By now you’ve no doubt heard the news: Former Clark County Commissioner Erin Kenny is headed to the slammer for 2-1/2 years. She was eligible for more, and she certainly deserved more, but we figured she’d do two or less so the U.S. attorney could still induce people to take deals when the FBI knocks on their door.
Props, by the way, to George "The Knappster" Knapp, who called the sentence during an appearance on Nevada Week in Review. Don’t ever bet against that guy: He knows everything.
You know, as glad as we are that Kenny is going away for awhile, the thing that pleases us most about her plea bargain and jail sentence is the felony conviction. You see, as a felon, Kenny cannot hold any office of trust or profit under the United States, or under the state of Nevada. And it would be just like Kenny to emerge from jail and want to run for office again.
Hell, she probably thinks she did the public a service by ratting out her co-conspirators (after she’d been caught, of course). The fact that jurors in the trial of real estate developer Don Davidson didn’t believe her even when she was confessing to crimes would deter most normal people from even showing their faces in public. Kenny? Well, she’s definitely not normal.
Besides, felonies can be erased, and voting rights restored. Anybody want to bet that Kenny will put her Boyd Law School education to work while she’s behind bars plotting a comeback?
No, like Godzilla and polo shirts with upturned collars, we hope we’ve seen the last of Kenny. But something tells us, she may be back yet.
» You know what we don’t like about the Review-Journal? For one, the paper doesn’t like to admit its mistakes, and many times, it will simply move on and forget about errors rather than promptly correcting them.
Take political reporter Molly Ball’s story on the non-existent scandal involving state Sen. Bob Beers and political consultant Robert Uithoven. Ball penned a story on Friday in which she pretty much suggested that Uithoven had broken a state law while rounding up sponsors for a Beers fundraiser. Consider the closing paragraphs of that piece:
Nevada statute states, "It is unlawful for a member of the Legislature … to solicit and accept any monetary contribution, or solicit or accept a commitment to make such a contribution for any political purpose during the period beginning … 30 days before a regular session of the Legislature and ending 30 days after the final adjournment of a regular session of the Legislature."
Each violation of the statute is punishable by a $5,000 fine.
At this point, Walsh said, the secretary of state’s office is looking into the potential violation only of that statute, 294A.300, which would apply only to the legislator in question.
However, another statute, 294A.310, prohibits solicitations on behalf of candidates and applies also to those making such solicitations or those making or committing to make banned contributions.
"A person shall not accept a contribution on behalf of another person to avoid the prohibitions of this section," it states in part.
Wow, sounds damning, right? Except for this: "Another statute," (NRS 294A.310) applies only to political party caucuses! The language is impossible to miss. The statute starts off like this: "A member of an organization whose primary purpose is to provide support for Legislators of a particular political party and house…" And since Uithoven was not employed by a party caucus, this statute clearly doesn’t apply. (We’re not just relying on our own legal judgment here; we called and checked.)
So, did the R-J, having been made aware of the error, fix it? (You could argue that nobody at the R-J reads this blog, but we all know that’s not true, don’t we? And somehow, we get the impression that Ball is acutely aware of her own press, wherever it appears.)
Nope. There was no correction. Instead, Ball just wrote another story — using the correct information — and blithely pretended the first story and its glaring mistake never happened. (This of course means that Ball, even assuming she didn’t learn of the mistake from this blog, learned of from somewhere but failed to ask that a correction be published.)
In journalism, ignoring your mistakes is not cool, not professional and certainly not ethical. And given that Ball and errors go together like PB&J, one would think that editors at the R-J would have stepped in, long ago.
Look, despite what some in the public or on blogs may think, journalism is a tough job. We’ve done it full-time for 18 years, so we know. And we’ve made a lot of mistakes in that time. But when we make a mistake in print, we damn well correct it. But more than that, we try to avoid them in the first place, and this was sure as hell an avoidable mistake.
» So Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid made everybody stay up all night and what did they accomplish? Nothing, besides proving once again that Republicans are the party of war. Hey, Harry: We knew that already.
» U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., is asking questions about drug czar John Walters‘ election year visits to Las Vegas. We thought those trips were bogus before it was cool. But maybe Waxman can do what nobody else appears to have been able to do: Stop the drug czar from campaigning on your dime.
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