I have to preface this column with a background story. During the 2007 legislative session in Nevada, I was approached by a group of card dealers who worked in the casino at the Wynn Las Vegas. They had written to nearly every single member of the Nevada legislature trying to get one of the Assemblymen or Senators to even listen to them about their employer confiscating a portion of their wages.

Steve Wynn is the owner of this casino. For decades he has built up a network of politicians who owe him favors. One is Bill Raggio, then the Senate Majority Leader and a long-time legislator from Northern Nevada. Raggio is also a lawyer whose law firm happens to have a number of gaming concerns as clients. Can anyone spell “conflict of interest”? I was the only member of the legislature to respond. One member out of 63.

In 1971 a state law came into effect that plainly stated the illegality of any employer taking any portion of an employee’s tips. Card dealers, like many other workers in Nevada subsist almost entirely on tips, and a few make a pretty decent living. Apparently Wynn thought his employees were making too good of a living because, in violation of the standing law, he instituted a policy that took 20% of the tips, excluded any of the dealers from being present when the tips were counted, and used those confiscated monies to boost the pay of managers being paid an hourly wage several times greater than the minimum wage paid to the dealers. Because a few of the dealers took home the occasional paycheck greater than that of their manager, Wynn called his policy fair, new, and refreshing. To the people losing 20% of their pay off the top it wasn’t refreshing at all. To the Nevada Revised Statutes it was a clear and direct violation of the law as it was written. But when you have a few Senators, Assemblymen and judges in your pocket, the written law is no barrier, especially when you can get a judge or two to say that the law doesn’t mean what it says.

I wrote a bill that would have forced the state to actually enforce the law. Wynn went ballistic and Bill Raggio shouted at me for 10 minutes about attacking his good friend. It’s amazing how much “friendship” money can buy. Prostitution isn’t an exclusive female occupation.

Now comes the elections and Raggio no longer has his big office, the leadership position or the majority. He is relegated to just being one of the boys in the minority and can no longer tell people what to do. So, what does he do? He issues a press release saying that the Republican Party must move to the middle and abandon the far right attitudes that obviously caused this electoral calamity. As is usual, Bill Raggio could not be more wrong. What caused the problem wasn’t Republican conservative ideals, what caused the problem was years of broken promises, greed and infighting. The party doesn’t need to move to the middle, what the party needs to do is go back to the days of Ronald Reagan and reestablish a set of core principles that benefit all citizens regardless of age, race, sex, religion or income. Then the party needs to stick to those principles even if it inconveniences their leadership or the rich and powerful. Of course, several members of the party would have to step down to do this, because one of those principles would include being principled.          

It is not surprising after the solid butt-whipping the Republican Party received at the hands of the Democrats in last week’s election that a number of stories about party disarray have surfaced. Some of them are bitter-edged recriminations that blame the voters for their lack of trust. Some, like what I have written, hold a tinge of gloat because the neocons who stole the party got what they so richly deserved. As a Republican Assemblyman who was recently defeated by the rigorous efforts of the Republican leadership, I have a personal interest in those stories. My contention is that while there may be some party disarray, this really is the end result of a concerted effort on the part of the leadership to purge the Republican Party of any and all moderation.

I lost my primary in August to a candidate (John Ozark) who did not even live in my district until shortly before primary voting ended. The “ideologues” in my own party wanted me out of this seat badly enough to ask as many as eight people to run against me. Last winter, I received a call from Heidi Gansert, the Nevada Assembly Minority Leader, asking me to step down in favor of Bob Seale, the man who held my seat before me, and I refused. Not one of the eight, including Seale, agreed to run, until they found Ozark, a candidate who has been trying to get into the Assembly through “district hopping” for the past 4 years at least. When Ozark agreed to run, the campaign of lies and deception started. The overblown yellow journalism that George Harris (publisher of Liberty Watch), Chuck Muth (a political blogger and not a Republican) and Ed Vogel( a Las Vegas Review-Journal stringer) cooked up about my forgetting to turn off the contribution page on my website during the special session this summer is a prime example. The story did not once mention all of the other Republican Assemblymen and Senators who, in the intense confusion of a special session being on, then off and then on again, also forgot to turn off their own websites. That incident, along with many other lies and half-truths, was used as a direct attack during and after the primary as a purging effort and to ensure that only the “ideologues’” mouthpiece was elected. The level of hypocrisy shown by these people is staggering. They complain about “ethical challenges,” but a check on the financial disclosures of John Ozark will show an interesting disparity in what he declared and what was spent. Just how much does it take to send out over a dozen high-end mailers in a primary? These “ideologues” ignored their own polls that showed that I had the highest fiscally conservative voting record in the Assembly, choosing instead to back a totally untried candidate, agreeable to anything they said and willing to be led about by the nose, as long as he got to play Assemblyman. But as history now shows, this strategy backfired terribly for them, causing the loss of a Republican seat and a Democrat supermajority in the Assembly.

There are similarities between a number of races race and mine. Many moderate representatives are honest and interested in representing all of their constituents, not just the “pure” Republicans. The problem is, the leadership may not be as ethical or as interested in representation. The GOP Nevada State Party Chairwoman, Sue Lowden said this about me, “He is too honest, we can’t trust him.” And if you go back and check the campaign literature, the Democrat attacks regarding these representatives were along the same lines. They never questioned the candidate’s honesty, but merely claimed he or she couldn’t be trusted. Isn’t it interesting that the GOP leadership never came to any of these folk’s defense? I believe it is because they are statesman, not politicians and where the GOP stands right now, statesmen need not apply.

Because of all of this “cannibalism,” I chose to support Ellen Spiegel, the Democrat Assemblywoman-elect in District 21. This is not because she isn’t a Republican, but because she was the only ethical candidate. Ellen will represent all the citizens in District 21, and not just those who reflect “party purity.” Now Harris, Muth and the assorted members of their cabal blame me for the Nevada Assembly’s Democrat super majority. Perhaps they should look into a mirror to fix blame.

Nevada Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley should send them a large, expensive fruit basket as a thank you for their efforts in the Democrat majority’s victory.

Yesterday I heard the talk show host Laura Ingraham complain bitterly about the so-called “moderate republicans” ruining it for everyone. In her estimation, John McCain lost because he wasn’t republican enough. As much as I respect Laura, she couldn’t be more wrong and her attitude is just digging deeper the hole GW and the rest of the party purists dredged out with their 8 years of drunken sailor spending. If you add up all the debts every administration since George Washington and combine them with those of the Clinton administration you will not even come close to the back breaking deficit Bush junior has put us into. Every gutless pundit, every sycophantic talk show host, every liaise fair neo con, all have had their part in both the fiscal crisis we currently find ourselves in and in the distrust the American electorate showed for the GOP label.

Some are saying Obama won more so than McCain lost. In one thing they are right, Obama did win, but not because McCain lost, but because the Republican Party lost. You can’t make promises for 8 years while lying through your teeth and then expect people to believe you when the chips are down. Sure you may have cost a CEO or two a bonus here and there if you kept your word, but you’d still be in office. Sadly, I think this is yet another one of history’s lessons you won’t catch on to.

Ronald Reagan never made a campaign promise he did not at least try to keep. That is why he is remembered so fondly. Being a man of your word is not a weakness, my late GOP acquaintances ( I can no longer use the term friends), it is a matter of honor. Because the law says something that may cost your business a portion of its profit margin, that doesn’t mean that you as an elected official can ignore it. As you see, the American people can and will do something about it. Your problem is that if a Reagan came along today, you and yours would pan him as not being Republican enough, when in reality, it is you who have lost your way.

Excuse me if I gloat.

Anyone who has read my blog will wonder at the title, especially based on who we now have as our President-elect. In my humble opinion Obama is going to administrate an economic and civil rights disaster of historic proportions, especially since he now has a congress and senate amenable to his stated Marxist policies. My friends, America is on the verge of losing its vaunted freedoms and you handed our country over, and that is partly why I’m gloating.

Here is Nevada, I was the target of the Liberty Watch crowd, an odious group of party Purity Republicans who attack anyone who disagrees with a single splinter in their plank. Rather than support a conservative who can cross the aisle to get things done, they published and circulated lies about character, voting records and even what was said in a televised forum, all in an effort to put their puppets into office; puppets who would support their ongoing system of corruption and favoritism. The reason I’m gloating is because that effort here was done against me and it is symbolic of what the Republican Party did for the past 8 years nationwide.

This does not mean that the Democrat Party is even one iota less guilty of the same tactics. One of the best representatives I know is Rosemary Womack, a Democrat. Her own party drove her out of her Assembly office because she had committed the sin of disagreeing with Barbara Buckley, the Assembly Speaker. Rosemary wanted to be an actual Representative, not just another drone politician.

Back onto the Republican side, an obsequious little kid by the name of John Ozark was put in against me by Liberty Watch. Never owning any home in Nevada and not even living in my district when he began proclaiming that he knew my constituents best, Ozark began parroting the lies written for him by the magazine’s publisher. What was published about me would be actionable as libel, fraud and even slander if it were done in any state other than Nevada, but here we do things a little differently. We put our crooks into office…well, not this time.

Ellen Spiegel is woman who reminds me of Rosemary. She ran as the Democrat for my Assembly seat and I supported her. Yes, I supported a Democrat and you Party Puritans can kiss my rosy red rump. Compared to Ozark, Ted Stevens is an innocent man. Ellen was not supported by her party, which tells you something. She is not a puppet and she is actually willing to study the issues that affect the district. We have talked about several ideas and what bills could be used to move them forward. These ideas would make it easier for small business to prosper and remove some of the burden from the economic backs of the taxpayers. Does that sound like Nancy Pelosi to you? To me, it’s a reason to gloat.

I am also gloating because so many of the Liberty Watch crowd got their clocks cleaned in this election. Many of them were Assembly members and Senators who joined in on the lies and corruption I saw behind the scenes in Carson City. Sometimes it doesn’t matter who gets into the office, just as long as who was there is out.

 

When John McCain first revealed his choice for Vice President, Sarah Palin revitalized a dying campaign. A significant portion of conservatives decided they could finally hold their collective noses and vote for the GOP ticket. Suddenly the republicans were not watching the Obama train disappear over the horizon, they were leaving it in the dust.

So, what happened? Why is Obama out in front yet again? He has done nothing different in his campaign from the beginning. Change is still the only item on his plank. What sort of change? He's not saying and you're a racist if you need any more information. Palin was the only change in the McCain campaign and it was a huge one. The voters did not want someone who had a history of being too cozy with the UN. They did not want someone who had essentially the same circle of friends in his stable as Bush Jr., but they were willing to go with him if he had a running mate with a history of actually representing the middle class...and winning the fight.

Apparently Sarah was too much for McCain's buddies. She has been shoved into the closet with a rag stuffed into her mouth. The old boys club, emphasis on "old", Palin had become almost as much a danger as Obama. The race had become Palin versus Obama. Didn't this Alaskan skirt realize who the presidential candidate was? As clueless as ever, the McCain campaign decided to silence the only weapon in their arsenal.

If Sarah Palin was allowed to take the lead in the campaign, Obama would now be 20 points behind and falling. She had exactly the combination of wit, wisdom and poise that America loves to see in leadership. The problem is, she is not John McCain. She is supposed to be the running mate. She is supposed to be tagging along on McCain's coattails. It is not supposed to be the other way around. Shame on you Mrs. Palin! Get into that closet and shut up.

Well, that is one way to lose an election.

 It was inevitable, a record has been broken. The left, not satisfied with a substantive discussion on the issues, has descended deeply into the gutter to attack Sarah Palin, a woman they have never met.

This blog will not repeat the topics covered in these attacks. Let it be said that the spectrum has been broad and offensive. What I find interesting is that if the same style of attack was done by conservatives against a Democrat...we would already have marches in Washington and defamation suits on file. Talking heads on every network other than Fox would be decrying the unfairness of the attack and Fox would be clicking its tongue in sympathy.

Obama did the right thing in immediately saying that family was off limits, but you notice that he has moved on past that now as the slime continues to flow. His tail is covered and he can safely say he stood up for the right thing all the while secretly chuckling at the lefty blogs, saying, “Go get her guys.”

There is no question that Mrs. Palin has more executive than any of the other three candidates. As the Alaskan Governor she has had more access to classified material than Obama, Biden or McCain. Remember, the Alaskan National Guard occupies a number of bases that have a direct line of sight to Siberia. Russian military aircraft often fly over US territory up there. Can any of the three say they have been the commander in chief of any military group? The two Dems haven’t even experienced boot camp.

Imagine the ACLU suit if hypocrisy in political campaigns were made a felony.