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NPRI News Bulletin LVCVA 'bigs' duck questions
Millions in public's MAY 19 — Las Vegas Convention & Visitors Authority Vice Chairman Keith Smith is refusing to answer questions about the authority's long-standing policy of advancing millions of dollars in interest-free operating funds to Airwave Productions, an affiliate of the authority's advertising firm, R&R Partners. There is no provision in the current agreement for the LVCVA to provide advance payments to R&R or any of its subsidiaries or affiliated companies, including the advertising firm's production arm, Airwave Productions. The LVCVA has routinely advanced millions of dollars to Airwave since at least 2005. Smith, who is also president and chief executive officer of Boyd Gaming, has direct oversight of the LVCVA's contract with R&R as chairman of the authority's audit committee. The committee is reviewing a proposed three-year contract with R&R that will be presented to the full LVCVA board next month for approval. R&R has controlled the LVCVA contract since 1980. The LVCVA board voted in April to extend the R&R advertising agreement rather than open the contract up to competitive bidding. The Nevada Policy Research Institute approached Smith minutes after the LVCVA monthly meeting concluded last week and attempted to interview the high-profile gaming official about the authority's cash advances to Airwave. But Smith's public relations assistant at Boyd Gaming, Rob Stillwell, repeatedly attempted inside the convention center to physically interpose himself to disrupt the interview. Smith declined to comment on the LVCVA's advance payments to Airwave and whether the practice will continue in the future. Smith is a highly respected gaming official who in January was appointed to a three-year term as a director of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. He is also vice chairman of the American Gaming Association and chairman of the Nevada Resort Association. R&R is a lobbyist for the Nevada Resort Association. Smith's reticence to discuss LVCVA issues related to the advertising agreement and the advances is mirrored by a refusal of every member of the 14-member LVCVA board to accept NPRI's request for a sit-down interview. [continued]
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Confessions of a
retired newsman Journalists as organisms By W.W. Anderson LAS VEGAS — When I myself was a young and smug reporter on the East Coast, I couldn’t see it. Years later, however, I noticed it regularly. It very much resembled the old Saturday Night Live routine where Chevy Chase would pause, look out at the audience, and then arrogantly observe, “I’M Chevy Chase, and YOU’RE not!” It was a funny send-up of celebrity self-importance. Of course, as time went by, it became increasingly evident that the routine was also an accurate send-up of Chevy himself — he was kidding on the square, as it’s called, only he was doing so unconsciously. Many young journalists radiate the same frame of mind. Certain that what they’re doing is of the ultimate importance — defending goodness and revealing evil, after all, just like any idealistic adolescent wants to do — they cannot help but unconsciously swagger about. And in their unguarded moments, the subtext is: “I’M a duly appointed agent of the Forces of Light, and you,… you are merely someone whose main function is to just behold me!” [continued]
Obama poll numbers
already collapsing
By Douglas E. Schoen,
Scott Rasmussen Polling data show that Mr. Obama's approval rating is dropping and is below where George W. Bush was in an analogous period in 2001. Rasmussen Reports data shows that Mr. Obama's net presidential approval rating -- which is calculated by subtracting the number who strongly disapprove from the number who strongly approve -- is just six, his lowest rating to date. [continued] 
Barbara Buckley:
By Del Tartikoff Barbara Buckley -- who boasts of having been at one-time a Vegas hotel maid -- has climbed to the top of the greasy pole in the Nevada Legislature. But all it means, she recently demonstrated, is that the Peter Principle is alive and well in Silver State politics.
The Peter Principle, for those who don't recall, is the rule that "in a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his or her level of incompetence." Buckley last week proved that, in the realm of economics, she not only is a hard-core authoritarian socialist, which all close observers of state politics knew, but also a complete economic ignoramus, which was not known. Buckley did all this by introducing a bill supposedly intended to "stabilize" Nevada's housing market, but which would be guaranteed to keep the market destabilized, politicized and corrupt -- while prolonging the state's housing crisis indefinitely. [continued]
It's a Nastygram from Bill Raggio
By Glenn Cook
In the high-stakes poker game that is the 2009 Legislature, Republican Bill Raggio has laid down his cards. No raise. No call. Not that anyone's surprised. The easiest mark of the session has been showing his tax-hiking tells since Election Day. With state revenues falling alongside the fortunes of this state's tourism industry, the sympathies of the state Senate minority leader indisputably lie with those of big-spending majority Democrats. [continued]
Hydrologist: Vegas water authority planning another Owens Valley
By Emily Green The raw glory of the Mojave and Great Basin deserts is difficult to imagine from the paved fantasyland of Las Vegas. As the road wends north of the city, past sun-soaked bluffs into Pahranagat Valley, there is what looks like a river but are in fact four spring-fed lakes running for some 40 miles. Audubon himself would weep at the birdlife working this watering spot on the Pacific flyway. Bald eagles ride the breezes. Herons skid across the water. [continue]
Earlier in the same series: To save his family’s livelihood from a Las Vegas water scheme that could reduce his land to dust, a White Pine County rancher joins forces with Utah By Emily Green, Las Vegas Sun When Southern Nevada Water Authority Manager Pat Mulroy appealed to Congress in 2004 to provide right of way for a pipeline to deliver ground water from the heart of Nevada to Las Vegas, Utah stirred. One of the two sweetest valleys targeted by Las Vegas sat bang on the state line between Nevada and Utah. And not just Utah, but Brigham Young’s chosen seat for the original Utah Territory. Utah quickly attached a condition to the bill: Before Nevada could draw from any shared water system, both states had to negotiate the amount. Or, as an incandescent Mulroy described it, Utah gained a “veto” on her pipeline project. [continue]
NY Times slips up, confirms Saddam nuclear bomb program BY Jim Geraghty I'm sorry, did the New York Times just put on the front page that IRAQ HAD A NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROGRAM AND WAS PLOTTING TO BUILD AN ATOMIC BOMB? What? Wait a minute. The entire mantra of the war critics has been "no WMDs, no WMDs, no threat, no threat", for the past three years solid. [more]
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