Recent Articles

Recent Articles By Jeannette Batz

  • Hard Case
    Marie Clark's group-therapy sessions are a sex offender's worst nightmare. Her down-and-dirty approach gives some of her colleagues the willies too.
  • Wait Elephant
    Flora prepares to pack her trunk once more -- but where's she headed?
  • Class War
    Marty Rochester wages war against the dumbing-down of public education -- even in the best of schools
  • A Matter of Honor
    Vets call on the military's top brass not to fight
  • Who's Afraid of Anthony Shahid?
    He's a hero to some, a pain to others. Either way, he makes people very nervous.

Recent Articles By Melinda Roth

Recent Articles By Richard Byrne

Recent Articles By D.J. Wilson

  • Slayer
    Could the mayor's uncanny habit of making enemies wreck the charter-reform effort?
  • The Worst of D.C.
    Shock jock's found a new way to annoy people
  • Demolition Man
    To save St. Louis public schools, Bill Roberti and his band of hired guns plan to blow things up. Who'll pick up the pieces when they're gone?
  • Don't Go There
    Metropolis' North St. Louis pub crawl could be just the beginning and the season's over for Coach Brady
  • Foul Ball
    Baseball coach Jim Brady has been fighting his bosses in the UMSL athletic department for seven years. And he thought colon cancer was a pain in the ass.

Recent Articles By Thomas Crone

Recent Articles By Safir Ahmed

  • Selling Out
    To save Maplewood, some residents have to go
  • Cleaning House
    The reasons we're resented aren't as simple as President Bush would have you believe
  • The Big Fix
    Public schools are broke all over, so why are only St. Louis and Kansas City getting charter schools?
  • A Black Eye Affair
    A minority firm takes a hit for no good reason
  • Black and Blue
    The conflicting versions of the shooting by police of a teenager widen the rift between cops and African-Americans

Recent Articles By C.D. Stelzer

  • Maybe in Memphis
    Jim Green, ex-con and government snitch, says he and his buddies from the Bootheel took part in the plot to kill Martin Luther King Jr. Trouble is, Green's been lying all his life -- so why should anybody believe him now?
  • Norm the Dinosaur
    Despite nearly a half-century of loyal service, Sinclair says goodbye to one of its finest
  • The Anarchists' Cookbook
    They make bread, not bombs, at the Black Bear Bakery
  • Stalking Back
    Trying to collect a half-million-dollar debt from Floyd Warmann, the hunter becomes the hunted
  • Cementing a Deal
    A giant quarry and the world's largest cement kiln are being welcomed by Ste. Genevieve County. But the operation may leave St. Louis gasping for air.

National Features

  • Phoenix New Times
    Canine Crusaders

    That drug-sniffing dog up ahead? He may not be your best friend.

    By Ray Stern
  • Broward-Palm Beach New Times
    The Muscle Men

    Thanks to a string of Florida "anti-aging clinics," baseball's steroid scandal isn't limited to superstars.

    By Michael J. Mooney
  • Miami New Times
    Picked On

    Farm workers earn nada in America's green-bean capital.

    By Janine Zeitlin
  • Village Voice
    "Why I'm No Longer a Brain-Dead Liberal"

    An election-season essay from one of America's greatest playwrights.

    By David Mamet

KASEN THE JOINT: It's rare that the story of a radical radio station can be told within a calendar year, but that's what happened at KKWK (1380 AM) -- the brainchild of local talk-radio gadflies Mark Kasen and Onion Horton. Kasen brokered an amazing Rube Goldbergesque deal that saw local radio giant Emmis Broadcasting donate a station to local minister the Rev. B.T. Rice, which Rice then allowed Kasen and Horton to run. The motley crew of malcontents that the dynamic duo chose to staff the talk slots early this year quickly landed the station in hot water, as hosts traded insults -- some racially charged -- over the airwaves. In July, Rice cut his losses and traded in the gab for jazz. But the story doesn't end there. Kasen and Horton are now suing the law firm and the lawyers (Lee Platke and Stuart Berkowitz) who helped put together the deal, claiming that they were wrongly aced out of the station. What do Kasen and Horton want? They want the station back, of course. And the radio carousel spins on.... (RB)

POL POSITIONING: Back in September, the RFT sat down for an interview with respected local TV reporter and anchor Don Marsh, who was retiring from the TV biz to run In the Line of Duty, a police-training-video business. Among the most provocative things Marsh said in the lengthy interview was that "the political coverage on local television today is the ad. That's it." The RFT decided to see whether Marsh was right about that, and our resulting survey of local television news one month before the 1998 elections found that the eminent TV newsman was completely vindicated. Only Marsh's former station, KDNL (Channel 30), ran more than one minute of local political news at 10 p.m. for the entire week. KMOV (Channel 4) didn't run any. Veteran GOP political consultant Don Sipple (who headed up Bob Dole's presidential run in 1996) put it bluntly to the RFT: "You want to control the agenda with paid advertising." In 1998, that was all too true on the local TV screen. (RB)

TRIPPED UP: You've heard so much about the nation's ongoing political saga of 1998 -- President Bill Clinton's affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky -- that you've probably gagged on it a few times already. So let's not rehash the seamy details (the dress, the tapes, the oral sex) at length once again. History has rarely been made from less substantive stuff, but that's the funny thing about history -- people shape it with their immediate actions, but they don't get to write it themselves. In the early days of the scandal, the RFT went to Washington to get a firsthand view of the madness, and David Carr -- editor of the Washington City Paper -- summed up the year succinctly and correctly only a week into the scandal. Noting that the story had advanced little beyond the allegation that Clinton and Lewinsky had a sexual relationship, Carr said that "the template of the story has been down since day one. Now (the media) has got to take these little balls of lint that are left and roll them into something." Carr was absolutely correct, but who could have predicted that we'd have such a big ball of lint (and an impeachment) as this misbegotten political year draws to a close? (RB)

NOTHING A FEW BILLION DOLLARS COULDN'T FIX: There are three things you just have to do, and "pay taxes" is not one of them. You have to die, you have to wait to die and, while you're waiting to die, you have to hear why it's absolutely essential for the St. Louis region that Lambert Airport be expanded. W-1W is the $2.6 billion answer, whatever the question is. Of course, don't ask the pilots' association and the air traffic controllers, because what do they know? They only fly the planes and make sure they take off and land safely. Both groups expressed concern and opposition about W-1W, but never mind -- the fix, uh, the deal, was done. This year the Federal Aviation Administration issued its "record of decision," which said, basically, "Yeah, go ahead, if this is what you want to do." Meanwhile, across the river, the $300 million MidAmerica Airport opened near Scott Air Force Base. Surrounded by cornfields, soon to be linked with MetroLink and waiting for flights, the new airport stands virtually empty while the bulldozers are idling in Bridgeton. But just wait. Even Lambert's estimates say its current average delay of six minutes will be decreased only slightly and for a short time by the expansion; by 2015 the delays will have grown back to six minutes. By then, some enterprising airline may start using MidAmerica for point-to-point discount flights, thereby relieving Lambert of some of its congestion -- something that could have been done many years, and several billion dollars, ago. (DJW)

DEVOLUTION OF DESEG: Sometimes the best reason for something is that the world would be worse without it. That may sound like a weak argument to support the 15-year-old St. Louis school-desegregation program, but consider what the city, and the metropolitan area, would be like if the estimated several billion dollars of extra state aid hadn't been given to area schools. Or if the tens of thousands of African-American city students hadn't been given a choice to attend suburban schools. Or if white suburban adolescents hadn't been immersed in perhaps the only integrated environment they had all week. Sure, the black kids all sit together in the cafeteria, but that's just lunch. This was the year that Missouri Attorney General Jeremiah "Jay" Nixon's obsessive effort to bring the issue to a head succeeded, if you want to call that success. The Legislature crafted SB 781, a bill -- somewhat flawed -- to provide continued funding for deseg, thereby making a settlement possible. Trouble is, for the plan to continue in any manner, a sales-tax increase has to be passed by city voters in February. Even if that passes, the most optimistic estimate is that the city schools will have a $10 million shortfall in funding. So the troubled city schools will have to make do with less money. If the sales-tax proposal fails, then it's back to the judge and then -- maybe, finally -- a full trial on the issue. (DJW)

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