Las Vegas Gleaner

Poor pacing threatens to undermine enjoyment of Sarah Palin Comedy Tour '09

Well, this is disappointing. Your Gleaner, somewhat to my own surprise, has been looking forward to America and Its Media's Full-on Farcefest starring Wingnut Barbie. And yet even before it starts in earnest, I'm already tiring of it. It's not unlike the letdown that comes when you allow yourself to get into the War on Christmas spirit too early, and then by the time Christmas Eve rolls around you just feel hollow and older and sad.

The AP reports that Mooselini has made a bunch of factual errors in her storybook, and off the top of my head I'm having trouble imagining some item of Palinalia that would be less newsworthy. Well, it's bound to get better, which is to say more batshit crazy, in the coming days.

Shortly after she quit that one job, when all the pundits were saying she was toast, I wrote a column explaining why she had a good shot at the 2012 GOP presidential nomination (but not of course the presidency itself). Given the collective hysteria that passes for the New Republican Party, her political prospects only seem to be brightening.

Having said that, there must be at least an equal likelihood that by 2012, Palin and Clod or whatever his name is will piss away all their new riches on overpriced blood-sucking hangers-on, his and hers hunting helicopters with leather seats and titanium gun mounts, warehouses full of bad wildlife art, the world's largest ruby, etc., and be forced into bankruptcy.

Could go either way, is all I'm saying.

Frightening elderly thrash-rocker stalks nice Nevada congresslady

The 60 Plus Association, which is some thing for wingnut geezers (or should that be geezer wingnuts?), is running ads against several Democrats who voted for the House health care reform bill, including Nevada's very own Dina Titus.

The group is fronted by Pat Boone, who apparently is still alive. Boone was briefly famous in the middle of one of the centuries before this one for being a polite clean-cut singer of trite ditties who was wholly devoid of any musical taste or artistic sensibility. He later would deteriorate into a destructive lifestyle of booze, drugs and whores but, ironically, still no taste or sensibility. Or not? Not that familiar with his biography really.

Anyway, the 60 Plus Association has a poem which suggests the capacity for appreciating literature among senior citizens is comparable to an average 5 year-old's, so that's pretty condescending and offensive. But mostly I'm just seizing this opportunity to run that picture of Pat during his metal period.

Meantime, the Constitution clearly grants newspapers the right to suck

You may have noticed that now the wingnuts are vowing to get their activist judges on the Supreme Court to legislate from the bench and kill any health care bill that becomes law.

There actually are some intriguing questions regarding the constitutionality of forcing people to buy insurance. Needless to say, a recent editorial from the Las Vegas Review-Journal and Right-Wing Masturbatorium fails to engage those questions either thoughtfully or meaningfully, instead marveling that Nancy Pelosi doesn't take extremist conservative talking points seriously. And in a blog post, the RJ's editor -- his customary intellectual acuity on blazing display -- echoes the simplistic teabagger contention that anything and everything not specifically authorized by the Constitution is ipso facto unconstitutional.

Well, the space program is boring anyway. And after Roberts and Scalia declare Social Security and Medicare unconstitutional, geezers will die much more quickly, thus saving society jillions of dollars, no?

Dean Heller, who is a congressman, more or less embraces the R-J/teabagger party line, explaining "I don’t know anywhere in the Constitution where it requires a citizen here in this country to have health care."

John Ensign, America's least significant senator, has always fallen for ultra-conservative pseudo-scholarship as if it was as natural as getting your parents to pay for your sex. "Most of what the United States government does is unconstitutional," Ensign sort of famously said nearly a decade ago.

Writing about Ensign's comment at the time, then-R-J columnist Steve Sebelius (though hard to believe now, the paper's opinion pages used to be much more willing to publish non-wingnut views) wondered if Ensign's assertion meant that "he'll vote against each and every appropriations bill that contains any extra-constitutional fat."

Alas, Ensign would later demonstrate how rules that apply to mere mortals don't apply to him because Goddy McGod made him better than everyone else and daddy has a yummy checkbook. So Ensign probably has his own version of the Constitution, a special occult edition he sneaked out with him when his fellow fanatical religious extremists kicked him out of their shadowy C Street compound. In that version, no doubt the founders specifically signed off on each and every one of the quarter-billion dollars in earmarks that Ensign has requested in just the last two years, to say nothing of $415 million to restore Lake Tahoe.

(Your Gleaner is no constitutional scholar, but I think a case could be made that Ensign's right to bone his best friend's wife is covered under the Ninth Amendment. But I digress.)

Anyway, if anyone cares, a wingnut stab at a serious argument (as opposed to the superficial assertions rendered by Nevada Republicans and their pet newspaper) against the constitutionality of health care reform has been made maybe most notably by these guys. For a clear and convincing explanation of why those guys are horribly wrong, see this guy. (Or this guy. Or even this guy.)

Of course, if the Democrats would quit screwing around and just extend Medicare to the entire population (Harry Reid, however unwittingly, is already stumbling toward a means of paying for it), constitutional questions regarding individual mandates would be moot. Plus the Democrats would win every election for the next 30 years.

NV gubernatorial candidate vows to start arms race with America

For years, North Las Vegas Mayor Mike Montandon has shilled for the problem gambling industry, er, neighborhood casinos and also served as a reliable yes-man for the sprawl lobby. Naturally he thinks he should be governor.

But it turns out Montandon is also something of a constitutional scholar, as he demonstrates in an essay he wrote for his campaign blog:

Today, supporters of the second amendment fight daily against what they believe are attempts to take away arms. The reality is that fight has already been lost in the purpose for which the amendment was written. As soon as we began to allow a difference between the effectiveness of the weapons that the States (citizens) could have vs. the Federal government, the battle was lost. Citizens involved can continue to fight the small fights, over ammunition rationing, concealed vs. open carry, etc., but they are just distractions. They distract us from the big issue. While we may have the ability to defend ourselves against our own ilk gone awry, we have lost the ability to defend ourselves from a Federal government gone awry. Without that ability, we are simply left to stretch out the loss of our other rights through the exercise of our best diplomatic abilities.

Seriously. How can Americans fend off an assault from all-gay armored infantry divisions led by Nancy Pelosi if they don't have weapons of the same "effectiveness" as the enemy, i.e., the military forces of the United States of America? Why are Americans outraged over a puny concern like "ammunition rationing" (!?) when big government has already trampled on the individual's Second Amendment right to mid-range missiles armed with nuclear warheads?

Montandon also writes that the Second Amendment is "crystal clear," and your lowly Gleaner envies the candidate's certainty. Frankly, sometimes it seems like the more I examine the nation's founding and contemplate what the framers were up to, the fuzzier things get. And the professionals are less help than one might hope. The nation's founding "involved processes of collective decision-making whose outcomes necessarily reflected a bewildering array of intentions and expectations, hopes and fears, genuine compromises and agreements to disagree," writes Jack Rakove in Original Meanings. And Rakove admonishes would-be diviners of the framers' "true intentions" to "never forget that it is a debate they are interpreting"

But Montandon's got it all figured out. And wouldn't you know? In contending that "the purpose for which the amendment was written" was to allow citizens to defend themselves "from a federal government gone awry," Montandon, unwittingly, perhaps, is embracing a militia-centric view of the amendment that at least brushes up against the interpretation favored here at Gleaner HQ. 

That interpretation was more or less captured by Saul Cornell in A Well-Regulated Militia. The "original understanding" of the Second Amendment, Cornell writes, was as "a civic right that guaranteed that citizens would be able to keep and bear those arms needed to meet their legal obligation to participate in a well-regulated militia."

Alas, it wasn't long before state militias were supplanted by a federal army and, eventually, a national guard. And so the original, contextual intent of the Second Amendment (though not the contemporary bastardization of it) became a relic, just like the the one that comes after it (as you may have noticed, politicians don't scramble over each other vowing to protect our Third Amendment rights). Or as Richard Urviller and William Merkel put it in The Militia and the Right to Arms, the Second Amendment "fell silent."

But if Montandon wants to recover the original meaning as he evidently sees it, reestablish a vigorous, active and purposeful state militia capable of standing up to the U.S. military, and force able-bodied Nevada citizens to muster at Sunset Park whenever they're told with their own military assault rifles, shoulder-launched missiles and surface-to-air artillery, purchased at their own expense, well, that should liven up the campaign trail.

One suspects, however, that he's just launching a bunch of hard-edged pro-gun rhetoric in the hope that it will arouse locals with more guns than sense and supply a spark to a flat candidacy that has thus far excited exactly no one.

*   *   *

One other smallish point about the framers and their firearms ... 

The founders were politicians, not gods. Blindly assigning infallibility to things that were written more than two centuries ago is foolish (that goes for the Federalist essays, though I'll leave the debate about Hamilton's proto-authoritarianism for another day). The founders disagreed among themselves, they changed their minds, and whenever anyone (it's usually somebody from the right) starts yammering on about "the founders believed" this or "the framers said" that, m'kay, Which founder? When (for instance, during revolution or ratification)? And most devilishly of all, Why?

So dusting off a snippet of something some founder or other said or wrote to make a point is rarely if ever as conclusive as its practitioners might think. But what the hell, here's one anyway (cited from Cornell): As a Virginia legislator in 1785, James Madison proposed a bill on deer hunting that also  penalized anyone who "shall bear a gun out of his inclosed ground, unless whilst performing military duty."

Hmm. Sounds like gun control.

Madison "understood the difference between bearing a gun for personal use and for the common defense," Cornell writes. "The state clearly retained the right to regulate the use of firearms and differentiated between the level of restrictions that might be placed on bearing a gun and bearing arms."

Maybe Madison's views on regulating weapons had transformed (changing outlooks was not out of character for him) by the time he drafted the Second Amendment four years later. 

Or perhaps the Second Amendment really wasn't intended to mean what today's gun rights enthusiasts think it means.

In any case, Montandon's gun worship may garner him a superior rating from the National Rifle Association. If Madison were running for office today, well, hard to say.

Area publication earns much-warranted recognition

A massacre of sorts has been reported at the Moonie-owned Washington Times -- hard to believe this type of thing doesn't happen at that organization more often, really -- in which the official newspaper of the Republican Party (relics, both) has axed the company chairman, publisher and CFO, with others on the way out.

But as Sean would say, let not your heart be troubled. The national media landscape is still littered with the likes of, well, Sean, as well as untold hundreds if not thousands of other cogs in the right wing echo machine.

Take the Las Vegas Review-Journal, for instance...

...or take it to task, in the case of Progress Now's new website, "LVJournal Review," which is dedicated to monitoring the foibles, oddities, biases, exorbitant influence of paid wingnuts and other surreal ailments, each more tragicomic than the other, currently plaguing the local dead tree of record. 

'Tis all a worthy task, to be sure, but -- and this can not be emphasized enough -- you simply must visit the site to behold the startling and never-before-seen photograph of R-J publisher Sherm Frederick as he ponders the enemy (or as they call it in the R-J newsroom, the 21st century).

Titus, Berkley make sense; Heller, by contrast, is a Republican

"Today America is less free," said Dean Heller in response to House passage of "the Pelosi healthcare takeover bill."

Meantime, back in the reality-based community, Nevada is fortunate to have two other members of the House of Representatives who aren't knee-jerk wingnuts. And in a welcome demonstration of decency and sense, both Dina Titus and Shelley Berkley voted for the bill.

Now all eyes turn to Blanche Lincoln, Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu and the rest of the radical moderates in the Senate whose passion for being perceived as centrists is in itself a form of ugly extremism. (Putrid Joe Lieberman is not included in that group, because his filthy and disgusting behavior long ago descended to venal and twisted motivations against which mere political posturing seems noble).

But in the meantime, good on Dina and Shelley -- especially Dina, who resisted the urge to cave lest someone in the media call her a liberal or a socialist or whatever. Many of her Democratic colleagues who, like Titus, will be in tough reelection fights next year trembled before the might of the right's talking points and fearfully voted against the bill.

Titus is smarter than they are. Her reelection depends on the health care reform bill becoming law. As Ezra Klein wrote a while back...

But the question isn't whether Republicans understand the power of successful opposition. It's whether Democrats understand the dangers of failure. And that's most true for the Democrats who are most likely to weaken the effort: The Democrats who are cool to health-care reform because they fear the conservative tilt of their state are the Democrats who will lose their seats if Obama loses his momentum and the Democratic majority begins to lose on its major initiatives. Legislative defeats will not threaten Henry Waxman's seat. But it will imperil Mary Landrieu's. And Ben Nelson's.

Breathless assertions to the contrary from the local wingnut newspaper and its frothing publisher notwithstanding, the House Democrats who voted against the bill are the ones who made a stupid mistake, not Titus. Voting for health care reform is not just good policy, it's good politics.

Unless of course you're Dean Heller. 

In that case, "policy," good or otherwise, is an inconsequential abstraction that can't compete in significance with ranting and raving about taxes and big government like a teabagger because the bumpkins in your congressional district eat that shit up. 

It's hard to believe that he used to be considered a sane, even moderate Republican. But after the Sharron Angle primary scare of 2006, Heller scampered to the hard right and hasn't looked back. He was letting the fruitcake wing of his party set his agenda for him long before anyone started demanding that Barack Obama provide his real Kenyan birth certificate. A Republican ahead of his time, Heller was assuring his own irrelevance well before it became the party's distinguishing characteristic. Now he's pointless, except for the point atop his shiny tinfoil hat.