Las Vegas Gleaner

In a development bound to make the RJ happy...

UNLV President David Ashley announced in a staff memo Monday that 29 people were given "notices of non-reappointment." That follows on the heels of another 70 people who lost their jobs at UNLV earlier this spring as a result of the state's budget shortfall.

In an interview with the Gleaner, Ashley said some of the 99 total people who have been told they're out of a job were from the instructional staff, but most of them, including the 29 who were sent notices Monday, were from the ranks of administrative staff rather than instructors or professors (disclosure: Gleaner is married to one of the latter).

Ashely warned that more cuts could be coming down the pike. As a result of the latest round of state budget cuts ratified by the Legislature last week, UNLV will likely have to slice another 3 to 4 percent off the budget. Hopefully, those additional cuts can be achieved through measures such as buy-outs and early retirement, Ashley said.

Meantime Ashley also responded to parts of the Gleaner's snippy broadside the other day, in which the UNLV president was taken to task for, among other things, suggesting that Lt. Gov. Brian Krolicki was "a great champion of higher education."

Through spokesman, Gibbons holds firm on vow that he did not have sexual relations with that woman, either

Trying to milk the diversion for every last possible meaningless headline that might distract the public and the press from the nation's worst governor's hilarious scandals, Jim Gibbons and John McCain adviser Sig Rogich had Gibbons press person Ben Keickhefer write a statement Monday announcing that Gibbons had signed the bills passed by the special legislative session.

The release also put a bunch of words into Gibbons' mouth about state policy on a going-forward basis -- words that Gibbons himself will likely forget before the week is out assuming he ever read them in the first place. So of course the far more interesting information bubbling up from the depraved depths of the Gibbons-Rogich Anxiety Vortex has to do, as usual, with Gibbons' laugh-a-minute antics involving  awkward moments with women who aren't his wife.

Specifically, Kieckhefer dished up an elaboration on why Gibby the Rodeo Clown was holding hands with whatsherface when she was giving birth.

"The Governor and Mrs. Gibbons were friends with Leslie, who was about to become a single mother," Kieckhefer is reported saying in Dana Gentry's blog. "They were together one day late in her pregnancy when she went into labor. The Governor and Dawn went with her to the hospital and stayed with her during the birth to help out their friend. Nothing else to it, really."

Kieckhefer stopped short, however, of clarifying Gibbons' stated position vis-a-vis any woman who he has witnessed giving childbirth, i.e, that her sexuality is irreversibly and forever neutralized.

NV War Party financiers unfazed by area economic collapse

As you may have heard, times are tough here in Nevada and people are struggling to make ends meet. Fortunately, however, some Nevadans still have enough money to lavish campaign contributions on out-of-state Republican politicians, if those Nevadans are shaken down, er, asked by the right person.

"I bring people out and raise money for them in Nevada that they could never raise anywhere else," Sen. John Ensign boasts to Congressional Quarterly. Those Nevada donors are ponying up  "only give because I’m asking them," the ever-modest senator adds.

The great and powerful Ensign, or Sen. Hairdo McWedgeshot, as he's known locally, has used his considerable charm to loosen $560,000 from "his prosperous state" for candidates defending War Party Senate seats this year, according to the CQ story.

Ensign is head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee charged with raising money for GOP Senate races. For months, Ensign has been whining that his fellow senators haven't been forking over enough money to the NRSC effort.

Frankly, it's hard to see why that would surprise him. If Ensign -- and Nevada -- learned anything from the failed fight to override George W. Bush's designation of Yucca Mountain as the nation's nuclear waste dump, it is that the Hairdo has no influence whatsoever with his fellow Republican senators.

Little wonder, then, that Ensign and his trusty sidekick, beltway consultant darling Little Mikey Slanker,  would resort to their financial comfort zone of Nevada gambling/hotel industry executives to raise some cash in a desperate last-ditch effort to make it look like they were at least marginally competent while presiding over the loss of several Senate seats currently held by warmongering government-hating Republicans.

Meantime, in a somewhat-related story, bitchy little area megalomaniac Sheldon Adelson's personal political propaganda arm, Freedom's Watch, is launching radio ads against 16 House Democrats from coast to coast (WaPo).

Freedom's Watch declined to disclose how much of Adelson's money it is spending on the radio spots.

But between the ad buy attacking Democrats nationwide and Nevadans contributing generously to Republican senate campaigns from around the country at the Hairdo's behest, one conclusion is inescapable: Now, clearly, is no time to raise the gaming tax.

Days later, 'Straight Talk' continues to exhilarate Nevadans

Sen. John Sidney McCain III explained last week that he just doesn't know anything at all about how Jim Gibbons is a lying philanderer whose madcap antics have made the nation's weirdest governor a laughingstock not just here in Nevada but nationally and even internationally.

But while local Sig Rogich promoter Sig Rogich, who advises McCain as well as Gibbons, did not bother to make sure that the Republican standard bearer was fully briefed on easily the single most important  and talked-about political storyline dominating the news in a crucial battleground state, Rogich apparently did make sure that McCain was intimately familiar with the details of boilerplate, certifiably ho-hum speech that Gibbons made a few weeks ago and that was mentioned in perhaps as many as two paragraphs toward the bottom of a couple local media stories on the Nevada Republican Convention.

In that speech, Gibbons failed to sufficiently marvel at the magnificence of a man who didn't bother to campaign for Nevada's failed Republican presidential caucus, the McCain campaign tells the RJ. And that speech, not Gibbons' hilarious scandals, is why McCain picked Lt. Gov. Brian Krolicki and not Gibbons to be the figurehead for the presidential candidate's Nevada campaign.

These startling new details reveal that the McCain campaign is:

1. Profoundly tone-deaf and clueless about what's going on in Nevada;
2. Shaped by the mercurial temperament of the man at the top, which is to say surly, mean-spirited and eager to nurture petty grudges, or;
3. Liars liars pants ablaze.

Though of course those possibilities are not mutually exclusive.

Time for media to cover Gibbons fairly, objectively

The Legislature moved some deck chairs around so now Nevada can resume sinking into infrastructural, educational and economic oblivion quietly without all the headlines.

In a particularly odious element of the proceedings, the gambling industry, led apparently by one of bitchy little area megalomaniac Sheldon Adelson's minions (no, not the governor but another one; Adelson wanted results) made sure to cover its own ass. Again. Whatever.

But the truly startling developments out of Carson City and environs of late involve first, the notion that Jim  Gibbons has something to say about policy, and second, the confirmation that the two top staffers for the philandering imbecile are the latest to abandon ship and retire from the "Gibbons administration."

No, there's nothing startling or frankly even interesting about those things in and of themselves. The startling thing is how the media reports policy statements Gibbons makes or movement among his staff as if there is actually a cohesive entity called the "Gibbons administration" and that the aforementioned fiction is motivated or even influenced by rational thought either for good or ill. What's up with that? The only thing of any consequence where Jim Gibbons is concerned is his many hilarious and humiliating scandals. All the rest of is just a bunch of noise.

At times like these -- which is to say on a Saturday morning with errands to run and chores to do -- the Gleaner likes to save time by self-plagiarism:

In the course of reading newspaper stories about the antics of the nation's worst governor, it is disappointing and frankly tiresome to see reporters repeatedly seeking color commentary from consultants of one party or another or analysis from political science professors. If one had a broken leg, after all, one would not seek a diagnosis from a political scientist or a campaign industry consultant. One would see a doctor. Similarly, if any truly useful insight into the administration of Nevada's current governor is going to be rendered by external observers, that expertise would most likely reside within the psychoanalytical community.

That was published seven months ago and the eleven people who saw it perhaps thought it was a joke. No, that'd be Gibbons.

Gibbons helps another woman find her truck

Oh look, it's Nevada Gov. Jim Gibbons doing one of his favorite things -- being chivalrous to a woman who isn't his wife in a parking lot.

The Carson City paper ran this and other photos of the nation's worst governor and September 1989 playmate Leslie Durant hanging and kanoodling at the rodeo the other day. The photos were taken by Brad Horn, who gets a Gleaner shout-out for having the good sense to realize that stalking the nation's creepiest governor was a much better use of his time and photographic talent than getting shots of grown men forcing terrified baby cows into bondage while Republican voters looked on approvingly.

The paper's photos of course are not the first of Gibbons and Durant together -- those were published in the lowly Gleaner a few weeks back. But whereas imagery of the couple provided by a Gleaner operative merely showed the governor looking like an idiot in the IHOP, the new photos show him exhibiting public demonstrations of affection.

And all on the up-and-up, or at least that's what the nation's oddest governor told the Carson City paper:

“She was upset, crying,” he said during a quick hallway interview with our reporter, who’d been trying to get a comment from the governor or his staff for two days. “She couldn’t get her breath. I put my arms around her.”

Such gallantry. But then, as Gibbons told Nevadans after helping Chrissy Mazzeo in a parking lot, "my reputation means everything to me."

And to all you cynics and Gibbons haters out there, well, if you stop and think for a minute, you'll realize that the description of a distraught woman in need of comfort is perhaps the most credible thing that the philandering imbecile Gibbons has said in months. If you had agreed to voluntarily see Jim Gibbons socially and repeatedly, and then held hands with him and let him hug on you and stuff in public, wouldn't you be "upset, crying" too?

It is in that light that Sig Rogich, currently a beloved and trusted adviser to both Jim Gibbons and John McCain, is all the more admirable. Has Rogich been photographed upset and crying and in need of hugs? On the contrary. He was photographed working feverishly to divert the state and it's media's attention away from his client's hilarious personal life through a needless sham of a special legislative session. Which started Friday, by the way, in the event that anyone has fallen for the Rogich sleight-of-hand and actually cares.

To recap...

Gov. Jim Gibbons: No new taxes blahblahblah mangled syntax cough excuse me flippity-floppity flippity floppity again and again like the flibberdigibbet I am but no new taxes and everybody please forget that I'm a philandering imbecile.

Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley: Asshat, ain't he? Meantime, Raggio and I will work it out.

Philandering imbecile governor drives his constituents to drink

Several readers, which is to say at least two, have made inquiries with regard to some "drinking game" that might be created to go along with the speech scheduled to be delivered by Jim Gibbons, the nation's worst governor, on statewide television 6:30 p.m. Thursday.

The Gleaner knows nothing of drinking games and has never participated in them, not even during the late middle half of the last century while pretending to go to college. The Gleaner has never viewed drinking as a game. An illness? Can be. A way of life? Once. An art demanding dedication and concentration like any other? Eh, probably not. Still, to treat drinking as a mere "game" is the stuff of amateurs, not unlike "partying" with willful abandonment on New Year's Eve or Halloween.

But if you insist...

Yes, whenever the nation's worst governor vows that there will be no new taxes, take a shot. By all means, whenever he suggests that he has shown "leadership" or congratulates himself for making "tough choices," take two shots.

And if by chance he decides to use his special televised moment to reiterate that he most definitely did not have sex with that woman, and not with that other one, either, take your alcohol to the rodeo or the farmers market, get photographed playing grab-ass with women who aren't your wife and be disappointed when the coverage of an asinine distraction of a special legislative session isn't the most interesting thing in the newspapers over the next few days.

McCain, in an obvious lie that should offend Nevadans but probably won't, pretends Rogich never told him about kindred spirit Jim Gibbons

Sen. John Sidney McCain III tells the Reno paper that he has never heard of Nevada Gov. Jim Gibbons:

In a telephone interview with the Reno Gazette-Journal during his campaign stop in Las Vegas, McCain said he didn't know enough about Gibbons' political ills to comment on whether they will hurt his own efforts to woo Nevada Republicans this fall, as some political observers have speculated.

"To be honest with you, I don't know enough about his situation to make a judgment," McCain said. "I just haven't kept up with it except the barest info. I know that the governor is going through a divorce or is divorced or something like that, but honestly I don't know much more about it."

McCain added that while both he and Gibbons served as Western Republican members of Congress together for a decade, "I just didn't know him that well."

Though they would be photographed together in 2007 at a fundraiser hosted by their shared master, bitchy little area megalomaniac Sheldon Adelson, it's perfectly understandable that while they were in Washington together McCain wouldn't have known Gibbons if he ran over him with one of Cindy's beer distributor trucks. Gibbons' congressional career, after all, was characterized chiefly by profound back-benching obscurity, occasionally rising to the level of moderately entertaining buffoonery.

Of course, bending over on command for Adelson isn't the only thing Gibbons and McCain have in common. They also share a key adviser, Sig Rogich promoter Sig Rogich.

So perhaps McCain can ask Sig to regale him with the madcap tale of how Sig got Gibbons drunk and then Gibbons slammed a single mother half his age up against a wall and told her to put out or else. Then, after Sig called in some markers and got it all covered up, Gibbons got elected governor and damned if he didn't start having an affair with a woman who looks exactly like the single mom that Gibbons/Rogich worked so hard to destroy in the court of public opinion. And Gibbons, well, he's a fucking liar through and through, Sig will continue, so of course Gibbons is lying his ass off to his constituents about his sexcapades, which is pretty damn rich when you remember that Gibbons voted to impeach Clinton. And look, Sig will conclude with a proud flourish, the imbecile is still the governor and (thanks to Sig, of course) he's even managed to distract the media from his lying cheating ways by calling a completely pointless special session of the Legislature.

It is a tale that McCain will no doubt appreciate. For one thing, he must be delighted to have unparalleled talent like Sig on board. And secondly, being a womanizing skeezer himself back before he became all old and shriveled and started lashing out at his fabulously wealthy trophy wife for pancaking on the make-up like a trollop, the cu ... oh never mind.

Anyway, what with Nevada being a highly prized swing state and all, and Sig being not only McCain's chief Nevada guy but also so very closely involved in all things Gibbons, it's sort of surprising that Sig hasn't told him all about the nation's worst governor already, no?

Area man breaks silence for no good reason

With Nevada's lying governor suffering publicly from neuroses and dementia, Sen. John Sidney McCain III turned elsewhere for a reliably docile Nevada Republican who would snap to attention, say Sidney the III is right about everything and introduce the presidential candidate at public functions when necessary (unless of course the function is something that's actually important, like a fundraiser, in which case the candidate would be introduced by Sig Rogich promoter Sig Rogich).

Accordingly, when Sidney the III showed up to scare everybody with his bitter-teleprompter face at UNLV Wednesday, he was introduced by Lt. Gov. Brian Krolicki. (For the record, Krolicki muttered some utterly forgettable words of praise for McCain about as serviceably as might be expected from a man who holds a totally useless job with no responsibilities.)

And Krolicki himself was introduced by UNLV President David Ashley. That's moderately intriguing on at least a couple fronts.

First, Ashley sightings in and of themselves have become a rather rare commodity since he assumed the presidency two years ago. While his predecessor, Carol Harter, was undeniably the face of the university, always out front and trying to champion her cause, Ashley has largely ceded that role to Jim Rogers, the Lord High Chancellor of Nevada's higher education system. Rogers, in turn, has joined the battle of the budget with the nation's worst governor, arguably in as vigorous and energetic a manner as anyone in the state, which just goes to show jillionaires can be useful on occasion.

But curiously, as Rogers has fired ammo against the governor in the form of memos and letters, he has drawn on expertise or assistance not from UNLV's president, but from a UNLV provost or a UNLV dean. Indeed, Ashley's silence as an imbecile of a governor plots the economic hollowing out of his institution is nothing short of unseemly -- unless of course Ashley is feverishly working behind the scenes to protect his university from the governor's simplistic cut-and-run solutions to the budget crisis. But if that's the case, it's difficult to see any evidence that such a strategy is working.

Anyway, so there's Ashley Wednesday morning, suited up and in front of McCain's Nevada faithful explaining how delighted he is that UNLV is at the center of the national policy debate blahblahblah. And then he introduces Krolicki, referring to him as "a great champion of higher education."

As the Gleaner has said on more than one occasion, the single greatest piece of legislation enacted in the state of Nevada in the last quarter century if not more is the Millennium Scholarship program that makes college affordable for Nevada students. That program was started in 1999 with money owed Nevada through the tobacco lawsuit settlement, and annual tobacco settlement payments have continued to help fund the scholarships ever since. Krolicki has proposed that the state basically borrow against future years of the settlement, in a fiscally irresponsible scheme to spend the money now to tide the state through its budget crunch.

As CityLife's Steve Sebelius has taken the bother and the trouble to helpfully explain, Krolicki may be a political opportunist willing to use public money, even unlawfully, to advance his own career, a crony capitalist, an ethically challenged hack ...

Krolicki may be many things. "A great champion of higher education" is not one of them.

Ashley should know that. If he doesn't, someone should tell him. And someone should also tell him that he might want to think about, you know, getting in the game.