Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

jon ralston:

Carson City juice and the ‘new’ Sharron Angle

Some succulent Carson City leftovers to munch on at week’s end, with an Angle morsel for dessert:

• Click on our juice, gamers: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the state’s gaming industry are against the PokerStars bill to open up Web poker in Nevada. So what do you do if you are a company worth billions and you need to get something through the Legislature?

You do what the gaming industry usually does: You try to purchase the best influence money can buy.

Ah, the irony.

So the Isle of Man outfit has hired many men, including a former Assembly speaker (Richard Perkins) who presumably has access to the current speaker and the Democratic chairman who introduced the measure; two former gaming regulators (Scott Scherer and Randall Sayre), who presumably have the credibility needed to make the case; and the state’s pre-eminent fiscal analyst (Jeremy Aguero), who has crunched numbers for many gaming and business interests as well as lawmakers.

So that’s what you saw Thursday in Carson City as that phalanx of PokerStars-acquired talent went up against R&R Partners, representing the industry, and the shadow of a majority leader irked that the Internet giant is trying to get the state to move before he can get federal legislation enacted.

With PokerStars trying to subvert the Nevada licensing process and the industry exploring Internet gaming but wanting it on its own terms, neither side has much sympathy. But the amount of juice in that committee room Thursday was electrifying.

• Mining the profits: I continue to believe, after my capital sojourn, that lawmakers who have been invertebrate in past sessions in the face of the industry’s influence will put their hands in that cookie jar this session.

I hear more legislative incursions are coming soon, even though the industry has hired ample lobbying talent, including two former Democratic lawmakers, Perkins and David Goldwater, to try to sway their former colleagues.

The anachronistic constitutional protections and the ludicrous “take all the deductions you want so you don’t have to pay taxes” statute have rankled enough folks, even some Republicans, that some kind of action seems inevitable.

Gov. Brian Sandoval was vehement in his defense of the tax policy and mining’s fair tax burden during an interview this week on “Face to Face.”

When I asked him about this structure, Sandoval declared, “That’s the law.”

I asked him about changing the law, and the governor echoed industry assertions about what a “vital role” they play in “the economies of” rural Nevada. And they are not going anywhere, either.

Sandoval tried to divert the discussion to the missing audits of the miners, which is merely a reflection of the insidious influence the industry has in every nook and cranny of both branches of government.

“Is it good tax policy?” I asked him.

“I believe it is,” Sandoval said.

I wonder how the Gang of 63 feels. It’s simple, really: Lawmakers will either decide that an industry making fantastic profits and using some of them to buy influence through lobbyists and legislative favors (“How about sitting at our table at the Black and White Ball?”) should not pay any more during the worst financial crisis in history. Or they will do the right thing.

• Here we go again: Remember all those times during the Sharron Angle for U.S. Senate campaign that she said such incendiary or otherworldly stuff? Some may have thought that with her new openness policy — she spent an hour with reporters this week — that she has trained herself to be more disciplined, less prone to the kind of gaffes that Harry Reid exploited.

Maybe next campaign.

The first “what did she say?” moment of her congressional campaign came in an email she signed and sent on behalf of a conservative veterans group (posted on my blog on the Sun site). After saying the Veterans of Foreign Wars PAC “betrayed America” by endorsing liberals, Angle followed up with this:

“The founding principles of our nation have been under siege for some time. It’s not just radical groups like al-Qaeda that threaten our liberty, either. Many of our own elected leaders have decided that the Constitution is archaic and, therefore, can be ignored! (Case in point: nationalized healthcare.) Modernized communication technologies, the liberal media, and Alinsky-like doctrine have accelerated a moral decline and an historical ambivalence that threaten the American way of life for us and future generations.”

It’s not just the Palinesque rhetoric. Or the moral equivalency drawn between a terrorist group and congressmen and senators. Or the failure to understand what the word “nationalized” means.

It’s all of it.

What was that Santayana quote again?

•••

(If you’re wondering, folks, I’ll weigh in Sunday on the shocking indictment of Doug Hampton, Sen. John Ensign’s former aide.)

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