User profile: CynicalObserver

OK, calm your nerves folks. A 2 point anything is just a little jiggle. Most Californians would not even notice it. In California, to get noticed, it has to be a 3.5 or more, and when it happens they call it land surfing.

We are in a far, far safer place, earthquake wise, than most of California.

I even have my doubts that it was an earthquake. I think it was Jackie Gaughin's staff dropping one of their huge salmon or trout filets on a plate at the El Cortez.

Reply to Sidney Spritzer:

I do have my proof of citizenship in my wallet. It's my voter registration card. I have no fear of being denied medical care in the emergency room.

I also note that when I cut my foot open on a piece of glass on a hotel beach in Mexico, my spouse had to come up with $500 U..S. cash in the local hospital's emergency room, before they would even give me an admission form to fill out.

Pro-illegal immigrant Democrats are, once again, failing to realize that the vast majority of blue collar, union Democrat men in the eastern and central states very clearly understand that their jobs security has been destroyed by non-union employers who hire illegal aliens, and get away with it, and by NAFTA and other duty free import treaties.

With unemployment as high as it is, and not getting any better, President Obama and the Democrats in Congress are going to have to effectively deal with the issue of the societal cost of illegal immigrants or lose control of the government. Rahm Emanuel gets it. Most other double talking Democrat politicians do too, they're just too politically correct to say anything.

I truly think there's something mentally off about any Congressman who wants to live in a single room in one of these old town houses on Capitol Hill. An apartment maybe, but a room in a house shared by others, no way. It's a community where students and young working people share these old, thrashed townhouses, which contain Washington's ubiquitous cockroaches no matter how hard one tries to kill them. The street crime rate is bad. There are no super markets nearby. It's impossible to find a place to park a car on the street. There are also big sewer rats and tree rats.

On a Congressman's salary, the guy could afford a decent apartment, at the very least. Senator Reid lives in the Ritz Carlton, in a cleaner, newer part of Washington, and I suspect our local congresswomen live in nice, newer apartments not overrun with cockroaches and rats.

On the scale of weird, a grown man living in the equivalent of a frat house is way up there in my book.

I am a Democrat. However, I applaud Dean Heller's view that illegal immigrants should be denied health care in any way subsidized by the taxpayers.

Though Nevada doesn't have income taxes, we have very high sales taxes and very high real estate taxes. Need a permit from a local government agency, or have a business which must make filings with the State of Nevada, get bled for money. I am talking $60 fee to submit a business change of address form to the Nevada Secretary of State. The value of my house has fallen by half, yet my real estate taxes have stayed the same, because the scam artists in the State Legislature secretly put in a "floor" on real estate taxes when they did their faux real estate tax reform measure to head off Sharon Angle's version of Proposition 13.

We taxpayers are the ones who foot the bill to run the UMC hospital system, where much of the illegal immigrant community receives medical care, as mandated by Federal law, but not reimbursed by the Federal government. That's my tax money and yours going to subsidize people who contribute nothing to our society, and who instead destroy American jobs.

When we go to local, private hospitals, like Sunrise Hospital (which laid off 100 people because of the cost of uncompensated care for the uninsured) we subsidize medical care for these illegals through our co-pays and deductibles.

Our "real" unemployment rate here in Nevada is calculated to be something like 17%, yet the hotels on the Strip and Downtown are filled with employees who can barely speak English, and who knew exactly where to get fake I.D. which the casinos never check.

Because of the power of the casino industry in Nevada, no one dares calculate and announce the cost of these illegal aliens living in the state. However, in California, Governor Schwartzenegger has repeatedly announced that his government has calculated that illegals cost the taxpapers of his state more than $1 Billion per year, over any above any taxes the illegals pay. It wouldn't be hard to do the math here in Nevada, but the casino industry doesn't want the public to know how much we pay for Nevada's illegal aliens.

I am sick of these law breakers who steal our tax money and who steal American jobs. Anything which is written in a health care reform bill to deny these illegal immigrants another subsidized health care benefit is fine with me.

Good work Congressman Heller.

To me, the idea of trying to tax resale of hotel rooms, when the resales occur outside Nevada, is simply ludicrous, and another ill-thought-out attempt to derive revenue to pay our state's and county's lazy and incompetent employees.

Clark County pursuing out of state resellers to tax revenues is just another foot downhill on the slippery slope leading to business income taxes in Nevada.

In case anyone hasn't noticed, the area south east of McCarran Airport is full of telephone customer service centers recruited to Nevada based on our no-tax environment, to lessen our region's dependence on gaming jobs.

Can you imagine how quickly Amazon will shut down its newly purchased Zappos in Henderson, if Nevada or Clark County starts messing around with a "broad based business tax" or if Clark County suddenly decides that shoes purchased by phone/internet by a buyer in Dubuque and shipped from Memphis are subject to sales tax in Clark County? The legal logic behind the County taxing out-of-state resales of hotel rooms is the same as the logic behind taxing call center "revenue".

In this economic crisis, Nevada is sending out all sorts of anti-business messages in its regulatory and tax schemes. The Nevada Secretary of State's forms, regulations, and filing requirements for business entities are so badly written, confusing and expensive that I am pulling all of our family's estate planning entities out of Nevada. It is now cheaper and less confusing to organize an entity, and operate it, out of the Ritz of the corporate world, the State of Delaware.

Clark County suing companies doing business outside Nevada, for sales outside of Nevada, will send businesses across the country yet another loud and bad message: "Tricky tax structure. Stay away!"

It's a sad state of affairs when government's need for revenue overwhelms it fulfilling its duty to foster the creation of jobs and preserve those which presently exist.