Here's a cute cartoon courtesy of the Jim Gibson for Governor campaign, slamming his opponent Dina Titus for taking $2,000 in campaign contributions from Enron several years ago. Did you know that Dina Titus has an accent? Accents are soo funny, and so easy to make fun of.
Curiously, the cartoon doesn't mention that not only did Titus take Enron's money. As Titus explained Friday, she also voted against bills Enron dearly wanted to see passed -- one to deregulate Nevada's electricity market, and one to let big customers like mines and casinos opt out of the regulated system and shop for cheaper power from wholesalers (leaving everybody else to foot the bill for the regulated system's upkeep, by the way). She shrugged off the cartoon as "science fiction" -- it's a parody of Star Wars.
Anyway, the cartoon is pretty darn slick, and we're guessing, just guessing, mind, that it actually cost more money to make the cartoon than the $2,000 Titus took from Enron. But so what -- a couple thousand bucks would be chicken-feed to Jim Gibson even if his campaign warchest wasn't bulging with a quarter million dollars from developers who got favorable treatment from the Henderson mayor within mere weeks of contributing to his gubernatorial campaign. After all, in 2002, a couple years after Titus took $2,000 from Enron, Gibson took 263 times that much money from another energy corporation whose incompetence ended up costing consumers millions -- Nevada Power Co.
Gibson never really has explained exactly what the contract work was that he did for Nevada Power and that was worth so much money. But in fairness, it's not as if Nevada Power at the time was boasting some track record of spending their money wisely. When Enron and other power wholesalers were manipulating California's power market, and claiming that an energy "crisis" was being caused by supply and demand, Nevada Power and it's corporate parent, Sierra Pacific, were naively and stupidly buying the wholesalers' story hook line and sinker, basically apologizing for the profiteers. About the same time, the power company, enamored with fashionable extremist free-market ideology, s'pose, was all excited about replicating California's electricity deregulation fiasco in Nevada. Sierra Pacific had even attempted to sell its power plants to the same corporate profiteers that were gouging California. And it was only intervention from federal regulators that stopped Sierra Pacific -- effectively saving the company from itself -- from buying Portland General Electric at a price that included a ridiculously bloated premium. From who, you ask? From Enron.
So when Nevada Power ambled along in 2002 and asked Jim Gibson if he would do some contract work for them, he would have been a fool not to gouge them for whatever he could, to get while the getting was good, as it were.
It just goes to show, Titus should have become a fancy high-dollar lawyer for a giant if incompetent energy corporation instead of a mere educator, then she'd be rolling in dough, too. Of course, that would have required going over to the dark side.

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