The headline on MSNBC is “Republicans kill Senate Jobless aid measure.”

The lead paragraph reads:

Republicans on Thursday defeated Democrats’ showcase election-year jobs bill, including an extension of weekly unemployment benefits for millions of people out of work more than six months.

The Las Vegas Review Journal reports:

Eugene Turner has a word or two for U.S. senators who voted Thursday against a $109 billion bill that would have extended emergency unemployment benefits for job seekers like himself.

The photo above is of Eugene Turner. He says:

“They have no heart for the public — the working man,” Turner said Friday at the Nevada JobConnect office on Maryland Parkway near Desert Inn Road, where people were waiting to use computers.

Turner, who moved here from Los Angeles six weeks ago looking for work, said he’s scared about how he’s going to pay rent when his government assistance runs out.

“My bills ain’t going to stop in 10 weeks,” he said, shaking his head.

[Read more →]

Joe Barton (R-TX) was on the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee yesterday when BP officials appeared in Congress.

Barton made the following remarks to the BP company.

I think it is a tragedy of the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown, in this case a $20 billion shakedown.

Good old Joe. He is steadfastly sticking to the Republican plan to criticize President Obama at every opportunity. Barton added “I’m ashamed of what happened in the White House yesterday.”

…it is a tragedy of the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown…

[Source: Talking Points Memo]

[Read more →]

It has offended the Nevada GOP.

Nevada Secretary of State, Democrat Ross Miller, up for re-election, appears in the 30 second ad for six seconds. Nevada’s GOP has filed an ethics complaint against Miller for using taxpayer money to further his political career. [Las Vegas Sun]

The ad shows Ultimate Fighting Championship fighters urging people to mail in their census forms. The UFC paid for the production of the ad. Nevada spent $156,723 to air it statewide between March 10 and April 3.

Miller calls the complaint a “completely silly allegation.”

The Census Bureau liaison asked him to participate in the census ad campaign to inform Nevadans that returning the form was worth $10,000 to Nevada. Miller is chair of Nevada’s Complete Count Committee, which oversees the decennial census. He is also a fan of UFC.

Miller acknowledged the ads could benefit his campaign but no more so than simply performing other aspects of his job as secretary of state.

“Obviously, for someone seeking re-election, my candidacy is going to benefit anytime I’m seen as successfully upholding the duties of the secretary of state,” he said.

Turns out that Nevada State Treasurer, Kate Marshall, has used radio ads to promote Nevada’s college savings plan. She spent $12,000 in the past year.

The $961,550 marketing plan for Nevada’s census was approved by the Nevada Legislature.

Republican Rob Lauer, running against Miller, says Miller “is clearly running a shadow campaign using that money. He wants to look cool with the UFC people.”

Nevada’s GOP also complained that Miller put his office phone number on the forms he filled out to run for re-election. Miller said he simply entered the wrong phone number on the wrong line on the form.

Nevada’s GOP filed a similar complaint against Kate Marshall.

Is paying unemployment benefits a crime?

Senator Tom Coburn, Republican Senator of my native state of Oklahoma thinks that extending payment of unemployment benefits to the jobless amounts to a crime, unless money is found to pay for it.

He says, “It is theft,” because it is essentially stealing from future generations.

On the other hand, Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, thinks the real injustice is holding up badly needed help to the jobless. He says, “It is as if a tornado hit their home or a flood wiped out their community. It is an emergency, and we respond to emergencies with emergency spending.”

It is a classic display of a difference between the Libertarian, Republican and Democrat’s thinking.

Coburn, a fiscal conservative, is against spending money the federal government doesn’t have. Few of us would disagree with that. If you don’t have it, don’t spend it.

Yet, what do you do if you are faced with an emergency? Borrow the money or not?

Look at New Orleans following hurricane Katrina. That was an emergency of major proportions. Thousands were homeless. Scores of people were drowning. Relief had to be provided. What could the Louisiana state and federal government do? Decline assistance on the ground they didn’t have nor could find the money to come to the aid of the citizens of Louisiana? New Orleans has a heavy population of the poor. Why spend money you have to borrow helping them? Are they worth helping?

Wouldn’t that be just another display of some kind of wealth redistribution from the wealthy to the poor by the government? Is that the Libertarian way? The Republican way? The Democratic way? The Tea Party way?

Now put yourself in the place of one of those unfortunate souls in New Orleans? Odds are you’d do whatever you had to do to escape the agony of your predicament.

So, would Senator Coburn maintain his position of refusing financial aid to Louisiana and the gulf coast if the money had to be borrowed? I don’t know.

Is governmental response coming to the aid of people caught in such turmoil a socialist act? Is it defensible in a capitalistic economic system? Certainly there is no profit to be gained. Who is to make the decision?

If you are jobless, through no fault of your own, your kids sitting at the bare dinner table, the electric bill is overdue—VEA is threatening to cut off your power, the mortgage payment or rent is due and the mortgagor is on the verge of foreclosing on your home, the landlord on eviction. You can only find five dollars in your pocket and no income. What do you do?

Do you head to the unemployment office to pick up your unemployment check—to be told your benefit had expired? Then go off to the welfare department, hat in hand, seeking welfare assistance?

Would it concern you that you might be taking money from the wealthy by doing so, or increasing a debt your descendants may wind up paying for? Or that you were taking assistance from a government being criticized as being socialist?

Is that what a self-professed Christian nation would do?

What if you knew that Business Insider, a financial management resource center, found that in 2007 the top 1 percent owned over a third of the nation’s wealth while the bottom 50 percent had a measly 2.5 percent and that you are taking some of the wealth of that top 1 percent?

Would you take that unemployment and welfare help if you were a Libertarian, Republican, Democrat, or member of the Tea Party? Of course you would.

From the Daily Beast:

From the department of “no one was supposed to see this” comes the Republican National Committee’s internal pitch to its fundraisers. A PowerPoint presentation, obtained by Politico, makes it clear that the committee’s strategy for raising money this election cycle will be fear-mongering. The committee says its campaign should focus on a promise to “save the country from trending toward socialism.” Helpful advice included is that wealthy “ego-driven” donors can be seduced by offers of access and, what they termed “tchochkes.” Another gem from the presentation is the page headed “The Evil Empire.” On it, President Obama is made to look like the Joker from Batman, Nancy Pelosi is depicted as Cruella DeVille, and Harry Reid as Scooby-Doo. RNC Chairman Michael Steele’s office has already distanced itself from the pitch. “Obviously, the chairman disagrees with the language and finds the use of such imagery to be unacceptable,” committee communications director Doug Heye told Politico. The Daily Beast’s Eric Alterman on the GOP’s breathtaking contempt for its own—and how the Dems should respond.

No wonder the Republican Party is in tatters.

John Avlon of the Daily Beast tells us that CPAC (Conservative Political Action Committee) is set to hold its annual meeting tomorrow. Republicans anxious to run for President in 2012 will be there in full force. Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, and more will be on hand.

The keynote speaker is Glenn Beck, the eminent conservative nutcase.

And guess what? The thing is being co-sponsored by the John Birch Society.

Avlon writes: [Read more →]

I’m not a fan of the Tea Party. CNN ran a poll to determine just who those folks are that populate the new Tea Party.

Activists in the Tea Party movement tend to be male, rural, upscale, and overwhelmingly conservative, according to a new national poll.

CNN found that Tea Party activists would vote overwhelmingly Republican in a two-party race for Congress.

“If the Tea Party runs its own candidates for U.S. House, virtually every vote the Tea Party candidate gets would be siphoned from the GOP candidate, potentially allowing the Democrats to win in districts that they might have otherwise lost.”

[Read more →]

The following is a letter to the editor that appeared in today’s Las Vegas Sun. It was written by a school teacher, Jeremy Christensen of Las Vegas. I’m running it here because I agree with what Mr. Christensen writes:

“It’s time to stop whining that education in Nevada doesn’t work because of a lack of funding,” Gov. Jim Gibbons said in his State of the State address last week. “We need to quit throwing money at programs that haven’t worked and don’t work for our children.”

What hasn’t worked and doesn’t work for our children is throwing clichés and ideology at problems.

This question is not as complicated as it seems. What is a reasonable cost to educate a child? Most of the other states in our nation believe that it costs more than what we spend in Nevada. How do these other states pay for the generous investments they make to educate their children?

Forty-five states in our country have an effective state-level corporate tax rate of at least 5 percent. How long have zealous ideologues proclaimed that businesses would flee if we even considered any taxes on corporations? These corporations pay taxes almost everywhere else in the United States. How long have our children suffered some of the largest class sizes in the nation and parades of long-term substitutes in vital courses such as mathematics because of this outrageous lie?

The state of Nevada is not making a good-faith effort to provide quality education for its children. Apparently our children have no voice or heroes to stand up for them and say enough is enough. The greatest sins in Sin City are committed against its children.

Governor “No New Taxes” Gibbons has a duty to those school children to see that their education proceeds with quality and unabated. It is his duty as elected governor whether he wants to raise taxes or not. I personally don’t care whether he gets re-elected or not. I didn’t vote for him to start with. I do care about the education of Nevada’s children.

All my kids are now grown with kids of their own. All still in California, which has its own financial problems. My grand daughter, Joan, will graduate from the University of California-Chico in June. She plans to then attend law school. She works and attends college now, has she has done since she started. One of my grand sons, Aaron, is attending college in California with the objective of obtaining a degree for his future as an accountant. He also works to pay for and attend school. But the financial burden of college tuition and expenses for law school are mammoth to a 22 year old.

Cutting the education budget, again, as proposed by Governor Gibbons, may be expedient to him, but not to those kids trying to get a college education.

Nevada maintains one of the lowest commitments in the nation for education. California is slipping fast, losing it’s once high education status.

I read that Nevada’s mining industry has enjoyed a low rate of taxation for 150 years. The implication being that that industry does not pay its fair share of taxes—a tax status that is unfair to ordinary taxpayers in Nevada.

I, frankly, think it is time that Governor Gibbons begin to realize that his obligation to Nevada taxpayers is higher than his adherence to his “no new taxes” creed. It is time to fairly and evenly raise taxes in Nevada, even if it requires applying a fair tax on the mining industry.

At a Tea Party protest in Las Vegas, Joe Heck, a Republican running for Congress, blamed both the Democratic and Republican Parties for moving the country toward “socialistic tyranny.” [New York Times]

The foregoing paragraph is an excerpt from an article in today’s New York Times by David Barstow.

Barstow portrays a bewildering array of political groups around the nation forming and struggling to find a way to thwart what they perceive as a governmental threat to their independence, liberty and freedom.

All kinds of groups are mentioned. The Tea Party, John Birch Society, Oath Keepers, Friends for Liberty, Defenders of Liberty

Glenn Beck gets prominent mention throughout the article, along with Ayn Rand and George Orwell, and Sarah Palin.

There is talk of eliminating Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Debates about secession, tax boycotts, nullification of federal laws, forming citizen militias.

“It is a sprawling rebellion” writes Barstow, “a narrative of impending tyranny.”

Lots of talk about patriotism, the Constitution, and the Federal Reserve.

A popular T-shirt at Tea Party rallies reads, “Proud Right-Wing Extremist.”

There is fear among right wing extremists of a “cataclysmic economic collapse in the United States.”

Far too much to in the article to summarize here. You are best advised to go read the coverage in the New York Times.

So what does any of this have to do with Pahrump and Nye County? There is evidence of the existence of some of these groups right here in River City, that’s what.

Nevada may give rise to a third political party, joining ranks with the Democratic and Republican Parties. Jon Ralston reports that the “Tea Party has qualified as a third party in Nevada and will have a candidate in the Senate race to battle for the seat held by Majority Leader Harry Reid.” [Las Vegas Sun]

The new Tea Party will need to get 1 percent of Nevada’s electorate to vote for its candidate in November to remain alive. The Tea Party has filed their Certificate of Existence.

So who is the Tea Party’s candidate to run against Harry Reid? Someone named Jon Ashjian says the Sun. Ashjian hasn’t yet declared he is a candidate.

What is the Tea Party’s aim:

“promote this nation’s founding principles of freedom, liberty and a small representative government. We believe that our government under both Democrat and Republican control has led to massive national debt, crushing deficits, increased taxes; while establishing a large and powerful federal government in a direct refutation of the founding ideals of America.”

You can read the Tea Party’s constitution, bylaws and officers here.

So now we can all watch a multitude of political partys compete for election to public office to run the country.

I predict there will be a number of Nye County residents flocking to the new Tea Party. Or maybe the Tea Party isn’t all that new, remembering the Tea Party in the Boston Harbor.

We’ll see how it goes.