Las Vegas Gleaner

NV gubernatorial candide 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 relible 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 brains 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 included penalties for persons 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.

Extraordinary teabagger delusions and the madness of crowds

About the infamous sign photographed (click the pic to big up) during the latest organized teabagger tantrum (via Think Progress)...

You can't argue with a sick mind, let alone the rampant sickness of thousands of minds feeding on each other's myths and delusions in a horrible circus of ignorance, fear and hate.

That is, there is no reasoning with these people. By now their inability to acknowledge, let alone consider, facts and stuff is, or should be, a given.

And yet I'll confess that I still experience just a vestige of surprise, or perhaps wonder, that the angry right is going full-on unhinged bonkers over what are essentially piecemeal, moderate proposals to change the nation's health care system. Even if reform was implemented in the most aggressive manner currently on the table in Washington, the impact of the legislation would go largely if not wholly unnoticed by many and probably most Americans, and the the United States would still have the most profit-driven health care system in the developed world.

Maybe the Democrats should just say to hell with it, quit screwing around and extend Medicare to the whole damned population. What's the right going to do? Accuse Obama and the Democrats of being socialists and Nazis hell-bent on a government takeover of health care?

There's a rule that says this video must be posted on every site on the internets

And it's a good rule.

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True fact: While with Public Citizen back in the day, your Gleaner used to hang and work in cahoots with Glenn Beck obsession Wade Rathke of the SEIU/ACORNS!!!! We deliberately went out of our way to stop a corporation merely because it wanted to charge low-income black people lots and lots of money for, you know, water.

Ha. Just goes to show the insidious radical conspiracy to ruin all your freedoms and turn everyone into gay Muslim atheist commies is so much more far-reaching and entrenched than even Beck suspects.

Looking for conventional wisdom that's overstated, simplistic and more trouble than it's worth?

   Relax. You're soaking in it.

This is going to be a big disappointment for Sarah Palin

Sue Lowden, who thinks she's senatorial material, went on the Nevada Newsmakers teevee program up yonder this week to deny that she laughed at the idea of Harry Reid's station wagon getting blown up. But that's not what this is about.

"Sue," began the amiable Ray Hagar of the Reno paper, amiably...

"you mentioned that you were the chair of the Nevada State Republican Party. But when you were the chair [Hagar's eyes roll here] I mean, the party almost had a civil war, it imploded. I mean, the Democrats, their registration in the state, they're --  they have a hundred thousand more registered voters, when you were at -- on your watch. So how does that help you get elected?"

The relatively high and frankly quite understandable sputter quotient of the delivery notwithstanding, good question!

And Lowden -- did I mention she thinks she's senatorial material? -- had her answer at the ready!

"Well, let's see what happens a year from now. Let's see what the registration numbers are. And let's face it, it was an Obama sweep, not just in Nevada but even in the very red state of Alaska. You know, we ended up with a, you know, an Obama win in Alaska. So from Florida to Alaska it was an Obama sweep."

Whoa, when you put it that way. After all, a whole year later, it's still shocking to hear that Obama carried Alaska.

But that's probably because McCain beat Obama in Alaska by 21 points, 59 to 38.

Hey, understandable mistake. It wasn't like the second biggest and first freakiest political story of 2008 had any Alaska connection or anything. And really, who would expect a former state party chairwoman and a self-described "frontrunner" for a U.S. Senate seat to know something that would only be known by someone who might have a passing interest in politics.

Virginia, New Jersey vote to attack Iran

The voters of Virginia and New Jersey have elected Republican governors, thereby nullifying the results of last year's presidential election. Health care reform is dead, because if it ain't broke, don't fix it! Ditto for climate change legislation, because let's face it, the science just isn't in on that yet. The key economic policy question now facing lawmakers in Washington is not whether businesses and rich people should get a big tax cut, but if they should get a bigger tax cut. And of course in foreign affairs, throughout the remainder of his one and only failed term, the president must do whatever Dick Cheney says.

Or maybe that's reading too much into the breathless media accounts about the thundering significance of two off-year low-turnout state-level elections.

Your Gleaner is genuinely saddened (sniffle), however, at the defeat of that full-on teabagging nutjob in New York's 23rd congressional district. For one thing, the last thing we need is one more Democrat in Congress fearfully looking over his shoulder at his conservative constituents and voting accordingly, i.e., with the Blue Dogs, which seems the likely result in this instance. But far more importantly, hopes were so high that the little foot soldier in Glenn Beck's army of enraged paranoid mouthbreathers would eke out a victory and even further embolden the kooks and the flakes and the nuts from coast to coast and especially right here in Nevada.

Oh well. The takeaway: Chins up, fruitcakes. I'm talking to you Jim Gibbons, Sueny Talklowdian and the rest of you birther-sympathizing glassy-eyed Republicans who have demonstrated you are willing to do or say anything to appeal to angry white people who hold a misspelled sign in one fist while angrily shaking their other at the sky. Pay no heed to fanciful accounts of alleged Nevada Republican moderation -- that sort of talk is so 2002. Your strategy is still sound, and the only way to seal the deal in Nevada is to run, run, run to the right as fast as your wingnutted feet will carry you. You know it in your heart, and in your gut, and in your head. OK, maybe not your head. But never mind. Soar, little wingnuts, soar, on to glorious victory.

In the primary, anyway.

Gibbons reaches out to the Republican base

For all his dishonesty, untrustworthiness, cruelty, narcissism, stunted emotional development and psychological disorders, mentally unbalanced Gov. Jim Gibbons still knows a thing or two about politics.

When he goes on TV and, citing the police report, insists that the 1981 attempt to blow up Harry Reid's car consisted of a phone book in a shoe box, even though the police report makes absolutely no mention of either phone books or shoe boxes, Gibbons isn't making "a mistake," as his spokesman claims.

The nation's creepiest governor is making a calculated and intentional appeal to the angry, paranoid base of conservative voters whose support will be crucial to winning the 2010 Republican gubernatorial nomination.

People who see socialism, death panels and a president with a Kenyan birth certificate under their beds are obviously impervious to sense, much less truth. By virtue of being Senate majority leader, Harry Reid allows Nevada's insecure, ignorant and frightened right-wing white people to localize their rage and paranoia and direct it at one concentrated source. And for all the innumerable matters of policy, or even decency, that Gibbons is too deranged or obtuse to comprehend, he totally gets the teabaggers.

Take a dedicated disregard for facts and mix it with the belief that Harry Reid is the boogeyman, and Gibbons sees a recipe for exploiting the people on whom the continuation of his political career -- at least through the Republican primary -- will hinge: the unhinged.

In his TV interview, Gibbons was not just wrong. He was strongly wrong:

"Wait a minute. Wait a minute, Ray. If you read the report, and I hope you read the police report. Did you read it? Did you read it? ... It didn't say car bomb. It said it was a shoe box with a phone book in it."

(For the record, again, the police report describes "a wire leading from the distributor to the fuel tank" and makes no mention whatsoever of a shoe box or a phone book).

Did Gibbons himself read the report? Almost certainly, just to see if by some bizarre coincidence there actually was some truth to the lone shoe box theory that he has propagated at least twice now. But let's be clear -- Gibbons has no more concern for what the report says than he does for the veracity of the words that come out of his mouth. Other matters are far more important, as his spokesman, Dan Burns, confirmed. "The larger question is, there was no bomb in the car? And who said the mob did it?" Burns told the Sun, demonstrating that he values accuracy and honesty every bit as much as his boss.

A sensible person, i.e., one not willingly associated with Gibbons, might think that the "larger question" has something to do with why Gibbons is lying so blatantly, willingly, deliberately, repeatedly and remorselessly.

The answer's simple. The teabaggers see him swiftboating Harry Reid. That makes them hot. And Gibbons knows it.

And really, is either Mike Montandon or Brian Sandoval, both of whom also hope to appeal to the radical right in the course of seeking the Republican gubernatorial nomination, going to call Gibbons out for lying about Harry Reid? Not likely, especially so long as Gibbons is viewed as a dead man walking, politically. Why bother?

But as the Sandoval and Montandon campaigns may have noticed, for now, Gibbons isn't running against them. He's running against the man the New Republican Party loves to hate. And he isn't the Batshit Crazy Shoeboxer King as a result of his idiocy, incompetence, laziness, sloppiness or dementia. He deliberately sought the crown.

Tricky little sociopath, ain't he?

GOP 'big tent' strategy coming along nicely

Remember the post-election buzz about how a struggle for control of the Republican Party had pitted those who wanted to appeal to a broader base against the kookwits who demanded that the party move somewhere to the right of, oh, Rush Limbaugh?

Look who's winning:

In a huge development in the NY-23 special election, Republican candidate Dede Scozzafava has announced that she is suspending her campaign, citing an inability to win in light of recent polls and a lack of money -- leaving this race as a vote between Democrat Bill Owens and Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman, and a strong message that the Republican Party can no longer nominate moderate candidates, or else face a right-wing revolt.

Your Gleaner suspects there is a good chance that Republican Party candidates in Nevada in 2010 will similarly have to demonstrate that they are every bit as misguided, angry, ignorant and paranoid as the  birthers, teabaggers, shoeboxers and such who will be selecting the party's nominees. In other words: Go, Gibbons, go!

But then, I'm always the optimist.

Wingnuts for Reid

Remember when Jim Gibbons sexual assault cover-up choreographer Sig Rogich teamed up with The Wayner to spearhead "Republicans for Reid?"

Well, not to be outdone:

"It’s much better to have a Senate majority leader than a rookie Republican freshman."

                 -- Local political consultant Chuck Muth

Muth himself can't join Republicans for Reid. As he will tell anyone who will listen, he left the party during the Bush-Cheney administration because all the tax cuts for the rich and regulatory neglect and recreational warmongering was too liberal for him.

And to be fair (but not balanced), when Nevada's answer to Ann Coulter made the case for Reid's reelection quoted above, he wasn't expressing his own sentiment (presumably) or those of his fellow wingnuts. He was describing the viewpoint of Nevada's gambling industry.

Then again... Bitchy Little Area Megalomaniac Sheldon Adelson, arguably the richest batshit crazy right-wing extremist in the world, finances rabid conservative front groups. And Fox News personality Steve Wynn has launched one of his famous charm offensives in the media -- except this time it's not to tout a "fresh and unique resort experience" or whatever but to warn everyone about all the socialism, all teabagger-like.

Maybe Muth was speaking for his fellow wingnuts after all.

In any case, Muth has hitched his wagon to Harry Reid -- or more accurately, the willingness of outraged paranoid white people the nation over to contribute American dollars to fund Muth's anti-Reid websites and PAC and general-purpose noisemaking. So it's a bit of a surprise to see Muth himself pointing out that "it's much better to have a Senate majority leader than a rookie Republican freshman" representing Nevada in the Senate, especially since Muth has spent most of the last several months struggling to contain his enthusiasm for GOP Senate candidate and train-wreck-in-waiting Sue Lowden.

Far -- far, far, far, far -- be it for your lowly Gleaner to presume to speak on behalf of Reid or the Reid campaign (a prospect no doubt unsettling to everyone involved). But in this one instance, if I may be so bold, I would venture to speculate that Reid appreciates and welcomes Muth's strong, gracious and certainly unexpected endorsement.

Why won't Harry Reid release the long-form police report about the attempt to blow up his Oldsmobile?

Guano crazy area radio lady Heidi Harris and her slimy conspiracy theory about how  that attempt to blow up Harry Reid's Oldsmobile back in the day never really happened has been tidily unpacked here, here and here, and I've little to add.

Except what do we call Nevada's version of Orly Taintz, along with Sue Lowden, Jim Gibbons, the commenters on the RJ's website and whoever else buys into what to all intents and purposes amounts to Nevada's answer to the birther movement? Bombers? Shoeboxers? Or, since they seem to be contending that the attempt to blow up the Reid family station wagon was but a comical thing that never could have exploded, duds? Or maybe dudders?

Lowden makes case for timely, effective leadership

Reports the Reno paper's Anjeanette Damon:

Nearly 18 months after the Republican state convention was dramatically aborted after a contingent of Ron Paul supporters took control, a missing box of uncounted delegate ballots has been discovered and will be counted on Friday.

Aborted? That doesn't sound very Republican.

The mildly amusing Paultardian antics likely to ensue as a result of this development notwithstanding, the more relevant (yes, low bar indeed) point is that the state convention was managed, and the box of uncounted ballots mysteriously vanished, under the able direction of then state GOP chair Sue Lowden, who now thinks she should be in the U.S. Senate.

Seems like a perfectly good idea. Quick, competent action on constituent service requests is an outdated concept, anyway.

Meantime, Nevada Republicans should keep searching the nooks and crannies of the Peppermill in Reno, where the long lost GOP convention ballots had been hiding and where, evidently, democracy goes to die. Maybe that's where Saddam hid the WMD.

Oh, and who did CBS's writers think they were kidding when they named the town "Hooterville," anyway?

Are you a liberal? Then you'll be pleased to know that when Harry Reid decided to put a public option in the Senate health care bill, he was pandering to you!

For Reid, it was an admission of the formidable power of liberal interest groups. He had been the target of a petition drive and other forms of pressure to bring the public option to the floor, and Monday's move made him an instant hero on the left. Americans United for Change hailed him for refusing "to buckle in the face of withering pressure from the big insurance companies." MoveOn.org admired his "leadership in standing up to the special interests."

Reid, facing a difficult reelection contest next year at home in Nevada, will need such groups to bring Democrats to the polls if he is to survive.

Of course, a compelling piece of evidence against the Reid-panders-to-left scenario quoted above is that it is being propounded by the Post's Dana Milbank who routinely scores an eight or nine out of ten on that publication's Columnists Chock Full o' Shit Meter. But broken clock, twice a day etc.

Besides, all we've been hearing for months, including from the likes of the Washington Post, is that boy oh boy Harry Reid has to pander to the right if he's going to have a chance to win reelection. So it is refreshing to see someone in the mainstream media suggest, for a change, that Reid must appeal to the left if he hopes to win.

(Of course if his opponent's handlers are unable to identify a consistently effective cocktail of mood stabilizers, that opponent's candidacy will almost certainly implode -- on TV, preferably -- and this whole Reid reelection thing might end up going a lot more smoothly than anticipated.)

Anyway, no sooner had Reid become, as Milbank put it, a "hero on the left" then people started floating the theory that it was all a hoax for show -- that Reid announced he'd put the public option in the bill only so he can tell the left that he did, that he knows it won't go anywhere in the Senate, and that he fully expects and intends to pull back to President Snowe's "trigger" tomfoolery later.

Can you believe that someone would think Nevada's senior senator capable of such cynical jiggery-pokery?

Eh, to quote the Petticoat Junction song, "lots of curves, you bet, and even more when you get" the bill out to the Senate floor (and even Lieberscum says he'll vote for that). So Reid's enigmatic ways notwithstanding -- and underscoring what a waste of time the whole Baucus debacle was -- the nation's discussion about health care reform may be just getting started. Yay.

For instance, debate over Ron Wyden's amendments (assuming Reid allows them) should be particularly edifying:

Jillionaire attitudes and ethics: Compare and contrast

Unless you've been bedridden and slipping miserably in and out of consciousness with the pig flu, you will have noticed that erstwhile dashing and innovative tourism magnate Steve Wynn has become a cranky old man yelling at everyone to get off his lawn.

Most recently, Wynn took the crazy to the Las Vegas Sun, where he reiterated complaints made on the Glenn Beck Network and elsewhere about Obama pushing all the socialism and how government is icky icky icky while the blessed private sector is super holy and stuff like that.

Obama and the Democrats "are trying to change the basic fabric of American life," Wynn said. But he didn't mean it in a nice way.

"The environment in China is much more free than here," Wynn added, raising the tantalizing prospect that Sarah Palin will team up with the aforementioned Mr. Beck to lead millions of angry fearful wingnuts to Chinese urban-industrial centers where they can finally work as long and as hard as they are told without being burdened by pesky environmental, labor and safety regulations. (An accompanying Sun story, btw, explains how government is so evil and destructive that even Wynn's magnificent success depends on it.)

Meantime, it turns out that not every billionaire darling of the private sector is an unmitigated egomaniac convinced of his own superiority over mere mortals who warns that America must heed his  dire warnings -- or else! -- and blithely thinks he owes no debt to society for his success.

"Basically most of the rich people in the United States ... they would not have done quite as well if they'd been in Bangladesh or someplace like that. I mean they may think they did it all by themselves, but the society has done an awfully lot for them. And if you get the chance to live very rich in this society, in my view you really ought to have a taxation system but you also ought to have a personal values system where you believe that a lot of that ought to go back to the people who got the short straws in life."

Oh yeah, Warren Buffet? Well if you're such a smarty boots how come you don't have a hotel named after you in Las Vegas? Huh?

Chump.

Yes he did

Gracias, Harry, for deciding that the health care bill you send to the Senate floor will include a public option.

The bit about not bothering to ask the Congressional Budget Office to waste time doing the math on Her Royal Excellency Olympia Snowe's "trigger" plan is a particularly nice touch.

If the bill becomes law it will mark much-needed, long-overdue and meaningful reform of the nation's failed health care system (an important step on America's inevitable march to Medicare for All). Less importantly but of local interest, it will figure as the most substantial achievement of Reid's career.

And as an entertainingly speculative aside, the compromise provision allowing states to opt-out of the public option will give Jim Gibbons, Brian Sandoval and every other Republican running for state-level offices one more constructive policy that they can be against in 2010. The majority of Nevada voters -- including the much-cherished all-important independents -- want a public option. Can't wait to hear Sandoval & Co. argue that Nevada should opt out.

Change we can pretend in

So just when Harry Reid starts to look promising, or something, Obama and the vastly overrated Rahm Emanuel are now pushing for the public option "trigger" scheme so as to defer to Her Imperial Highness Olympia Snowe.

To clarify, the White House is preparing to piss away an opportunity to obtain transformational, meaningful health care reform just so they can pretend a bill, any bill, is "bipartisan" for a few news cycles. Yes we can't.

Your majority leader earns tentative, conditional attaboy

The stream of coverage reporting that Harry Reid has all but decided to include a public option when he takes a health care reform bill to the Senate floor is encouraging, no?

True, it might be just another cycle of ephemeral and irrelevant Beltway media noise (like this) -- speculation about what Reid will or won't include in the bill has been all over the map ever since the task of merging the Finance and HELP bills landed on his desk.

Or as TPM noted when the news began spreading Thursday, the majority leader could be floating a trial balloon designed to see just how much Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu and other conservative Democrats freak out.

Meantime, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, the outfit that bought a TV ad and a poll here in Nevada in an attempt to push Reid to include a strong public option, is taking credit for Reid's reported movement in that direction. "The growing sense that it is time for Majority Leader Reid to be strong and lead comes after an intense week of grassroots activism -- and the release of our new poll showing that Reid's political survival in Nevada requires strong leadership on the public option," said PCCC's Stephanie Taylor. 

The NYTimes sort of agreed, reporting that Reid's "outlook was shaped, in part by opinion polls showing public support for a government insurance plan," though the Times did not reference PCCC's polling in Nevada specifically, and several national polls have also shown growing support for the public option.

Curiously, neither PCCC nor the nation's paper of record characterized Reid's outlook as a reaction to the relentless, dogged cajoling and needling over several months from a little liberal website in his home state. Nor is any credit given to his ardent supporters in Nevada who behind the scenes have urged Reid not to settle for sham reform.

Oh well. However thankless the task, now is not the time to let up, on either the needling from outside the Reid collective or the encouragement from within.

Details as to what Reid means when he says "public option" are still hazy. And while his defenders say Reid has consistently and repeatedly expressed support for the public option, those expressions of support include but are by no means limited to:

• supporting a public option -- just so long as it's private;
• supporting a "trigger" that would indefinitely delay a public option;
• the classic Reidian analysis wherein the public option is a "relative term ... there's a public option, there's a public option and there's a public option, and we're going to look at each of them."

If Harry is headed in the right (which is to say left) direction, well, good on him. But he's a mercurial flibbertigibbet who can -- and likely will -- fold, spindle and mutilate his position a few more times before Obama (who hopefully has decided to finally pull his head out and get in the game, btw) signs something. So the customary temptation to rejoice! over the doings of the Great and Powerful Harry Reid notwithstanding, please excuse your Gleaner for suggesting the dude's just another politician, and you can't trust him any further than you can throw "Willie Horton publicist," Jim Gibbons's sex assault cover-up choreographer and Republicans for Reid figurehead Sig Rogich.

Rory's scheme to confirm electorate's suspicions and doom candidacy revealed

Rory (reid) loves to say that everybody has told him not to take any positions on anything, but he's going to take positions anyway, because goshdarnit that's just the kind of guy he is.

And then of course he proceeds to take no meaningful position on the overwhelming problem that will dominate the administration of whoever is the next governor: a failed fiscal system that can't sustain a state government that is already America's cheapest.

Yes, Rory has proposed a plan to rescue Nevada's economy by painting colorful lines across the country. If the plan reflects Rory's willingness to take tough stands on controversial issues, watch for him to announce that he is "for" education any day now.

Leveling with Nevada voters and talking about taxes -- that's what everybody is actually telling Rory not to do. And he is dutifully not doing it.

But:

By playing coy ... Rory effectively confirms the suspicions of skeptical and cynical voters who are inclined to dismiss him as just another politician who will say anything -- or nothing -- to get elected.

And because of, you know, dad, Rory (reid) can't afford to play it safe. Or so your Gleaner argues in this week's CityLife.

UPDATE: In the same paper, Steve Sebelius has a different view.

NV activist unveils plan to boost progressive turnout in 2010

Social conservative performance artist and Official State Homophobe Richard Ziser has filed an initiative to outlaw abortion and limit "end-of-life decisions," Ralston reports.

Good. Brian Sandoval, Downy Suekanian and the rest of Nevada's Republican wannabes needed something they could strongly get behind so as to show voters who they really are. Now nobody can say that the GOP is just the party of no! Ziser is giving them something they can be "for."

And nothing makes Nevadans happier than a creepy churchy zealot calling for government control over their bodies and their lives.