The Nevada Democratic Party hopes to re-take control of the Nevada state Senate for the first time in 18 years. <\/p>\n
Democrats chose to target two seats — those of state Sens. Bob Beers of Las Vegas and Joe Heck of Henderson. <\/p>\n
First step: Recruit two Democrats to run against them. <\/p>\n
Introducing, in this corner for today\u2019s tag team match, former water district employee Allison Copening in Beers\u2019 Senate District 6, and — challenging Joe Heck of Henderson — former 30-year School District secretary-turned-administrator Shirley Breeden, who unsuccessfully sued the district in 1997 after she said a colleague made a coarse remark to her and her supervisor refused to do anything about it. <\/p>\n
(Breeden reportedly demanded a $500,000 settlement from Superintendent Carlos Garcia for her emotional \u201cpain\u201d — the U.S. Supreme Court threw the whole thing out after the district spent $290,000 in taxpayer money defending itself.) <\/p>\n
Now summer 2008 arrives and mesdames Copening and Breeden show up for the first media debates and candidate forums of the season, at which point something becomes instantly obvious to all — including pundits who generally lean to the left: <\/p>\n
These may be perfectly pleasant ladies who are kind to pets and children, but when asked the most rudimentary questions about state government, they resemble deer in the headlights. <\/p>\n
\u201cAll sugar and spice but can\u2019t tell you the first thing about state government,\u201d understates former Review-Journal political columnist Jon Ralston, who actually used the phrase \u201cdeer in the headlights\u201d to characterize Ms. Breeden. \u201cIf vacuousness were an Olympic sport, we\u2019d have had a couple of gold medal performances from Copening and Breeden during the Congregation Ner Tamid-sponsored debates.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u201cThe worst performances we\u2019ve ever seen in covering politics,\u201d echoed Steve Sebelius, editor of Las Vegas CityLife. <\/p>\n
A Democratic disaster. What to do? <\/p>\n
DEMOCRAT DISAPPEARS <\/strong><\/p>\n Ms. Copening, particularly, started turning down invitations to candidate forums. Instead, it soon became clear the new official Democratic strategy was to keep Ms. Copening largely out of sight, instead spending hundreds of thousands of dollars smearing Sen. Beers with signs and a planned series of seven large-scale, all-color mailers, hoping they could run up his \u201cnegatives\u201d till voters would prefer, in essence, to cast a vote for \u201csome Democrat I\u2019ve never heard of.\u201d <\/p>\n And what mailers they are. <\/p>\n A little bit of background: In May, the first segment of \u201cLegends of Las Vegas\u201d was installed at 1234 Las Vegas Boulevard South, as Mayor Oscar Goodman set his footprints, handprints and signature in concrete in front of a vacant hotel next door to Talk of the Town, a combination porn store\/strip club. (\u201cHome of the $10 table dance\u201d boasts the sign outside.) <\/p>\n The idea — eventually — is to have many, many plots on a walk of fame from Sahara Avenue to Fremont Street, each with handprints and footprints, a lighted memorabilia box and an audio biography playing in a continuous loop via nearby speakers. <\/p>\n But organizers were willing to start small. \u201cWe want to see if this holds up for a month or so, see if anybody takes a crowbar to it,\u201d said Raymond Pistol, who owns Talk of the Town and is active in the Downtown Turnaround Organization, a loose affiliation of business owners that put the project together. <\/p>\n How else has Mr. Pistol gained fame and fortune? Apparently, when the producer of the porn film \u201cDeep Throat\u201d needed money for legal fees to fight obscenity charges a few years back, Mr. Pistol helped the filmmaker by agreeing to buy the rights to his entire film library. <\/p>\n In 2006, when state Sen. Beers ran in the Republican primary for governor, this same local businessman gave candidate Beers a perfectly legal $10,000 campaign contribution. When Mr. Beers lost that primary, he returned $5,000 of that money — the part he could otherwise have used in the general election — to Mr. Pistol, as instructed to do by state regulations. <\/p>\n \u201cI hadn\u2019t actually met the man,\u201d says Sen. Beers, who adds he did not solicit that particular donation. \u201cThe incoming checks, basically I didn\u2019t even see them, they went to the campaign treasurer.\u201d <\/p>\n Yet the Democratic mailers now hitting mailboxes in the Sixth District declare \u201cBob Beers Ran on Family Values and then took $10,000 in cash from the maker of \u2018Deep Throat\u2019. … Took $10,000 from the Nevada Porn Industry … Bob Beers is in bed with the sex industry,\u201d etc. <\/p>\n The Democrats and their union pals haven\u2019t done themselves so proud since they targeted former state Sen. Sue Lowden — now head of the state Republican Party — for her attempt to let Nevadans choose for themselves which overrated childhood inoculations their kids should get, accusing her of \u201cpromoting childhood disease\u201d! <\/p>\n Gives new meaning to that line on Ms. Copening\u2019s resume, where she says she has extensive experience in \u201cwater and sewer.\u201d <\/p>\n Say what you want about Sen. Beers\u2019 politics, he\u2019s a perfectly normal middle-class Las Vegan, living in a perfectly normal middle-class house with the woman to whom he\u2019s been married for 26 years (his Scoutmaster\u2019s daughter, actually), putting two kids through the public schools. He enjoys bluegrass music and rock collecting. <\/p>\n \u201cMy idea of night life is watching \u2018CSI,\u2019 he says. \u201cThe real dirt on me is I play the banjo.\u201d <\/p>\n POLITICKING BY THE TAX-EXEMPT? <\/strong><\/p>\n The Democrats are also using a quotation against Beers, claiming the local Episcopal diocese has said his \u201cdisdain, flippancy, and disrespect are shocking.\u201d <\/p>\n In fact, Sen. Beers says that line comes from a personal e-mail exchange he had with former Episcopal Bishop Katharine Schori (now her church\u2019s national bishop.) <\/p>\n The bishop had e-mailed Sen. Beers on behalf of some \u201creligious alliance\u201d supposedly including Presbyterians, urging him to support state tax hikes, thus making a mistake common among leftist churchmen, that being to imagine that Caesar can properly do the churches\u2019 charitable job for them, using funds extracted under threat of force. <\/p>\n Sen. Beers says he asked for a show of hands on the proposed tax hikes at the men\u2019s club of his own Mountain View Presbyterian Church in Sun City, where only one of 40 members raised a hand. <\/p>\n \u201cYou certainly don\u2019t seem to represent MY church,\u201d Sen. Beers wrote back to the bishop, at which point she did indeed write to him that his \u201cdisdain, flippancy, and disrespect are shocking.\u201d <\/p>\n (Imagine: a Presbyterian not taking orders from the Church of England!) <\/p>\n Since that was a personal and not an official church communication, \u201cI\u2019m in possession of an e-mail from the current bishop of the Episcopalian Church, Dan Edwards, in which he asks the Democratic Party to stop using that quote.\u201d Beers said Friday. \u201cBut they sent another one out that hit the mailboxes today.\u201d <\/p>\n Accept a legal $10,000 campaign contribution from a licensed local strip club owner — in Nevada, no less — and Democrats contend that \u201cputs you in bed with the sex industry\u201d? <\/p>\n What, then, should we say about candidates and parties who actively solicit help and contributions from labor unions \u201cwhose pension funds used to be controlled by mobsters who committed murder-for-hire\u201d? That they\u2019re \u201cin bed with the mob?\u201d That their opponents will soon \u201csleep with the fishes\u201d? <\/p>\n In an era when Democrats shriek hysterically about largely imagined threats of Republican smears, whimpering that calling Barack Obama a \u201ccommunity organizer\u201d is a code word that really means he\u2019s \u201cblack\u201d (as though it had escaped anyone\u2019s attention that Sen. Obama is part African), this Democratic direct-mail campaign is embarrassing and pathetic. <\/p>\n Though it does, at least, distract attention from the fact their candidates aren\u2019t saying what they\u2019d actually do if sent to Carson City, which is to raise taxes. <\/p>\n That is what they want to do, right? That\u2019s why they want to remove Heck and Beers — among the capital\u2019s leading champions of restraining government to modest rates of growth. <\/p>\n So why won\u2019t they say so? <\/p>\n Let Allison be Allison! <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Nevada Democratic Party hopes to re-take control of the Nevada state Senate for the first time in 18 years. Democrats chose to target two seats — those of state Sens. Bob Beers of Las Vegas and Joe Heck of Henderson. First step: Recruit two Democrats to run against them. Introducing, in this corner for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8,5,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2nd-amendment","category-elections","category-free-speech"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pWqFl-1O","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=112"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}