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Tools to fight deficit Goodbye to baseball! This was the straw that broke the camel's (fan's) back. Major league baseball players went on strike Tuesday. Perhaps by the time this is published, the strike will be over. No matter. There is no excuse for a strike to take place during the middle of the season. The only possible reason for such actions by players and owners is for bargaining leverage, and to strengthen their respective positions witfi fans. It didn't work. This strike is the ultimate slap in the face to baseball fans. Forget the bargaining positions of both skies. They have forgotten us. get their excuses. Fc being played in our schools in parks. Not the semi-pro ball you can find played in your city. Not even minor league baseball should be fully forgotten. No, the baseball that should be forgotten is that once entertainini Airport concern To The Editor: I am an 11 year resident of McHenry County and I am concerned about the proposed McHenry County Airport. The citizens committee leading the •=---^Charge for an airport is made up primarily of people with aviation in­ terests. The "need" for an airport is based upon a survey of pilots and a handful of businesses. Some of these surveys were even mailed to non- county residents to take advantage of large metropolitan areas such as Elgin. Even then, the response rate was only approximately 30 percent overall, and of that number fewer still owned aircraft for either business or pleasure. I believe it is ir­ responsible for the County Board to entertain this proposal based upon the special interests of so few. Homes and farmland will be taken by Eminent Domain, many neighbor­ ing properties will fall in value. Not to mention the suffering it will cause Forget pleasure you watching this Forget the derived fr excuses have derived from graceful game when it is played at its best. Forget baseball. Not the amateur ball you find game that is supposed to be played at the major league level. Yes, it is a business. But it is in the enter­ tainment business. Like the con­ cert performer who ignores the audience and Simply takes the money from ticket sales, major baseball is abusing its fans, such a performer treated you like that at a concert, you would walk out and ignore any more of that performer's concerts. Why should baseball receive any different treatment? WASHINGTON - Some say the line-item veto is an idea whose time has come. But that wasn't the case in the Senate last month when supporters of this proven deficit- cutting tool failed to break a fili­ buster led by Sen. Mark Hatfield, R-Ore., whoprevented the propos­ al from coming to a vote. Hatfield gave a lot of high-sound­ ing "constitutional" reasons for blocking the line-item veto. But there were really only two reasons why he opposed a vote on this sensible proposal: 1. The line-item veto would allow the president to strike non-essen­ tial spending from appropriations bills that come out of the Senate Appropriations Committee, which Hatfield chairs. This would reduce Hatfield's power and authority to slip many of the thousand and one expenditures that annually go into the funding bills his panel approves. 2. If Hatfield had ended his fili­ buster, the bill would have easily passed by a clear majority. Fifty- eight senators -- including Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass. -- voted to end the filibuster and most of them would have voted to enact the measure. But those 58, while a decent ma­ jority, were still two votes shy of the 60 votes needed to cut off un­ limited debate on the bill, a parlia­ mentary device by which senators can literally talk a bill to death. This was a tragedy of consider­ able proportions because, as I out­ lined in the August issue of Read­ er's Digest, the line-item veto is a tool through which the president could substantially cut the deficit with just the stroke of a pen. Forty-three governors possess line-item veto authority and an in­ vestigation I conducted for the Di­ gest revealed that that authority has saved their taxpayers billions of dollars in wasteful and unneed- ed spending. Illinois Gov. Jim Thompson, for example, used it to slash $286 mil­ lion in fat and waste from the $16 billion budget package his legisla­ ture sent him last year. Among the less-than-vital expenditures Thompson blue-penciled from the bill: $750,000 to remodel a state Donald Lambro office building; $3.2 million for an unneeded community college li­ brary; and $4.2 million for an un- wanted regional office btpding. ~ California's Gov. Gfprge Deuk- mejian scratched a whopping $1.1 billion from his state's $21.8 billion budget last year, and then cut $725 million from this year's $25 billion budget. Deukmejian didn't do it by throwing the poor out into the street. He did it by deleting and reducing hundreds of wasteful or low-priority spending items, including: -- $5.2 million in subsidies for the little-used "Spirit of Califor­ nia" night train from Sacramento jto Los Angeles; $1.5 million to build intercity bikeways; $4 mil­ lion for the state's Public Broad­ casting Commission; and $100,000 to "study" the state's motion pic­ ture industry. When Massachusetts Gov. Mi­ chael Dukal J was handed a defi­ cit-ridden fiscal 1985 budget, he eliminated dozens of unneeded ex­ penditures to bring it into balance with state revenues. Among the items he cut: unneeded parking studies, less-than-necessary recre­ ational boat ramps and grants that would have benefited the state's richest communities. Similarly, when Tennessee's state legislature handed Gov. La­ mar Alexander a $2.6 billion bud­ get last year, he pared $7.7 million in fat and then quickly signed the rest of the bill into law. Among his cuts, Alexander deleted plans for an unneeded state university foot­ ball stadium and millions of dol­ lars in questionable highway projects. The president could do the same -- cutting non-essential pork-bar- rel items totaling billions of dollars -- if he had similar authority. Unfortunately, as long as Hat­ field and his friends persist in their opposition, the line-item will be filibustered every time it comes up. Yet, there's hope that the ene­ mies of the line-item veto can still be defeated. NORTHWEST HKRALD Good is not good »where better is 'expected. '* Thomas Fuller ROBERTA. SHAW Editor and Publisher LEONARD M. INGRASSIA Executive Editor STEVEN H. HUNTER Marketing Diroctor MICHAEL E. MORSCH News Editor/Regional DENNIS M. McNAMARA Editorial Page Editor RONALD L. STANLEY Circulation Director the affected residents. When issues like this come up, most people think it's OK as long as it doesn't affect them personally. In this case, few will be spared the noise and air pollution from jet aircraft. Chances are that any of us could be on the runway approaches. How far is far enough away so you aren't bothered by jets? One final question. Who is going to pay for the operation of the airport if the needed air traffic doesn't materialize? Hold on to your wallet Write us! , Send letters to Reader Forum, The Herald, 7803 Pyott Road, Crystal Lake IL 60014. Letters must be signed and give the author's ad­ dress and telephone number for the editor's reference. We recommend letters of 300 words or less. All let­ ters are subject to editing for clari­ ty and brevity. fellow taxpayer!!! Concerned citizens should attern the public meeting on August 14 a the McHenry County College. James < Uniot Seat belt excuses TO The Editor: Re: Doctors Urged To Issue Few Seat Belt Excuses It is bad enough that we have ig­ norant doctors. Now we have ig­ norant legislators who are out to con­ trol the ignorant doctor. What a sick society! This is what happens When you allow the hoipolloi to receive educa­ tion without first training character. All that evolves is highly trained vocational people: without depth or substance. One essential hortatory - cease!! God spare us all! Mrs. Karen Hardtke Cary asr SWTE LEGISLATURES] DO. i DRIVE How to fight the pornographers WASHINGTON - During this past term the U.S. Supreme Court wrestled one more time with the problem of defining pornography. The court lost. It was not its finest hour. The case was Brockett v. Spo­ kane Arcadez, decided June 19. The opinion provides fresh confir­ mation of a view I have often ex­ pressed -- that the way to get at the evils of pornography is not through laws that punish pornog­ raphy. Every attempt to define and to punish "obscenity" results in a march into the murky swamps of the First Amendment. So it was in the case at hand. In 1982 the state of Washington adopted a "moral nuisance" law. The act undertakes to punish the sale or exhibition of "lewd mat­ ter." The statute says that lewd matter is synonymous with ob­ scene matter, and it defines ob­ scene matter as matter that, on the whole, appeals to a "prurient" interest in sexual acts. Finally, the act defines prurient matter as "that which incites lasciviousness or lust." Note the "or lust." Four days after the statute be­ came effective, a group of dealers in X-rated stuff brought suit in a U.S. District Court to enjoin en­ forcement. The case wound up in the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where the statute was found unconstitutionally over­ broad. The court's reasoning was that the word "lust" could have two meanings. There is the bad kind of lust, which arouses shame­ ful or morbid desire. But there is also "good, old-fashioned, healthy" lust. Material that mere­ ly arouses a "wholesome, human reaction" is protected by the First Amendment. After all, the circuit court ob­ served, if everything that aroused merely normal lust were declared illegal, the next step would be to prosecute dress designers, per­ fumers and manufacturers of soft drinks, soap suds and automobiles. By defining prurient in terms of lasciviousness "or lust," the Wash­ ington legislature had fatally erred. The whole statute was thrown out. The U.S. Supreme Court re­ versed. Speaking through Justice White, six members of the court agreed that the statute could be preserved simply by excising that troublesome word "lust." State au­ thorities may now proceed, if they wish, to prosecute under their moral nuisance act. The statute continues to speak in such terms JamMJ. ] mtm T PPH KHpatrick as average person, contemporary community standards, prurient in­ terest, patently offensive, normal sexual acts, lewd exhibition, and "serious literary, artistic, politi­ cal, or scientific value." Every one of those terms positively invites constitutional attack. Consider the different approach now being tested in California. At the instance of David A. Roberti, president pro tem of the state sen­ ate, the legislature in 1982 enacted a law that mandates a three-year prison sentence for hiring people to perform sex acts. In a contro­ versial test case, a Van Nuys jury recently convicted Harolcr Free­ man, 49, producer of a 90-minute movie called "Caught from Be­ hind, Part II." The defendant acknowledged that he had produced the film and that the women who participated were paid from $200 to $800 a day for their services. Nevertheless he contended that they were ac­ tresses expressing their art, and as such were entitled to constitu­ tional protection under the First Amendment. The trial court rejected that de­ fense. The women who appear in sexually explicit X-rated films are not "actresses" by any stretch of the imagination. In that fine old biblical word, they are whores. It is not their hearts and minds that are employed, but parts of the anatomy a bit farther south. To prosecute their employer as a pimp involves no interpretation of subjective words and phrases. Did this man hire these women to per­ form these acts? Pornography is a big business, estimated by the Los Angeles Times to produce outlays of $550 million a year in Los Angeles alone. There is no way that these films can be defended in the name of their literary or artistic merits, for they have none. They tend to rot the social fabric, as the Su­ preme Court said some years ago, and society is not compelled by the Constitution to tolerate them. National editorial sampler Urban dwellers facing one of the newest horrors of city living -- we refer here to those yard-long, 50- watt portable radios sometimes called "boom boxes" -- will take heart from the way New York City is handling the problem. Officials of the Big Apple, where many of the deafening machines assault the eardrums of innocent bystanders, have declared "radio- free zones" in which the noisemak- ers are banned. There's one at Central Park, for example, in the Sheep Meadow. Persons who insist on deploying these offensive weapons within the zones are subject to a $50 fine and may have their radios impounded by New York's finest; Once again Mayor Edward Koch, who announced the policy at a press conference last week, has risen to the occasion. Civic leaders elsewhere who confront the samfc menace would do well to adopt his reasonable response. ~ "The law doesn't restrict your right to have a radio; it simply restricts your right to play a radio in areas where it might annoy oth­ er people," Koch explained. That's terrific. And if we didn't think it might be misunderstood we'd shout "Hear! Hear!" (Scrlpps Howard News Service) Page 4 NORTHWEST HERALD Section B Thursday, August t, 19*5 Reader Forum