

Not to mention the incomprehensible things that the Jeff  has quoted him saying here. He's begun to sound like a NFL player being interviewed in the locker room. You know the kind of blather I mean: "We came here today to play football."

Finally, there's nothing more irresponsible than proposing a law with no idea what it would cost to enforce. Especially now, with the nitwits in Annapolis already gleefully thinking up new taxes.

It's time for Mr. Kamenetz to move on to a new career, or to retire. If only someone would step forward to oppose him in the next primary election. Republican candidate Lisa Marquardt pulled nearly 30% against Kamenetz in last year's election. That in itself is impressive, in a district dominated by yellow-dog Democrats. The only prayer of defeating this particular loose cannon would be having a Democrat oppose him in the primaries. But don't hold your breath waiting.

Last week, I emailed Barry Barber, Captain of the Second Police Precinct, and asked what data the police department might have about disturbances at or service calls to group homes.

Captain Barber replied:

We don't arbitrarily track statistics at all group homes in the Precinct.  When we start to notice an increase in calls for service, especially criminal calls, at a particular group home location, we then begin to track all calls there.

At the same time we start to target the location with increased enforcement. At the same time we contact the home administrator in a effort to relocate some of the problem residents and/or to close the facility all together.

For all other homes, if given an address, we can pull up calls for service over a given period.  We will not do this unless specifically asked to do so.

As for the location on Dogwood Road, it is not a group home.  The proposal is for this to be a dormitory for an Islamic School.  There are no known problems connected to the school and there is no reason to believe that its presence would cause a problem within the community.

Aside from the specifics about the Darul Uloom operation, it is significant that the police department does not track calls to group homes. If, as so many aver, they are a source of trouble, the county ought to be compiling data that either backs up this assertion or disproves it. The don't ask/don't tell approach is unacceptable, especially since the county already uses an (expensive!) GIS mapping system to track crime by category. At the very least, this system could easily show crime rates at non-owner-occupied addresses, compared with owner-occupied ones. God knows, this might also provide a grasp on whether the problem is houses occupied by groups of "retards," Section 8 housing, multiple-unit properties, or some factor nobody has imagined.

Meanwhile, it's worth asking Councilman Ken Oliver when, if ever, he plans to make good on the promises he made shortly after being elected the first time. County Vibe* no longer appears to exist, and somehow it escaped being cached by Google, but it was for a time another of those local newsletters aimed solely at black residents. In February 2005, this web site published an interview with Oliver, who had been elected in 2002. I had the foresight to do a screen capture of the interview, written by one "C. Green." Here's the interesting part, where group homes are concerned. See my footnotes:

Another major concern in the district is the group home issue. We’ve heard that upwards of 70% of group homes in Maryland are located in NorthWest Baltimore County. What impact have they had on the community and what initiatives, if any, are in the works to address this issue?
Good question and I am glad you’ve asked it. Group homes have been in Baltimore County for over 20 years. They have been in this district for over 20 years, and the first councilmatic district for over 20 years. The first and fourth councilmatic district have over 80% of all group homes in the state of Maryland. So they didn’t happen and come in the year 2002 when I got elected. They were here prior to that. I didn’t hear one word about group homes prior to 2002. (1)

Yes, I do have an initiative. The councilman from the first councilmatic district(S.G. Samuel Moxley) and I are sponsoring legislation to have a study done of the group homes so that they can take that information and pass it to our senators and delegates because everything that happens to group homes does not happen on a county level. It is a federal issue and than it becomes a state issue. The problem is that you have three agencies who are issuing licenses and they are not talking to one another. (2) What Senator Kelley has done is sponsor legislation where one agency will issue licenses for all group homes and no more will go in certain areas. They will have to go elsewhere because of the over saturation.

The group home issue is a hot button. Therefore, it is common for some residents to blame group homes for any number of issues in their community. Are some of the concerns and their impact overblown?
I think people are picking it to death and it is overblown.(3) They are not going anywhere. We didn’t pass the federal laws we just have to abide by them. No elected official wants to deal with it and that’s why I took the initiative to talk to my colleague in the first councilmatic district and we are sponsoring legislation to do something about it at least on the state level.

I can't help wondering about several statements attributed to Oliver here. In fairness, the article is quite badly written, and the Councilman may have been misquoted or quoted out of context. Nevertheless:

(1) Councilman Oliver's curriculum vitae includes nearly twenty years with the county's planning commission. How can anyone say they "didn't hear one word about group homes prior to 2002," given that experience?

(2) Even if three different agencies are empowered to license group homes, why has the county never managed to provide an accurate count of them, much less district-by-district? It seems to me that this information is knowable, although admitting that you know it poses several problems: (a) it could blow a hole in the assertion that X percentage of the county's group homes are in such-and-such an area; (b) it makes even more questionable the Police Department's policy of not tracking service calls to these homes; (c) shouldn't the number of these residences in a given area be an important factor in planning ambulance and hospital facilities?

Or is the truth that nobody has the slightest idea how many physically handicapped and developmentally disabled people live in any given part of the county? I realize, this seems difficult to believe, in an era when the US Census Bureau collects an inordinate amount of personal information, and when the Transportation Security Authority has been revealed to be keeping track of what reading material people carry on to airplanes. Obviously, someone, at some level of government is lying about the existence of this data.

(3) Has Mr. Oliver changed his view, that the group home matter is overblown and being nitpicked? If so, how would he explain his decision to intervene in an otherwise ordinary request for a zoning variance?

* If you try to pull up the domain CountyVibe.com on your web browser, you will find yourself redirected to "YourPrintCafe.com," which is a parking spot for semi-inactive domains. The WhoIs database reveals the following about CountyVibe.com:

Registrant:
ATTN: COUNTYVIBE.COM
c/o Network Solutions
, Yukon Territory Box 447
Zimbabwe

Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: COUNTYVIBE.COM
Created on: 13-Mar-02
Expires on: 13-Mar-08
Last Updated on:

Administrative Contact:
Green, Clinton gu4ec74v9nw@networksolutionsprivateregistration.com
YourPrintCafe.com ATTN: COUNTYVIBE.COM c/o Network Solutions P.O. Box 447 Herndon, VA 2017

It would not be a huge leap to assume that the administrative contact  for the domain is the same guy whose name appears on the byline of the Oliver interview. But what's his connection, if he simply works for some outfit in Virginia? And obviously the registrant information is bogus: Yukon Territory in Zimbabwe?

It's not unusual to find domain registrants hiding their identity behind bogus names and addresses, or registration tracking services like GoDaddy. As revealed in a blog entry in 2006 George Soros, one of the major bag-men of the Democratic Party does this.  By contrast, it is relatively easy to find at least some sensible registration info for domains owned by companies you might think are vulnerable to attack by the net, such as Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, eBay, etcetera.

Conclusion:

1. Someone should demand that the police track, and make public, data about group homes, whether or not it fits the convenient story that they are such a pestilence.

2. If there is a third alternative for housing people unable to care for themselves besides so-called institutions and so-called group homes, someone should propose it. By appearances there would be a boat-load of money to be made.

3. Someone needs to ask Councilman Oliver about the inconsistencies I've noted here. Since he no longer answers my emails or phone calls, someone else will need to try.

-30-

Since then I have heard a few rumors floating around, but no new information has been published, and as far as I can tell, the zoning variance process for the school is on permanent "hold." However, I did stumble across an article I had missed in The Community Times.

As I digested this article, I became increasingly convinced that the objections posed by the so-called concerned neighbors are terribly thin, and that the only fathomable reason for all the fuss is an irrational fear of all things Muslim.

Read a few quotes from the article, along with my observations:

Thomas H. Bostwick, the deputy zoning commissioner, found Sept. 27 that even though the school property in the 6300 block of Dogwood Road had been duly posted, the surrounding community was not informed "in a timely manner."

This is a genuinely weird assertion, for which the newspaper article offered no support. I learned of the matter through a legal notice in The Jeffersonian, the county paper in which all zoning matters are announced. The scheduling for the hearing did not appear to provide any less time than the others posted alongside it. Aside from posting the property and placing a legal notice in the paper, neither the county nor the property owner has any obligation to "inform the surrounding community." If you are concerned about this kind of stuff, you get a subscription to the paper and read the notices regularly. If you don't then you have no right to complain about something you missed.

The zoning hearing had been set for Oct. 1 on a request to grant a special exception and variance for a dormitory for students attending the Darul Uloom school.

The commissioner received several letters of concern from neighbors and decided to allow more time before proceeding.

As of this writing, the case has not reappeared on the zoning commission's schedule. One might ask how much time Mr. Bostwick plans to allow.

In addition to the special exception, Kabiruddin also sought a zoning variance for a slimmer side-yard setback and for a narrower driveway.

The next-door property has been operated as a storage yard for heavy equipment for at least a decade, and continues to be zoned for commercial use. Its driveway is scarcely larger than that of the Darul Uloom property.

The school, ... is intended to offer religious education for students in grades six through high school, according to Kabiruddin. The school Web site says Darul Uloom will also offer secular home schooling for students using the Calvert curriculum and Keyton program.

This sounds as though it would be a welcome addition to the neighborhood, especially since the local high school ranks dead last in the county, and the middle school serving the area is near the bottom of the heap.

Kabiruddin said he finalized the purchase of the dormitory property in February.

It would be correct to say that Kabiruddin finalized the purchase of the entire property in February. The dormitory is proposed for the site of a large carriage house on that property.

The property is in the district of state Delegate Emmett C. Burns (D-10th), who attended a Sept. 27 community meeting where some neighbors of the property voiced concern that the dorm could generate too much traffic or even become a group home for troubled youths.

"People are not concerned that it's an Islamic school but they're concerned about traffic patterns and group homes and they don't know much about the intention," Burns said in a telephone interview after the community meeting. "The overwhelming concern is that there's too much congestion. A pub is across the street and just down the street is Woodlawn High School."

That particular high school built a football "stadium" several years ago, and most of the traffic congestion in the area stems from illegal parking of cars and buses during games. But the football field--which has a much greater impact on the neighborhood--was built without public discussion, and ballyhooed as a grand addition to the area.

Kerri Lastner, who lives a block from the property, said that speculation is flying because neighbors weren't sufficiently informed about the project.

"You wonder what kind of families these kids are coming from, what kind of background they are coming from," she said. "We haven't been given any information."

In a telephone interview, Kabiruddin sought to correct the group home misconception.

"This is a religious school. We only take students that are the opposite background of that. . These are not disturbed kids," Kabiruddin said. He added that the students would be models and be an asset to the community.

***
Neighbors of the school wrote Bostwick contending that neighborhood calm is threatened by non-residential development.

The closest non-residential uses added recently include two auto repair shops, both of which maintain junkyard conditions on their properties; two Pentecostal-flavored churches, at least one of which creates a traffic jam whenever it holds an event; the football field; and several home-based day care centers.

Where were the concerned citizens when this stuff arrived? 

(Three blocks away, the local volunteer fire department built a new station, and a hundred yards north of that, the old station was purchased and converted into an automobile repair shop. Compared to the other two shops, that place is a model of responsible ownership. Yet the owner of the place was put through an expensive ordeal by one of the same busybodies who appear to be behind the objection to Darul Uloom.)

 One neighbor used the example of rowdies who spilled from the nearby tavern one night, leaving a trail of broken glass to be swept up.

The tavern in question has been a neighborhood trouble spot since I moved nearby in 1975. To draw a connection between that joint and any other neighborhood activity requires a huge leap of logic.

If you go back to my original blog entry on this subject, you will find a somewhat different set of citizen concerns being voiced. There's the so-called "group home" objection. This has been the pet arguing point of a handful of neighborhood busybodies for as long as I can remember. They have yet to provide any concrete evidence of the problem that they claim exists.

More to come...

The Gwynn Oak Park had been built in the 1890s as a "trolley park," a destination at the end of one of the city's trolley lines that would provide an excuse to run the cars on weekends. In addition to a wooden roller coaster and other rides, there was the Dixie Ballroom, a venue for concerts and dancing. This being the Jim Crow era, black people were excluded altogether from admission to the park. The owners had failed to see any economic advantage, and thus had not even gone the extent of providing the separate-but-equal sort of facilities to be found in some of the city parks, such as Druid Hill Park.

On July 4, 1963 the situation reached a tipping point, and a large group of demonstrators marched from the city to the amusement park, demanding the right to spend their money there. Several people were arrested, and the event is said to have been the first time that white clergymen participated in a desegregation action. Chester Wickwire, the chaplain of Johns Hopkins University, was one of the arrestees.

The park owners grudgingly admitted black customers, and the results were predictable. A rowdy element among both races provoked a few fights, and the owners apparently decided it was no longer worth keeping up the place. The condition of the park and its rides deteriorated, until Hurricane Agnes dealt it the final blow.

Fast forward to around 1987, the year I left my 9-to-5 job to become a real estate salesman. Having lived in Woodlawn for twelve years, I decided it should be my home turf as a salesman. It was not until then that I discovered bigotry still alive and well. One popular watering hole was not formally segregated, but there seemed to be an understanding that blacks were welcome to order carry-out food through the liquor store up front, but far less welcome to spend their money in the bar/dining room. Just around the corner, a block away, I found myself trapped in a conversation in which a local lawyer and a local real estate appraiser were casually discussing how they might "keep the niggers from taking over Woodlawn." It seemed to me that particular ship had already sailed, not to mention that what they were about to discuss would have been a federal crime, so I made an excuse to leave.

Now it's twenty years farther along still, and the bigots are still out in force. Ironically, it appears that the old-time white bigots have joined forces with some black ones.

The Baltimore Sun reported the story thus: [commentary added in brackets]

School's dorm proposal has neighbors worried

It would be too much like group home, some say

By Laura Barnhardt | Sun reporter

September 29, 2007

"We don't know where these kids are coming from," said Van Ross, president of the Woodlawn Community Education and Development Association. "We don't know if they are troubled young people or what. How would you like a dormitory or a group home next to your house?"

[comment: This property is located on the corner of Gwynn Oak Avenue and Dogwood Road. The property immediately abutting the proposed school is a large tract of land that has been home to a commercial diving operation, and used for the storage of heavy equipment. The owner of the diving service DID live there, until his recent death. Across the street is Hertsch's Tavern, where you can easily observe rowdy behavior in the parking lot, in addition to a number of illegally posted beer and liquor signs on the fence. Across Dogwood road are a pair of two-story office buildings, perpetually under-utilized because they were built in a flood plain, and periodically flooded.]

A zoning hearing on the religious school's plans, originally scheduled for Monday, has been postponed, in response to a request by County Councilman Kenneth N. Oliver and community leaders, who have expressed concerns about the proposal and said they want to learn more about it.

The school, Darul Uloom Maryland, is seeking approval from Baltimore County to build a dormitory for 15 to 20 students.

[The school also happens to operate a web page, which explains quite adequately its mission. My impression is that it will be the Islamic equivalent of a Rabbinical school.]

***

Del. Emmett C. Burns Jr., a Baltimore County Democrat who organized a meeting with residents this week about the boarding school, said, "We don't want to appear that we are anti-Islamic. But we don't want any more group homes in our district."

As of last year, about two-thirds of the approximately 500 group homes in Maryland were in Baltimore County. Most are in Randallstown, Woodlawn and elsewhere in the northwestern part of the county.

[Now, nobody knows precisely how many group homes exist in the state, much less where they are located, because no single government entity regulates them.  Burns, a political veteran who knows which side his bread is buttered on, knows he'd better make some kind of obesiance to Islamic people, since there are any number of Nation-of-Islam "mosques" in the Baltimore City portion of his district.]

In letters to county officials, neighbors of the boarding school said they are also concerned about businesses being allowed to open in residential areas and about possible disruptions of what they describe as a quiet, peaceful area.

"Please," one resident wrote to county officials, "don't disturb a good thing."

[This "good thing" that the anonymous letter-writer mentions includes the high school with the absolutely worst academic performance in the county, a middle school that is in the bottom 1/3 of the heap, and a community with the county's worst crime rate. As for "businesses"opening in the immediate area, there are two auto repair shops within a block of Darul Uoom, both of which maintain junkyard conditions, in violation of county law. the high school has a football "stadium" that draws, on game days, dozens of illegally parked vehicles, and whose P.A. system can be clearly heard more than a mile away. The neighborhood is dotted with day care centers, including one that for at least five years has touted itself as providing "Christain [sic] Day Care," and the enterprises that cause the worst traffic congestion are churches of the penetcostal flavor. In the so-called business park whose buildings are scattered throughout the area inside the Beltway along Security Boulevard, the worst problem is the number of medium-to-large office buildings that have remained vacant for at least a decade.]

The neighborhood's good-news rag, a monthly calling itself The Woodlawn Villager, reports the story a little differently. The rationale this paper cites is that:

...the members of the communities surrounding the proposed school noted that the additional traffic on the narrow streets would cause safety concerns for their children.

[Unfortunately, this is more than a little disingenuous. People traveling to and from the school will use Security Boulevard (a major local highway), the widest portion of Gwynn Oak Avenue (most of which is one-way), and Dogwood and Windsor Mill Roads, two other minor traffic arteries in the area. The only reason for school staff or parents to drive on the "narrow streets" would be if they lived there! Moreover, none of these concerned citizens have stepped forward to complain about the traffic and illegal parking created by the Redemption Christian Fellowship, a block away on Dogwood Road, or the New Rehoboth Baptist Church, another large congregation two blocks away on Windsor Mill Road.]

The contention that "group homes" is insupportable, at least in terms of any hard evidence. When the community meeting was announced, I queried Captain Barry Barber, commander of the local police precinct, about trouble and group homes. Here's our exchange of emails:

Captain Barber:

Does the BCPD keep track of the number of calls to so-called group homes?

***

Stan,

... We don't arbitrarily track statistics at all group homes in the Precinct.  When we start to notice an increase in calls for service, especially criminal calls, at a particular group home location, we then begin to track all calls there.

At the same time we start to target the location with increased enforcement. At the same time we contact the home administrator in a effort to relocate some of the problem residents and/or to close the facility all together.

For all other homes, if given an address, we can pull up calls for service over a given period.  We will not do this unless specifically asked to do so.

[Captain Barber continues] As for the location on Dogwood Road, it is not a group home.  The proposal is for this to be a dormitory for an Islamic School.  There are no known problems connected to the school and there is no reason to believe that its presence would cause a problem within the community.

My sense of the group home situation in general is that it has been blown out of proportion. You see a few mentally handicapped people on the streets, and of course they are the most high-functioning members of that little sub-group. I have never known one of the folks I see regularly to misbehave in any way. We also see groups of people from these homes escorted here and there--for example you'll find them eating at Old Country Buffet, or taking a trip to the bank. Again, no problem. [The same can't be said of the local high school students, who can regularly be heard swearing at each other and us homeowners on their way to and from school. One afternoon as I was letting my dog out, some high schooler accosted me from forty yards away, yelling "What the fuck are you lookin'at, cracker?" As far as I could see, he was not mentally handicapped or a Muslim. And I'm sure it was not a Muslim or a  "mental case" who scrawled "Black is Back" on the side of my car, or who made any of the three attempted thefts of my vehicles.]

What bothers me the most about the attitude towards the group homes is that it's so unrealistic. People don't want this kind of housing in their neighborhood, but they also want the Rosewood School closed, and the same for Spring Grove. Unless someone decides to propose shipping these people out of state or euthanizing them, they have to live somewhere.

The "group home" category also includes housing for people with devastating physical problems, as well as mental ones. On Carlynn Avenue, there's one poor fellow whom I've seen now and again being dropped off at the house or at Kernan's, who is completely paralyzed, apparently with cerebral palsy, and horribly atrophied. [The man is literally a "basket case."] Again, since we do not euthanize people in this country (thank God!) the choices of housing for someone so helpless boil down to either a so-called group home, which might at least look and smell like a genuine home, or [permanent] hospitalization.

Furthermore, the houses that become group homes are often functionally and economically obsolete. The former Bauhof residence, where Darul Uloom has located itself, is a prime example of this. When the Bauhof family sold it to Mr. Cignatta (who owned it until recently), the place had between six and nine bedrooms, and only one bathroom. When you have a property of that sort, there are only a few alternatives, and re-adapting it for a commercial or educational enterprise is one of the best. Others get cut up into apartments, often in violation of the zoning regulations, and still others end up vacant and boarded. Those houses don't do anything for the neighborhood.

I'm impressed by the fact that Darul Uloom has--at least thus far--not applied for tax-exempt status. As you know, many "church" operated properties get themselves a tidy little exemption, removing a valuable property from the county tax base. (One example is the Set the Captives Free center. That property is worth at least two million, and we don't see a dime in property taxes from them. Another is the New Rehoboth church, which I believe sold
for more than half a million dollars.)

 

After young Dominic Solesky suffered an attack by a vicious dog, Gardina called forth a task force to look at dog attacks. But the task force's report recommended seven things that did NOT include the breed-specific law Gardina had hoped they would call for. So he decided to ignore the report and do what he'd wanted to do all along: introduce a bill requiring the owners of specific breeds of dogs to take specific precautions. Irrespective of the individual dog's temperament, of course.

Gardina could have asked someone who knows something about dogs, by virtue of having bred, trained and handled them. Someone with a "degree" in canine behavior, in short. Baltimore County is home to at least one well regarded dog training club, whose members own all manner of canines, purebred and otherwise. He might have learned, for example, that you cannot accurately assess whether a dog is a "pit bull mix," as his bill terms it, without a genetic test.

Gardina could have gone a bit farther still, and investigated the national dog registry and dog training clubs. In addition to the American Kennel Club, two other registries thrive here. The most sane of the three when it comes to dog behavior and performance is the Continental Kennel Club, based in Louisiana. Here's an excerpt from CKC's position paper on breed-specific legislation:

Instead of labeling breeds as “dangerous”, local law enforcement should work with local animal control organizations to identify owners with dogs that show signs of aggression toward people. Owners with dogs that show signs of aggression should be the target of legislation which requires them to prove their animals are not dangerous to society. In addition, enforcing existing leash/restraint laws and animal abuse laws would go a long way in reducing dog-related incidents in the community. If necessary, communities could require mandatory temperament testing for dogs which have access to public streets and parks.

I don't happen to support that last suggestion, because mandatory temperament testing gives local governments a little too much power. But I do support the idea of temperament testing of dogs suspected of dangerous tendencies, provided it is done uniformly and by someone with no particular ax to grind. Not surprisingly, an organization and a test standard exist, in the form of the American Temperament Testing Society. (I say "not surprisingly" because pet dogs represent a huge financial enterprise in the USA. Americans spend more than $12 billion a year on dog food, grooming and boarding alone. To put that figure into perspective, the average US household spends at least three times as much on its pets as on reading material.) The ATTS is not some new, whiz-bang outfit, incidentally. It has been organized for thirty years now. The society's copyrighted standard tests a dog in ten distinct areas of behavior including behavior towards strangers, response to stimuli (including gunshots!) and aggressive/protective behavior. It's a realistic test that should not require extraordinary talent on the part of the dog or its owner, unlike the "dog sports" that you see so much about on Animal Planet.

As reported in The Jeffersonian, Gardina has been aided and abetted in this know-nothing legislation by Ken Oliver, the Council's token black member. Never mind that the bill works on the same principles as "racial profiling," which is supposed to be anathema to all sentient black people, at least as the average politician tells it. As usual, the "jeff" didn't bother to quote Oliver, but they certainly gave Gardenia  Gardina enough rope to hang himself.

Last week's article about the introduction of the bill notes that it "would require owners of pit bulls, pit bull mixes and dogs that have a history of biting to keep their dogs in covered, anchored runs. Those runs would have to be locked. The bill... also would require that the dogs covered by the bill be muzzled when out in public."

The article goes on to quote Gardina saying, "If there's a safe enclosure, there won't be a threat to another person or animal."

Now, as a guy who is always crowing about his experience on the county police force, while he was studying for his law degree, Gardina ought to know better than to make such a dumbassed statement. I know that he had some firearms training in the police academy; I have a close friend who was in the same academy class." SHE, after a career in law enforcement, personal protection, commercial security and firearms instruction, will tell you that you never trust the "safety" on a firearm, and that you always assume it is loaded and ready to be fired. Gardina's police experience may have been different, from what I have heard about it.

But viewed in the light of that training, Gardina's statement above is especially stupid. We know from experience that even when people are required by law to use trigger locks on firearms, or to store them under lock and key, often they don't, and that injuries occur as a result of those failures.

Why, then, would someone trained in firearms safety make the dunderheaded assumption that nobody will ever neglect to lock a dog run, that locks and fences will never fail, that people who are required as a matter of law to muzzle a dog will always muzzle the dog, etcetera?

Predictably, this weeks Jeffersonian carries an article [mysteriously not yet published on their web site] describing the outrage among the responsible owners of the breeds condemned as dangerous. And God help us, its headline reads "Dog owners unleash criticism of pit bull bill." It's bad enough that the legislation is in itself ill-informed and useless, without the county's self-anointed newspaper-of-record trivializing it further.

It's difficult to believe that the County Council can be more incompetent than it has been on this particular issue, but I'm certain that they will, as always, rise to the challenge.

...wearing pants low enough to show boxers or bare buttocks in one small Louisiana town means six months in jail and a $500 fine. A crackdown also is being pushed in Atlanta. And in Trenton, getting caught with your pants down may soon result in not only a fine, but a city worker assessing where your life is headed.

The more astute members of the hip-hop generation are mildly amused, wondering aloud whether workers in the construction trades--long noted for their occasional show of butt cleavage--will be caught up in these laws.

On the whole, the mainstream media is treating the matter like a big joke. The news articles generally feature some corny double entendre (see "crackdown" in the quote above), or a catchy headline, like The Examiner's editorial titled "Let the pants issue fall." The Baltimore Sun has assigned the story to Tanika White, a reporter who covers the fashion beat.

The self-anointed arbiters of taste argue that these fashions make young people unemployable, and that point cannot be argued. But getting turned away from a job interview over inappropriate attire should be message enough, unless perhaps employers have become so afraid of reprisal that they will make another excuse not to interview or hire someone. Were I in a position to interview potential employees, the baggy-pants types would hear something on the order of, "You look like an idiot.