• I haven’t watched professional basketball regularly since around the days of Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, but I think I’ll take an interest in the championship series coming up this week. Lakers or Jazz…doesn’t matter to me. As long as they beat Steve Kerr’s “Los” Suns!
• On Saturday, Utah Republicans bounced incumbent U.S. Sen. Bob Bennett from office for not being conservative enough. In trying to save his seat and his bacon, here’s the bottom line argument Bennett made to GOP convention delegates who voted against him and in favor of someone else: “Don’t take a chance on a newcomer. There’s too much at stake.”
• Hey, isn’t that the same argument being made by supporters of Nevada Sen. Harry Reid?
• Bennett, by the way, spent $2.8 million to get just 905 convention delegate votes. The Club for Growth’s independent campaign, widely credited for helping take Bennett down, spent less than $200,000. Seems it’s true: Money can’t buy you love. Yet another potential lesson for the Reid race.
• Not surprisingly, the district court judge who ruled that the drugmaker defendants in the endoscopy lawsuit couldn’t blame the nurses and doctors who reused needles and infected a number of patients with Hepatitis C has been rated in the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s annual survey as one of the worst judges on the bench today.
• Indeed, only 36 percent of the attorneys who participated in the survey said Jessie Walsh should be retained. As one put it, “It is scary that someone this clueless could even graduate from law school, never mind actually get a seat on the bench.” Why are we not surprised? Is it possible to recall a district judge?
• Meanwhile, Jacob Hafter, a Republican candidate for attorney general, predicts the new Arizona anti-ILLEGAL immigration law will withstand constitutional muster. However, he doesn’t think Nevada should adopt a similar law because we get so many tourists from Mexico and “can’t afford even one incident of somebody who was here as a tourist being mistaken as illegal.” That, Mr. Hafter said, “would be deadly to our economy.”
• But wait a minute. Aren’t all foreign visitors, including those from Mexico, required to have a passport to get here? And aren’t they required, by federal law as a condition of being allowed into our country, to carry that passport with them at all times while on their visit? So how could they be mistaken for an illegal if they’re legally visiting here and have the legally required passport to prove it?
• Tony Wright, a Republican candidate for state Senate District 7, inked the Taxpayer Protection Pledge at the First Friday Happy Hour event at Stoney’s on Friday. And Rob Archie, GOP candidate for Assembly 26, left me a voice-mail advising he, too, has signed the Pledge and is faxing it down to us.
• On the other hand, I’m continuing to get reports from other candidates who have been threatened by, so far unnamed, lobbyists to not to promise the voters of their districts that they will oppose and vote against any and all efforts to increase taxes if elected. These candidates are being told that if they sign the Pledge, no money. In other words, political extortion. And some self-proclaimed conservative candidates are caving into it.
• The only way I can see to combat this is for grassroots voters to put counter-pressure on some of these candidates, especially those running in primaries. And I also want to “out” the tax-hike lobbyists who are doing this arm-twisting. So if any of you candidates who have been victimized by this no-donations blackmail campaign want to name names ANONYMOUSLY, shoot me an email or give me a call.
• And finally, the Nevada Republican Party appears to have taken my suggestion to use automated phone calls in an effort to persuade a independent voters to switch over to the GOP so they can vote in the June 8 primary because I received one of the calls (I mailed in my party switch just recently, so I assume I’m still in the party database as an independent voter). It’ll be interesting to see if they pick up any significant numbers with this last-minute appeal.
