The perfect gift any time.
Nevada News & Views – January 13, 2010
Jan 14th, 2010 by TMH
By: Chuck Muth
Nevada News and Views
TODAY’S NN&V HEADLINES
- If Harry Reid Does Quit….What Then? (John Fund) – In the end, I don’t believe Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will run for re-election. Whether or not the health care bill he muscled through the Senate becomes law, the 70-year-old will bow out of his race for a fifth term.
- Exclusive Interview with RNC Chairman Michael Steele (Elizabeth Crum/Nevada News Bureau) – Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele in an interview on Monday said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s recent comparison of the opponents of health care reform to those who supported slavery combined with his statement about President Obama being more acceptable to white voters because he is “light-skinned” and does not have a “negro dialect” shows a “disturbing pattern of insensitivity and ignorance.”
- Reid Denies His Bill Cuts Medicare, Contradicts CBO Report (Mike Chamberlain/Nevada News Bureau) – Senator Harry Reid extolled the virtues of his health care bill in Las Vegas last Thursday night. What was not reported is that when a Reid was asked about the cuts to Medicare on which the CBO’s estimates of savings were based, he denied any such cuts exist in his bill, which seems to contradict page 18 of the CBO analysis of the Senate health care reform bill.
- Vision Stakeholders Group Meets Out of Sight (Robb Archie) – Last Friday, I was quietly enjoying coffee with my wife when the phone rang and a friend reminded me that the Nevada Vision Stakeholders Group would be meeting for the first time. I mentioned that I was planning to watch the proceedings over the Internet until I discovered they were not being broadcast for some unknown reason.
- What’s Going on in Massachusetts? (Newt Gingrich) – With one week to go, who will win the special election in Massachusetts to replace the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D) is still anybody’s guess. But before a single vote is counted, we can be sure of this: The Massachusetts race is already telling us a lot about how unhappy Americans are with the liberal, big government agenda in Washington.
Click here to read these stories at the Nevada News & Views site!
SURVEY SAYS!
Do you agree with Sen. John Ensign that Republicans should back off of Sen. Harry Reid?
- Yes, John Ensign is a paragon of truth and virtue
- No, John Ensign should blow it out his pipe-hole
To cast your vote in today’s online survey, click here!
MUTHS TRUTHS
- Hey, there’s a fairly decent chance that Republican Scott Brown could win the U.S. Senate seat formally occupied by Ted Kennedy in Massachusetts next Tuesday (see Newt’s column on the Nevada News & Views website today). With that in mind, the Lowden for Senate campaign has made an in-kind donation to Brown in the form of donating the use of its 30 campaign phones to Tea Party people to make GOTV phone calls for Brown. That’s teamwork. All for one, one for all!
- John Ensign will be holding a town hall meeting at the Summerlin Library at 2:30 p.m. today. Maybe somebody will ask him why he continues to support and defend (give aid and comfort to?) Harry Reid and why he’s telling Republicans to back off the Senate Majority Leader over his “Negro” comments.
- By the way, Ensign extended his Stonewall 2009 Tour into 2010 this week with an interview on Nevada Newsmakers. As he’s done with Alan Stock and CNN before him, Ensign declined to answer legitimate, straight, direct questions by host Sam Shad about his ongoing scandal, but found time to criticize me for leaving the Republican Party. Wrong, Senator. I didn’t leave the Republican Party; it left me. (Where have I heard that before?)
- More on Ensign’s interview and his various non-answers later, but the big question now is: Why won’t John Ensign go on Nevada’s only daily statewide political interview show, Face to Face with Jon Ralston? He’s interviewed with just about everyone else, but not with Ralston. What is the senator afraid of? Bawk!
- Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Republican gubernatorial candidate Brian Sandoval announced yesterday that his campaign has raised more than $900,000 since September and still has over three-quarters of a million in the bank. Pretty impressive haul.
- Fellow GOP gubernatorial candidate Mike Montandon is reporting only having $50,000 left in his campaign account for the primary against Sandoval’s $750,000 and Gov. Jim Gibbons’ as yet undisclosed warchest (which includes the power of the gubernatorial bully pulpit). Since Sandoval has the money and establishment support and Gibbons now has a pretty firm grip on the conservative wing of the party, it’s hard to see why/how Mayor Mike competes and wins. Just not the right time or race for him.
- By the way, if Sandoval can raise over 900 large in just three-and-a-half months with hardly no name ID and for an office with no real national appeal or interest, imagine the warchest U.S. Senate candidate Danny Tarkanian is going to report with his universal name ID (thanks, Dad!), some two hundred large from that Hugh Hewitt kick-start in the summer, and the virtue of running in a race with ginormous national interest combined with a super-aggressive national email fundraising campaign. Anything less than a million raised has got to be seen as a real disappointment and will call into question Tark’s ability to compete successfully with Reid in the fall.
- Starting later and not enjoying Tark’s name ID, nor having the benefit of a Sandoval-like anointment by the establishment, fellow GOP candidate Sue Lowden will be lucky if she breaks $500,000 raised for her U.S. Senate campaign. But my bet is she does just that.
- Democrat Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto – politically vulnerable for the first time since her 2006 election thanks to her botched prosecution of Lt. Gov. Brian Krolicki – was interviewed on Sam Shad’s Nevada Newsmakers on Tuesday. How do Republican leaders in charge of knocking her off think she did? Who knows? Not a peep from either the Nevada or Clark County or even Washoe County Republican parties on what AG Masto said. I’m starting to think this might be a new script idea for “LOST.”
- This just in!!! Clark County schools Superintendent Walt Rulffes stopped yelling “The sky is falling!” yesterday long enough to admit that “Budget cuts…are not all bad, and they can have somewhat of a cleansing effect on the system.” Once again proving that there are plenty of cuts left in the budgets at all levels of government, but bureaucrats will never look for them, let alone implement them, unless they are FORCED to. And you force them by taking tax hikes OFF THE TABLE.
- Which, by the way, reminds me: Republican U.S. Senate candidates Sharron Angle, Sue Lowden, Mark Amodei, Robin Titus and Danny Tarkanian have all joined Sen. John Ensign in signing the Taxpayer Protection Pledge. John Chachas, to the best of my knowledge, has not.
- Also, Republican congressional candidates Rep. Dean Heller and Joe Heck have signed the Pledge, as has Gov. Jim Gibbons. Republican gubernatorial candidates Mike Montandon and Brian Sandoval have not. Just an FYI for conservative Republican primary voters trying to keep up on their scorecards.
- After legislative leaders told Gov. Gibbons to pound sand as far as having the Legislative Counsel Bureau draft his education reform bills for the upcoming special session (Valentine’s Day anyone?), the governor in turn instructed agency department heads to no longer respond to legislative requests for information that didn’t first come through the governor’s office. Let’s play hardball!
- Meanwhile, Jon Ralston reported yesterday in Flash that Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley (D-Teachers Union) wrote a letter to the governor outlining her brilliant ideas for fixing the budget crunch. Among suggestions for a short-term fix? “No education cuts.” Long-term fix? “Improve education, including more funding, expanding all-day kindergarten.” And some people still wonder how we got in the budget fix we’re in today?
- And finally, yesterday Mike Wiley and Nathan Taylor said….oh, who cares?
OTHER NEWS & VIEWS
“Sue Lowden, who is considered by many to be the front runner in the GOP primary for the chance to face off against Harry Reid despite polls showing her in a dead heat with Danny Tarkanian, stopped by the Review-Journal Tuesday afternoon for a far-ranging session with the editorial board,” blogs RJ editor Tom Mitchell. How’d she do? Find out HERE
TUBE TIPS
- Former state Sen. Joe Neal, NAACP president Frank Hawkins and UNLV professor Rainier Spencer – all African-Americans – go Face to Face with Jon Ralston tonight to cover Harry Reid’s donkey over Reid’s “Negro” comments. The program airs at 4:00 pm Monday through Friday on KVBC Channel 3 in Las Vegas, as well as NBC affiliates in Reno and Elko. http://www.lasvegassun.com/videos/face-face/
- Sam Shad’s guests today on the Nevada Newsmakers program will be State Senator Mark Amodei (R) Candidate for U.S. Senate. The program airs on KRNV-TV Channel 4 at 12:30 pm in Reno and on Cox Cable Channel 123 at 4:30 pm and 11:35 pm in Las Vegas. http://www.nevadanewsmakers.com/
FAMOUS LAST WORDS
- “(President) Obama’s ballyhooed ‘stimulus’ spending has accomplished nothing except to save the existing jobs of government bureaucrats and contractors.” – Las Vegas Review-Journal editorial
- “I still find it humorous that (Sen. Harry) Reid has claimed, as (former Sen. Trent) Lott did in 2002, a ‘poor choice of words,’ but has refused to say what better choice would have been.” – Sun columnist Jon Ralston
