Las Vegas Gleaner

Canceled checks prove Gibbons owns most valuable grazing land on planet earth

Under pressure to come up with something, anything, to counter the widely and rightly held public perception of Gov. Jim Gibbons as a pathological liar, the nation's worst governor's shameless minions have produced copies of the backsides of endorsed, canceled checks written to Gibbons by disgraced former judge Jerry Carr Whitehead. (Sun)

The canceled checks appear to prove that Whitehead in fact paid more than $5,700 to graze livestock on Gibbons' 40-acre scenic retirement ranchette in Elko County for four-to-five months in 2007. Whitehead sold the land to Gibbons in August of that year.

In the course of alleging that Gibbons and friends strong-armed him into granting a lucrative tax exemption, Elko County Assessor Joe Aguirre has said that he was not provided evidence that the checks had been cashed. The land would have had to earn more than $5,000 a year from agricultural use to qualify for the tax break.

On the radio the other day, Aguirre also clarified that the tax break reduced Gibbons tax bill from $2,000 to $39. Aguirre had earlier estimated that Gibbons' tax burden on the ranchette property could be as high as $5,000.

By producing the canceled checks, Gibbons and Co. have not only shown that the nation's most crooked governor was in fact paid to lease his property for the purpose of livestock grazing, as Gibbons and his cronies have contended.

It also proves that Gibbons was paid as much as $1,425 per month to lease land that, at best, would have provided enough forage for one cow.

Possible (and by no means mutually exclusive) conclusions that can be drawn from this revelation include but are not limited to:

• For what he pays to lease grazing land for his cattle, Whitehead could rent each of his cows their own three bedroom house with 2.5 baths and a two car garage in a Green Valley gated community.
• Whitehead is making money even though he pays such exorbitantly high lease rates because he found someone to buy his cattle who is not only ridiculously rich but also a magnificent idiot.
• Whitehead's the idiot.
• The whole thing is a tawdry scam to game the system so Gibbons could get a lousy tax break.

Obama victory means there won't be other wars, McCain warns

Barack Obama  is traveling the world spreading hope, yes, hope, that maybe it just might be a little bit possible that America isn't full-on batshit crazy anymore.

Not to be outdone, John Sidney McCain III has bought an ad intended to remind everyone that unlike Obama, Sidney the III is a proud and patriotic American who possesses the foreign policy experience and qualifications this nation is going to need if it wants to indiscriminately start other disastrous wars with Muslims.

Sid's new ad is a nice follow-up to his last one in which he appealed to America's desperate longing for change and competent, engaged leadership by jumping up and down and yelling  "Come on! I was a prisoner of war! I should get to be president a little."

What? That's not what he said? Well that's the way it's described in the Gleaner's latest Citylife column.

Nation's worst governor heaps more insults on rural voting base while destroying its way of life

It turns out that Jim Gibbons wasn't kissing on  the dizzy forgetful doctor's wife in the rodeo parking lot. He was performing CPR on her.

Frankly, the nation's worst and most mentally unbalanced governor shouldn't be playing doctor. He should be seeing one.

Then again maybe he did -- in a series of excruciatingly painful-to-watch TV interviews (KTNV, KVBC, KLAS, Fox5), the one question that seemed to linger in the air but that was never asked was, So what explains your creepily enthusiastic demeanor today, governor, amphetamines or steroids?

Anyway, Gibbons told interviewer after interviewer that it is far more important for him to adhere to his No New Taxes pledge than to his oath of office, and as such he will not rest until he has done everything in his power to inflict irreversible harm on the state of Nevada and its citizens.  So nothing new there.

But over the course of the full, extended interview with KTNV, the serial liar and sociopath did provide some fresh insight when asked about the Elko County tax break that he didn't deserve but that he got anyway through a scam that relied on illegally using the influence of his office for personal gain.

Gibbons was asked if he had muscled around Elko County Assessor Joe Aguirre (who has said that Gibbons, with the help of state Tax Commissioner John Marvel "backed me into a corner") to get his tax bill lowered from as much as $5,000 to about $40.

As is his custom, Gibbons initially responded by lying. Then, when caught, he just pretended that he never told the lie.

Gibbons:  "I never talked to this individual. First of all, I bought a parcel..."

KTNV's Casey Smith: "He said you did. He said you came to see him personally."

Gibbons: "I did. I came in and I asked him what the process was. I stood across the counter from him."

Having thus established yet again that he's a pathological liar for whom a lie is the default answer to every query, Gibbons lied some more, contending that his retirement property should be taxed at the very, very low rate assigned to agricultural property "because I bought the core of a ranch ... the guy who leases it pays me $5,700 a year to keep his ranch operation going because I bought the core of his ranch."

First, disgraced former Judge Jerry Carr Whitehead didn't pay $5,700 to lease the land for a whole year, because Gibbons didn't buy the land until August of 2007 and only owned it for four months of the tax year in question, five at the outside. In Gibbons' defense, the land has to earn more than $5,000 from ag use in a single year to qualify for the agricultural tax break, so it's easy to see why he would have described it as $5,700 "a year" since that was the applicable time frame upon which hinged the success of his tawdry little scam.

Second, and more importantly, Gibbons says he "bought the core of (Whitehead's) ranch."

Gibbons bought 40 acres of scrub -- very pretty scrub, by all accounts, but scrub nonetheless. As was abundantly established in the original AP story on the tax scam and elaborated on at length in this little corner of the cyberwasteland, when it comes to grazing livestock in the West generally and where the Gibbons property is located specifically, 40 acres isn't jack -- typically not even enough to provide forage for a single cow.

Unless it contains, oh, the sole point of access to a crucial water source (and Gibbons' land doesn't; by his own admission it needs to be irrigated), forty acres is not the "core" of any working ranch in the Western U.S. -- ranches that often spread over thousands of acres and that are supplemented by additional thousands of acres of public grazing lands.

Forty acres, however, is a very common size for parcels when grazing land is overtaken by real estate developers and subdivided into ranchettes for sale to dudes from the city who want to buy a hat and play cowboy on their summer vacation.

Some folks in the rural West are a little less than thrilled at the influx of outsiders building McMansions on land that once grazed cattle as part of working ranches. Demise of the custom & culture, end of a way o' life, etc.

There's not a lot that they can do about it -- development is much more profitable than grazing cattle, and too profitable to stop. But it doesn't help when some relatively rich guy from the city says something asinine like his 40 acres are the "core" of a ranch. That's just an insult to the original injury whereby the aforementioned city boy gets a lucrative tax break that he obviously didn't deserve -- a tax break, as it happens, that was designed to preserve the very industry and lifestyle that he himself is helping to destroy by purchasing his cute little scenic ranchette.

Betcha he still calls it a "service" station

This is all over everyone's internets. And deservedly so. Please note the subject-appropriate hand gesture at the top of the clip.

Sen. Craig's fellow champion of traditional family values and long-time ideological kindred spirit, Nevada Sen. John Ensign, was not immediately available for comment.

And Gibbons hasn't even started campaigning for him yet

Obama leads McCain 42 to 40 in Nevada, Rasmussen sez:

"While the presumptive Democratic nominee’s lead in Nevada is statistically insignificant, it represents quite a change from the last three polls. In each of those, McCain held the advantage by margins ranging from three to six points."

Of course the shift toward Obama is expected to become even more pronounced once Nevada voters realize John and Cindy McCain are Muslims.

Reno 911 urges calm, asks for willing suspension of disbelief

Not only is Leslie Durant not having sexual relations with Jim Gibbons the nation's worst governor. She also was not drinking before she drove her Cadillac Valdez or whatever it's called over a few lawns, took out a utility box, slammed into a truck and then drove away without telling anyone at one o'clock in the morning.

The governor's parking lot paramour has been cited for careless driving and hit and run. However, reports the Reno paper:

She told investigators she suffered a dizzy spell, which caused her to swerve, Detective Shawn McMenomy said.

Durant said she bumped her head in the crash and didn't remember leaving the scene, McMenomy added.

Durant told detectives that she had not been drinking prior to the accident and that she was alone in the vehicle at the time of the crash.

She said she was at a Fourth of July event before the crash, McMenomy said

That's a relief. If she was at an event then no doubt there were witnesses who could confirm that she had not been drinking, and so everything must be on the up and up and Nevadans can rest assured that the governor didn't illegally use his office to influence the Reno police department as if it was a county assessor reluctant to bestow a valuable and completely undeserved tax break.

Then again, maybe the police investigation didn't go that far, which is to say perhaps the authorities merely accepted Durant's story and did not seriously pursue the possibility that her moonlight road rage was alcohol-related.

If so, Reno police are to be commended for effectively overcoming years of automatically stereotyping those who hit and run in the middle of the night as drunk drivers.

It may be too late to redress the injustice inflicted on the many, many people who preceded Durant and who have also hit stuff in the middle of the night because of a dizzy spell and then immediately forgot about it and drove off, almost as if they were trying to get away with something.  But at least in this one instance, not only have police not rolled their eyes in disgust. They have granted the popular dizzy spell/memory loss combination explanation the full and long-overdue credibility it deserves.

The people of Reno can only hope this marks a new day of improved law enforcement community relations, and that from now on confusion and forgetfulness will be routinely accepted as a plausible explanation from all citizens who slam their cars into stuff in the wee hours, slink home and pull the covers over their heads when someone knocks on the door.

The charm offensive continues

In the latest installment of the Sig Rogich Supercalifragilistic Hail Mary Plan for Applying Lipstick to a Pig, Nevadans find Jim Gibbons telling them that just because he's the nation's worst governor doesn't mean he needs to be the nation's loneliest, too.

"What I want to tell people is that I'm just like they are," Gibbons told KOLO TV.

Hmm, not sure about that choice of words. After all, if you're trying to ingratiate yourself to a skeptical and overwhelmingly disapproving audience it's probably not a good idea to suggest that they're all mentally unbalanced lying cheating tax evading sociopaths who don't care about the state, its people or its future. But hey, Sig's the image makeover professional.

"I don't want to be a lonely governor," Gibbons added, proving that Phil Gramm was right and America is a nation of sickening pathetic whiners. "I'm going through a divorce. I'm in the middle of a very painful time in my life, this has been going on, my wife and I have been separated for about 7 months. I really think that people should expect, and will, see me with my friends out to dinner, wherever, going to a rodeo, that shouldn't be a newsworthy thing."

How 'bout lying and cheating and illegally using the influence of your elected office for your own personal gain by browbeating a county assessor into giving you a wholly undeserved $5,000 tax break? Would that be a newsworthy thing?

The answer is no -- or at least not at KOLO. Apparently the TV folks didn't get around to asking that question. They were probably overwhelmed by sympathy for the poor little friendless shitbucket.

"I'm the governor of the state of Nevada, and I have to be the governor 7 days a week, 24 hours a day," Gibbons said. "But I also want to be a governor that doesn't have to be alone in life."

Actually, the skanktard will be relieved to know that he does not, in point of fact, "have to be the governor." He could do as all thinking Nevadans think he should and hope he would, and resign.

And as for the other bit, well, he'll never be truly alone; he'll always have this guy.

UPDATE: In the context of any and every development or event regarding Gibbons, there are so many appalling things about his behavior and nature that some points are inevitably overlooked. For instance, this post completely neglected to mention the astounding hypocrisy of Gibbons talking about his personal life in the press after swearing repeatedly that he wasn't going to talk about his personal life in the press. If you didn't read the great piece by Dennis Myers about Gibbons' two-faced approach to the media when it was published last month, now would be a good time. It makes an excellent companion to the "hard-hitting" KOLO interview.

Must-see JSMc3 TV

In a Naval Academy class of 899 (that's 899 midshipmen, not the year 899), John Sidney McCain III finished 894th, fifth from the bottom. But there is no evidence that the only reason he finished at all, instead of getting tossed out on his sorry ass, was that his father was an admiral as was his father before him. After all, preference like that would make Sidney the III part of the elite, and neither he nor wife the terrifying heiress can be called elite because as everybody knows only Democrats are elite.

Anyway, thanks to the incomparable Jed, here's a short video of JSMc3 explaining that over the course of many, many, many, many decades he has been consistent and never flip-flopped when it comes to his profound inability to learn.

But wait, there's more! In a remarkable and wonderful find, Sven the German Blog Magnate at My Silver State "stumbled upon" Sidney the III, the nation's worst governor (when he was merely the nation's most obscure congressman), Sen. Hairdo McWedgeshot and more, all gathered together to praise a man who "has led with great moral clarity" and "deserves not only our support but our admiration."

Instead of running his own ads in Nevada, Barack Obama should just run this one.

Miniglean

• Bitchy Little Area Megalomaniac (BLAM) Sheldon Adelson continues to smother Israel with his love. Meantime, one Israeli who is not feeling the love refuses to refer to Adelson's free daily as a "newspaper," calling it instead a "printed product" (WaPo). If BLAM buys the RJ, perhaps Nevadans should quit referring to it as a "newspaper" and call it merely a "printed product." On second thought, why wait?
• BLAM comes to Hairdo's rescue! WaPo
• She's baaaack -- Dawn II: The Castaway Wife Returns. Maybe. Sun
• His Lordship will not be quieted -- and certainly not by the village idiot.  RGJ, Ralston
  
• Won't you generously donate today so a poor blogger can go to band camp, er, the Democratic National Convention. No, not this poor blogger. This other poor blogger.
• (Well, this poor blogger too -- unless you've already contributed. And thanks so very much to the ones who have, by the way. It looks like this is actually going to work).
• Note to state Democrats: These fine graphic creations of Monger's should be made into signs and placed next to the campaign signs that these guys put out on the street.
• Oh yeah. The entire economy is collapsing like a house of cards. AP, RJ

Gibbons sickens few remaining supporters in exchange for $10,700

Elko County Assessor Joe Aguirre was on the Face to Face TV program -- actually it was more of a Phone to Face thing -- Tuesday explaining that he looked into the glassy empty black eyes of Jim Gibbons (paraphrasing there a little) in person during the Elko County Fair last year and told the nation's worst governor flat-out that his foo-foo retirement property shouldn't be designated as "agricultural" land eligible for a teensy-tiny tax rate.

So then the nation's creepiest governor slinked away and ordered a minion from the Nevada Tax Commission to browbeat Aguirre -- or as the assessor put it, Gibbons and Tax Commissioner John Marvel "backed me into a corner."

Following Aguirre, the Gleaner was also on the program saying that the governor is a crook etc. But Gleaner readers already know that so let's move on to another subject. How about ... animal unit months!

The friendly animal unit month, or AUM as it's known amongst the bumpkin set, is the amount of forage needed to feed a cow for a month. Or maybe a cow and her calf. Or perhaps five sheep. Exact definitions can vary depending on whether federal bureaucrats or state bureaucrats or welfare cowboys are doing the defining, but for purposes that will be charitable to the nation's most crooked governor, let's say it's a cow.

In the original AP story exposing the nation's worst governor's latest criminal activity, cowboy types who presumably would know were quoted saying that the value of an AUM can range from less than $2 on the low end up to as much as $20. They also said that as a rule of thumb, for native rangeland of the sort that comprises the Gibbons property, a cow would need about 100 acres to get the amount of forage needed to feed it for one month (i.e., an AUM).

Jim Gibbons has 40 acres. And he owned the land for about four months in 2007. Assuming his land warranted even the most generous price per AUM, and assuming -- very, very charitably -- that his 40 acres of scrub could generate a full AUM, i.e., feed a cow, two conclusions can be drawn. First, that cow would have been pretty spindly. Second, the grazing value of Gibbons land would have been, at best, $80 ($20 for one AUM over four months).

Instead of paying Gibbons $80 in grazing fees, disgraced former judge Jerry Carr Whitehead paid him more than $5,700. Demonstrating a penchant for understatement, Aguirre described that amount on Ralston's show Tuesday as "excessive."

He could have added convenient. The land had to generate more than $5,000 in agricultural income for Gibbons to qualify for the agricultural property tax designation. As a result, his property tax bill was $40 instead of about $5,000.

So why all the recapping and such?

First, it's hard to believe that anyone, and certainly not discriminating well-informed opinion leaders who constitute the Gleaner's readership, would doubt that this whole sordid turn of events is anything other than a full-on scam. But just in case, there's the math. There is no way that grazing leases on the 40 acres could have been genuinely and legitimately worth $1,000, let alone the more than $5,000 Gibbons was paid. Gibbons absolutely positively should not have qualified for the much smaller tax bill. Period.

Second, assuming the checks Whitehead wrote Gibbons were cashed, the total value to Gibbons of this ... hmm, what's the word? ... oh yeah, scam was nearly $11,000 -- the $5,700 his crony Whitehead gave him, and the $5,000 in taxes that Gibbons evaded.

And third, whatever shape is taken by the criminal investigation -- whether it's the Elko County DA probing the deliberate manufacture of a phony transaction to avoid a tax bill, or the state AG examining Gibbons illegally using the influence of his office for personal financial gain, etc. -- this latest scandal is, at bottom, about crass, base, crude personal enrichment.

But this con didn't take place on a cruise ship or in a congressional committee in Washington amid contested allegations and the hidden terms of a shadowy deal with a defense contractor. It went down in Elko, Nevada, for all his most ardent erstwhile political supporters to see.

Going back to Chrissy Mazzeo or even before that, to the plagiarism and beyond, there's always been an element within the "Gibbons country" rural base that has felt the darned big city media was always out to get their poor Jim.

Serial cheating on his wife has started to chip away the support among those "20 percenters," as  Erin Neff dubbed them.

Now, with the possible exception of the three to five people who don't care if Gibbons is filmed murdering children with his bare hands in broad daylight so long as he doesn't go back on his no new taxes pledge, this latest criminal act should just about take care of the last few stubborn holdouts in whatever was left of the Jim Gibbons "base."

So that's cool.