Las Vegas Gleaner

Porter underscores own pointlessness by stealing fellow backbencher's lame-ass gimmick

The answer isn't immediately jumping out from Mr. Google. But there seems to be an information morsel lodged in a remote nook of the Gleaner brainpan that wants to attribute the phrase, "It's not if you steal, it's what you steal," to B.B. King, delivered when somebody was interviewing him years ago about coming up with guitar licks.

Hey, maybe Jon Porter would know! In addition to being a career politician, rent lord, insurance salesman and dashing putz about town, he's also a groovy musician with a snazzy combo.

On second thought, there's no way that Porter could be familiar with the phrase. Otherwise he wouldn't have stolen something so lame as his ultra-super-lame-ass idea to have people send him their gas receipts so he can give them to Nancy Pelosi and then put out a press release about it later.

Some other obscure War Party congressional nimrod got a few headlines out of the gas receipts stunt last month. Apparently the idea is that if a Republican backbencher accosts Pelosi in a hallway and informs her that gas prices are really high, the Pelosi palm will go to the Pelosi forehead in a blazing realization that all her San Francisco liberal values are hopelessly and tragically wrong, and she'll agree that Congress must immediately adopt the House Republican energy strategy of staring at the ceiling and thinking of the queen while the world's largest oil corporations lay the wood to American consumers.

Porter has decided to steal the gas receipts gimmick (KLAS). It isn't clear whether Porter was going to bother to tell anyone that some other pointless congressman has already pulled the stupid stunt, which by the way is just an offensive affront to people who can't afford to put gas in their cars. But it probably should be noted that attributing the idea, dumb as it is, to someone else would entail some measure of honesty and integrity whereas the subject of this blog post is Jon Porter.

Coal (cough cough) does not make us (cough) sick, America tells Harry Reid

Only 22 percent of voters surveyed nationwide by Rasmussen Reports agree with Harry Reid's YouTubian diagnosis that "coal makes us sick."

More than half of the respondents, 52 percent, disagreed. About half also disagreed with Reid's assertion that "oil makes us sick," while 31 percent agreed.

Though survey respondents were divided in their reaction to Reid's blunt assertions, a nearly unanimous 97 percent of all those polled agreed that the idea of Rasmussen spending money to poll them about it made them sick.

John Ensign: The nation's most out-of-touch senator

Harry Reid is making sure that the solar power industry is favored with the same government largesse -- cheap and/or free land -- historically bestowed on all the other industries that have made untold riches economically colonizing the American West while falsely promising to bring sustainable prosperity to the region's backward and insecure residents. (NYT, Sun, RJ)

Well, Harry's got an election coming up in 2010, so he's eager to show that he hasn't lost touch with Nevada and that he still cares about the folks back home.

Nevada's other senator, by contrast, is not burdened by petty concerns such as the narrow interests of his constituents. There are far more important considerations commanding the attention of John Ensign. For instance, given a chance to help Nevadans taken in by a rapacious, unregulated and unscrupulous mortgage lending industry, Ensign instead leveraged the full measure of his senatorial power and influence to stop legislation aimed at providing relief to struggling Nevada homeowners.

Why would Sen. Hairdo McWedgeshot do such a thing, especially since Nevada is the Saudi Arabia of home foreclosures?

The ostensible answers involve Ensign's love of partisan political posturing and tawdry beltway gamesmanship.  And to be sure, when it comes to members of Congress being out of touch with their own state, particularly with regard to economics, John Ensign takes a backseat to nobody.

But there's a more fundamental reason why Ensign could so cavalierly turn his back on Nevada, a reason that is a) hinted at in the cheesy photo illustration accompanying this blog post and b) explained in the Gleaner's latest column in CityLife.

Change that isn't too threatening for bitter clingy Americans to believe in

Thanks mostly to year piled upon year of failed, incompetent, corrupt and venal U.S. foreign and domestic policies, many Americans can't afford fireworks this Fourth o' July, let alone the gas it would take to drive to the res to buy them.

And thanks to the flag-burning Democrats who wrested control of Congress from the War Party (at a time of war, too; go figure) in the 2006 midterm elections, this Independence Day marks the second in a row that the nation is not treated to an informative and enlightening debate over a proposed constitutional amendment to ban flag "desecration."

Demonstrating their keen grasp of issues that matter most to American economic and national security, Republicans in the House of Representatives had proposed the flag-burning amendment nearly every year that the party controlled Congress, from 1995 through 2006, because Republicans love America more than just plain old regular Americans.  The Republican-backed flag burning amendment always somehow managed to be introduced right around July 4. Some might describe that as a freakish coincidence but really it's nothing less than a sign of America's special place in god's heart.

So between fewer colorful explosions on our streets and a diminished effort by House Republicans to exploit the citizenry's natural love of country for cheap political gain on our teevees, Independence Day might seem just a little less festive for some this year, especially the only true Americans, i.e., the traditional values-totin' god-fearin' gun-lovin' inhabitants of the heartland.

Let us reflect, then, on remarks delivered earlier this week by that nice young Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

...it is worth considering the meaning of nationalism because the question of who is – or is not – a nationalist all too often poisons our political debates, in ways that divide us rather than bringing us together. I have come to know this from my own experience on the campaign trail. Throughout my life, I have always taken my deep and abiding love for this country as a given. It was how I was raised; it is what propelled me into public service; it is why I am running for President. And yet, at certain times over the last sixteen months, I have found, for the first time, my nationalism challenged – at times as a result of my own carelessness, more often as a result of the desire by some to score political points and raise fears about who I am and what I stand for.

So let me say at this at outset of my remarks. I will never question the nationalism of others in this campaign. And I will not stand idly by when I hear others question mine.

Most uplifting and ... what? Obama wasn't talking about nationalism, but patriotism? Oops, boy is the Gleaner's face red -- especially since all the bitter clingy heartlanders Obama was targeting with his remarks are so keen on the distinction.

Anyway, Obama also has been saying some very nice things about Goddy McGod lately, so all he has to do now is get a concealed weapons permit and Americans can celebrate the Fourth of July comfortable in the assurance that an Obama presidency will represent change that isn't too icky or scary for them to believe in.

Area man tingly at gubernatorial prospects

Jon Ralston went on KLAS teevee Tuesday night to report that senatorial offspring and Clark County Commissioner Rory Reid bought a poll and dang if it doesn't show that Reid the Younger would swamp the nation's worst governor in a head-to-head, 49 to 32.

Yes, most startling. Who could have imagined that 32 percent of any poll respondents would express a willingness to vote for Jim Gibbons, no matter who he was running against?

Rory's poll also showed him crushing Madame Speaker Barbara Buckley in a Democratic gubernatorial primary, 51 to 20. On the bright side, at least for Buckley, if Reid runs for governor, his campaign would likely be managed by Dan Hart.

Was that too mean? The Gleaner can never tell.

T. Boone Pickens, honorary Nevadan

If one element has been sorely missing from America's angst over $4.40 a gallon gas and the broader debate over the nation's energy future, it's a summit. Finally, that glaring omission will be rectified, as the Great and Powerful Harry Reid has announced that Las Vegas will host something called the National Clean Energy Summit at UNLV August 19.

And now here are some words that were put into the Great and Powerful Harry's mouth by the "Let's Get Harry Some Innocuously Positive Headlines Division" of his media message development center:

"I am hopeful that this event will result in some consensus ideas and principles that participants can carry to the parties’ political conventions and on into the next Administration.”

Dang. Obama was in town just the other day speaking in a rather detailed and yet comprehensive manner about, as Harry might say, the "ideas and principles" guiding his clean energy policy. Just imagine how much better Obama's proposals would be once he and his several hundred policy advisers have digested the magnificent consensus that will emerge from Harry's Supercalifragilistic Energy Summit.

Okeydokey, perhaps the snark should be dialed back a tad -- especially since Harry's diagnosis that "coal makes us sick" and "oil makes us sick" is so popular on the YouTubes (via Sun). Besides, the more promotion of sane energy policy the better, and certainly no harm could come from the Reid/UNLV/Center for American Progress confab. By the way, people who are scheduled to attend include but (presumably) are not limited to: Bill Clinton, who hopefully will have resumed his former status as an ex-president by then, Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter, and Wall Street darling and Clinton administration Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin.

Notably absent, obviously, is Al Gore.

Conversely, conspicuously invited is "businessman T. Boone Pickens, who is committing to build the largest wind farm in America."

Oh for cute. After decades of making jillions in the oil industry, Pickens is building a big wind farm in Texas. Not only does it stand to earn him a buck or two. He also gets to greenwash his reputation.

To be fair, the oilman and erstwhile corporate raider's enthusiasm for wind power isn't the only thing he has in common with Nevada. It's not even the most important thing. Before he concluded that wind power could be profitable, Pickens realized that if he mined the Ogallala Aquifer beneath the Texas panhandle in a water privatization scheme and then piped the water to Dallas and San Antonio, he could make a huge profit (especially if the wind farm transmission line and the water pipeline share the same easement corridor).

As it says right there on the "A suprising environmentalist" page of "T. Boone Pickens. His Life ... His Legacy" ... his website:

The water is high quality, it is not needed for local irrigation because the land it rests under is unsuitable for farming, and studies support that supplies can support a prudent plan of drawing off water from the aquifer.

See? Mining aquifers is profitable and environmentally harmless. Southern Nevada Water Authority Czarina Pat Mulroy couldn't have said it better herself. Nor, for that matter, could Harry Reid, who has done so very, very much to facilitate Southern Nevada's very own aquifer mining schemes -- all part of official Nevada's long and storied commitment to the care and feeding of the corporate growth industry.

Meantime, Harry's Supersonic Summit is yet another event that was organized without consulting the Gleaner. Otherwise, Amory Lovins would be keynoting.

(Disclosure: Several years ago while employed with some simply wonderful people at a place called Public Citizen, your lowly Gleaner was paid to advocate against water privatization schemes generally and, if memory serves, did a nominal amount of work in opposition to the Pickens scheme specifically.)

Innocent bystanders waddle up to state trough, submerge snouts

Regular Gleaner readers, all seventeen of you, are familiar with the axiom wherein when a politician says something, often as not, the exact opposite is true. Needless to say, it goes double for lobbyists who shill on behalf of big bidness.

As an example, let's take the manner in which a bill died during last week's not-so-special session of the Nevada Legislature. The bill would have tried to protect state and local governments and school districts from having to fork over as much as $150 million to the world's biggest gambling corporations, a burden that hangs over the state's head because Nevada's conflict-of-interest-ridden courts determined the industry needn't pay taxes on meals comped to drug runners, arms dealers, slave traders, tin-pot dictators and other preferred customers at area casino-resorts.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Raggio swears to the Las Vegas Sun that the bill simply got bogged down in partisan politics and as for the gambling industry, why, it had no influence whatsoever in killing a measure that might have deprived the industry of tens of millions of dollars. Raggio has been around long enough -- 217 years, by some estimates -- to know that some people are morons who will believe such nonsense, and most of the rest who recognize it for the inane drivel that it is just don't care because cynicism has inured them to politicians and their bullshit.

Bill Bible, a former head of the state Gambling, er, Gaming Control Board who liked the industry he used to regulate so much he decided to go to work for it, also made statements premised on the apparently sound belief that the public is by and large comprised of idiots and suckers and/or a jaded citizenry who can't be bothered to care when a key representative of the state's largest industry shamelessly feeds them a line of crap:

Bible, head of the Nevada Resort Association, said he hadn’t done any lobbying, nor did he have time to poll all his members on whether they supported the bill.

He dismissed the notion that this was an example of gaming’s influence.

“Quite frankly, I thought the bill would be approved and passed out,” he said. “It appears to me it was bogged down in partisan wrangling at the tail end of the day.”

If true, and Bible did not lobby on nor canvas his employers about a piece of legislation that threatened to cost his industry as much as $150 million, he should be fired for negligence and incompetence. He won't be fired, of course, because what he told the Sun is full-on bullshit. (By the way, another axiom that rarely misses: whenever someone is quoted in a newspaper saying "quite frankly," whatever they say after that is almost guaranteed to be a lie).

So while institutions such as those comprising Nevada's education system or the state's social services safety net suffer under more and deeper budget cuts, the good corporate citizens in Nevada's gambling, er, gaming industry stand to gain a $150 million windfall from more or less the same pool of money that funds those public institutions. And the industry didn't even have to ask; the bill to stop the grand giveaway just withered away, as if by accident or divine intervention, and the gambling industry and its lobbyists were mere innocent bystanders. Lucky industry, no? No wonder the house always wins.

The industry is magnanimous, too. Just ask them. For instance, whenever any discussion of the state's tax structure comes up, leading industry figures and their political apologists are eager to note that gambling, unlike other businesses in Nevada, at least pay a little something in taxes 'round here. And that's true, which is why the Gleaner, along with every other thinking Nevadan, has long and repeatedly called for a broad based tax to make other big bidnesses start paying something, perhaps even as much as -- gasp! -- their fair share.

But it's a crying shame that the state education association struck a deal with the gambling industry in May and backed off the ballot initiative to significantly increase the gambling tax. As was proved yet again last week, the gambling industry, at the end of the day and taken all in all, is just another gaggle of corporate pigs who aren't going to do anything for the state on their own volition, but instead must be dragged to the table kicking and squealing every time.

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.