‘Find me candidates who believe in real conservative principles’?

One-note Root today offers his solution to the 2018 Republican election rout.

One can’t argue with his premise that Gov. Brian Sandoval did not live up to his election promises. Instead, he shepherded though the largest tax increase in state history to pay for the highest budget; pushed through the commerce tax on businesses; expanded Medicaid under ObamaCare; allowed illegals aliens to get driver’s licenses; and bailed on school choice.

But Root’s solution is:

Find me candidates who believe in real conservative principles and who know how to proudly and loudly sell that message, and I’ll show you a Nevada that is painted Republican red again. That’s a Christmas message of hope for the Nevada GOP.

Well, they don’t get any more conservative than Bob Beers, who lost the race for state treasurer to an unknown, much less-qualified Democrat. The same could be said for Ron Knecht, who lost his controller re-election bid, and Wes Duncan, who lost his bid for attorney general. And, yes, Adam Laxalt had said he would try to repeal the commerce tax and as attorney general defended conservative principles and values. He lost to a tax-loving Democrat. We’ll skip over tax-hiker Michael Roberson.

Root’s solution has already failed. What now, one-note Root?

Get out while the getting’s good or they’ll come for you next

Jane Ann Morrison with a Strip performer’s ape. (R-J file pix)

Run, Jane, run. Get out while you can with your reputation intact.

On page 1B of the Sunday newspaper Jane Ann Morrison announced she was voluntarily shoving aside her columnist keyboard. On the back of the Viewpoint section columnist Daniella Greenbaum reported that she had been basically shunted aside for failing to be politically correct.

Greenbaum wrote that she resigned from her post as Business Insider columnist after she wrote that actress Scarlett Johansson taking a movie role in which she would portray a transgender man was just make-believe and actors should be allowed to take on any roles they wish. The piece was spiked and she bailed. Johansson also dropped the planned role when the politically correct pique hit the roof.

After reading that I looked back at Jane Ann’s reminiscence about her decades as an ink-stained wretch and wondered if some self-styled animal rights zealot might take issue with that photo of her with a Strip performer’s ape. There’s always something. Eventually anyone who espouses an opinion is bound to run into the politically correct buzzsaw.

Two of today’s letters to the editor, conveniently, took umbrage with recent screeds by columnists Victor Joecks and Wayne Allyn Root for being insensitive.

An alert reader took the opportunity this morning to email a bit of anonymous satire someone had posted to the web:

It had been snowing all night. So at ….

8:00: I made a snowman.

8:10: A feminist passed by and asked me why I didn’t make a snow woman.

8:15: So, I made a snow woman. Now I have a snow couple.

8:17: My feminist neighbor complained about the snow woman’s voluptuous chest saying it objectified snow women everywhere

8:20: The gay couple living nearby threw a hissy fit and moaned it should have been two snowmen instead

8:25: The vegans at the end of the lane complained about the carrot nose, as veggies are food and not to decorate snow figures with.

8:28: I am being called a racist because the snow couple is white.

8:42: The feminist neighbor complained again that the broomstick of the snow woman needs to be removed because it depicted women in a domestic role.

8:45: TV news crew shows up. I am asked if I know the difference between snowmen and snow-women? I reply, “Snowballs” and am called a sexist by the TV reporter.

9:00: I’m on the News as a suspected racist, homophobic sensibility offender bent on stirring up trouble during difficult weather.

9:29: Far left protesters offended by everything are marching down the street

Moral: There is no moral to this story.  It’s just the world in which we live today and it’s going to get worse.

By the bye, Jane Ann says she plans to give a shot at that novel that everyone is supposed to have inside of them. I can’t help but wonder if it will be set in a small desert, mob-infested gambling town called Three Cacti. (Hint: Obscure “literary” reference to one of her, and my, favorite mystery writers.)

 

 

 

 

Time to end those NFL tax subsidies?

Nearly entire Raiders team sits for national anthem.

Before you poke someone in the eye, you should take your hand out of his pocket.

Michelle Malkin’s column posted at Townhall points out that those NFL players kneeling during the national anthem are doing so on turf paid for by taxpayers, not just ticket holders.

“Over the past decade, new tax-supported NFL stadiums rose up for the Indianapolis Colts (the $720 million Lucas Oil Stadium), the Dallas Cowboys (the $1.15 billion AT&T Stadium) the New York Jets and Giants (the $1.6 billion MetLife Stadium, the Minnesota Vikings (the $1.1 billion U.S. Bank Stadium), the Atlanta Falcons (the $1.5 billion Mercedes-Benz Stadium), and the San Francisco 49ers (the $1.3 billion Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara),” Malkin notes.

She also reports that there soon will be a $2.6 billion stadium for the Los Angeles Chargers and Rams, as well as a $1.9 billion stadium for the Oakland Raiders when they move to Las Vegas. Though she neglects to point out that $750 million of that Raider stadium will be covered by room taxes, she does note that there is an $83 million taxpayer debt on two-decade-old renovations to the Alameda County Coliseum that the Raiders are abandoning.

Malkin also noted that a majority of economists say providing state and local subsidies to build stadiums for professional sports teams usually costs taxpayers more than any economic benefits.

So team players and owners are sticking it to taxpayers figuratively and literally.

If you just can’t wait till Thursday’s newspaper for Wayne Allyn Root’s predictable pro-Trump screed on this topic, it is already posted at Townhall. He argues that the NFL is committing economic suicide.

“It’s time for a nationwide boycott,” Root cheer leads. “It’s time for 63 million Trump fans to stop watching. Turn off NFL games on your TV for the next month. Watch the owners cry. Watch them panic. Watch them beg. Watch them order an end to all kneeling or disrespect for the national anthem. Watch them sing a whole new tune.”

He, too, gets around the taxpayer aspect and suggests that people call their governors and demand an end to all subsidies for the NFL.

Brent Bozell, also posted at Townhall, points out the liberal media jumped all over Trump’s tweets about the anthem kneeling equating them to racism and censorship, spurring “cowardly NFL teams” up the ante on Sunday with bigger displays of disrespect.

“The liberal media are shameless hypocrites when they polarize the country and then complain the country is polarized,” Bozell writes. “They have honored (Colin) Kaepernick as some kind of ‘star-spangled’ patriot and pushed his radical racial agenda. They have pressured the NFL and every other televised sports league to take liberal stands on everything from race to gun control to imposing transgender bathrooms.”

Local newspaper columnist Victor Joecks also weighed in on the NFL tax subsidy boondoggle today.

He noted how Gov. Brian Sandoval boasted that the Raider stadium would be a boon to the state’s economy. There were projections that the stadium would produce almost 6,000 annual jobs, total wages of $230 million and an increase of 1 million visitors annually.

“By putting taxpayers on the hook for a significant portion of the stadium’s cost, Raiders’ owner Mark Davis reduced his risk and directly benefits from a $750 million subsidy.  That makes sense for him. It never made financial sense for you,” Joecks writes. “The NFL protests are just another reminder of why government shouldn’t pick winners and losers in the economy.”

 

 

 

Dueling columnists could be entertaining, except …

Epithets at 10 paces. Turn and fire.

First, in the pages of the Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist Wayne Allyn Root took issue with MGM’s CEO Jim Murren telling his employees that the firm would match any donations they decided to make to certain groups that he apparently identified as civil rights organizations. In a letter to employees Murren noted recent violence in Charlottesville and Barcelona and stated, “In the midst of this uncertainty, I want to affirm a clear-eyed, concrete view of the company in which you have chosen to invest your career, because on the question of human rights, MGM Resorts takes and unequivocal position: The protection of human dignity, demonstrated in the form of tolerance and respect for all people, is the core of our identity. We strive to create workplaces and entertainment spaces that are welcoming, open and respectful to all kinds of people, regardless of disability, age, gender, race, ethnicity, religious preference, gender identity or sexual orientation.” (His bold face and italics.)

He listed the groups for which the company would match donations as Southern Poverty Law Center, NAACP, ADL, Council on American Islamic Relations and others.

Root took issue with the doling out of shareholder funds to liberal groups in general but especially with the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is known for tossing out hate group labels like trinkets at a Mardi Gras parade, and the Council on American Islamic Relation, which has been pegged as the clean-faced front for Hamas.

Root blasted, “Jim Murren has gone too far. And he’s put MGM’s board, shareholders and employees in a terrible position because of his extreme, radical, reckless decisions” — without bothering to append the usual disclaimer about the newspaper’s owner, Sheldon Adelson, being both a business competitor with MGM and frequent political opponent of Murren.

Today, the putative editor of the insert inside the Review-Journal filled that gap with a diatribe. Brian Greenspun said of Root’s Thursday missive:

That day, he went after one of Sheldon’s biggest, most forward-thinking and most responsible competitors in the gaming industry. It is exactly what the gaming industry feared might happen when the news — as secret as the Adelson family tried to keep it — broke that one of the GOP’s wealthiest donors had purchased one of the two largest newspapers in Nevada. The Las Vegas Sun is the other “largest” newspaper in Nevada.

I don’t know if Sheldon knows what Root writes from one day to the next, but he should be very careful about what his minions publish in and under his name. Root and publisher Craig Moon certainly know what would please Sheldon.

Not only are Adelson and Murren competitors on the Strip but also in Macau and perhaps in Japan in the future.

Adelson is a huge Republican donor, while Murren was a card-carrying Republican for Reid and a Hillary Clinton supporter.

A couple of years ago Adelson tore into MGM and Caesars for driving down the price of rooms on the Strip and costing his Sands corporation money. Adelson personally attacked Murren for supporting a convention center expansion, which competes with Adelson’s convention center, over a new football stadium.

But perhaps the funniest thing in Greenspun’s screed was this line:

Which reminds me of one of the first lessons in newspaper publishing I learned from my father, Hank Greenspun, many decades ago — publishers have profound responsibilities to the public interest and it must always be placed before personal interest.

Hank Greenspan was notorious for pulling his newspaper like a dueling pistol to attack business competitors and political foes and to support his friends. He was virulently critical of an FBI agent who conducted a sting on certain politicians and he conducted a campaign to discredit a competitor in the cable television business.

Greenspan concludes his spiel, “Come on, Review-Journal, publish your paper in the community interest. You and your owners should be better than this.”

A little dueling between newspaper columnists could be entertaining — if they both weren’t such clowns.

If leaks are treason, what is to be done about the accessories after the fact?

A certain Las Vegas columnist is, shall we say, apoplectic over the leaks coming out of the Trump White House.

Wayne Allyn Root writes today:

This is outrageous and ridiculous. More importantly, it’s illegal. It’s actually worse than illegal — it constitutes treason. It threatens America’s national security. The greatest country and military in world history cannot allow our president’s private conversations with world leaders to be leaked to any Tom, Dick or Harry. Or worse, to the leaders of Russia, China, Iran, North Korea or ISIS.

What stirred Root’s dander was recent reporting by The Washington Post of transcripts of two Trump conversations with foreign leaders. His remedy is: “Any government employees caught and convicted of leaking must be charged with treason and punished with life terms — or the death penalty.”

Not lacking for superlatives, Root declares, “This scandal is the greatest threat to national security in our history.”

He doesn’t go into what penalty should be assessed for the accessory after the fact — the press. Without the press there would be no distribution of what Root deems treason punishable by death. Surely the press would have to be held accountable under Root’s rules.

The same newspaper in which Root rants reported a few days ago quotes from those purloined conversations with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

The newspaper related:

The transcripts of the two calls did not reveal top-secret information, but they showed the president in a less than favorable light. Trump told Peña Nieto to stop saying Mexico would not pay for a border wall. “You cannot say that to the press because I cannot negotiate under those circumstances,” said Trump, in an exchange that made him seem more opportunistic than principled.

Trump then told Turnbull he liked talking to Russian President Vladimir Putin better. “I have been making these calls all day and this is the most unpleasant call of the day. Putin was a pleasant call,” Trump said.

Are the newspapers that report the leaks to be held accountable or not in Wayne’s world?

Washington Post image

 

The facts about job growth are dire, but not that dire

Never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

A columnist in today’s Las Vegas newspaper gloats about being vindicated in his opinion of the lagging Obama economy by citing the findings of a liberal economist.

Wayne Allyn Root

Wayne Allyn Root recounts a report by the former chairman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers Alan Krueger and fellow Princeton economics prof Lawrence Katz, which came out in September but was recently reported on by Breitbart. Root said the report shows “94 percent of all new job (sic) created under Obama was part-time. There were no jobs created — unless you wanted to work part-time for low wages with no health insurance. There were no real jobs … middle class jobs … high quality, high-wage jobs you could take to feed a family of four and pay a mortgage.”

Actually that report concluded, “A striking implication of these estimates is that 94 percent of the net employment growth in the U.S. economy from 2005 to 2015 appears to have occurred in alternative work arrangements.” Those alternative work jobs rose from 10.7 percent in February 2005 to 15.8 percent in late 2015.

The report defined “alternative work arrangements” as temporary help agency workers, on-call workers, contract workers, and independent contractors or freelancers. Yes, a large number of those are part-time, but by no means all.

In fact the economists’ study states, “Workers in alternative work arrangements are more than twice as likely as other workers to be classified as part-time for economic reasons (7.6 percent versus 3.3 percent).” Part-time is 35 hours a week or less.

Chart accompanying Breitbart account.

The facts do appear to belie the claim made by Obama in his 2016 State of the Union address:

Let me start with the economy, and a basic fact: the United States of America, right now, has the strongest, most durable economy in the world. We’re in the middle of the longest streak of private-sector job creation in history. More than 14 million new jobs; the strongest two years of job growth since the ’90s; an unemployment rate cut in half. Our auto industry just had its best year ever. Manufacturing has created nearly 900,000 new jobs in the past six years. And we’ve done all this while cutting our deficits by almost three-quarters.

Anyone claiming that America’s economy is in decline is peddling fiction. What is true — and the reason that a lot of Americans feel anxious — is that the economy has been changing in profound ways, changes that started long before the Great Recession hit and haven’t let up.

The deficit has fallen but the debt has doubled from $10 trillion to nearly $20 trillion.

Inflation adjusted household income as of 2015 was 1.7 percent lower than in 2007 and fully  2.4 percent below the 1999 peak.

Those are the facts.

 

 

Newspaper columnist beats the drum over and over and over

Some might describe it as Aristotelian triptych: Tell them what you are going to say, say it and tell them what you said.

I call it redundant.

The morning newspaper’s recycled political columnist — his columns appeared for short time more than half a dozen years ago — Wayne Allyn Root posted a 425-word column earlier this week that easily could have been 125 words.

In his screeching jeremiad Root breathlessly informs his readers that there is something in Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails that is driving her to distraction and will — upon revelation — destroy her political career and her presidential campaign. “It’s like a ticking time bomb. Stress is eating away at her. The weight of the world is on Hillary’s shoulders,” we are told.

Without ever offering readers specifics, the political columnist who appears on a news page instead of the editorial page tell us:

So she knows what is soon coming. …

No one could handle that kind of stress. …

Soon, everyone will know what she’s done. …

I know why Hillary is sick. She knows what’s coming.

Soon the whole world will know.

This drumbeat is longer than In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.

His column is like his speeches. He has little to say, so he says it over and over again in a bombastic delivery that after a while amounts to a droning yammer.

Hillary stumbles under the weight of her deleted emails, suggests Las Vegas newspaper columnist.

Root calls for term limits for politicians

When Wayne Allyn Root — sports handicapper, former vice presidential nominee for the Libertarian Party and Henderson resident who is currently on the Republican speaking circuit — writes or speaks, it is in a staccato stream of quips suitable for a bumperful of bumper stickers.

In a 2010 column in the Review-Journal, he wrote:

“Obama is as hopeless, helpless, clueless and bankrupt of good ideas as the manager of the Chicago Cubs in late September. This ‘community organizer’ knows as much about private-sector jobs as Pamela Anderson knows about nuclear physics.”

In another newspaper column that year he wrote:

“My advice: V.E.T.O. — Vote Every one of Them Out.”

In still another column Root wrote:

“The mob comes to a businessman (like me) and demands 10 percent for ‘protection.’ The rub, of course, is that the protection is from them. The government calls that extortion and will send a mobster to prison for 20 long years on that charge. Yet the same government comes to that same businessman, demands a 50 percent (or more) cut of his business, and offers no protection whatsoever.

“I prefer the deal offered by the Mafia.”

On Townhall.com today Root has a piece on why moderate Republicans are killing the GOP. He ticks off a list of losers the party has put forward in recent years, moderates like Romney, McCain and Dole. The problem with these Democrat-lite types is that they lose elections, he says.

He makes a good point in this and those other columns.

Root concludes today’s screed with this:

“From this day forward we must term limit the politicians. Limit them all to two terms. One term in office. And one term in prison. I call it ‘the Chicago Rule.’”

I thought it sounded vaguely familiar.

Bumper sticker

It is easy to remember.

Ralston labels Root a birther — fair or not?

I think someone is stretching the definition of birther a bit.

On his blog Friday, defrocked newspaper columnist Jon Ralston, stated: “Wayne Allyn Root, the state’s most famous birther, continues to be honored by state Republicans and may soon become an albatross for a congressional candidate.”

I thought the definition of birther was one who stated or believed Obama was born in a foreign country and therefore not eligible under the Constitution to serve as president.

Ralston, ever the self-aggrandizer, went on to write:

“MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow picked up on Root after I broke news of the invite this summer with Nevada GOP elected officials and House No. 3 man Kevin McCarthy. In her piece, Maddow played the clip of Root saying Obama was an illegitmate (sic) president who got into college as a foreign-exchange student with an Indonesian passport. Root responded in a bizarre piece in which he accused Maddow of trying to “defame and slander me.” (He also has had a lawyer contact me.)”

Wayne Allyn Root

Now I’m not defending Root, whose bombastic speaking style leaves me cold and whose columns I published under protest at the Review-Journal, but rather I question Ralston’s accuracy. I can’t recall Root ever claiming Obama was foreign born.

Root has “suspected” Obama, in order to get some form of affirmative action benefit, enrolled in college as a foreign exchange student, possibly using an Indonesian passport.

Here is what Root himself has to say on this topic:

“I believe Obama is a fraud. But it has nothing to do with his birth. Obama’s critics have it all backward. They are looking in the wrong place. He isn’t a foreigner portraying himself as an American. He’s an American who fraudulently portrayed himself as a foreigner. So because of his own fraudulent actions, Obama is actually the one to blame for starting all of this conspiracy talk.

“Months ago, MSNBC television host Rachel Maddow spent 15 minutes on her national show calling me a “birther.” I scratched my head, because I’m not — never have been, not for one minute. A “birther” believes Obama is a foreigner, not legally qualified to be President. I have never believed that.

“I’ve always believed that Obama is 100 percent American. There, I’ve said it loudly. I’m a leading critic of the President, but I’ve always believed him to be American-born. He is as American as P.T. Barnum. And he lies and exaggerates like Barnum, too. While Obama is no foreigner, he is a fraud.”

Root goes on at some length laying out the circumstantial evidence that leads him to this rather tenuous conclusion. A conspiracy theorist, sure. But a birther?

Accuracy in commentary, as with Obama’s so many broken promises, should never be allowed to get in the way of a good old name-calling tirade.