Las Vegas Gleaner

Who brings the most crazy?

Both are deliberately obtuse, alternatively pretending not to understand questions or refusing to acknowledge the questions exist. Both revel in purposeful deceit and view evasion as not merely a tactic practiced to avoid self-incrimination but a game played for self-amusement. Both eagerly traffic in outlandish conspiracy theories that cater to only the most ignorant and fearful of their followers.  Both have a callous disregard for facts and intellectual honesty. Both are revoltingly smarmy.

But who is creepier, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (dive in at 4:45 or so if you -- understandably -- don't want to watch the whole thing)...

Or Glenn Beck?

Yes, but does he also know how to smeyes?

You'd think Barack Obama would show a little more concern, what with the troubling revelation that ACORN has a secret nuclear facility, no?

Cardboard cutout? Good guess. But Republicans shouldn't rule out the possibility that he's a space alien pre-programmed with an earthling smile function, especially since that would help explain why he refuses to produce his REAL birth certificate.

Oh. Smeyes.

Late lunch interrupted by telemarketer

In the latest installment of Who Wants to Decipher Harry Reid Over the Phone (i.e., another "tele-town hall"), we find our Senate majority leader declaring that a public option "trigger" is "a pretty doggone good idea." Sayeth Harry:

The lone Republican who's still talking like she might support health care reform is Snowe from Maine. And here's what she came up with, which is a pretty doggone good idea. She said "OK, here's what I'm willing to consider. We will set standards, goals that insurance companies must meet. And if they don't do it by a time certain, then we have a public option."

I think that is better than this so-called co-op that they're talking about. My first choice is a public option, because I think it will create competition and make the insurance companies more honest. And my number two choice is the trigger, that is, that Snowe talked about. Number three is a co-op.

Doggone indeed. First he channels Jim Gibbons. Now he's channeling the rhetorical stylings of Sarah Palin.

Nancy Pelosi, by the by, says "a trigger is an excuse for not doing anything." But her statement and Reid's statement might not be mutually exclusive, at least from Reid's point of view. That is, he may think "an excuse for not doing anything" is "a pretty doggone good idea."

Meantime, at another point while phoning it in to his constituents, Reid explained for the 634th time how the health insurance industry enjoys an anti-trust exemption and the only other industry that is so blessed is major league baseball (they still play major league baseball?) so Congress should get rid of the health insurance exemption, "which we are going to do."

Actually, a story in The Hill reported Thursday that Reid fears including repeal of the exemption in health care legislation because it "risks damaging prospects for an effort already facing significant hurdles."

And in other trenchant health care policy analysis, Reid asserted that if his wife went in for a foot operation and saw that the doctors were about to perform surgery on the wrong foot, she wouldn't say a word, because she is that painfully shy. Yes. It was a very awkward phone call.

'Got whiplash?'

"It seems like only yesterday that all the grown-up media kids were maintaining that the Republican Party was toast." And...

Considering what a hot topic the intraparty struggle was just months ago, the media has been somewhat quiet about the outcome of the struggle for the heart and soul of the GOP.

But then, the outcome of the Republican internecine battle presents an inconvenient narrative. After all, was the conventional wisdom wrong when it declared a further move to the right would doom the party to possibly terminal irrelevance? Or is the media narrative wrong now to suggest the party is riding its far right base down the road to recovery?

And so, since conventional wisdom forged and championed by the political/media industrial complex is as ephemeral as the public's attention span, Democrats should pay less attention to who is winning the news cycle and instead concentrate on trying to govern well and, you know, see how that works out for them, says your Gleaner in a CityLife column.

Harry and the R-J finally on the same (deliberately negligent) page

• In a report on the Max Baucus Insurance Industry Appreciation Act of 2009, the Review-Journal fails to tell its readers that expanding Medicaid eligibility is a relatively more expensive proposition for Nevada than for other states in the first place because Nevada has always been so very, very heartless, cheap and anti-safety net. Or as Harry Reid put it in a statement crowing about his greatness, Nevada has "unique challenges."  And so by virtue of their respective determinations to willfully and deliberately avoid the unpleasant and embarrassing truth of the matter, Reid and the R-J have finally found something upon which they can see eye to eye.
• The Reid-R-J memo of understanding will likely come to a noisy and bitter end, however, when the R-J learns that Reid has declined a request from Republicans to drop everything right now and direct the U.S. Senate's attention to the most pressing crisis threatening the national security of the United States today. I speak of course of ACORNS!!!!
  
• Only the harsh, dark, extremist bumpkin enclaves of Alaska, South Dakota and Wyoming ask less of their bidness communities (inasmuch as they have any) than Nevada. And refraining from imposing any taxes to speak of on business is the surest way to secure sustained growth and prosperity, as evidenced by Nevada's economic performance in these our troubled times. Any fools could tell you that. Oh look, here come Somer Hollingsworth and Dan Burns now...
• The U.S. Senate doesn't care what people in other countries think either. Or put another way, if the international community would like the Senate to take swift action to address global warming, the international community is going to have to start giving conservative Democrats lots and lots of money.

Casual observations tossed off as common knowledge in beltway paper shatter NV media memes

Harry Reid has been coming under fire for letting Max Baucus piss away the summer, Roll Call reports in a profile of the Senate majority leader.

Reid has been getting criticized? For being a no-show on health care? Alert the local media.

No, seriously. Somebody tell the Nevada press. For various reasons, Reid's mamby pamby non-leadership style will be news to them (though of course not the kind of news that they actually publish).

Overrated octogenarian calls for balanced tax study but probably not really

Nevada state, Sen. Bill Raggio, who is like 13,467 years old in dog years, wants a new study of Nevada's tax structure to be "balanced."

The study of which Raggio speaks is split into two parts, the first being the typical deal wherein some number crunchers confirm that Nevada businesses don't pay taxes.

The second part, which is the part Raggio was talking about, calls for a panel of people who are going to sit around and imagine what Nevada should be like in five, ten and twenty years and how it should get there (hint: start taxing businesses).

The group of visioneers "can’t be lopsided with the sector using taxes versus those who are paying the taxes," Raggio warned, repeating a theme he's harped on in prior discussions of the study process but that bubbled into the news this time because of the old fart's dotty language about tax "users" and such.

What? Oh, sorry. I forgot one mustn't say such things about Nevada's beloved "Sir Bill."

Anyway, Raggio's concerns are wholly misplaced. Oh, it's true that if the group was comprised only of those who are "paying the taxes," business would be largely excluded.

But if the panel is comprised from "the sector using taxes," everyone would be included -- even and especially business, which relies on taxpayer-provided schools and taxpayer-provided roads and, far too often, taxpayer-provided health care for employees not covered at work, and etc., etc.

*  *  *

The legislation that established this latest study, by the way, calls for a review of "proposals for broad based taxes which are fair and equitable."

Excellent. No form of taxation is more broad based, fair, and equitable than the progressive personal income tax, and your Gleaner eagerly awaits the study's analysis of potential income tax revenue under various scenarios (starting with one that entirely exempts the first $50,000 of income).

Some people, which is to say probably just about everybody, will say that there is no reason to include a personal income tax in the study because Nevada voters would never repeal the constitutional prohibition on the tax, so Nevada should just hush, continue to pretend that 43 other states don't rely on personal income taxes as a primary (and often single-largest) source of state revenue, accept the fact that Nevada will forever remain the cheapest state in the country, and rationalize it all away by jumping up and down and gushing "yay, we don't have an income tax!"

Say, that does sound seductive.

But the study is charged, again, with reviewing "proposals for broad based taxes which are fair and equitable." Failing to include a serious discussion of a personal income tax, in addition to being exactly the sort of thing that will probably happen, would not only be intellectually dishonest (historically not a key concern in the development of Nevada policy), but also unfair to the people of Nevada. How can we rule out any consideration of even the possibility of an income tax, deliberately ignoring any and all information that threatens to challenge our predetermined conclusions, if we're not presented with the information in the first place?

Failure to consider a personal income tax would also lock the supercalifragilistic visioneering o' the future group in a box outside of which they would not be allowed to think. And that doesn't sound like a very visioneery thing to.

Any serious study of proposals for broad based, fair and equitable taxes necessarily must include the personal income tax. As Sir Bill himself has decreed from atop the mountain that was at least 1,600 feet higher when he first climbed it (erosion over the millennia takes a toll), the study should be balanced.

Ensign vows to distract everyone from the fact that his parents pay for his sex

• 

  John Ensign, who apparently is still in the U.S. Senate, intends to file an amendment to health care legislation whereby every reference to the word "fee" would be replaced with the word "tax," in the hope that such tired wingnut gimmickry will eventually make everyone forget what a spoiled rotten little scumbag he is.
• Ensign also says that making sure everyone in America has some sort of health insurance coverage would be wrong. In his capacity as one of The Chosen among the C Street super-special holy roller collective, Ensign no doubt heard that from Goddy McGod himself, on the golf course, maybe. In a related note, Nevada is one of the most heartless states in the country when it comes to providing -- or not providing,to be accurate -- health care for the poor. So say what you will about Nevada's dysfunctional, incompetent and/or corrupt politicians, particularly the so-called fiscal conservatives. When it comes to health care policy, there is no denying that they are working together tirelessly to coordinate state and federal policy in a manner guaranteed to assure the continued misery of the state's least fortunate people.
• Las Vegas is one of the ten worst cities to raise children, says some magazine whose editors simply don't understand what kind of children we're trying to raise.
• On the bright side, the socialist government takeover of rural Nevada is going well. None too soon, I say.
• Thomas Mitchell, editor of the Review-Journal, writes the best column in all of Nevada newspapering. I'll have to read it sometime.