Las Vegas Gleaner

What if the Hokey Pokey IS what it's all about?

Someday, some gold hoarder (an Arab nation under new management, perhaps?) will decide that gold has peaked, and start selling. More sellers will follow. Panic-selling will ensue, and the price will plunge. That's what bubbles do: pop.

When that passage from your Gleaner's latest CityLife column was submitted for publication the other day, gold was selling at an all-time high of $1,911 an ounce. A couple days later when the column was published, the price had fallen $200. It's recovered some since. The harsh reality, s'pose, is that your Gleaner is pretty much like all the Wall Street analysts who won't rest until everything of value in the entire world is owned by by the super rich, i.e., wholly clueless as to exactly what the price of gold is going to do or when it's going to do it.

But more importantly -- and just for the record since nothing meaningful is going to be done about it any time soon, if ever -- thanks to the humiliating farce passing as state mining tax policy, as far as any significant contribution to Nevada's pathetically inadequate and job-killing state budget is concerned, the spectacular increase in the price of gold over the last several years, including the rapid escalation over the last several months, might as well not even have happened. Nevada is getting royally ripped off each and every day. Or as the headline of your Gleaner's column in CityLife puts it, "Squandered opportunity pushes $2,000 an ounce."

Btw, please don't blame Newmont and Barrick. The global mining companies care deeply about Nevada's well-being, which is why they directed their lobbyists to work so hard to pass a broad-based business tax during the last legislative session.

True, despite making a business tax their tip-top priority -- why, Newmont's lobbyist, Jones Vargas, apparently even put the governor on the payroll -- mining's lobbyists couldn't quite get the job done.

But take heart. Newmont and Barrick didn't become giant transnational conglomerates by giving up! So we must assume the industry's government affairs efforts are now dedicated to bankrolling and fighting for a broad-based business tax initiative on the 2012 ballot. After all, if they're not, why, that would mean that mining's commitment to a business tax is but a sham, just some rhetorical Hokey Pokey performed to deflect any tax discussion away from mining, and the industry's lobbyists, including and especially those who are former elected officials, actually care more about their fat paychecks than they do about the state of Nevada, and probably always have.

And if the people of Nevada determine that dozens of the state's most successful lobbyists can't be trusted any farther than their luxury SUVs can be thrown, well goodness, then what?

Irony spared in newspaper downsizing

The Las Vegas Review-Journal, which is a newspaper, is preemptively praising Willard Romney's Big Plan to create jobs. The plan will be officially unveiled in Nevada after Labor Day, and while the Stepford candidate has yet to announce the details, he is widely expected to propose more tax cuts for big business and rich people while displaying a blithe disregard for everyone else.

Since "no state has endured as much economic hardship as Nevada, and no state needs jobs more, it's fitting" that Willard will announce his plan in Nevada, writes the R-J braintrust, or what's left of it.

Agreed. No state in America levies a lower tax burden on business and the rich than Nevada. And no state sports a proportionally smaller state government. Nevada is the ideal place for Romney to preach standard-issue anti-government corporate-coddling gospel, because if America wants to know how important small government and low taxes are to a healthy economy, America need look no further than Nevada. 

And of course, if anyone can testify how small government and a light tax burden are virtually guaranteed to create a climate of job creation and get the economy moving again, who better than the R-J?

Willard finds nice teabagger lady to handle his light work

Does anyone else feel sorry for Nevada's political-media-industrial complex?

Assorted yahoo presidential candidates, each more zany than the other, are gallivanting all over states with early nominating contests, engaging the wingnut base in a post-modern dialog that rejects reality or facts, spewing outrageous statements with such numbing regularity as to render the Republican presidential race roughly equivalent to the sound of the refrigerator running (maybe we'll notice it when it stops?), and tragi-comically affirming that today's GOP is the most right-wing extremist major political party in the industrialized world. From Iowa to New Hampshire to South Carolina, the candidates rant and rave and romp, throwing money around like there's no tomorrow (which makes sense because, you know, The Rapture) and generating a blizzard of madcap infotainment everywhere they go.

But not -- sniffle -- in Nevada. Oh, Nevada has an early presidential contest, too. But all Nevada gets is the assurance that a few candidates will fly into Las Vegas for a reality TV show in October. Then in February, after spending months of time and millions of dollars in States That Matter, any candidates who are still standing may spend a few thousand dollars on Pete Ernaut and Ryan Erwin and a couple of hours in Incline Village. That's if Nevada's lucky. If Florida and other states rejigger their primaries frontward, Nevada can look forward only to visits from exciting campaign surrogates such as Chuck Grassley and Jim DeMint.

Maybe Nevada will get more attention during the general election, thanks to our vaunted swingy-majingyness. Let's hope so. Perhaps as much as 19 cents of every campaign dollar spent with Nevada's out-of-state-owned TV stations stays in Nevada (an aggressively unofficial estimate), and the economy needs all the help it can get -- especially since Obama and his Democrats have signaled they are willing to win at any cost, even if that means promoting economic, regulatory and entitlement policies somewhere to the right of Dole-Kemp '96.

Fine. Republicans are too deranged to talk sense about the real problems facing the country, and Democrats are too a-scared, so what the hell, might as well get on board and indulge in some meaningless horserace horseshit, er, punditry:

It was awfully kind of Teabaggette Michele Bachmann to take out the presidential "candidacy" of fellow Minnesotan Tim Whateverhisnamewas so Willard Milton Romney didn't have to. But can she do Willard another favor and take out Cowboy Rick Perry, too? Perry signed -- and praised -- the establishment of new taxes. And it wasn't just higher taxes on the poor, which is to say the sort of tax hike that Republicans like. No, 'twas a tax on Our Lord Bidness Who Art In Heaven.

So yer Gleaner is thinking that yes, if Rollins & Co. can keep her from barking at the moon more than two or three times a day, it is entirely possible that Mrs. Marcus Bachmann can stay relevant just long enough to take out Mousse in Boots before inevitably sinking under the weight of her own inanity. The nagging problem, for Willard, is that Bachmann may have already peaked, posing the prospect that Willard & Mousse will spend jillions in a long, drawn-out fight over who has the best hair. In that Battle of Stylists, your Gleaner gives the nod to Willard, because even the otherwise knowledge-deprived GOP base knows that he's the Republican Obama fears most. And for all the Republican hyperventilation over taxes and debt and government and god blahblahblah, for that crowd, at the end of the day, it's all about the African.

Kate Marshall's disturbing link to Barack Obama

Mark Amodei, the cookie-cutter Republican who wants to be your next Jim Gibbons/Dean Heller, says Kate Marshall, the latest token Democrat running "for Congress" in Nevada's second congressional district, has way too much in common with Barack Obama and the rest of the Democrats in Washington.

In this week's CityLife column, your lowly Gleaner is forced to conclude that the cookie-cutter Republican is ... gasp ... right! Indeed, Kate Marshall may be the quintessential modern American Democrat. Just not for the gormless reasons Amodei thinks.

*    *    *

In a completely different but perhaps not altogether unrelated development, the race for the Democratic nomination to run against Heller is over. Democrats should be delighted, because a relevant, serious, fact-based, candid debate about economic policy is a big fat turn-off to voters, and now there is virtually no chance of such a discussion breaking out.

Silly upstart doesn't realize a political campaign is no time to talk about the economy

Survey says: Known commodity Shelley Berkley is crushing someone named Byron Georgiou in the Nevada Democratic Senate primary, 71 to 6.

With the short American century (1944-2007?), one of the briefest in the history of empires, having come to its ignominious and whimpering end, successful U.S. politicians have sensibly abandoned any serious consideration of economic policy to cynically focus exclusively on clever positioning so as to secure the all-important short-term objective of winning their next election (see: Obama, Barack). Partisan Democrats will go along with this, because Republicans are horrible.

Meantime, all this Byron Georgiou person ever talks about is the need to tackle the fundamental structural problems that are precluding any possibility of economic recovery, particularly household debt. So clearly, this poll makes as much sense as anything in contemporary American politics.

Soar, America, soar!

If Goddy McGod had wanted people to fly, out of Ely, he/she/it would have provided some reason for people to move to Ely in numbers sufficient to make air travel pencil out.

But more -- much, much more -- importantly, God, R-America, hates unions, amen.

So at least three dozen people have to lose construction jobs at the Las Vegas airport, and tens of thousands of people must be tossed out of work nationwide, until Congress reconvenes in September when Democrats and Obama can resume doing whatever teabaggers say.

True, America's inability to govern itself poses the seemingly imminent prospect of the nation deteriorating further into chaos and despair until finally giving way to a fascist regime wherein Congress is replaced by a puppet "Patriot Protectorate" whose membership is limited exclusively to radio talk show hosts and people who have been administered the sacrament by The Reverend Norquist himself. There still won't be any jobs -- on the contrary, hopelessness and misery all 'round, and disease and starvation and unimaginable disaster and ruin, I'm guessing.

But what's more important, a functioning and vibrant but stable society and some measure of prosperity and opportunity for all, or returning control of the country to "proper" Americans? I think Mark Amodei, Dean Heller, Joe Heck, Brian Sandoval and Sharron Angle know the answer to that one.

Besides, in New Old America, the entire air travel system, along with every other type of system, infrastructure and organizational capacity currently underlying civilization, will probably collapse under the weight of all The Stupid, or at best be severely curtailed, and the only flight to Ely or any other ruby red Republican small town in America will be on a Koch Industries helicopter, betcha. So it won't be all bad.