• The Smoking Gun reports that “A Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screener is facing an assault rap after he allegedly beat a co-worker who joked about the size of the man’s genitalia after he walked through a security scanner.” The screener and his co-workers had been training with new “whole body image” machines which provide very revealing images of a traveler.
• “The X-ray revealed that [the screener] has a small penis and co-workers made fun of him on a daily basis,” according to the police report filed in the case. The screener said “could not take the jokes anymore and lost his mind.” So he pulled out a police baton and beat a the co-worker in an airport parking lot on Tuesday.
• Don’t you feel much safer flying now?
• I’ve been saying for months that Gov. Jim Gibbons has an outside chance to still win the Republican gubernatorial primary in June – depending on which Jim Gibbons, the Dr. Jekyll Gibbons or the Mr. Hyde Gibbons, shows up when voters start casting their ballots.
• He’s lucky the election isn’t today. Essentially calling opponent Brian Sandoval an anti-Semitic Nazi sympathizer yesterday was one of the stupidest things Mr. Hyde Gibbons has said and done since his midnight swearing-in ceremony in January 2007. And that’s saying something!
• For his part, Sandoval responded: “Jim Gibbons’ statement today is so repugnant it is beneath the dignity of the office of Governor. It is sad for Nevadans to see him resort to such a ridiculous act of desperation. But unfortunately this is exactly what we’ve come to expect from Jim Gibbons and exactly why Nevadans overwhelmingly have rejected his misguided administration.”
• Game on.
• According to a story in Wednesday’s Silver Pinion Journal out of Winnemucca, Republican U.S. Senate candidate Danny Tarkanian said that while he doesn’t support the recently-passed ObamaCare measure, he doesn’t support trying to repeal it because “it was highly unlikely, realistically, the legislation will be repealed.” Lovely.
• From the Department of Silver Linings, the real estate crash means “Las Vegas home prices have never been more affordable in relation to income, correcting back to 2000 levels,” according to real estate consultant John Burns. Burns notes in today’s LVRJ that “a lot of cabdrivers and hotel workers below the media income have a chance to become homeowners for the first time in a long time.”
• In other words, the market works if the government would just stop screwing with it.
• In Ohio on Tuesday, voters shot down several proposals for tax hikes, including in Toledo where, according to Political Diary, “Nearly two-thirds of voters said ‘no thanks’ to higher taxes to maintain spending levels at the city’s public schools.”
• PD notes that the Toledo school system is facing a $30 million funding gap, but voters there and everywhere “are increasingly focused on generous pension benefits to unionized public employees that threaten state and local bankruptcies around the country.”
• Not surprisingly, the teachers union “besieged voters with warnings of savage cuts to classrooms, bus service and sports programs” and “said the tax hike amounted to ‘only’ 0.75%” and would only be paid by “the rich.” But voters didn’t buy the bull this time.
• Meanwhile, over at the Buckeye School District – also the victim of a voter rejection of a tax hike for schools – Superintendent Dennis Honkala despaired, “We haven’t passed [a tax hike] in 16 years. I can’t explain it. I don’t understand it.”
• It’s actually quite simple. Taxpayers and voters have had enough. They no longer want government to simply do more with less; they want the government to do less with less. They don’t want the government to merely tighten its belt; they want it go on a crash diet. They don’t want government to simply start skipping desert; they want it to start skipping some meals.
• Yet some Republicans here in Nevada continue to refuse to take tax hikes off the table. Indeed, James Dean Leavitt, chairman of the Nevada University Board of Regents, went on Face to Face this week and called for higher taxes for education. “Let’s not reduce ourselves to taxpayer pledges, OK,” Leavitt said to host Jon Ralston. “Because those are an embarrassment, OK.”
• Really? Telling the voters that you won’t raise their taxes is “embarrassing”? Really? Well, OK.
• RalstonFlash reported this morning that Republican U.S. Senate candidate Chad Christensen – rebuffed by Gov. Gibbons on his call to call a special session to pass an Arizona-like law cracking down on illegal immigration and getting “no traction among colleagues” for such a session – says he will now pursue a ballot initiative instead.
• Of course, had Christensen followed through on his announced plan to run for the STATE Senate rather than jump into the U.S. Senate race at the last minute, he’d have been able to pursue this legislation in the Legislature next session. Ah, what might have been if not for unbridled and unrealistic ambition.
• And finally, the RJ reported this morning that “A Las Vegas High School teacher was arrested Wednesday night on six counts of sexual misconduct with a student.” You know, you almost never hear of such a thing among home-schoolers.
