Las Vegas Gleaner

Grandma seems awfully happy with hers

"Why the angst over government-run health care?" I ask in a column over at CityLife.

Palin-Ensign 2012!

Disgraced and grotesque John Ensign could serve out his current term as the least significant person in the United States Senate free and clear of any and all legal complications, some beltway kids are reporting.

Ensign, who has always sucked very hard, briefly stepped into the glare of the national mainstream media's kleig lights (do they still use klieg lights?) earlier this year when it was learned that he got his filthy rich parents to pay his Aunt Judy to have sex with him.

Well, it turns out Uncle Doug is still miffed -- even after Ensign served as his agent, got on the horn with some cronies and juiced up a few phony but lucrative lobbying contracts for poor mistreated ol' Doug.

As might be indicated by the words "agent," "cronies," juiced," "phony," "lucrative" and "lobbying" (to say nothing of "Ensign"), that was maybe probably against the law.

But now "sources" in Eric Holder's Justice Department "privately signal that the case is a low-priority matter for them." Which means that maybe the only formal consequences Ensign will face will be those rendered by a Senate Ethics Committee investigation. Or as they say in Washington, "none."

C'mon, DOJ.  No matter how venal or atrocious Ensign's actions, it is incumbent upon the American legal system to extend Ensign the same rights as would be afforded any other person charged with crimes in a U.S. court of law. He deserves -- repeat, deserves -- a fair trial, and swift justice. And to all you naysayers, well, America has nothing to fear from the risk that John Ensign will get an opportunity to spew his vile and twisted ideology in a federal courtroom.

UPDATE: Should have mentioned, s'pose, that Uncle Doug "speaks out(!)" on Nightline (which evidently is still on the air) for your viewing pleasure.

Area publication sets standard for cutting-edge reader interactivity

Hmm, carry the two, now round, and ... there. The Congressional Budget Office has finally assigned a numerical value to the Harry Reid Government Rollover Health Care Bill of 2009. It's 42. Or $849 billion. Or whatever. Anyway, now "all eyes," as they say in the grown-up media, turn to the rest of the Senate to see what the next exciting development will be in this epic saga to fundamentally reform ... ooh, look, Sarah Palin made a present for Bill Kristol.

While we wait to see if Reid has enough votes to even get the bill to the floor so the Senate can begin turning it into tort reform, the ability to sell insurance across state lines and tax cuts for the private sector entrepreneurial heroes who are the true creators of all the jobs and prosperity in America,  here's a sort of off-topic question: What's up with the Las Vegas Sun website allowing readers to comment on stories, unless the stories mention Harry Reid in the headline?

Sure, Sun poohbah Brian Greenspun totally wants to gay marry Harry, and vice versa, and more power to them. But sheltering and coddling a single elected official is, you know, unfair (unless being "fair" means puffing up and protecting one side while denigrating or ignoring others, i.e., the interpretation of the word at Fox News). And why stop at Reid? Why not protect Rep. Dina Titus from bitter hordes of online kooks and flakes, too? Or every other politician whose appearance in a headline is sure to garner oodles of opprobrium and ill-will from the commentariat, like, say, Jim Gibbons, or John Ensign? 

Yes, the Las Vegas Review-Journal and its publisher are waging a clumsy jihad on Reid. But that doesn't, or shouldn't, automatically mean the Sun has to compensate with a ham-handed bias of its own.

Besides, Reid is a scrappy little fighter (his autobiography says so) and the most powerful Nevadan in the whole history of ever (his ads say so). Presumably he can withstand obtuse rants on the internets from assorted teabaggers, Palindrones and staffers from two-bit Republican senatorial campaigns, no?

Not that any of this is your lowly Gleaner's bidness, mind. Just find it squirrelly, s'all.

UPDATE: "The Sun has disabled comments on stories about Sens. Harry Reid and John Ensign for the last few weeks," so as to have a "cooling off" period, says a statement the organization posted Thursday afternoon. Makes sense. If the outraged ignorant teabaggers have proved nothing else, it's that they're sure to "cool down" as the campaign heats up.

Anyway, the Sun statement is followed by a comment, posted by a genuine reader, presumably, saying something bad (maybe? who reads these things?) about Harry, indicating that comments have been undisabled. Or reabled. Or whatever. So there, batshit crazy paranoid Nevada wingtards. Don't say the evil commie atheist Gleaner never did anything nice for you.

Btw, the Sun statement says comments had been disabled on Ensign stories all this time, too, though I could have sworn the Nov. 8 Ensign story I linked to above, which currently shows no comments, had 45 comments on it earlier Thursday. That was pretty much why I linked to it, or so I thought. Oh well. Must be my mistake.

UPDATED UPDATE: Oh, I forgot about how Yahoo's cached pages might not be refreshed as regularly or frequently as Google's. So not to be bitchy about it or anything (well, maybe a little) but just, you know, for the record:

World's most important conservative hates Nevada

Some person or persons took the initiative to compile an index of Wingnut Barbie's Big Fat Book, and in a blistering confirmation of Nevada GOP irrelevance, not a single Nevada Republican or conservative is mentioned.

Not Ensign, Gibbons or Muth.

Not Heller.

Not even Sherm Frederick!

Nevada's snubbed and ignored right-wingers will also be interested to know the book that launched Sarah Palin's Fur Collar Comedy Tour includes a reference to that filthy secularist and radical, Thomas Paine, but not Paine's polemical combatant, conservative patriarch Edmund Burke. I know! WTF? Let's just say Newt Gingrich would never commit such an oversight.

Oh wait a minute, there he is on page 252. "Eddie Burke."

Still. No Heidi Harris!

After years of practice, Senate Democrats master art of being tedious

Conservative Senate Democrats insist that any health legislation reaching Barack Obama's desk must be small, deferred and insurance industry-friendly enough to guarantee that Democrats lose hundreds of elections in 2010 if not beyond.

So rather than doing something popular like, oh, letting people buy into Medicare if they want, the all-powerful Senate "moderates" will make sure that public health insurance options are extended to no one, and instead force everyone to go buy an inadequate but overpriced policy from a private company whose commitment to collecting premiums is matched only by its dedication to denying claims.

Why are a handful of senators empowered to transform what should be a landmark once-in-a-generation Democratic legislative victory into a bill that, at best, will provide some modest protections to the already insured and at its disgusting worst transfer wealth from taxpayers to an unaccountable insurance industry, succeeding mostly in pissing people off and thus spoiling any chance of meaningful reform -- yet again -- for another 15 or 20 years?

The Senate's storied procedural arcania doesn't account for all of the inability, or unwillingness, of  leadership to even attempt to enforce discipline on Senate Democrats. And a precious regard for Senate prerogative isn't confined to Democrats -- all senators, regardless of party, are convinced that they are very, very special and oh so clever and wise and should be treated with deference reserved in earlier times and other places only for dukes or earls or some other variety of useless and insufferable aristocratic fop.

Having said that, Republican Senators are also not afraid to muscle their own around, as they did a few years back when they told Arlen Specter he could chair the Judiciary Committee if and only if he vowed to play hardball to seat Bush administration judicial nominations.

Democrats, by contrast ... well, Sarah Palin's vice-presidential debate helper, Joe Lieberman, still chairs the Homeland Security Committee.

There is nothing new about dainty Democratic senatorial decorum, as I was reminded while reviewing an old interview I did with Harry Reid in June of 2001 when he was then the Senate's second-highest ranking Democrat. A dozen Democratic senators had voted to give the newly installed president, George W. Bush, a $1.35 trillion tax cut catering mostly to the rich. Reid and the Democratic Leader, Tom Daschle, were against the tax cut, but Reid explained -- or more accurately, boasted -- that Democratic senators were free to do whatever they wanted:

"I think the thing that Tom Daschle and I have been able to do is keep our caucus together. Never in the history, in the last 100 years, have we had a Democratic Party that stuck together like ours has done in the Senate."

"We really get along well," he added.

All that togetherness, the senator said, is due to Daschle's non-confrontational, listen-to-everybody approach. Daschle doesn't do anything without running it past the rest of the Democratic senators, Reid said.

"If anywhere along the line, there is someone in the leadership, if one person disagrees, it's gone. And if there's some vocal opposition in the caucus it's over with. So when Daschle walks out...he's got the full support of the caucus. "

Reid at the time also ladled praise on the now mostly defunct Democratic Leadership Council for shifting the party to the right. Reid approved of that repositioning, because ...

"for too long we were a party that was represented by the far left. And now we have some moderates who have places also."

The party has "some real liberals," Reid suggested, naming Sens. Barbara Boxer, Paul Wellstone, Patrick Leahy and Ted Kennedy. "They're very vocal, they're very determined to get their view across.

"But once a decision's been made, they're part of the team."

So Democratic senators "really (got) along well" as long as the "moderates" got to vote however they wanted and the "real liberals" hushed.

Later would come 9-11 followed by what was for all practical purposes the disappearance of the Democratic Party as a going congressional concern. When Daschle lost his seat in 2004, Reid became the leader of a Democratic Senate caucus that was smaller than at any time since the administration of Herbert Hoover, and I've occasionally wondered if he got the job because nobody else wanted it.

One also wonders if Reid's view of Senate Democratic dynamics has changed with the times, or if "keep(ing) our caucus together" still means the freedom of senators to vote however they want whenever they want, and if he still takes progressive senators for granted.

One thing is for certain: throughout the health care debate, Reid has never asserted of conservative Democrats that "once a decision's been made, they're part of the team."

And to think politicians pander to these people

Sixty-seven percent of your fellow 'Mericans surveyed for an AP poll said they favor changes to the health care system "requiring that everyone has at least some health insurance."

Sixty-four percent of those surveyed in the same poll said they oppose "a law that would require every person to have health insurance, and pay money to the government as a penalty if they do not, unless the person is very poor."

Poor pacing threatens to undermine enjoyment of Sarah Palin Comedy Tour '09

Well, this is disappointing. Your Gleaner, somewhat to my own surprise, has been looking forward to America and Its Media's Full-on Farcefest starring Wingnut Barbie. And yet even before it starts in earnest, I'm already tiring of it. It's not unlike the letdown that comes when you allow yourself to get into the War on Christmas spirit too early, and then by the time Christmas Eve rolls around you just feel hollow and older and sad.

The AP reports that Mooselini has made a bunch of factual errors in her storybook, and off the top of my head I'm having trouble imagining some item of Palinalia that would be less newsworthy. Well, it's bound to get better, which is to say more batshit crazy, in the coming days.

Shortly after she quit that one job, when all the pundits were saying she was toast, I wrote a column explaining why she had a good shot at the 2012 GOP presidential nomination (but not of course the presidency itself). Given the collective hysteria that passes for the New Republican Party, her political prospects only seem to be brightening.

Having said that, there must be at least an equal likelihood that by 2012, Palin and Clod or whatever his name is will piss away all their new riches on overpriced blood-sucking hangers-on, his and hers hunting helicopters with leather seats and titanium gun mounts, warehouses full of bad wildlife art, the world's largest ruby, etc., and be forced into bankruptcy.

Could go either way, is all I'm saying.

Frightening elderly thrash-rocker stalks nice Nevada congresslady

The 60 Plus Association, which is some thing for wingnut geezers (or should that be geezer wingnuts?), is running ads against several Democrats who voted for the House health care reform bill, including Nevada's very own Dina Titus.

The group is fronted by Pat Boone, who apparently is still alive. Boone was briefly famous in the middle of one of the centuries before this one for being a polite clean-cut singer of trite ditties who was wholly devoid of any musical taste or artistic sensibility. He later would deteriorate into a destructive lifestyle of booze, drugs and whores but, ironically, still no taste or sensibility. Or not? Not that familiar with his biography really.

Anyway, the 60 Plus Association has a poem which suggests the capacity for appreciating literature among senior citizens is comparable to an average 5 year-old's, so that's pretty condescending and offensive. But mostly I'm just seizing this opportunity to run that picture of Pat during his metal period.

Meantime, the Constitution clearly grants newspapers the right to suck

You may have noticed that now the wingnuts are vowing to get their activist judges on the Supreme Court to legislate from the bench and kill any health care bill that becomes law.

There actually are some intriguing questions regarding the constitutionality of forcing people to buy insurance. Needless to say, a recent editorial from the Las Vegas Review-Journal and Right-Wing Masturbatorium fails to engage those questions either thoughtfully or meaningfully, instead marveling that Nancy Pelosi doesn't take extremist conservative talking points seriously. And in a blog post, the RJ's editor -- his customary intellectual acuity on blazing display -- echoes the simplistic teabagger contention that anything and everything not specifically authorized by the Constitution is ipso facto unconstitutional.

Well, the space program is boring anyway. And after Roberts and Scalia declare Social Security and Medicare unconstitutional, geezers will die much more quickly, thus saving society jillions of dollars, no?

Dean Heller, who is a congressman, more or less embraces the R-J/teabagger party line, explaining "I don’t know anywhere in the Constitution where it requires a citizen here in this country to have health care."

John Ensign, America's least significant senator, has always fallen for ultra-conservative pseudo-scholarship as if it was as natural as getting your parents to pay for your sex. "Most of what the United States government does is unconstitutional," Ensign sort of famously said nearly a decade ago.

Writing about Ensign's comment at the time, then-R-J columnist Steve Sebelius (though hard to believe now, the paper's opinion pages used to be much more willing to publish non-wingnut views) wondered if Ensign's assertion meant that "he'll vote against each and every appropriations bill that contains any extra-constitutional fat."

Alas, Ensign would later demonstrate how rules that apply to mere mortals don't apply to him because Goddy McGod made him better than everyone else and daddy has a yummy checkbook. So Ensign probably has his own version of the Constitution, a special occult edition he sneaked out with him when his fellow fanatical religious extremists kicked him out of their shadowy C Street compound. In that version, no doubt the founders specifically signed off on each and every one of the quarter-billion dollars in earmarks that Ensign has requested in just the last two years, to say nothing of $415 million to restore Lake Tahoe.

(Your Gleaner is no constitutional scholar, but I think a case could be made that Ensign's right to bone his best friend's wife is covered under the Ninth Amendment. But I digress.)

Anyway, if anyone cares, a wingnut stab at a serious argument (as opposed to the superficial assertions rendered by Nevada Republicans and their pet newspaper) against the constitutionality of health care reform has been made maybe most notably by these guys. For a clear and convincing explanation of why those guys are horribly wrong, see this guy. (Or this guy. Or even this guy.)

Of course, if the Democrats would quit screwing around and just extend Medicare to the entire population (Harry Reid, however unwittingly, is already stumbling toward a means of paying for it), constitutional questions regarding individual mandates would be moot. Plus the Democrats would win every election for the next 30 years.

NV gubernatorial candidate vows to start arms race with America

For years, North Las Vegas Mayor Mike Montandon has shilled for the problem gambling industry, er, neighborhood casinos and also served as a reliable yes-man for the sprawl lobby. Naturally he thinks he should be governor.

But it turns out Montandon is also something of a constitutional scholar, as he demonstrates in an essay he wrote for his campaign blog:

Today, supporters of the second amendment fight daily against what they believe are attempts to take away arms. The reality is that fight has already been lost in the purpose for which the amendment was written. As soon as we began to allow a difference between the effectiveness of the weapons that the States (citizens) could have vs. the Federal government, the battle was lost. Citizens involved can continue to fight the small fights, over ammunition rationing, concealed vs. open carry, etc., but they are just distractions. They distract us from the big issue. While we may have the ability to defend ourselves against our own ilk gone awry, we have lost the ability to defend ourselves from a Federal government gone awry. Without that ability, we are simply left to stretch out the loss of our other rights through the exercise of our best diplomatic abilities.

Seriously. How can Americans fend off an assault from all-gay armored infantry divisions led by Nancy Pelosi if they don't have weapons of the same "effectiveness" as the enemy, i.e., the military forces of the United States of America? Why are Americans outraged over a puny concern like "ammunition rationing" (!?) when big government has already trampled on the individual's Second Amendment right to mid-range missiles armed with nuclear warheads?

Montandon also writes that the Second Amendment is "crystal clear," and your lowly Gleaner envies the candidate's certainty. Frankly, sometimes it seems like the more I examine the nation's founding and contemplate what the framers were up to, the fuzzier things get. And the professionals are less help than one might hope. The nation's founding "involved processes of collective decision-making whose outcomes necessarily reflected a bewildering array of intentions and expectations, hopes and fears, genuine compromises and agreements to disagree," writes Jack Rakove in Original Meanings. And Rakove admonishes would-be diviners of the framers' "true intentions" to "never forget that it is a debate they are interpreting"

But Montandon's got it all figured out. And wouldn't you know? In contending that "the purpose for which the amendment was written" was to allow citizens to defend themselves "from a federal government gone awry," Montandon, unwittingly, perhaps, is embracing a militia-centric view of the amendment that at least brushes up against the interpretation favored here at Gleaner HQ. 

That interpretation was more or less captured by Saul Cornell in A Well-Regulated Militia. The "original understanding" of the Second Amendment, Cornell writes, was as "a civic right that guaranteed that citizens would be able to keep and bear those arms needed to meet their legal obligation to participate in a well-regulated militia."

Alas, it wasn't long before state militias were supplanted by a federal army and, eventually, a national guard. And so the original, contextual intent of the Second Amendment (though not the contemporary bastardization of it) became a relic, just like the the one that comes after it (as you may have noticed, politicians don't scramble over each other vowing to protect our Third Amendment rights). Or as Richard Urviller and William Merkel put it in The Militia and the Right to Arms, the Second Amendment "fell silent."

But if Montandon wants to recover the original meaning as he evidently sees it, reestablish a vigorous, active and purposeful state militia capable of standing up to the U.S. military, and force able-bodied Nevada citizens to muster at Sunset Park whenever they're told with their own military assault rifles, shoulder-launched missiles and surface-to-air artillery, purchased at their own expense, well, that should liven up the campaign trail.

One suspects, however, that he's just launching a bunch of hard-edged pro-gun rhetoric in the hope that it will arouse locals with more guns than sense and supply a spark to a flat candidacy that has thus far excited exactly no one.

*   *   *

One other smallish point about the framers and their firearms ... 

The founders were politicians, not gods. Blindly assigning infallibility to things that were written more than two centuries ago is foolish (that goes for the Federalist essays, though I'll leave the debate about Hamilton's proto-authoritarianism for another day). The founders disagreed among themselves, they changed their minds, and whenever anyone (it's usually somebody from the right) starts yammering on about "the founders believed" this or "the framers said" that, m'kay, Which founder? When (for instance, during revolution or ratification)? And most devilishly of all, Why?

So dusting off a snippet of something some founder or other said or wrote to make a point is rarely if ever as conclusive as its practitioners might think. But what the hell, here's one anyway (cited from Cornell): As a Virginia legislator in 1785, James Madison proposed a bill on deer hunting that also  penalized anyone who "shall bear a gun out of his inclosed ground, unless whilst performing military duty."

Hmm. Sounds like gun control.

Madison "understood the difference between bearing a gun for personal use and for the common defense," Cornell writes. "The state clearly retained the right to regulate the use of firearms and differentiated between the level of restrictions that might be placed on bearing a gun and bearing arms."

Maybe Madison's views on regulating weapons had transformed (changing outlooks was not out of character for him) by the time he drafted the Second Amendment four years later. 

Or perhaps the Second Amendment really wasn't intended to mean what today's gun rights enthusiasts think it means.

In any case, Montandon's gun worship may garner him a superior rating from the National Rifle Association. If Madison were running for office today, well, hard to say.

Area publication earns much-warranted recognition

A massacre of sorts has been reported at the Moonie-owned Washington Times -- hard to believe this type of thing doesn't happen at that organization more often, really -- in which the official newspaper of the Republican Party (relics, both) has axed the company chairman, publisher and CFO, with others on the way out.

But as Sean would say, let not your heart be troubled. The national media landscape is still littered with the likes of, well, Sean, as well as untold hundreds if not thousands of other cogs in the right wing echo machine.

Take the Las Vegas Review-Journal, for instance...

...or take it to task, in the case of Progress Now's new website, "LVJournal Review," which is dedicated to monitoring the foibles, oddities, biases, exorbitant influence of paid wingnuts and other surreal ailments, each more tragicomic than the other, currently plaguing the local dead tree of record. 

'Tis all a worthy task, to be sure, but -- and this can not be emphasized enough -- you simply must visit the site to behold the startling and never-before-seen photograph of R-J publisher Sherm Frederick as he ponders the enemy (or as they call it in the R-J newsroom, the 21st century).

Titus, Berkley make sense; Heller, by contrast, is a Republican

"Today America is less free," said Dean Heller in response to House passage of "the Pelosi healthcare takeover bill."

Meantime, back in the reality-based community, Nevada is fortunate to have two other members of the House of Representatives who aren't knee-jerk wingnuts. And in a welcome demonstration of decency and sense, both Dina Titus and Shelley Berkley voted for the bill.

Now all eyes turn to Blanche Lincoln, Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu and the rest of the radical moderates in the Senate whose passion for being perceived as centrists is in itself a form of ugly extremism. (Putrid Joe Lieberman is not included in that group, because his filthy and disgusting behavior long ago descended to venal and twisted motivations against which mere political posturing seems noble).

But in the meantime, good on Dina and Shelley -- especially Dina, who resisted the urge to cave lest someone in the media call her a liberal or a socialist or whatever. Many of her Democratic colleagues who, like Titus, will be in tough reelection fights next year trembled before the might of the right's talking points and fearfully voted against the bill.

Titus is smarter than they are. Her reelection depends on the health care reform bill becoming law. As Ezra Klein wrote a while back...

But the question isn't whether Republicans understand the power of successful opposition. It's whether Democrats understand the dangers of failure. And that's most true for the Democrats who are most likely to weaken the effort: The Democrats who are cool to health-care reform because they fear the conservative tilt of their state are the Democrats who will lose their seats if Obama loses his momentum and the Democratic majority begins to lose on its major initiatives. Legislative defeats will not threaten Henry Waxman's seat. But it will imperil Mary Landrieu's. And Ben Nelson's.

Breathless assertions to the contrary from the local wingnut newspaper and its frothing publisher notwithstanding, the House Democrats who voted against the bill are the ones who made a stupid mistake, not Titus. Voting for health care reform is not just good policy, it's good politics.

Unless of course you're Dean Heller. 

In that case, "policy," good or otherwise, is an inconsequential abstraction that can't compete in significance with ranting and raving about taxes and big government like a teabagger because the bumpkins in your congressional district eat that shit up. 

It's hard to believe that he used to be considered a sane, even moderate Republican. But after the Sharron Angle primary scare of 2006, Heller scampered to the hard right and hasn't looked back. He was letting the fruitcake wing of his party set his agenda for him long before anyone started demanding that Barack Obama provide his real Kenyan birth certificate. A Republican ahead of his time, Heller was assuring his own irrelevance well before it became the party's distinguishing characteristic. Now he's pointless, except for the point atop his shiny tinfoil hat.

Extraordinary teabagger delusions and the madness of crowds

About the infamous sign photographed (click the pic to big up) during the latest organized teabagger tantrum (via Think Progress)...

You can't argue with a sick mind, let alone the rampant sickness of thousands of minds feeding on each other's myths and delusions in a horrible circus of ignorance, fear and hate.

That is, there is no reasoning with these people. By now their inability to acknowledge, let alone consider, facts and stuff is, or should be, a given.

And yet I'll confess that I still experience just a vestige of surprise, or perhaps wonder, that the angry right is going full-on unhinged bonkers over what are essentially piecemeal, moderate proposals to change the nation's health care system. Even if reform was implemented in the most aggressive manner currently on the table in Washington, the impact of the legislation would go largely if not wholly unnoticed by many and probably most Americans, and the the United States would still have the most profit-driven health care system in the developed world.

Maybe the Democrats should just say to hell with it, quit screwing around and extend Medicare to the whole damned population. What's the right going to do? Accuse Obama and the Democrats of being socialists and Nazis hell-bent on a government takeover of health care?

There's a rule that says this video must be posted on every site on the internets

And it's a good rule.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
The 11/3 Project
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

True fact: While with Public Citizen back in the day, your Gleaner used to hang and work in cahoots with Glenn Beck obsession Wade Rathke of the SEIU/ACORNS!!!! We deliberately went out of our way to stop a corporation merely because it wanted to charge low-income black people lots and lots of money for, you know, water.

Ha. Just goes to show the insidious radical conspiracy to ruin all your freedoms and turn everyone into gay Muslim atheist commies is so much more far-reaching and entrenched than even Beck suspects.

Looking for conventional wisdom that's overstated, simplistic and more trouble than it's worth?

   Relax. You're soaking in it.

This is going to be a big disappointment for Sarah Palin

Sue Lowden, who thinks she's senatorial material, went on the Nevada Newsmakers teevee program up yonder this week to deny that she laughed at the idea of Harry Reid's station wagon getting blown up. But that's not what this is about.

"Sue," began the amiable Ray Hagar of the Reno paper, amiably...

"you mentioned that you were the chair of the Nevada State Republican Party. But when you were the chair [Hagar's eyes roll here] I mean, the party almost had a civil war, it imploded. I mean, the Democrats, their registration in the state, they're --  they have a hundred thousand more registered voters, when you were at -- on your watch. So how does that help you get elected?"

The relatively high and frankly quite understandable sputter quotient of the delivery notwithstanding, good question!

And Lowden -- did I mention she thinks she's senatorial material? -- had her answer at the ready!

"Well, let's see what happens a year from now. Let's see what the registration numbers are. And let's face it, it was an Obama sweep, not just in Nevada but even in the very red state of Alaska. You know, we ended up with a, you know, an Obama win in Alaska. So from Florida to Alaska it was an Obama sweep."

Whoa, when you put it that way. After all, a whole year later, it's still shocking to hear that Obama carried Alaska.

But that's probably because McCain beat Obama in Alaska by 21 points, 59 to 38.

Hey, understandable mistake. It wasn't like the second biggest and first freakiest political story of 2008 had any Alaska connection or anything. And really, who would expect a former state party chairwoman and a self-described "frontrunner" for a U.S. Senate seat to know something that would only be known by someone who might have a passing interest in politics.

Virginia, New Jersey vote to attack Iran

The voters of Virginia and New Jersey have elected Republican governors, thereby nullifying the results of last year's presidential election. Health care reform is dead, because if it ain't broke, don't fix it! Ditto for climate change legislation, because let's face it, the science just isn't in on that yet. The key economic policy question now facing lawmakers in Washington is not whether businesses and rich people should get a big tax cut, but if they should get a bigger tax cut. And of course in foreign affairs, throughout the remainder of his one and only failed term, the president must do whatever Dick Cheney says.

Or maybe that's reading too much into the breathless media accounts about the thundering significance of two off-year low-turnout state-level elections.

Your Gleaner is genuinely saddened (sniffle), however, at the defeat of that full-on teabagging nutjob in New York's 23rd congressional district. For one thing, the last thing we need is one more Democrat in Congress fearfully looking over his shoulder at his conservative constituents and voting accordingly, i.e., with the Blue Dogs, which seems the likely result in this instance. But far more importantly, hopes were so high that the little foot soldier in Glenn Beck's army of enraged paranoid mouthbreathers would eke out a victory and even further embolden the kooks and the flakes and the nuts from coast to coast and especially right here in Nevada.

Oh well. The takeaway: Chins up, fruitcakes. I'm talking to you Jim Gibbons, Sueny Talklowdian and the rest of you birther-sympathizing glassy-eyed Republicans who have demonstrated you are willing to do or say anything to appeal to angry white people who hold a misspelled sign in one fist while angrily shaking their other at the sky. Pay no heed to fanciful accounts of alleged Nevada Republican moderation -- that sort of talk is so 2002. Your strategy is still sound, and the only way to seal the deal in Nevada is to run, run, run to the right as fast as your wingnutted feet will carry you. You know it in your heart, and in your gut, and in your head. OK, maybe not your head. But never mind. Soar, little wingnuts, soar, on to glorious victory.

In the primary, anyway.

Gibbons reaches out to the Republican base

For all his dishonesty, untrustworthiness, cruelty, narcissism, stunted emotional development and psychological disorders, mentally unbalanced Gov. Jim Gibbons still knows a thing or two about politics.

When he goes on TV and, citing the police report, insists that the 1981 attempt to blow up Harry Reid's car consisted of a phone book in a shoe box, even though the police report makes absolutely no mention of either phone books or shoe boxes, Gibbons isn't making "a mistake," as his spokesman claims.

The nation's creepiest governor is making a calculated and intentional appeal to the angry, paranoid base of conservative voters whose support will be crucial to winning the 2010 Republican gubernatorial nomination.

People who see socialism, death panels and a president with a Kenyan birth certificate under their beds are obviously impervious to sense, much less truth. By virtue of being Senate majority leader, Harry Reid allows Nevada's insecure, ignorant and frightened right-wing white people to localize their rage and paranoia and direct it at one concentrated source. And for all the innumerable matters of policy, or even decency, that Gibbons is too deranged or obtuse to comprehend, he totally gets the teabaggers.

Take a dedicated disregard for facts and mix it with the belief that Harry Reid is the boogeyman, and Gibbons sees a recipe for exploiting the people on whom the continuation of his political career -- at least through the Republican primary -- will hinge: the unhinged.

In his TV interview, Gibbons was not just wrong. He was strongly wrong:

"Wait a minute. Wait a minute, Ray. If you read the report, and I hope you read the police report. Did you read it? Did you read it? ... It didn't say car bomb. It said it was a shoe box with a phone book in it."

(For the record, again, the police report describes "a wire leading from the distributor to the fuel tank" and makes no mention whatsoever of a shoe box or a phone book).

Did Gibbons himself read the report? Almost certainly, just to see if by some bizarre coincidence there actually was some truth to the lone shoe box theory that he has propagated at least twice now. But let's be clear -- Gibbons has no more concern for what the report says than he does for the veracity of the words that come out of his mouth. Other matters are far more important, as his spokesman, Dan Burns, confirmed. "The larger question is, there was no bomb in the car? And who said the mob did it?" Burns told the Sun, demonstrating that he values accuracy and honesty every bit as much as his boss.

A sensible person, i.e., one not willingly associated with Gibbons, might think that the "larger question" has something to do with why Gibbons is lying so blatantly, willingly, deliberately, repeatedly and remorselessly.

The answer's simple. The teabaggers see him swiftboating Harry Reid. That makes them hot. And Gibbons knows it.

And really, is either Mike Montandon or Brian Sandoval, both of whom also hope to appeal to the radical right in the course of seeking the Republican gubernatorial nomination, going to call Gibbons out for lying about Harry Reid? Not likely, especially so long as Gibbons is viewed as a dead man walking, politically. Why bother?

But as the Sandoval and Montandon campaigns may have noticed, for now, Gibbons isn't running against them. He's running against the man the New Republican Party loves to hate. And he isn't the Batshit Crazy Shoeboxer King as a result of his idiocy, incompetence, laziness, sloppiness or dementia. He deliberately sought the crown.

Tricky little sociopath, ain't he?

GOP 'big tent' strategy coming along nicely

Remember the post-election buzz about how a struggle for control of the Republican Party had pitted those who wanted to appeal to a broader base against the kookwits who demanded that the party move somewhere to the right of, oh, Rush Limbaugh?

Look who's winning:

In a huge development in the NY-23 special election, Republican candidate Dede Scozzafava has announced that she is suspending her campaign, citing an inability to win in light of recent polls and a lack of money -- leaving this race as a vote between Democrat Bill Owens and Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman, and a strong message that the Republican Party can no longer nominate moderate candidates, or else face a right-wing revolt.

Your Gleaner suspects there is a good chance that Republican Party candidates in Nevada in 2010 will similarly have to demonstrate that they are every bit as misguided, angry, ignorant and paranoid as the  birthers, teabaggers, shoeboxers and such who will be selecting the party's nominees. In other words: Go, Gibbons, go!

But then, I'm always the optimist.

Wingnuts for Reid

Remember when Jim Gibbons sexual assault cover-up choreographer Sig Rogich teamed up with The Wayner to spearhead "Republicans for Reid?"

Well, not to be outdone:

"It’s much better to have a Senate majority leader than a rookie Republican freshman."

                 -- Local political consultant Chuck Muth

Muth himself can't join Republicans for Reid. As he will tell anyone who will listen, he left the party during the Bush-Cheney administration because all the tax cuts for the rich and regulatory neglect and recreational warmongering was too liberal for him.

And to be fair (but not balanced), when Nevada's answer to Ann Coulter made the case for Reid's reelection quoted above, he wasn't expressing his own sentiment (presumably) or those of his fellow wingnuts. He was describing the viewpoint of Nevada's gambling industry.

Then again... Bitchy Little Area Megalomaniac Sheldon Adelson, arguably the richest batshit crazy right-wing extremist in the world, finances rabid conservative front groups. And Fox News personality Steve Wynn has launched one of his famous charm offensives in the media -- except this time it's not to tout a "fresh and unique resort experience" or whatever but to warn everyone about all the socialism, all teabagger-like.

Maybe Muth was speaking for his fellow wingnuts after all.

In any case, Muth has hitched his wagon to Harry Reid -- or more accurately, the willingness of outraged paranoid white people the nation over to contribute American dollars to fund Muth's anti-Reid websites and PAC and general-purpose noisemaking. So it's a bit of a surprise to see Muth himself pointing out that "it's much better to have a Senate majority leader than a rookie Republican freshman" representing Nevada in the Senate, especially since Muth has spent most of the last several months struggling to contain his enthusiasm for GOP Senate candidate and train-wreck-in-waiting Sue Lowden.

Far -- far, far, far, far -- be it for your lowly Gleaner to presume to speak on behalf of Reid or the Reid campaign (a prospect no doubt unsettling to everyone involved). But in this one instance, if I may be so bold, I would venture to speculate that Reid appreciates and welcomes Muth's strong, gracious and certainly unexpected endorsement.