Stripper’s last laugh

A few weeks ago, the media jumped all over the story of Capital Christian School in Rancho Cordova kicking out the 5-year-old daughter of Christina Silvas because church leaders discovered that mom was a stripper at Gold Club Centerfolds.

The church people said prancing around in all her divine natural glory was un-Christian. Silvas said it ain’t easy for a single mom to pay tuition and be a good mom while flipping burgers, and that her daughter was being punished for mom’s actions.

The two sides back-and-forthed a bit, then announced a compromise by which Silvas would quit stripping at least until the school year ended, the school would let the kid stay and even waive tuition, and everybody was happy, right?

Well, last week, Silvas appeared on the Playboy Web site, posing nude and answering questions.

She said she’d quit stripping, but didn’t make any promises about keeping her bare breasts out of national magazines. Hilarious! No word yet on the church’s reaction, either to Silvas posing, or telling Playboy about the church members who frequent Centerfolds.

More obscenity: Remember Assembly Bill 680? Maybe not, but the supporters and opponents of this bill—which would make the Sacramento area a test market for regional tax sharing in California—sure haven’t forgotten, and they’ve been working their behind-the-scenes angles in preparation for a final showdown in the Senate this summer.

Last week, regionalism guru Myron Orfield rolled his dog and pony show through town at the request of ACORN and others who back the bill as a means of lessening the intra-city competition for big sales tax generators.

Orfield is a state senator from Minnesota, where a Minneapolis-area tax sharing system has been working well for many years. It’s worked so well that Orfield has decided to make an industry of the concept, writing two books and traveling all over the country to consult in areas considering going regional.

This guy’s got all kinds of charts and studies showing how competition hurts regions and cooperation helps (check it out at www.metroresearch.org for details). But what Bites found interesting was his dig at the League of California Cities, which he found more intractable than any leagues of cities in the 40 jurisdictions where he’s consulted.

“The League of Cities just says no here,” Orfield said, noting that in most other areas, the concerns of cities deal with specifics and mechanics, but not the basic concept. His research shows that about 18 percent of cities benefit over the long haul from the competitive system—wealthy cities with the property tax base to subsidize the chase for sales tax dollars—and these happen to be the ones in control of the League of California Cities.

Chalk it up to good ol’ American shortsighted self-interest.

Our baby, their bathwater: Bites’ old nemesis, Walter Mueller, is back, and he’s causing a stir that is taking down SN&R with it. Herr Mueller put out another issue of his Community News, a vile little hatesheet that skewers Jews and people of color while singing the praises of the Third Reich.

People were understandably upset to see this thing sneak back into polite society, so they complained to the businesses that carried it, such as the Raley’s supermarket in El Dorado Hills and the Starbucks at Town and Country Village, both of which rid it from their premises.

Unfortunately, the Starbucks managers decided that they couldn’t exclude a paper filled with articles denying the Holocaust ever happened and still allow other papers like SN&R there, so they kicked everybody out. This is an issue fraught with First Amendment pitfalls, because Mueller definitely has a right to publish. But business people also decide what papers they’ll allow. In fact, there have been many businesses that have refused to carry SN&R because of its adult ads. But if the managers at Starbucks don’t see a difference between SN&R and Mueller’s rants, then they’ve been sucking down too many Frappuccinos.