Libraries are one of the pinnacles of the American democratic experience; as such, they deserve our attention and support. But I have to take issue with the notion that local library districts have been "traditionally fiscally responsible." The districts in southern Nevada engaged in massive public works construction over the past 20 years and their budgets are now showing the strain. Instead of focusing on books, literacy and information, each new library became an entertainment venue replete with CDs, movies, theatres, etc. Many older libraries used to occupy simple storefronts in commercial centers; these were tossed in favor of new, palatial stand-alone facilities in which all the detritus of our new, multicultural age can be displayed. Hardly fiscally responsible. And with the palaces came lots of overpaid employees. The sad part is that, like all the other parasites at the public trough, these "public servants" can only cut costs by cutting "service" -- that is, hours. Because doing more with less is not in their vocabulary, and heaven forbid a public employee should consider longer hours at equal or less pay to maintain vital community services. If that doesn't tell you their number one consideration is themselves, then nothing will. So while I revere traditional libraries and librarians, local libraries and librarians are nothing of the sort. To be a librarian nowadays requires a meaningless specialized degree, which artificially limits the labor supply and increases costs to the public. This makes library personnel similar to the insular whiners in the teachers union. And for pure bloat, library administration is on a par with the useless layers of bureacracy at the school district. So spare the tears for these folks; cry for the public instead, which gets to see its services cut because the servants are really...the masters.

The only spectacular canards in this situation are the notions that (1) education has always been woefully underfunded in this state and (2) educational performance is somehow a function of how much money you throw at it. But Ralston, being the happy hooker that he is for the established elite, never questions that. Better to diss Gibbons for being an idiot than to acknowledge the uncomfortable truth that throwing over half your state revenues at education and most of the rest at bloated entitlements is a path to fiscal disaster. Welcome to the jungle of the special interests, folks. When someone like Ralston implies that leadership is somehow doing more of the same, but more "politely" and "inclusively," you know you're being shucked.

Gibbons may be an eponym for the arboreal ape or vice versa, but it doesn't mean he's wrong on the facts. The only one living in fantasyland are people like Ralston, who seem to believe things might have been different if the governor had been more "politic" with RINOs like Raggio or quasi-socialists like Horsford. These folks, along with the public unions and special interests who feed at the public trough in a myriad ways, are wholly dependent on the status quo. The status quo is a public square where Peter is robbed to pay Paul, everyone is encouraged to look to government for solutions to our problems, and none of us is expected to pay for what we're given. Everything is someone else's fault, and if only we scare up some more money, it would all get better. It's time to grow up...the therapeutic, "socially just" state is nothing more than an excuse for parasitic do-gooders to rob each of us of our net worth, personal dignity and ability to control our lives.

If you want real leadership, learn to live within your means and stop looking to others to make up whatever deficits exist in your life. Tell government and its infinite supply of overpaid, unmotivated slackers to drop dead. Tell people like Ralston to drink their own motivational kool-aid. Get utterly mad at what we've done to our country, state and communities, then get even at the ballot box. If you take a public paycheck and are one of the enablers of this fiscal irresponsibility, grow a pair and stand up for the rights of the citizen being bled for your benefit. It starts there with each of us...not with some phony jeremiad from a kept woman like Ralston, not with bombast from Gibbons, not with the wailing of public union leaders. It starts with us, or it will inevitably end in servitude for all.

With due respect to Green and Gorman, if you're going to write a story, get the facts right. SNWA lobbyists didn't err, but the staff of the Legislative Counsel Bureau did, trying to calm noise from legislators unfriendly to southern Nevada. LCB takes proposed language for bills and converts it into what LCB deems is legally appropriate wording. Anyone who cares to review the legislative record will find that in the first committee hearing on SB336, SNWA proposed the following words for the change in question:

"This section shall apply to all applications filed after its effective date and to all applications previously filed that are pending on or after the effective date." ('Effective date' refers to that of the bill, if passed.)

That language disappeared once processed by LCB staff. LCB Research instead used: "action may be postponed by the State Engineer if the purpose for which the application was made is municipal use." It's hard to imagine that members of the Supreme Court do not understand the difference between present and past tense in verbs, but evidently they don't.

Regardless, what exists in the legislative record is NO recorded difference of opinion from either Assembly or Senate committee members as to the intent or purpose of SNWA's requested change. Everyone knew what the intent was, and it was to apply to southern Nevada's municipal applications pending at the State Engineer's office. Here's what one senator had to say on the subject, when asked in committee:

"[The SNWA/District] have two separate cases. One individual has said that, because it took more than a year, [the applications] are deemed denied. In another case, an individual said, because they have taken more than a year, they are deemed approved. What this amendment says is, if the State Engineer takes more than one year to act on the water right, the rights are neither deemed approved or deemed denied. That was just a friendly amendment from [the Authority]."

And in the Assembly, here is testimony on the LCB language:

Hugh Ricci (State Engineer): I do concur with the replacement of "and" with "or" in both instances.

Assemblyman Goicoechea: Just a clarification on the bill, how long do you anticipate that would be postponed for, the blue, because we probably did have you here for the other testimony?

Hugh Ricci: If I told you a time, Assemblyman Goicoechea, I'd probably be lying because I really don't know. We've had applications on file for many years that we have never acted on for one reason or another.

So any confusion over intent can be traced to (1) a supremely lazy group of justices in Carson City; or (2) LCB staff, for failing to capture plain-face language in a way that would withstand scrutiny by robed morons. But no one - even a journalism 101 student - could look at the record and conclude the decision was the result of an oversight by an SNWA lobbyist, as Ms. Green and Mr. Gorman do.

The idea that is a non-idea. Rory is essentially asking the state and private sector to bail out the UMC boondoggle, which means he wants to spread the pain from Clark County to the rest of the state. Not original, since I think Washoe already did this. But give him points for PR. His whole vision thing was a hackneyed launch and now this is what he passes off as policy innovation. (BTW, anybody actually look at that "new vision" logo he used when he launched his campaign? look familiar? that's right, like every other government logo in southern Nevada -- way to go, Mr. New Vision Reid!)

UMC is broken for the same reason the American economic system is broken. Less revenue than expenses. No rationale nexus between who gets served what, and who pays. For all their worldly wisdom, the bright lights of the political world have never learned the second law of thermodynamics -- you cannot create or destroy matter in a closed system. In an economic system as broken as UMC, the path to stability is through increased taxes, reduced expenses or (short-term) by passing the bill down the line. This is passing the bill down the line. Among its other customers, UMC serves undocumented workers, the indigent and the subsidized public-employee bureacracies of Southern Nevada. It is staffed with political cronies and low-end juice hires. I'm sorry, folks, but you can't get to a balanced budget with that and the brainiacs on the Clark County Commission know it. So Rory pulls Mr. Rogers out of his hat and says "let Jim, the private sector and the state fix it." Good luck...we all saw what a genius Rogers was at UNLV. If this guy hadn't fallen into a media fortune by being in the right place at the right time, he'd be obsessively washing the floors of some non-descript office building as part of its contract janitorial service. But at least Rogers shows what kind of governor Rory will be -- more of the same by a different name. Folks, get ready to bend over, hold your ankles, and take a deep breath!

The Fertittas are welshing scumbags, like most of society today (anyone out there walked away from their fixed or adjustable mortgage lately because -- oops! -- your property ain't worth all that money you borrowed to buy it?).

But the Fertittas -- and everyone else who decided that promises aren't worth the paper they are written on -- forget that some folks have a long memory. On this deal, they screwed a few people they graduated with, some people who used to do business with their father, and these people do not forget things like this. The boys can make all the money on earth by ripping off bondholders, building UFC and what-not, but the piper will be paid, eventually. When you break your word, sometimes people find a way to break parts of yours that you do care about. I mean, that's how these guys operate, right? You beg off a marker and they break your legs, literally or legally? Well, I hear there's talk someone at Nevada Gaming Control is quietly looking into legal challenges to their licensing, as well as that of any follow-on company (like Isle of Capri) should the BK court kick control of Stations to a third party. Evidently the thinking is that state law can hold gaming companies and their owners accountable for egregious bond defaults via their gaming license requirements, and that this would back-door any effort by the federal bankruptcy court to blow off the subordinated debt, vendor contracts, whatever. It would at least make the Fertittas pay where it hurts. Hope their friendship with Reid the Elder holds, because these scumbag boys might need the juice sooner rather than later.

Another example of how law enforcement creates a culture of petty criminality among its own members. Just on principle, I respect anyone who wears a badge. But I would never trust them. I think our laws are important, but no one should blindly worship people who wear badges and carry guns; far too often, they've demonstrated an unwillingness to police themselves or hold themselves accountable for the responsibility they have to the community. You accept a badge, carry more weaponry than an insurgent militia, then whine about how you had to shoot that little lady holding a dinner knife because she was an "imminent threat" to your life? You drive like a moron, rolling your car at high-speed because someone makes a left-hand turn in front of you, then try to roust the poor bastard for drunk driving, only to be proven a liar when - by the grace of God - the truth finally comes out? You take hours off from your job - with pay - to parade out to the funerals and weep at embarassments to the uniform, touting them as "heroes" and "fallen soldiers" - when they represent really nothing more than wasted, stupid lives that've cost taxpayers time and money in training them, only to cost even more in pensions and benefits once they die by their own stupidity or recklessness? After doing things like this, you expect people to trust you? You're lucky anyone even respects you. And there's nothing in a training program to fix it, because it's basically a disconnect in a police officer's own values - the ones he or she says they profess (and expects others to profess, or else risk going to jail) and the ones they actually demonstrate on a daily basis (and generally end up justifying on the basis of all the "scum" and "risk" they have to deal with). Here's a tip to all police officers on that path or tempted to it: we get it. Life's hard; people are cruel, stupid and prone to wickedness; the work day of a cop is fraught with risk, uncertainty and the possibility of death. But we didn't ask you to become a cop, and we've never given permission to police officers to view us or our community as their personal playground, to lord it over whenever their work or personal life gets tough and unsavory. We certainly didn't give the police permission to discount their responsibility to all of us, simply because the people they deal with on a daily basis may be the worst of us. You're a police officer. Act like it. And stop making excuses for yourself or your colleagues. It diminishes the honor and dignity that should be inherent in the badge.

So no one here thinks the cost per manhole is "ridiculous"? What are these people doing during an inspection, replating them? X-raying them like they're key components of a nuclear power plant? Documenting the lousy placement that creates a nice distance between the cover and the roadway, so our car suspensions get a free makeover every couple hundred miles of driving? Folks, they're talking about spending over $200 to look at a single, circular piece of metal. How long does that take, a couple days? Because by my math, you're either paying your people a hell of a lot to look at a cover, or you're taking forever to do it. A cover costs only about $40. You could replace the whole thing for maybe $150. Why isn't anyone talking about that? And Mendes should be canned...any public manager who wastes the time of private business in order to get "free" cost estimates is a moron and should be fired.

One last point. This is not about fraud, but defalcation, and the federal bankruptcy courts have upheld that one can be guilty of defalcation without any intention or knowledge of doing so. Intent or awareness of the debtor is irrelevant to proving that valuable assets were moved to the ultimate benefit of the debtor and the injury of a creditor(s).

This is important because an unsecured creditor never truly lends money without expectation of repayment of principal, nor does a debtor accept money without expectation of a claim on assets for the amount of that principal. Security notwithstanding, a $2.3B creditor whose lending is substantially prior in time to that of a subsequent $2.985B creditor has a reasonable claim to injury when the later debt arrangement is shown to have directly benefited the debtor and effectively removed or reduced the assets available to the original creditor. At the time of the 2004 lending, any reasonable creditor would have viewed the construction of casino assets such as RR as part of Station's "general corporate purposes" and therefore open to claim in case of default (along with all other wholly owned properties of the company).

Stations may have viewed it this way as well, as evidenced in presentations and comments made by company executives before and during the construction of RR, expansion of Palace Station, design of Durango Station, etc. prior to the going-private transaction. If true, one could argue that defalcation was knowingly committed in that the facts show (1) the company leveraged away the prime casino properties for the subsequent going-private transaction and (2) failed to formally appraise the raw land that formed (a) the balance of the company's creditworthiness argument in its materials for the new "privatized" financial structure and (b) a substantial part of the assets the company would ultimately leave for the original creditors. (The land holdings were never formally appraised; Stations only solicited a "professional opinion" on their value from CB Richard Ellis, a fact acknowledged in materials from the time.)

But it doesn't matter whether Stations did this knowingly or not. You don't need proof of intent to prove defalcation occurred and defalcation is critical because it trumps all other creditor claims. Victims of defalcation are entitled to have their claims paid first. Given there is about $2.3B of those, it would force Stations and Deutsche Bank to do what they should have done in the first place -- make a reasonable offer to repay the unsecured creditors what they are owed instead of trying to walk away without paying anything.

I generally agree with CynicalObserver, except in this case serious questions surround how Stations handled the "old debt" of $2.3 billion referenced above. As the article notes, "the deal left Station with $5.285 billion in debt, including old debt of $2.3 billion...[t]he new debt included $510 million from a senior secured credit facility and the $2.475 billion mortgage encumbering the four hotel-casinos." Stations borrowed the "old debt" in 2004, when it was financing Red Rock Station, Aliante and pipe dreams like Durango Station...well before any talk of going private. RR & Aliante alone cost $1.6 billion. At the time, a reasonable debt investor would have relied on those assets being available in the event of default, since there were no other assets or costs to justify the need for $2.3B. Station effectively said as much during the "old debt" issuance. By (1) encumbering the prime casinos to a senior loan in going private and (2) transferring raw land to the "old debt" with inflated values and no formal appraisals (only a weak "professional opinion" rendered by CB Richard Ellis) -- all without a supermajority vote of all "old debt" holders -- Station effectively engaged in defalcation of the "old debt" holders. Now that may or may not be a violation of the UFTA, but it is certainly long-standing case law in bankruptcy court at the federal level.

Most people opposed to Yucca Mountain have no regard for nuclear energy, viewing it as nothing more than the civilian version of "nuclear bomb." Their conditioning is driven by pacifist politics dating back a half century or more, the environmental movement of the 60's and 70's, and the anti-institutional bias of the "identity politics" crowd. They're selective Luddites who can't stand the thought of using atoms for American energy independence, but have no problem gorging themselves on myriad consumer products based in petroleum (think an Iphone doesn't depend on oil?) while spewing tone-deaf political doggerel as if it were reason or common sense.

Yucca Mountain was one of seven sites under consideration at the time. It was uniquely suitable from an ownership point-of-view, being in a federally controlled area dedicated to nuclear activities in the first place. From a containment perspective, it was uniquely suitable in that it was dry, arid, substantially elevated from sources of groundwater and nowhere near surface-water sources. The notion that Nevada was a political football at the time of selection is fair, but the subsequent "screw Nevada" meme was more the product of enterprising politicians and an anti-nuclear hometown newspaper than anything else. Absent the weapons testing of the time, Congress might have pushed the location further into the Test Site, but I think the basic decision of storing our nation's spent fuel rods and other nuclear "waste" in a mountain in the middle of the Nevada desert on a known site where nuclear activities and specialists abounded would not have changed.

Yucca Mountain was principally about science as engineering. The question really was, "do we have confidence in our nation's ability to engineer and manage a safe storage location for these types of materials, irrespective of the exact time element involved." If you believed in American enterprise and the strength of our people to accomplish great deeds, the answer was yes. If you're one of those perdurable cynics who came to hate the America you grew up with, your answer was no (more often, hell no). The "no" tends to imply that nothing should be done that has any element of risk in it, because engineering can fail, space shuttles do fall from the sky, and radiation exposure within an underground storage facility, with loss of life, is always a possibility. Someone who mistrusts existing systems and institutions almost always expects the worst. But for the same reason one should not confuse the reality of Chernobyl with the reality of Three Mile Island, such a view simply reveals a bias of another stripe. It fails to provide any meaningful determination of whether to operate Yucca Mountain or not, for it willfully ignores an inconvenient truth about America; namely, that we're very good at what we do, more often than we are not. Yucca Mountain would have been a case in point, had the harridans not had their day.