Vote for Change

I swear this is true.

I had a dream last night where I found myself watching late-night TV (did Neanderthals dream of staring at cave paintings?) and the scene was of a gay man telling a nondescript male friend how hard it still sometimes is to be gay in America, with its sub-surface homophobia even in “tolerant” environments, etc. As he spoke, the friend metamorphosed, in that crazy dream way, into a full-on drag queen who listened with compassion, drawing slowly closer to the speaker until eventually kissing him tenderly, protractedly, on the mouth.

Light music starts, and then an awful dawning: In the dream, I realize I’m actually watching a last-minute Barack Obama campaign ad. The drag queen is Obama himself, playing this role to underscore his solidarity with gay and, indirectly, transgender voters — a move guaranteed to destroy him at the polls.

“Oh my God, what’s he doing!?” I say to my girlfriend, suddenly appeared next to me, and she says, “What? I think it’s really cool that he–” and I say “Yes of course, but oh my God this is bad this is bad this is bad,” rocking back and forth with my face in my hands.

…at which point I woke up, the happiest I’ve been in a long time to hear my alarm clock.

College: It’s about more than manicured lawns, bloated athletics programs and secret societies. It’s also about convictions — learning what you believe and how much fight you’re willing to put into it.

If you’re a high school senior with a strong commitment to civil liberties, the kind of kid who’s more excited about taking over the dean’s office than doing a keg stand, then the ACLU of Nevada wants to hear from you. The national office will offer $12,500 scholarships to 16 aspiring youth activists from across the country.

Winners will also be invited to attend two youth activist leadership institutes, one in Washington, DC and another in New York City. Applicants must demonstrate a commitment to civil liberties, carry at least a 3.0 GPA on a 4-point scale and intend to pursue their studies full-time at an accredited college or university. Demonstrated financial need is not a requirement, but may increase your chances of qualifying for the scholarship.

Applicants from Nevada must submit their materials to the Reno office by Nov. 14. Call Rebecca Gasca at (775) 786-1033 or email her at gasca@aclunv.org for more information.

The U.S. Attorney has filed an appeal to the 9th Circuit in the Medical Mafia case, asking the court to reinstate the charges against Noel Gage because the trial judge messed up in numerous ways.

Gage and Awand have essentially agreed to be joined at the hip, their fates literally tied together, so if the government prevails on Gage, it means they get to try Gage and Awand together, which is what they wanted in the first place.

Read the complete appeal here.

Wall Street is getting more than $1 trillion in early Christmas cash, and top brass at the Pentagon don’t want to be left out.

The Iranian press reports that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and his top generals want an additional $57 billion for fiscal 2010 which, the Iranians think, is being set aside to fund a future war.

Those paranoid fuckers.

But wait, our own Bloomberg also knows about the Pentagon’s grabbing hands.

Could there be something larger at play?

The Chinese think so. They’re reporting the Rand Corporation – the premier Washington, D.C., think tank whose stable includes former president George H.W. Bush, former British prime minister John Major and Frank Carlucci, former secretary of Defense and deputy director of the CIA and former head of the Carlyle Group – will push our next president to start another major war to yank the economy out of recession (you can translate the page here or here).

Crazy, right?

Not at all. World War II ended the Great Depression as American industry upshifted to help beat the original Axis Powers. What better way to help us avoid what former Fed chair Alan Greenspan called a “once-in-a-century” crisis?

Interestingly, conservative think tankers, speaking on the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, are already warning that America should stay on the lookout amid these worrying economic times. We don’t want to get so serious about solving our own problems, they argue, that we ignore the rise of another Hitler!

U.S. News & World Report thinks I’m crazy.

We’ve heard about this concept of “failing upwards,” but we’ve never seen it in action until today’s Las Vegas Sun reported that U.S. Sen. John Ensign may get promoted despite the fact that he’s going to get his senatorial ass handed to him on Election Day.

It turns out, Ensign was doing his colleagues a favor when he volunteered to take the thankless task of trying to convince people that more Republicans in the Senate would actually be a good thing, despite the fact that Republicans have fucked things up pretty thoroughly in the past eight years. (And silly us, we thought that favor was repaid when Ensign landed a seat on the Finance Committee.)

So, despite the fact that he failed to recruit good candidates, failed to raise enough money to be competitive and failed to get a good ground game going, if the Republicans simply don’t lose enough seats to give the Democrats a cloture-busting 60-vote majority, Ensign will actually be considered the winner. And he may realize his dream of heading up the Republican Policy Committee, the No. 4 job in the Senate.

Go figure.

"I will guard this high-level nuclear waste. Now, bring me more delicious meatballs!"

Oh, I’m not talking about him wanting to mimic Sweden’s “enviable standard of living under a mixed system of high-tech capitalism and extensive welfare benefits” (blurb courtesy of our very own CIA), but rather the frosty nation’s troubled love affair with nuclear power.

In case you’ve been distracted by his chronic blinking and voice that sounds like a haunted rocking chair, John McCain wants to redistribute our nation’s wealth to bankroll a slew of brand new nuclear power plants by 2030. Yeah, Sweden’s downy li’l head was filled with a similar dream once upon a time … until it woke up screaming blood in 1980 and decided to shake off the nuclear nightmare. But the hangover persists. This just in from the world’s leading producer of death metal:

Oct 30th, 2008 | STOCKHOLM, Sweden — Sweden’s nuclear watchdog has criticized the managers of an atomic power plant for posting cleaners and janitors to guard the facility when alarm system sensors were out of order.

The Swedish Radiation Safety Authority says the incident at the Oskarshamn plant was serious and the workers had no training as security guards.

Plant spokesman Anders Osterberg says 20-25 cleaning and maintenance staff were deployed for a week around the plant’s perimeter this month in areas where a new alarm system’s motion sensors had malfunctioned.

The Oskarshamn plant, 210 miles (340 kilometers) south of Stockholm, has three reactors and provides around 10 percent of Sweden’s electricity.

What’s Swedish for “Doh!”?

So the John McCain campaign, desperate to scare as many Jews in Florida and elsewhere as possible before Election Day, is trotting out more ammunition against Barack Obama. This time the subject is Rashid Khalidi, a critic of Israel and former University of Chicago professor. Apparently, Obama attended his 2003 going-away party.

Stop the presses! Obama must hate Israel.

In fact, Obama has pledged his full support for Israel, at every opportunity, including by traveling to Israel. And if Obama’s ties are suspicious, check this out: McCain, while president of the International Republican institute, gave a group that Khalidi helped found — the Center for Palestine Research and Studies — almost half a million dollars. Does that mean McCain is funding anti-Israel causes! Does McCain hate Israel?!

Of course not. Here’s a news flash to the McCain/Palin ticket: You can know people, do business with people, socialize with people and not share every belief that they have. We know that’s a radical concept, so we’ll pause for a moment to let it sink in.

OK, ready to go on? Good.

See, we’ve got friends all over the political spectrum. One is a libertarian anarchist. Do we agree with him that “there’s no government like no government”? No. But we’re still friends with him. We still enjoy talking about political ideas with him. And we’re not going to stop being friends with him because some beauty pageant winner from up north who doesn’t even know what the vice president does might someday slam us for the association.

Oh, sorry, was that mean?

Our point is, just because you know somebody or hang out with them or go to church with them doesn’t automatically mean that you share all their beliefs. It means only that you have friends. And yes, who a person chooses as friends does say something about them, but that only goes so far. Because you can also judge a person by his enemies. And when we see the people arrayed against Obama these days — the liars, the uninformed, the stupid, and that’s just Sarah Palin — we actually feel pretty good about him.

So let’s all relax before nobody has any friends left, shall we?

Another dispatch from the economic collapse:

The Salvation Army can’t afford to help female addicts kick the habit. The agency suspended an inpatient treatment program for women with substance and gambling abuse problems because it was losing as much as $400,000 a year, contributing to a $2 million shortfall.

That leaves WestCare holding the bag, says Charles Desiderio, development director at the Salvation Army, since it’s the only institution left in Las Vegas that provides treatment services to women. Courts in Clark County often refer petty criminals with addictions to the Salvation Army and WestCare in lieu of sending them to jail. Which is a good idea, if an unfunded one. The county doesn’t pay the agencies for their rather extensive counseling and job-training services, Desiderio says, which save it the costs of keeping someone in a jail cell.

A lot of nonprofits are struggling to make ends meet right now. Blame the tanking economy, which has put a stranglehold on donations while sending demand skyward. The Salvation Army is one of the biggest local charities, and the first to have to make such a substantial cut to its services.

“We all lose when this happens,” Desiderio tells CityBlog. “You don’t want someone breaking into your house because of an addiction. No one wants more crime in their neighborhood. But the women are the ones who lose the most. Unfortunately, we’ve got to cut this bleeding somehow.”

The agency is trying to preserve essential programs like the food pantry and homeless shelter. So if you see any of those red kettles this holiday season, consider making a donation. And if you’ve got a couple million lying around, give Desiderio a call.

More here.

So at least the Republicans are consistent: First, they mortgage the nation’s future by cutting taxes for rich people and borrowing heavily for an unnecessary war, thus plunging the nation into debt. Now, they’re borrowing again for an equally dubious project: Electing some of their own members to the U.S. Senate.

For those keeping score at home, our very own U.S. Sen. John Ensign has been totally unable to raise money from his Senate colleagues to elect Republicans. As a result, he’s been going around warning people that evil socialist Democrats might get to 60 votes, at which point they could steamroll the Republicans and finally pass progressive legislation. (They won’t, of course, but that’s the fear.)

Anyway, the GOP has taken out a loan for $5 million to save whatever senators they can, on the not-so-outlandish notion that their national ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin is dead. Don’t believe us: Read what that axis-of-evil guy had to say about it.

Now, given that Republicans have been filibustering more in the last two years than any other minority party in history (including, say, Ensign’s own filibuster against a perfectly good bill requiring electronic filing of campaign reports so he can intrude on the First Amendment rights of independent groups) the prospect of a 60-vote majority that can achieve cloture is a scary one indeed.

So, once again, Democrat Barack Obama succeeds where Republicans fail. Ensign has been trying for months to get money for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which he chairs. He had about as much success as he did getting fellow Republicans to vote against Yucca Mountain after he was elected in 2000, which is to say, none. But along comes Obama, and suddenly the Republicans get so frightened they’re willing to borrow on their own dime lest he be successful. Ensign, you owe Obama a fruit basket, at least!

Speaking of Ensign, what’s up with him blowing off a Brookings Insitutution seminar about solving problems in the intermountain west, othern than the notion that Ensign doesn’t really care about solving people’s problems? Why is the Las Vegas Sun always having to wonder where he’s at? It reminds us of the time back in 2002 when he vanished from the public for two weeks, only to emerge and refuse to explain his absence, later telling the Review-Journal, “I have no plans to ever explain.”

Yeah, whatever.

"It's Chupacabra that will swing this election, Scully, whether you believe it or not."

For the next week, no temptation Sin City can wave before me will match the online tragedy of poll addiction: the compulsive checking and re-checking of pre-election voter sentiment, as measured by trillions of separate surveying entities, whether they’re testing the oceanic political currents among Democrats and Republicans, or the estuarial leanings among Bay-area aromatherapy practitioners and Louisiana Pentecostal snake-handlers.

You’d think after being jacked by the polls the last two times around, I’d just plaster over my eyes and ears and get a friend to walk me to the polling station on Tuesday, but no. I’m still hopelessly possessed by the belief that everything counts and the truth is out there. Oh, we can slap some cowardly “chaos theory” label on anything we’re not yet willing to comprehend, but that doesn’t mean the next category five hurricane can’t be predicted if we track down the right devastation-minded Amazonian butterfly. We CAN know, right now, exactly what’s going to happen Nov. 4, down to the precise vote count, if we just pay attention to the right factors today.

What are the right factors? I DON’T KNOW, but they’re everywhere if you go to the right sources. CityLife Managing Editor Andrew Kiraly was kind enough to further enable my condition with a heads-up about this site. Fivethirtyeight.com is the product of one ingenious statistics maven’s efforts to compile numbers from all over, weighting the results according to a poll’s past predictive success and coming up with a bottom line — in this case, a forecast that John McCain has a nerve-wracking 3.8 percent chance of winning the White House.

But here’s the rub: the truth changes every day. On top of polls, there’s poll punditry to consider. Here’s a sampling just from the today’s links on MSNBC.com’s Decision ‘08 Dashboard:

Obama leads McCain in 6 of 8 swing states

Does GOP have a youth problem?

Can McCain close?

Why it’s still a race

Why it ain’t over until it’s over

Gah! And then there’s everything else that could affect the race, like this story about an Atlanta-based organization, Marriage for Life, that can’t get a single entrant for their contest in which engaged couples could win $10,000 for not having sex before they’re married. Doesn’t that bode well for Obama? The fact that a deep-South push for abstinence (an abstinence poll of sorts?) finds young voters diving just as surely into godless liberalism as the rest of the country?

This could be big. Then again, what’s this Obama Effect I’m hearing about? Is it for real? Now I’m shaking again.

With the financial crisis looming, 401(k) accounts shrinking, layoffs possible and the cost of goods rising, we know everybody in Las Vegas is probably thinking the same thing: How is Las Vegas Sands Chairman Sheldon Adelson doing?

Well, thankfully, the the answer is: Pretty goddamn well, considering. And we have the Las Vegas Review-Journal to thank for the news, since they keep on top of Adelson’s situation with unusual alacrity. Today’s paper, for example, reported Adelson has lost about $16.6 billion on paper. But before you panic and start sending him care packages, rest easy: According to the report, he’s got access to $3.5 billion in investments outside of his ownership of Las Vegas Sands stock.

Whew. That’s sure a relief, huh? Sure, you may have missed the story because you have to clip coupons so your family can eat next week, but it looks like Adelson will be OK. (Although, as the R-J noted recently, the poor bastard has fallen from third to 15th richest man in the United States.) But at least Adelson will have enough money to keep paying lawyers to keep prosecuting the lawsuit that has driven R-J columnist John L. Smith into bankruptcy or to keep funding lying ads through the front group, Freedom’s Watch.

Now, we know you’re worrying about whether you’ll be able to retire anytime in the next decade, or perhaps about whether your children will be able to afford to go to a good college — or to any college! — but the R-J knows you’re probably also worried about whether some corporate raider will try to take over Adelson’s company. Well, rest easy! His massive controlling interest makes that unlikely. So back to worrying about those other things.

UPDATE: It’s a Christmas miracle! R-J reports that Adelson has gained $1.2 billion in a stock surge! Oh, what a joy! We were so worried!

Seriously, R-J, what’s the deal? Why do you follow Adelson’s fortunes so closely? What, are you, like, in love with him or something? Because we hear he’s kind of a dick. And he’s suing one of your star columnists. And he’s not very nice to the union. And all the rest of your readers have real economic struggles that might be worth a story or two instead of constantly checking up on how one of the richest men in America is doing. We’re just saying.

Budget cuts will close a county office that manages the money of nearly 300 disabled residents next month — leaving its clients vulnerable to financial abuse and their own destructive habits.

Clark County’s elimination of the representative payee program is part of an effort to shrink government spending in the face of a deep economic slump. The program, which launched 17 years ago, serves people receiving government assistance who are unable to handle their own finances. Its clients include the homeless, people with addiction disorders and the mentally ill.

At-risk recipients such as those in the Clark County program suffer high rates of exploitation by the people appointed to handle their money, according to a government study published last year. More than 5 percent of all representative payees — people who volunteer to take the checks and pay the bills of social security recipients — abuse the system. The study, which was conducted by the National Research Council, suggested expanding programs like Clark County’s, in which clients pay a small fee to have professionals budget their income.

“There are some people who are alone in the world,” says Linda Lera-Randle El, executive director of the homeless advocacy group Straight from the Streets. “How are they going to find someone trustworthy to manage their money?” (more…)

Since June, we at CityLife have been all atwitter that someday, someone might agree with former Los Angeles prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi and prosecute President George W. Bush for the murder of the more than 4,100 American troops who’ve died so far in the Iraq war.

The notion of Bush rotting behind bars is probably too much to hope for, we concede, but you can make up your own minds this week when Bugliosi, still on a nationwide tour promoting his latest book, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, makes his case live Thursday morning at 8 on the Basham & Cornell Show on KLAV 1230 AM.

Bugliosi is convinced. This one-man conviction machine (he won 105 out of 106 felony trials in his tenure as a Los Angeles prosecutor) worked non-stop, seven days a week in his office to compile the evidence that Bush and his cohorts in the administration knowingly led us into a bogus war.

It’ll never happen you say? Bush will live out his days kicking shit in Texas or yachting near his daddy’s estate near Kennebunkport, Maine?

Not so fast, according to Bugliosi. According to CityLife Editor Steve Sebelius’ review of Bugliosi’s book, at one point, everything in law hadn’t happened before.

According to our review back in June, Bugliosi says, “‘The necessary intent that would have to be shown, as indicated, is malice aforethought, satisfied if Bush either intended to kill the soldiers by ordering them to war, or he started the war with reckless and wanton disregard for the consequences and indifference to human life.‘ While it would be difficult for even the most ardent Bush-hater to believe the former, the latter seems more and more likely.”

Tune in and decide for yourself.

(H/t to Christoon for the art.)

Eight months of free-falling revenue, widespread construction delays, emergency cash infusions … barring a miracle, 2008 will go into the books as the toughest year on record for Las Vegas casinos.

That’s the good news.

The bad news? Unless researchers find that neon mixed with cigarette smoke and well-brand booze can cure cancer, AIDS, spina bifida and restless leg syndrome, 2009 looks even worse for the Vegas gambling syndicate.

According to last night’s report from Bloomberg, the Las Vegas Sands Corp., Wynn Resorts and MGM Mirage, the nation’s three largest casino companies, should brace for an “ugly” year ahead as gamblers stick closer to home and further curtail their gambling.

The only gaming house looking to expand? Wyomissing, Pa.-based Penn National Gaming, flush with cash and hunting for new properties, according to this morning’s Review-Journal.

Of course, as always, you only get half the story from the R-J.

After a headline stating that officials with Penn were hoping to branch out in Las Vegas, the company’s chief executive told a different story within the same piece.

According to the article, Penn Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Peter Carlino admitted, “We’re continuing to poke around the market. Las Vegas is doing a whole lot less well than we had envisioned. We’ll cherry pick the right opportunity if it appears. But for now, we’ll take a deep breath. That’s the best answer I can give for Las Vegas.”

Digging deeper into company documents reveals Penn isn’t as healthy as it claims, and thus, isn’t much better positioned to grow its business than most other gambling companies. Funny, but the R-J also failed to mention that without $1.48 billion in merger termination fees from former suitor Fortress Investment Group and other one-time items, Penn’s profit was 50 cents a share, down from 54 cents a year ago.

With the infusion of termination-fee cash, however, Penn’s third quarter income jumped to $147.5 million, or $1.69 a share, from $46.6 million, or 52 cents a share, in the same period a year ago.

Looking for a safe bet?  Once the next 12 months make casino bosses pray for a return to 2008, Penn won’t be branching out west of the Mississippi anytime soon.

Further, despite recent proclamations from our friend David Schwartz, the writer, historian and director of the Center for Gaming Research at UNLV, that uncertainty is the nature of the future, the nation’s near-record unemployment (that’s only expected to rise in 2009), a worldwide credit crunch and an economy that hasn’t yet begun to truly nosedive (and here) mean the current state of economic affairs is a once-in-a-century crisis that cannot be ignored.

In these uncertain times, shouldn’t we expect our city’s supposed flagship newspaper to provide a little context and a more complete picture about just how fucked our local and state economy truly is?