You no doubt read recently that the Nevada Supreme Court ruled in favor of former Assemblywoman Sharron Angle, who is waging a lonely, misanthropic quest to cut funding for the firefighters, police officers, doctors, nurses and schoolteachers who make up the backbone of our communities in Nevada.

(We thought Angle had, once again, failed, until the ruling gave her vicious quest new life.)

The high court — quite correctly — found the Legislature had set a date too early for the filing of initiative petitions, such as Angle’s latest attempt to impose California-style property tax limitations in Nevada. The ruling expanded the signature-gathering period by nearly a month.

And, you’ve probably read that Angle’s initiative — thanks no doubt to the extra time — qualified in Clark County. (Under a highly suspect and probably unconstitutional law, the initiative also has to qualify in each of the other counties, with a varying number of signatures required in each. We are waiting now to hear the results of the canvass. The deadline is today.)

Now, you would think with Angle’s three previous failures to qualify this initiative, the experience of her failed bid for Congress and the extra time granted by the state Supreme Court, that she’d have finally made it, right?

Not so fast.

A law firm hired by the Nevada State Education Association has reviewed the petitions filed in Clark County, and discovered that the affidavit that’s supposed to be signed by the person who circulated the petition was not notarized on at least 832 pages, as required by law. And in the “vast majority” of those cases, the pages weren’t signed by anybody. That means those signature pages must not be counted as valid, the union’s attorneys say. (See the complaint for yourself, below.)

But wait, there’s more: Up in Carson City, one person signed the affidavit, but the address listed belongs to a different person, who also notarized the affidavit. That means either the notary circulated the petitions, and then notarized them, which makes the signatures invalid, or the first person circulated the petition and improperly filled out the affidavit, which also makes them invalid.

The Secretary of State has sent Angle a letter with the complaint attached. We’re guessing she’ll say something about the union wanting big, fat paychecks for its members, which only proves that Angle has no idea what they pay teachers these days. Besides, no amount of rhetoric can fill out defective petitions after they’ve been turned in.

Another Angle failure? It looks that way right now.

nsea-complaint.pdf

UPDATE: This just in, from the secretary of state’s office. According to county clerks across the state, Angle’s property tax petition does have enough signatures to quality. However, because of the challenge lodged by the NSEA described in this post, Secretary of State Ross Miller will not certify the petition for the ballot until the charges have been resolved. And that means Angle cannot celebrate victory just yet, or perhaps ever, since Miller has strictly interpreted the petition requirements on a series of other would-be ballot measures this year. Stay tuned, readers.

And just when California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was becoming a hometown hero for firing a bunch of state workers and cutting pay for even more. Now he goes and proposes a tax increase.

We suggested not long ago that if state Sen. Bob Beers and conservative activist Chuck Muth learned that the California governor was slashing and burning because the Golden State’s Legislature had yet to pass a budget, they’d wonder why Nevada wasn’t doing the same to deal with its budget crisis.

But now, our beloved home state is turning once more to that tried-and-true answer to a gaping budget hole: An increase of 1 cent in the sales tax, supposedly only to last three years.

Granted, California’s budget is bigger, deficit is wider, and governor is less skanky than Nevada’s, but when push comes to shove, reality breaks through and the state does what it must to keep services flowing to the millions of residents in the nation’s most populous (and popular!) state.

We will shortly be visiting California, and, even though it won’t be in effect yet, we’d still be glad to pay that extra penny on the purchase of, oh, let’s say, a box of Avo Intermezzo cigars there at the Tinder Box in South Coast Plaza. Why? We believe in a little thing called civilization, that’s why, and we know it’s not free.

Now if only we could smoke those Intermezzos in a bar in California. The search for civilization continues…

We’ve been following, with ever-diminishing interest, the flap over the alleged playing of the so-called “race card,” whatever the hell that is, and we’ve got to tell you, we’re confused. Is Sen. John McCain a racist or not? Is Sen. Barack Obama? Just what the hell is going on?

To catch you up, here’s what we know, in chronological order:

On July 31, Obama told crowds (as he’s been telling them for months) that Republicans are trying to scare them out of voting for him, because the only thing their party has left is fear, baby. “Nobody really thinks that [President George W.] Bush or McCain  have a real answer for the challenges we face, so what they’re going to try to do is make you scared of me,” Obama said. “You know, he’s not patriotic enough. He’s got a funny name. You know, he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills, you know. He’s risky.”

Side note: Ironically enough, Republicans HAVE said almost all of those things, including saying Obama isn’t patriotic enough (remember flag-pin gate?), they HAVE made fun of his name (remember the detestable provocateur Ann Coulter?) and they HAVE said he’s risky (including McCain himself).

But, insisting that McCain has never said anything about Obama “not looking like all those other presidents on those dollar bills,” the Republican’s campaign insisted that Obama “played the race card.” (And, to our knowledge, McCain hasn’t said anything remotely approaching the issue of race in a pejorative sense in the campaign.)

“Barack Obama played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck,” said McCain campaign manager Rick Davis. “It’s divisive, negative, shameful and wrong.”

Side note: Isn’t it interesting that we should hear the echo of O.J. Simpson attorney Robert Shapiro in Davis’s remarks? Shapiro, lamenting his role in the not guilty verdict in Simpson’s murder case, was the first to coin the “…from the bottom of the deck,” lingo, to illustrate the use of race as an inappropriate diversion from the truth. So, too, it seems is Davis trying to divert us from the reality of what Obama was actually saying. It buttresses our personal theory that, in eight cases out of 10, when somebody claims something is racist, they’re trying to make a cynical political play. 

Anyway, Obama set the record straight by noting that he thinks McCain is cynical, not racist. And that’s probably an accurate enough description of McCain, who has predicted “more wars, my friends, more wars” and who has said, absent casualties, he doesn’t mind if Americans were in Iraq for up to 10,000 years. Sure, McCain opposed making Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a holiday in Arizona, but he apologized for that.

Then, on Aug. 1, McCain said Obama had “retracted” his remarks and thus, “let’s move on.”And, to an extent, Obama did retract his remarks. He admitted the McCain campaign wasn’t using race improperly in the campaign, but he stuck to his statement that the Republican senator was trying to scare voters into thinking Obama was a risky choice. And as we’ve confirmed above, the McCain campaign specifically and Republicans generally are doing exactly that.

So, are we done? Have we established that Republicans, including McCain’s campaign, have used all manner of disreputable attacks against Obama, but have held their tongues when it comes to his race? Are we all agreed that McCain isn’t a racist, and can we now, as McCain suggests, move on?

“John McCain is the whitest candidate you could possibly have,” said comedian George Lopez, in a Saturday Las Vegas campaign appearance on behalf of Obama. “But Barack Obama isn’t the blackest. I’m darker than he is!”

Oh, damn it all. Lopez is playing the race card, and dealing it from, like, the top third of the deck, or something….

A prospective home buyer checks out the Southern Nevada housing market in 2010.

Hi. You probably don’t remember me talking about the state economic crisis last week because you were too engrossed in accurately squirting your tiny ration of mustard onto your shoeleather sandwich while simultaneously fending off an attack of unemployed rapacious outland mutoids. Well, I’m actually glad you weren’t listening, because now the news that things are only gonna get powerfully worse will only depress you half as much as if, say, you absolutely, positively weren’t able to resist the urge to CLICK HERE or HERE).

Basically, the story in the International Herald Tribune today says the subprime crisis was just the tip of the terrorberg, and that the next wave of home foreclosures won’t be due to those thousand species of zany mortgages dreamed up by lenders and their very hot crack pipes. Nope. Nudged by high unemployment, the next big wave will see banks foreclosing on your typical all-American prime mortgage held by sane people with good credit as the subprime crisis levels out.

Read this snip while I make tea by crying on fistfuls of crumpled “Payment Past Due” notices:

Defaults are likely to accelerate because many homeowners’ monthly payments are rising rapidly. The higher bills come as home prices continue to decline and banks are tightening their lending standards, making it harder for people to refinance loans or sell their homes. Of particular concern are alt-A loans, many of which were made to people with good credit scores without proof of their income or assets.

This can’t spell good things for the economy of Nevada, whose state bird is now a pair of bloody hands hammering in futile rage at a “For Sale” sign jammed into the eye of the American Dream. So, the next time you read one of those R-J stories in which Marty McAnalyst the Real Estate Boosterhead says an uptick is just around the corner, you know, big-ass grain of salt and all that.

Accidents and Emergency? Arts and Entertainment? Or just in the keys of A and E? You decide.

I didn’t think much of the sectional shifts recently employed by the Review-Journal, a cost-cutting move initiated last week in lieu of pink slips — until today. As some of you may know, the Monday and Tuesday versions of the Living section have been substituted for a lone entertainment-oriented page in, of all places, the Nevada section. The compilation of largely wire stories has been, so far, reflective of mainstream pop culture — if a little random, too. And perhaps no single inclusion has been more arbitrary than today’s AP feature on Spiritualized, whose primary member, Jason Pierce, nearly died of pneumonia during the making of its just-released album, Songs in A&E.

Why is this weird? Spiritualized is a British alternative rock group that, despite its roots in traditional American music, is about as far from the mainstream as any other act you could imagine being written up in the R-J (music writer Jason Bracelin’s interest in local and underground hardcore/metal acts — which usually only get ink in the Living section — aside). The act, most “known” for its 1998 epic, Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating in Space, has never hit local radio stations nor performed in town; I’d be hard-pressed to find many local musicians and scenesters familiar with it. So, with any number of commercial acts and celebrities making headlines for all sorts of reasons, it’s peculiar the R-J editors went with the Spiritualized story, especially in a high-traffic section of the paper.

At any rate, I’m not complaining. It’s good to see they went with a good story as opposed to a cheap headline.

OK, let’s see if we have this right:

1. Exxon Mobil breaks all known records and records a profit of $11.68 billion for a single quarter, the largest profit ever made by any company in the history of mankind on planet Earth.
2. Other oil companies also record huge quarterly profits, ranging from Conoco Phillips at the low end with $5.43 billion to Royal Dutch Shell, just less than Exxon Mobil with $11.55 billion.
3. Totaled, the top six Big Oil companies posted quarterly profits of $51.47 billion.
4. Gasoline is selling for more than $4 per gallon in most places.
5. Confronted about the huge profits by reporters demanding an explanation, the company’s Vice President of Public Affairs Kenneth Cohen says this: “Our Congress needs to give us access to areas currently off limits to the industry. The best way to bring downward pressure on prices is by bringing on new supply while doing everything we can to use energy efficiently.”
6. The industry currently has access to thousands of acres of offshore drilling sites which it is not using.
7. It is well-known that, even if permission to drill anywhere the industry wants to drill was granted today, the supply would not reach the market for years.
8. Despite that, however, Republicans in Congress — including our own U.S. Rep. Jon Porter and U.S. Sen. John Ensign — have jumped to do precisely what the industry says it wants done, which is to allow drilling in places where it’s currently prohibited, for damn good reason.

Do we have all of that right? Because it seems to us that there is the makings of a pretty good anti-incumbent election-year ad in that list. Oh, say, something about doing the bidding of the most profitable companies in the world while the constituents who actually vote for members of Congress are getting totally screwed while oil companies use record profits, not to explore for new sources of oil, but to buy back stock and ensure future profits.

That might be a pretty good ad. If only a certain challenger hadn’t already endorsed the idea of drilling, too.

Remember back during the special session, when we wrote that Nevada Democrats shouldn’t have rubber-stamped Gov. Jim Gibbons’s simpleminded approach to the state budget (i.e. cut the hell out of it)? Remember when we said that everybody in Carson City (except perhaps the governor) knows what needs to be done to set Nevada aright? Remember when we said … well, let’s just reprint what we said, back on the night of June 27:

Throughout the state, Gibbons is derided as a punchline to a joke, a man too stupid to lead, beset by scandal of his own foolish making. But that same governor managed to call the Legislature to Carson City and get precisely the thing he wanted: budget cuts. And nobody stood up to say no.

Who’s laughing last at that joke?

Apparently, the governor is. According to Molly Ball’s Political Notebook in today’s Review-Journal, the governor isn’t too worried about the new website launched by Nevada Democrats last week that derides him in the title: www.americasworstgovernor.com.

Why not? Here’s why, in a quote from gubernatorial spokesman Ben Kieckhefer:

“If they [Democrats] think so poorly of him, why are they following him in lockstep when it comes to solving the worst budget crisis in the history of the state?” he said. “They’ve offered zero solutions. If he’s the worst, what does that make them?”

Bingo! Kieckhefer is precisely right: Democrats love to bash the governor, they love to talk about standing up to the governor, they often threaten that they will “never again” cut the state budget the way the governor wants them to, but at the end of the day … they did precisely what the governor wanted them to do.

So what does that make them? Feckless enablers of a bankrupt policy, we’d say.

Now, standing up to a governor in Nevada is difficult, especially when you have a state Senate controlled (barely) by Republicans, some of whom are rhetorically very skilled (we’re looking at you, state Sen. Bob Beers, you handsome devil!). The requirement (authored by then-Congressman Gibbons) to get two-thirds to raise taxes is difficult to achieve, as history has shown. The goes-down-easy anti-tax rhetoric of the Republicans is hard to uproot from the minds of people who are worried about other things. Low-voter turnout means elections can be turned with 1,000 votes or so, so taking political risks could lead to the end of a career.

But somebody should at least try. Somebody should at least suggest another path, rather than joining in to cut to ribbons our universities, our road-building budgets, our K-12 schools and our social safety net.

Maybe if somebody did that, they’d earn the right to note that Jim Gibbons is, in fact, America’s worst governor.