Las Vegas Gleaner

Hell blasted by freezing temperatures

The R-J's Molly Ball enterprisingly cornered Gov. Jim Gibbons after a luncheon address last week to ask him a few questions and has been carving up gobbets of the governor's hypocritical and inane responses for the amusement and edification of readers ever since. (Suggestion/request: Full transcript, please.)

The latest snippet:

From the fact that two prominent members of his own political party have already announced they'll run against him in 2010, you might conclude, as many already have, that Gov. Jim Gibbons no longer has the full confidence of his fellow Republicans. But that's not the message Gibbons takes from the situation.

Asked about it last week, the governor responded, "Why would you say that? What makes you think I don't? Have you done a poll? I don't know what you're even talking about to come to that conclusion. The Republicans I talk to are all coming around saying to me that I'm doing a good job, so I don't know what you're talking about."

And so finally and at long last Gibbons and your Gleaner agree on something: Gibbons is the face, the leader, the embodiment -- indeed, the very heart and soul -- of the Nevada Republican Party.

'Helpful' to who?

It was buried in a longish Gleaner discourse on a separate topic, but upon consideration perhaps this sentence fragment is worth highlighting:

"...by the end of the week Reid took a break from bashing liberals long enough to remember that his actual job description is to carry water for the president, not appease Sherm Frederick..."

Of course that's an overstatement -- a perhaps pithy but hastily tossed off simplification. When Reid whined that MoveOn and Americans United for Change are being "very unwise and not helpful" by running ads targeting Evan Bayh and the Senate Democratic Wuss Caucus, he was not distancing himself from progressive groups solely to push back against the Review-Journal publisher's obsession with calling Reid a dirty filthy socialist liberal etc.

For one thing, as he gears up for his re-election campaign, Reid would be triangulating himself in opposition to the left even if Frederick confined himself to his full-time job as bean-counter-in-chief in a dying industry and never bothered to fill blog posts and columns with ill-informed opinions and hackneyed prose.

Anyway, Reid might think that it's good politics, both for him and his party, to tell liberals what to do. But it will be in the best interest of the nation at large if Reid would expend his precious time and energy whipping Bayh and Co. into shape and telling them what to do.

Faith, hope and tax deductions

Just a little more than two months after George W. Bush stole away to ignominious exile, Barack Obama's latest prime time press conference was another reminder that for all else that is roiling the world, be it the large issues that matter or the micro-controversies preoccupying the jabbering classes on increasingly unwatchable cable news programs, goodness it's a fine thing to have an intelligent thoughtful human being serving as president of the United States.

Several of Obama's responses during Tuesday's televised meeting with the press -- on homelessness, race, sacrifices forced on households by the economy, America's slowly but surely improving image in the world, a closing paean to persistence -- resonated as the observations of a sane and grounded man in a milieu (Washington's media-political-industrial complex) not renowned for its connection to reality, let alone good sense.

And perhaps one of the more compelling passages came after Obama was asked if he regretted making a proposal to curb tax deductions granted the wealthiest Americans for mortgage interest and charitable giving.

Short answer: "No." Then after noting that average incomes have stalled while top-level incomes have skyrocketed over the last several years, Obama focused on the criticisms leveled by some charitable organizations:

It just means, if you give $100 and you're in this tax bracket, at a certain point, instead of being able write off 36 or 39 percent, you're writing off 28 percent. Now, if it's really a charitable contribution, I'm assuming that that shouldn't be a determining factor as to whether you're given that $100 to the homeless shelter down the street.

And so this provision would affect about 1 percent of the American people.  They would still get deductions.  It's just that they wouldn't be able to write off 39 percent.  In that sense, what it would do is it would equalize -- when I give $100, I'd get the same amount of deduction as when some -- a bus driver, who's making $50,000 a year, or $40,000 a year gives that same $100.  Right now he gets 28 percent -- he gets to write off 28 percent; I get to write off 39 percent.  I don't think that's fair. 

So I think this was a good idea.  I think it is a realistic way for us to raise some revenue from people who benefited enormously over the last several years.  It's not going to cripple them; they'll still be well-to-do.  And ultimately, if we're going to tackle the serious problems that we've got, then in some cases those who are more fortunate are going to have to pay a little bit more.

The pernicious increase in the polarization of wealth, progressive taxation, fairness -- this is exactly the kind of talk that too often over the past few decades has sent Democrats scurrying in the opposite direction, frightened that someone somewhere might call them a liberal.

Old habits being hard to break, some Democrats in Washington are getting nervous at the prospect that maybe, just maybe, when Obama said he would bring change, he wasn't kidding. Perhaps most notably, Evan Bayh, a Democrat known more for carefully navigating electoral victories in erstwhile conservative Indiana than leading the charge for social and economic justice, is spearheading a bloc of Blue Dog Democratic senators who are making noises about the need to trim Obama's budget.

And Democrats are also quivering on the specific issue of tax deductions allowed the wealthiest Americans who give to charities. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus of Montana has questioned the viability of Obama's proposal. After narrowly rejecting a resolution that criticized Obama's plan, the Senate Thursday approved an alternative version presented by Baucus that was watered down but that still calls for preserving deductions.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had been reportedly withholding judgment on the charitable deduction proposal. To his credit, by the end of the week Reid took a break from bashing liberals long enough to remember that his actual job description is to carry water for the president, not appease Sherm Frederick, and Reid defended Obama's plan, saying the issue was "blown all out of proportion." 

But perhaps emblematic of the party's not-so-grand tradition of insecurity and apprehension, Nevada's two Democratic members of the House, Reps. Shelley Berkley and Dina Titus, are rejecting Obama's proposition that "those who are more fortunate are going to have to pay a little bit more." Both Berkley and Titus have announced their opposition to scaling back the mortgage interest rate and charitable tax deductions for the rich.

Berkley even went so far as to assert earlier this month that concern about reducing the size of tax deductions for the wealthy is "the number one issue" occupying the minds of her Las Vegas constituents -- a somewhat startling priority for voters in a congressional district where the unemployment rate is 10 percent and the median household income is roughly $50,000.

To borrow a phrase popularized by a famous white collar criminal whose financial shenanigans seem profoundly quaint by today's standards of comprehensive financial sector chicanery, charity is "a good thing." And as Rep. Charlie Rangel, D-N.Y. said while questioning the Obama proposal on tax deductions, "I would never want to adversely affect anything that is charitable or good."

Politicians are "for" charity.

But a reluctance to curtail tax deductions afforded the wealthiest Americans is also driven by the Democrats' traditional fear that a tax hike, any tax hike, will be seized on by Republicans and feature prominently in an attack ad in the next election. In opposing Obama's specific common sense proposal on charitable deductions, as well as their skittishness over a budget that finally begins to address priorities Washington has neglected for years, some Democrats are hewing to conventional parameters of political discourse circa, oh, 2003, and hoping to preempt criticism from the right by siding with the rich.

From Bayh and Baucus to Berkley and Titus, balking congressional Democrats will serve their constituents better if they concentrate on what the country needs, and pay a little less attention to overblown anxieties forged over decades of cowering before once-fashionable Republican narratives.

Apocalypse later

FollyCenter, er, CityCenter, lives to -- what? Fight? Die? Get carved up, securitized and repackaged into an AIG-backed financial instrument? -- another day.

Largest private sector construction project in U.S. history turns out to be dumbest, too

Your lowly Gleaner is not a financial guru (but then neither, apparently, are the financial gurus), but with the CityCenter project reportedly poised on the precipice of a bankruptcy filing perhaps as early as this weekend, one or two admittedly off-the-cuff gleanettes come to mind.

1. Whatever else is going on with MGM's litigious Arab Emirate partner, Las Vegas isn't Dubai World's only problem. The Arab peninsula seems to be littered with assorted Dubai World projects, each of them perhaps every bit as ill-advised as CityCenter -- if not more so (one plan involves a 46-mile canal with a whole new city of 2.5 million people on its banks.)

2. Just out of curiosity, did anybody ever say that maybe it wouldn't be such a great idea if MGM were allowed, first, to pick up Mirage Resorts and then, later, merge with Mandalay Resort Group, thus more or less ultimately subjecting the fate of Southern Nevada to the decisions of a single octogenarian? Just wondering. Oh. That's octogenarian in question Kirk Kerkorian at right, as represented in one of those charming Wall Street Journal woodcut thingies. The business press -- you know, the folks who have spent the last several years wondering why you aren't rich like everyone else -- along with the investor class like to call Kerkorian "Captain Kirk." Alas, as Scotty explained time and again, sometimes patiently and sometimes not, you can't change the laws of physics, Captain.

3. Every new wave of Las Vegas megaresort construction for the last two decades, each of course more over-the-top than the one that preceded it, was met with hand-wringing from some market analysts and others concerned that there simply wasn't the capacity to fill all the properties and Las Vegas was being overbuilt. But this this last time, eh, not so much -- or if there were any cautionary voices, everyone had grown very, very tired of listening.

4. On the one hand, selling a high-end property like Bellagio or Mandalay Bay might raise enough money to get CityCenter through another few weeks, while selling low-end properties like Circus (not Caesars as I originally and blunderingly typed while trying to rush out the door) or the Excal might not. On the other hand, without cash flow from Bellagio and Mandalay Bay, maybe MGM Mirage has, um, no point? So maybe an intermediate megaresort should go on the immediate emergency chopping block -- perhaps the eponymous ant farm itself.

Snake oil buzz leaves a nasty bite

Reporting on Paul Krugman's visit to Capitol Hill this week, the Sun discloses that "many on the right see his views as radical socialism."

How uncharacteristically nuanced for those on the right to apparently be distinguishing between "radical" socialism, by which presumably is meant revolutionary socialism, and, say, reformist socialism, or market socialism, or mainstream (!?) socialism.(Having said that, if the blunt mischaracterization of Krugman's views is any indication, the right's capacity to differentiate among sometimes dramatically varying strains of leftist economic thought should still be considered, at best, a work in progress.)

You know what must be riveting? Nevada Rep. Dean Heller explaining whether he thinks prevailing Western corporatist models of interdependence between government and private capital is a potentially fatal compromise vulnerable to democratic control of the means of production or a powerfully spectrum-narrowing distraction that placates labor and thus helps to prevent any abrupt and systemic reorganization of the economy. OK. Maybe not that riveting.

Anyway, later in its story, the Sun confirms that Heller and like-minded Republicans, after due consideration of the nation's severe economic ailments, remain steadfast in prescribing the hair of the dog: less government investment and more tax cuts for business.

For a party that prides itself on its hard-boiled appreciation of market forces, what today's Republicans refuse to acknowledge -- or fail to comprehend -- about the economic crisis is jarring. Part and parcel of the economy's contraction is the collapse of demand. We could cut taxes on business -- the right's miracle tonic -- to zero, and it still wouldn't prompt the private sector to hire more workers to produce more goods and services that people still wouldn't be buying. That would be throwing a supply-side solution at a demand-side problem.

The folly would be laughable, except the dogma has held sway in America's economic dialog for so long that even as the nation is buried beneath its wreckage, supply-side orthodoxy/mythology wields a vestigial and perhaps subconscious but powerful influence on popular opinion -- it's still part of America's psychic furniture, if you will.

Which brings us to congressional Democrats, including those from Nevada. As they grouse about Obama's transformational budget or whine about raising taxes on the overburdened rich, they are demonstrating that the most important battle in the near term isn't between Democrats and Republicans (and hasn't been for months), but between Democrats and their own legacy of first capitulating to and then absorbing ideas championed by the likes of Dean Heller. And if Democrats lose that fight with their inglorious past, revert to form and chicken out on a progressive agenda, they could end up elevating the conservative minority's influence by effectively re-legitimizing the right's faith-based economics in the minds of voters. That's another folly that would be laughable -- if no more were at stake than the careers of Democratic politicians.

Unfortunately, however, the Democrats would also be aiding and abetting the distribution of exactly the same economic notions and potions that have already left the nation with really quite a beastly hangover.

Rest assured, Republicans will get 'back to basics' in 2010

From my column in this week's CityLife:

... whoever wins the Democratic primary will also have to contend with a Republican candidate (Gibbons, hopefully) in a general election who will eagerly unleash that party's customary alarmist assaults against (yawn) "tax and spend liberals."

The state's budget hole is so deep that Democrats, with the help of one or two responsible GOP state senators, are going to have to raise some taxes this year. If they adopt a host of tax measures -- the already-enacted room tax increase, hiking the minuscule payroll tax paid by employers, eliminating some mining industry tax deductions, raising sin taxes and otherwise tinkering around the edges -- yet refrain from establishing a broad-based tax that finally makes Wal-Mart pay something, does anyone believe that Republican campaign attacks are going to be somehow more restrained or less outrageous?

Nevada Democrats generally and Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley specifically would be naïve to craft a fiscal agenda, or any other agenda for that matter, based on an unfounded concept for which there is scant if any evidence in the modern era, i.e., a Republican's intellectual honesty on the campaign trail. The more prudent assumption is that the GOP gubernatorial nominee, whoever it is, will distort wildly, obfuscate deliberately and lie shamelessly -- execution of such campaign tactics being the one thing the party typically does rather well.

Instead of worrying about what Republicans will do -- we already know -- Nevada's Democrats, including and especially those who aspire to replace Jim Gibbons, "should acknowledge that a broad-based business tax is good policy, and remember that good policy is good politics."

What happens here...

...still stays here, at least when it comes to the working class being able to find strength through numbers and negotiate a living wage. The rest of the country will be perfectly happy to continue to let businesses crush union organizing efforts through intimidation, firings and whatever other nefarious means are at hand, thanks to the acrobatic flip-floppery of one Arlen Specter.

The Pennsylvania Republican was for the Employee Free Choice Act -- the "card check" bill -- before he was against it. But against it he is, now, because he's afraid if he isn't than Rush Limbaugh won't let him be a U.S. senator anymore. Specter is gearing up for a primary fight against Pat Toomey of Club for Growth fame. Toomey hails from the economic extremist nether fringe of the Republican Party -- for instance, he'd probably fit right in with the angry rump of Nevada Assembly Republicans who hate everything (whatever happened to them, anyway?). So Specter has determined some brazen sucking up to the most enthusiastic if poorly informed segments of his party's base is in order.

Specter was the only Republican senator to vote for card check legislation in 2007.  Specter's new flibbertygib job notwithstanding, Sen. Harry Reid says EFCA isn't dead yet because Specter is "not the only Republican that has indicated a willingness to consider something being done." We'll see.

Meantime, the silver lining here is that Specter's betrayal means no one has to feel sorry for him when Toomey beats him in the primary, which still seems likely since Republicans absolutely hate Specter because of the occasional sane vote -- support for the $789 billion stimulus package being a fresh case in point.

And then with a certifiable right-wing extremist and wholesale economic illiterate as the GOP nominee, Pennsylvania Democrats should be able to flip that seat. Unless of course society has deteriorated so dramatically by November 2010 that general election voters are willing to support a zealous advocate of all the irresponsible cronyism, ethereal dogma and failed economic exotica that brought us here in the first place. But in that case, civilization will in the advanced stages of an irreversible headlong plunge toward a post-apocalyptic dog-eat-dog anarchy intermittently ruled by roaming bands of armed gunmen -- the Libertarian Utopia! -- and nobody will care who is in Congress, if there is one.

What? No retention bonuses?

Perhaps you'll forgive me for so belatedly addressing this business of Gov. Jim Gibbons giving his staff enormous raises while nearly everyone else in the state and the nation teeters on the edge of economic ruin. It's just that yet another bit of offensive mischief emanating from the general direction of Gibbons hardly seems noteworthy anymore. Were Gibbons to do something noble, or honest, or right ... well, obviously, that would be news.

But however strong the temptation, it is wrong to just ignore Gibbons. After all, he is the face of the Nevada Republican Party.

In fact, in the absence of criticism from Nevada Republicans, we can only assume that they approve of Gibbons giving giant pay hikes, nearly double in some instances, to his staff.

And why not? Whether deliberately trying to destroy Nevada's system of higher education, establishing itself as irrelevant or just small stuff like, well, failing to flag the idiocy of giving huge raises to people at this particular point in time, the Gibbons "administration," with the assistance of trusted advisers like that one guy at the RV dealership, has done a heckuva job. Brownies all 'round, I say.

Last one to leave turn out the lights

 A small and formerly wealthy nation is suing MGM Mirage basically on the grounds that Southern Nevada and all who dwell there are doomed to miserable poverty and despair so CityCenter, yikes. Meantime, Harry Reid is giving up his day job as Majority Leader of the United States Senate to shamefully (or shamelessly) beg banks for money on MGM's behalf, but it won't work.

Well, so much for that. But hey, Las Vegas was fun for a minute there.