Las Vegas Gleaner

Area woman foolishly enables Clinton's sad, tragic denial

Apologies for being the last website in the United States to note that the most apt analysis of what's left of the Hillary Clinton campaign was not performed by Karen Tumulty in Time, or by Peggy Noonan (of all people) in the WSJ, but in the Monty Python scene with the Black Knight.

Now, if only Rep. Shelley Berkley would get it.

Berkley, D-Tel Aviv and Las Vegas, is one of 16 17 Democratic members of Congress who signed off on a letter Friday urging the party's superdelegates to ignore all that stuff about who has the most votes and who has the most delegates, and just give the party's presidential nomination to Hillary Clinton anyway because she's not black.

OK, that's paraphrasing. But not much.

"Hillary has won the big battleground states by connecting with voters whose support we must have to win the general election," Berkley and friends write.

What voters might those be? Why, "working, hard-working Americans, white Americans," as the former first lady helpfully explained to USAToday earlier in the week, "whites in both states who had not completed college ..."

Berkley and her moderate-to-conservative-to-bluedog colleagues also touted Clinton's "ability to connect with voters we must deliver in the fall, including blue collar Democrats who can sway this election as they have in the past."

Hey, isn't that supposed to read white blue collar Democrats?

Granted, as a politician from Nevada, Berkley's constituency, pound-for-pound, likely includes more white people without a college education than is found in the average congressional district. But while the Clinton campaign has cynically embraced and even disgustingly exploited ugly prejudices in an effort to "connect" with the least educated and most fearful and ignorant among the citizenry, it should be noted that Berkley is not a member of that demographic. In fact, she's a bit of a smarty boots.

As such, she knows damned good and well that it's over, that the former first lady isn't going to win the presidency this year (and probably not ever).

No one expects Berkley to say that publicly at this stage of the game. She is a Clinton supporter, loyalty is a virtue and Obama will secure the nomination in due course without Berkley saying anything one way or the other.

But pretty much the entire Democratic Party is — for now — showing a little patience and hoping that Clinton snaps out of it and calls it a day, preferably sooner rather than later, and stops flailing around in hopeless but nonetheless disturbing futility. The last thing Berkley should be doing is egging her on.

Extramarital affair that nation's worst governor definitely isn't having still isn't news

• Now Canadians are chortling over the worst governor in the nation, too. Oh, our nation. Not their socialized medicine-riddled Iraq invasion-hating nanny state. NationalPost
• Amid growing cries of "vive la feminista" (no one tell Dean Heller), Dawn wins one, gets divorce case moved to Reno (AP), a town where the nation's worst governor might be thought to be having an affair if it hadn't been asserted by his official spokester definitively and in no uncertain terms that the governor is not having an affair.
• That assertion, btw, just makes salaciously crafted wild rumor-mongering about how the governor rekindled a new flame with an old girlfriend all the more reprehensible and irresponsible. So here's the link.
• "Who's Kathy?" asks a commenter on the Reno paper's website after a couple other commenters make reference to the mysterious person who obviously Jim Gibbons couldn't be having an affair with because his spokester says the governor isn't having an affair. Whoever else at Nevada news organizations may find the question of the nation's worst governor's fidelity or lack thereof icky and beneath them, it isn't the web maintenance people. Thankfully.
• Really, there are so many subjects to which one could turn on any given day to underscore how Nevada's governor is the nation's worst. The New York Times, for instance, goes with the hepatitis thing.

Oh fergawdsake just resign already

"This hysteria has been created by people not getting the right information," the nation's worst governor said in March. "The fact is they haven't found more than those six people (who contracted hepatitis C)."

Thursday, public health officials announced that 77 more people have been diagnosed with hepatitis C because of shoddy practices at incompetently regulated and under-inspected outpatient clinics.

Sebelius about sums it up. Again.

Big bad Democrats continue mean attacks on poor little rich man's recreational spending

In contrast to local Democrats, who hush and take money from him, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has filed yet another complaint against Sheldon Adelson, or to be precise, Freedom's Watch, the wingnut warmongering propaganda arm generously financed by the bitchy little area megalomaniac.

The latest complaint charges that Freedom's Watch isn't reporting its spending on teevee ads it has run against Democratic congressional candidates in special elections in Louisiana (won by the Democrat) and Mississippi (election next week). The complaint follows earlier ones filed with the Federal Election Commission alleging that Freedom's Watch is coordinating advertising with the National Republican Congressional Committee in violation of federal election laws.

"Freedom’s Watch is operating as the cash-strapped NRCC’s de facto independent expenditure campaign," the DCCC said in a release Thursday. "Clearly, Freedom’s Watch thinks they are above the law," the DCCC added, insightfully drawing everyone's attention to one of the key delusions that so often accompanies megalomania.

For it's part, when it's not hiding behind Adelson's skirt, the NRCC is stuck in a jam. In a giant clam. Or, as Politico's Joe Bresnahan put it in a delightful lede to a story this week: "Shellshocked House Republicans got warnings from leaders past and present Tuesday: Your party’s message isn’t good enough to prevent disaster in November, and neither is the NRCC’s money."

More from that story:

...in a closed-door session at the Capitol, National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Tom Cole (R-Okla.) told members that the NRCC doesn’t have enough cash to "save them" in November if they don’t raise enough money or run strong campaigns themselves.

So War Party members o' Congress nationwide increasingly might be hoping our bitchy little area megalomaniac can "save" them.

But wait — "As the NRCC looks to Freedom’s Watch to save them," the DCCC said in its release Thursday, "the NRCC, Republican Members, and Republican candidates need to decide whether it’s worth it to return to the hay days of Republicans’ culture of corruption by being tied to a group that regularly breaks the law."

Yes, well, three points:

1. Republicans and "a group that regularly breaks the law" is a redundancy.

2. The DCCC's persistent reluctance to single out Adelson by name in its media assaults on Freedom's Watch is increasingly confounding, and one can only hope that omission will be rectified when the DCCC actually starts using some of its substantial cash advantage to discredit Freedom's Watch — and Adelson  — in teevee ads aired in districts where Adelson is throwing money around later this year. Some suggested language, in case the DCCC missed it the first time:  "What does the world's 12th richest man, a Las Vegas gambling kingpin who is building a casino empire in China, expect to get in return for helping elect (insert War Party candidate) to Congress? Will (insert War Party candidate) be good for (insert state), or good for Chinese casinos?"

3. It's "heydays," not "hay days."

Phoning it in with Frank

Frank Fahrenkopf, former head of the Republican National Committee, co-chairman of the Commission on Presidential Debates, current head of the American Gambling, er, Gaming Association and overall long-time member in good standing of the Washington D.C. club for rich white guys in ties recently took a break from his busy schedule packed with important duties to write a letter to CityLife blasting one of the Gleaner's columns that appeared in that free weekly with sex ads in the back.

Fahrenkopf's trigger was tripped by the column's contention that the amount of casino industry revenue generated by local people with gambling problems is a) vastly underestimated and b) something that Official Nevada doesn't want to talk about.

Writing in defense of the special interest he has represented in Washington for so long, Fahrenkopf characterized the column as an "outrageous commentary" based on "utter fallacy."

So severe an admonishment from such a powerful and respected beltway lobbyist made quite an impression on the lowly Gleaner.

In fact, it seemed the only responsible thing to do was to write another column about how the casino industry's bottom line is fattened by problem and pathological gamblers, but this time featuring a close examination of Fahrenkopf's strongly worded denials.

So please read the Gleaner's latest column in CityLife. Perhaps you can help settle a matter of no doubt deep and growing concern to Nevada's casino industry — whether Frank has lost a step, or he just doesn't care anymore.

For what it's worth...

Fatigued by the media's politeness, the Gleaner figured ah what the hell and sent an email to Ben Kieckhefer, spokester for one James Arthur Gibbons, governor (in exile) of the state of Nevada:

From: Hugh Jackson
Sent: Wednesday, May 07, 2008 2:08 PM
To: Ben Kieckhefer
Subject: a question...

Hi Ben, I have an on-the-record question:

Is the governor having an affair?

Subject: RE: a question...
From:"Ben Kieckhefer"
Date:Wed, May 07, 2008 2:44 pm
To:"Hugh Jackson"

No.

And so there it is, on the record. From a spokester, anyway.

Assorted gleanettes from the madcap world of Jim and Dawn

• "Why now?" asks local columnist. To reiterate, there seems to be a false premise underlying the entire discussion about Jim and Dawn's madcap divorce, and that is the assumption that either unstable whack job is acting in a rational manner. Which is to say one can ask questions such as "Why now?" but, really, why bother?
• Yes, goodness, how awkward for the media to cover this oh-so sensitive issue. But demanding openness would be a start, says the RJ's Smith and the Sun in an editorial — though neither jumps on the Gleaner's call for the media to mount a gubernatorial stakeout. Having said that, one can't argue with Smith's assertion that if the nation's worst governor "wanted to keep his divorce private, he should have resigned from public office." The suggestion comes a tad late, though; the nation's worst governor should have resigned when he started his administration with a lie — and not just any lie, but a lie wherein he cynically tried to use the "war on terror" to mask a tawdry bureaucratic act of vengeance on his predecessor.
• Welcome readers from far and wide who saw the url for the lowly Gleaner in the wire service story in your local newspapers. Expecting someone taller? Sorry. Anyway, here's the post that's mentioned in story, ifn's that's what yer looking for, though this one certainly features more in the way of mean-spirited rumor-mongering.
• Emerging feminist cause celebre Dawn Gibbons seeks a change of venue (AP, RGJ). Apparently she doesn't trust a judge who ordered the case sealed at her idiot husband's request without even telling her lawyer the request had been filed. Women are so suspicious.

Heller offers agenda of hope to frightened, hateful voters

Obscure War Party congressman and cute blond trophy spouse Dean Heller says he is in tune with the ignorance-driven paranoia of the fearful, cloistered constituents who elected him, so they should return him for a second term of ineffective representation laced with silly wingnut rhetoric.

Specifically, it makes heartland heads hurt to think about America's catastrophically bungled and morally offensive warmongering. And any serious consideration of the structural causes for national and global economic instability is precluded within most of Heller's district as it would require an abandonment of simplistic and vulgarized conservative ideologies that Heller's supporters hold so dear.

Not surprisingly, then, the one issue that Heller says he hears about the most from his thoughtful electoral base is the pressing need to require that federal ballots be printed only in English (RJ, RJ, RGJ).

Heller's bill would make an exception for ballots printed in Native American languages because, as the blond explains, "they were here first" — by which he appears to mean "they were here before blond Republicans like me."

In 1776 when America was still an English colony and the "American" notion of wilderness didn't extend much west of Boonesborough, Spanish explorers were scouting Heller's congressional district.

A half-century or so later, trappers would work the region. In French, often as not.

The Mexican territory that would become the state of Nevada was ceded to the United States under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo signed at the conclusion of the Mexican-American War in 1848 — three years before Willard Romney's ancestors would establish the first "white" settlement in the state. Among the treaty's provisions was a stipulation that the civil rights of Mexican nationals living in the ceded territory would be protected.

Meantime, in recognition of his constituency's empassioned nationalism, Heller is also reportedly drafting legislation to change the name of the state from Nevada, which is the un-American and offensively Spanish word for "snow-covered," to the more patriotically appropriate "Whiteland."

Hillary still not president some more

Oh look, despite the overwhelming support of her key constituency (rural white Catholic senior citizen female truckers without a college education, pictured, at right), Hillary Clinton still isn't going to be president any time soon.

All the embarrassing performances by her husband the former ex-president, all those new personalities and personae adopted as quickly as the old ones were discarded, all the pandering, the pathos, the pantsuits — it was all for nothing, as an apparent split decision between Indiana and North Carolina effectively amounts to sound and fury signifying no more than the next inexorable step toward the nomination of Barack Obama that has been inevitable for months.

What's even worse for the Clintons is that notwithstanding their best efforts to render the Democratic nomination wholly worthless on the theory that if they don't get it this year they can come back in 2012 and try, try again, Obama is still going to win the presidency because John McCan't is such an old stinky fart. But for now, of course, it's time for the media noise machine to spend a week pretending West Virginia matters.

Miniglean

• "She doesn't believe that just because her husband is trying to divorce her that she should not be performing acts for the common good," says lawyer for Nevada First Lady and feminist icon-in-the-making Dawn Gibbons (LVRJ). Quite the contrary — dragging the nation's worst governor through a humiliating public divorce is easily the most significant act for the common good Dawn Gibbons has ever performed. Story also underscores yet again how Gov. Wussy McScaredofhiswife has to ask the court to give him his governor's mansion back because he doesn't have the balls to go get it himself.
• "The public is entitled to know the affairs of and the nature of the governor's activities," adds everyone's new favorite lawyer (RGJ). Sounds like another vote for the media stakeout.
• WaPo runs an overview of the story so far, no doubt prompting something along the lines of ... "Hey," says Congressman X, "did you see the story about that dullard from Nevada getting a divorce?" "Which one?" asks Congressman Y. "Gibbons," answers Rep. X. "Who?" asks Rep. Y? "Glassy-eyes, shit-for-brains, Pombo's boy," breaks in Congressman Z after overhearing the conversation. "Oh yeah, forgot about that dumbass," says Rep. Y, nodding in acknowledgment. "They elected him governor? Damned Nevadans must be as stupid as he is."
• Ooh, you too can get the latest exciting news about who is filing for political offices from Congress to the Legislature all the way down to the Overton Power District 5 race! (County Election site). Of course you may prefer to spend time in front of your computer screen in a more interesting and productive manner, in which there's always Bejeweled 2.
• If Harry Reid's book is as entertaining as his appearance on the Daily Show, well, again, there's always Bejeweled 2.
• Another Tuesday, another pair of pointless contests in the miserable battle for the once-highly valued but now increasingly damaged prize that is the Democratic presidential nomination. Yay, Democrats! Yay, Clintons!