By: Chuck Muth
Nevada News and Views

TODAY’S NN&V HEADLINES

  • New Poll Shows Reid, Goodman in Virtual Tie (Chuck Muth) – A new poll conducted for Nevada News & Views shows a third of likely Democrat voters would favor Rory Reid if the Democrat gubernatorial primary were held today, with Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman pulling another third, and the remaining third favoring someone else.
  • CANDID CANDIDATE: An e-Interview with Don Gustavson – Don Gustavson is seeking the Senate District 2 seat in Reno being vacated by term-limited Sen. Maurice Washington and was interviewed this week about that race by Nevada News & Views senior political reporter Nancy Dallas.
  • The National Commission on Healthcare Reform (Mike Zahara) – If your house caught fire, would you call the Fire Department, or build a new subdivision next door?
  • Another Day, Another Liberal Attack on Freedom (Mark Noonan) – According to the “Elko Daily Free Press”, the ACLU has filed a lawsuit against the proposed “personhood” ballot initiative. This initiative seeks to define human beings as anyone who has the human genome. As this would include babies at the moment of conception and elderly people even a minute away from death, such an initiative – if passed – would constitute a ban on abortion and euthanasia in the State of Nevada.

Click here to read these stories at the Nevada News & Views site!

DRIVE-BY MUTHINGS

First Things First: At least a half-dozen of the Republican candidates running for United States Senate in Nevada are engaging in national direct-mail fundraising, as well as email solicitations. And it’s become accepted practice for them to do so with claims along the lines of this one from one of those candidates which arrived in my mailbox on yesterday:

“I’m running for U.S. Senate against Senator Harry Reid…”

No…they…aren’t.

If I were to lose my mind, re-register as a Republican and decide to enter the U.S. Senate race tomorrow, I would NOT be running against Harry Reid. I’d be running against Sue Lowden, Danny Tarkanian, Sharron Angle, John Chachas, Mark Amodei, a bevy of lesser GOP candidates and at least two wingnut gadflies.

The fact is, NONE of these people can run against Harry Reid unless or until they win the Republican Party nomination next June. THEN they can honestly say they’re running against Harry Reid.

In the meantime, will you candidates PLEASE stop telling us how bad Harry Reid is. We get it. We know it. We agree. That’s not the point.

What we want to know is why YOU are the candidate with the best chance to beat Harry Reid in November if, and only if, you win the Republican nomination in June. Why should we choose you to be “the one” to take on Harry? What makes you so special? And perhaps more importantly, what makes your opponents so weak by comparison.

Inquiring Republican minds wanna know.

New Sheriff in Town: The Nevada Republican Party elected Chris Comfort as its new chairman at their fall meeting in Hawthorne yesterday. Comfort takes over from Sue Lowden, who left the post to run against…get this…Danny Tarkanian, Sharron Angle, John Chachas, Mark Amodei, a bevy of lesser GOP candidates and at least two wingnut gadflies for the right to square off against incumbent Democrat Sen. Harry Reid next November.

Good luck, Chairman Comfort.

FAMOUS LAST WORDS

“The Club for Growth finally made it official this month and endorsed Marco Rubio for (in the Florida U.S. Senate race) over Gov. Charlie Crist. The National Review made him a cover boy, and everyone from George Will to Laura Ingraham has touted him as more conservative than Crist. But now Rubio is officially the new darling of conservatives across the country. He has been invited to be keynote speaker of the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington in February, a widely watched annual event.” – Adam C. Smith, St. Petersburg Times, 11/15/09