Las Vegas Gleaner

Battle Born Bankruptcy

Nevada's congressional Republicans--Gibbons, Porter and the state's Other Senator--voted for the bill to herd class action suits into federal courts where a Republican judge can kill them. It's the first movement in a suite of legislation the Strong Leader is proposing to keep mean and powerful citizens from roughing up poor put-upon corporations. A dozen Democrats in the Senate voted for the legislation, too, demonstrating yet again that the Great and Powerful Harry Reid can't hold his caucus together for shit.

So Bush gets the first big win of his first term as an elected federal official.

Next up: bankruptcy "reform."

Nevada typically sports personal bankruptcy rates that are among the highest in the nation. The American Bankruptcy Institute reports that one out of every 43 households in Nevada filed for bankruptcy, the fourth-highest rate in the country.

Gambling, you say? Professors commissioned by the Congressional Budget Office will back you up. The casino industry points to studies of its own, some uncharacteristically not funded by the casino industry, that say there's no connection between gambling, er, gaming and bankruptcy. Conditioned, stimulus-response-fashion, to believe that whenever the casino industry renders an assertion on an issue of public policy, the opposite is true, the Gleaner believes that gambling causes bankruptcy.

But it's not the biggest cause of bankruptcy. A Harvard report released this month found about half of the personal bankruptcies filed in the U.S. were caused by health care costs. And most of the folks filing actually had health insurance--a fact that would seem counter-intuitive until you remember that health insurance companies are in business to collect your money, not pay for your health care.

With the insured getting hammered into bankruptcy by medical bills, imagine what those bills do to the uninsured.

Nevada typically posts some of the highest percentages of uninsured people in the nation. A state legislative working group received data last year estimating that as much as 23 percent of Nevada's non-elderly population was without health insurance, compared to about 17 percent for the rest of the nation. Earlier reports publicized by the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada have found the state tied with New Mexico for having the fourth-highest rate of uninsured folks in the nation.

So, to recap: Health care bills account for half the bankruptcies in the country. Nevada has one of the highest proportions of people without health care coverage in the country. Nevada has one of the highest personal bankruptcy rates in the country. Bush and the Republicans, at the behest of credit card companies who doled out money for, among other things, health care bills that insurers won't pay, want to gut bankruptcy laws so that middle-class people can't get the "fresh start" that bankruptcy laws were designed to provide.

Former Nevada Democratic Sen. Richard Bryan saw the threat of pro-corporate anti-consumer bankruptcy legislation, and used his perch on the Senate Banking Committee to fight the legislation tooth and nail. Surely, no current Nevada member of Congress could support legislation that will assuredly hurt Nevadans as much if not more than anybody in the country?

OK, Nevada's Republicans in Congress support the bankruptcy bill. But then, "Republicans support legislation favoring corporations over consumers" isn't exactly the headline equivalent of man bites dog.

"Democratic Senate Leader supports credit card companies over consumers" is. And sadly, 'tis true. The Great and Powerful Harry Reid, rather than fighting the corporate-sponsored legislation, turns out to be smooching a touch of corporate bum when it comes to rolling back bankruptcy protections. And as explained in a Bloomberg piece, the corporations are just wild about Harry:

``The election outcome has brightened the prospects for bankruptcy reform,'' said Rick Lazio, a former U.S. representative from New York who is now executive vice president for global government relations at JPMorgan.

Republicans gained four Senate seats in the election, giving them 55 out of 100; three former House Republican lawmakers who won Senate seats -- John Thune of South Dakota, Jim DeMint of South Carolina and Richard Burr of North Carolina -- voted in favor of the bill in the past. In addition, a long-time supporter of the legislation, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, was elected Senate Democratic leader; New York-based Citigroup Inc. has a credit-card processing center in his home state.

No wonder his errant colleagues did not feel duty-bound to stick with Harry and fight Bush on the class-action bill.

The prospect of Reid leading the Senate has always been more than a little unnerving. Ideologically vacant on the one hand, while fancying himself the consummate behind-the-scenes deal-maker on the other, there's that nagging fear that he'll strike the Big Political Deal wherein the nation gets Chief Justice Scalia and privatized Social Security in exchange for a bigger minority committee staff budget. So who knows what he's playing, or what he played at in some prior point in his illustrious career, that cornered him into the position of supporting legislation liable to hurt Nevada more than just about any other state in the nation. It's more than curious; it's spooky. And from the standpoint of serving his constituents, it's, well, bankrupt.

DeLay's man in Nevada

The Republican House leadership, which is to say Texan Tom DeLay, has designated Jon Porter as one of the ten Republican House members most vulnerable to defeat in 2006, The Hill reports. "The list provides an early preview of who GOP leaders think need the most help from their fellow lawmakers. It also lets potential Democratic challengers know that any run will be expensive."

Porter, who won re-election to his second term in November, spends most of his time in mild-mannered obscurity befitting a back-benching newbie. He's quick to discard his well-cultivated nice guy image during campaign season, though, opting for slash and burn TV hits on his opponent.

In 2002, Porter decimated Harry Reid's hand-picked pretty candidate, Dario Herrera, painting him as a sleazeball. Subsequent events have revealed that Dario was, in point of fact, a sleazeball, but hey, Porter didn't know that at the time. In 2004, a well-funded Democrat named Tom Gallagher spent a couple million dollars to broadcast no discernible message and garnered 40 percent of the vote. Porter spent $2.6 million ripping Gallagher a new one on TV, mostly by calling the hapless Democrat a carpetbagging casino executive who made a lot of money while everyone else was being laid off after 9-11. And that got Porter 54 percent of the vote.

They, which is to say professional political types, maintain that a congressman's first re-election is the toughest, and that if the opposing party can't knock him/her off in that go-round, then the incumbent's safe for evermore. Well, 2004 was Porter's first go-round, and the Democrats couldn't knock him/her off.

True, voter registration in the congressional district in question (the third) is about evenly split between Republicans and Democrats. And there is the possibility, one supposes, that next year Porter could face an opponent unlike his two previous foes, which is to say a candidate with a readily identifiable reason to run for Congress above and apart from a personal desire to be in Congress. Democrats might even field a candidate--wishful thinking gone wild, here--who is willing to point out that Porter is just another go-along, get-along cookie-cutter Republican whose very presence in Congress serves but one purpose: contributing to GOP majority status so they can give tax cuts to corporations and a great big dose of a humorless, anal-retentive God to everybody else. So yes, the Gleaner's deep streak of naive optimism likes to hope that Porter could be beat.

Meantime, back in the reality-based community, there is no impassioned Democrat on the horizon, and certainly not one capable of raising enough money to match the single skill Porter has displayed thus far in his short congressional career--spending oodles on dark, methodical televised destruction of the opposing candidate's character and motives.

And so, sadly, Porter's appearance on Tom DeLay's list of most vulnerable Republicans may signal a disturbing prognosis indeed for the 2006 midterms: DeLay is having a hard time finding any House Republicans who are vulnerable. Have a nice day.

Porter-Gallagher campaign finance overview (Center for Responsive Politics)

Voter registrations in Congressional District 3 (NV Secretary of State)

NV 2004 election results

Hitting on Harry

Soon after securing his exalted post as leader of the Senate Democrats, Harry "The Venerable" Reid loaded up a capital "war room" with Kerry-tested, Kennedy-approved media types to aggressively promote the Democratic message, begging the question, What Democratic message would the war room aggressively promote?

Apart from killing Yucca Mountain, shielding the "gaming" and mining industries from taxes and regulations and supporting preemptive unilateral invasions of unarmed nations in the errant and cynical hope that the issue could be removed from the table for the 2002 mid-term elections--laudable, typical and inexcusable positions, respectively--for what can Our Harry fairly be said to stand?

The Las Vegas Review-Journal, ever quick to share it's sharp grasp of the Democratic agenda, thought it knew exactly what to expect, as it explained in a December editorial:

"We eagerly await a hearty defense of the popular core principles that have characterized the Democrats for seven decades: A hostility toward the notion of personal responsibility and an embrace of higher taxes, the redistribution of wealth, the welfare state, and an ever-expanding federal bureaucracy."

Ah, if only 'twere true. As it happens, Reid's Democratic response (via LA Times) to the State of the Union, the war room's best work thus far, merely proclaimed that there is a God and that He, in all His Terrible Might, has banished some hapless 10-year-old to growing up in Searchlight. Oh, and the Democrats are pretty happy that Bush has handed them the whole Social Security privatization thing. A reason to exist where before there was none, etc.

But the R-J's breezy battle to define Reid as a--gasp!--liberal, of which the December editorial was but a single salvo in a long-standing campaign, signals that the paper may finally, after years of dogged pursuit, get to show the nation what locals know all too well, namely, that the morning paper falls somewhere in the ideological spectrum just to the right of the Montana Freemen and just to the left of Anne Coulter.

The Republican National Committee, in its hit piece on Harry released this week, uses our very own morning paper to, you guessed it, define Reid as a--gasp!--liberal.  "Reid's Home-State Newspaper Noted The Irony In His Attempt To Reach Mainstream America Using Aides Borrowed From Liberal Northeastern Democrats," the RNC blusters, showing that Republicans not only prefer an inappropriate over-reliance on bastardized capitalism when it comes to the nation's social contract with its senior citizens, but in grammar, too.

This, then, is the right-wing echo chamber, where someone in the mainstream conservative media blurts something, then the Republicans pick it up and dish it back to the mainstream conservative media as news, and then more right-wing commentators spit it out in their columns and on TV. The R-J may have finally earned a spot in the rotation, thanks to Harry Reid.

Reid's Home-State Progressive Online Publication Notes The Irony.

If at first you don't succeed...

After being passed over for grown-up House positions time and again, Rep. Jim Gibbons finally landed the chairmanship of the Subcommittee on Energy and Natural Resources. All those votes in favor of nuclear power finally paid off. Earlier reports dissing Gibbon's monumental congressional ineffectiveness may have been too harsh--he also co-chairs the powerful Congressional Gaming Caucus.

Did Laura ever get an apology?

Some beltway Republicans are proposing that members of Congress should dip their fingers in purple ink on their way into the state of the union speech tonight, because purple is the color of empire. Or to show support for the embattled and outed Spongebob. Or to show solidarity with Iraqi voters.

Whichever, It's high-time for new gimmickry at the SOTU. Nobody's really done anything new since Reagan started pointing out waitresses, soldiers and such. And this administration has an excellent track record of using visual aids to build support both at home and abroad. Who can forget Colin Powell's vial of faux anthrax at the UN?

Unfortunately, for Powell, history won't forget. Crafters of history's first draft, however, which is to say the mainstream media, already seemed to have forgotten the image from two years ago of what should have been, in retrospect, one of the more memorable SOTU moments of this or any other Bush presidency: Chalabi and Laura.

Chalabi's the one in the gray suit . He's also the one that was feeding the administration a lot of talk about rose petals and WMD, even though it looks like all the while he was spying for yet another nation on Cheney's target list, i.e., Iran. Because failed National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice was so ably advising the administration about national security, Rove seated a lying Iranian spy right behind Laura.

Click the pic and look closely, and you'll see that Chalabi seems to have anticipated the whole inked fingers thing long ago, so maybe he had inside information about the future of Iraq after all. Or maybe that's blood on his hands.