Allstate Insurance is out with its latest annual rankings of the nation’s 200 most populous cities with the best and worse drivers. It’s not good news for the Las Vegas area.
The giant insurer calculated ranks for seven places in the Las Vegas Valley, comprising 94% of the Clark County population: the cities of Las Vegas, North Las Vegas and Henderson, and the unincorporated townships of Enterprise, Paradise, Spring Valley and Sunrise Manor. Averaged together, the seven ranked No. 138, in the bottom third of the list, where No. 1 is best and No. 200 is worst.
That’s bad enough. But the reality was actually more depressing than that, because No. 100–the middle ranking in a list of 200–is not the national average. Continue reading →
Over the weekend, Pete Buttigieg, the only openly gay presidential candidate for 2020, told a TV interviewer that it was “statistically almost certain” that the U.S. already has had a gay president.
I can do a lot better than that. Not only has the U.S. had a gay president, it also had a gay vice president, although not at the same time. But amazingly, the two were an item for many years.
Don’t worry, you didn’t miss this sleeping through your high school class on American history. This kind of stuff just wasn’t in the curriculum in the old days. Continue reading →
Thanks largely to The New York Times, UFOs–unidentified flying objects–are back in the news. U.S. Navy pilots went public with accounts of objects whizzing through the atmosphere at speeds suggesting their provenance was extraterrestrial, although none explicitly used that characterization.
Fascination with UFOs is a long-standing thing. Two years ago The Times reported on how Las Vegas’s own U.S. Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, now retired, pumped secret U.S. government dollars for years into a secret UFO-research project.
Meanwhile, next month will be the 72d anniversary of the event that is the cornerstone of all UFO claims. I am referring to the Roswell Incident, the assertion that alien bodies from a flying saucer crash were recovered from the New Mexico desert in the summer of 1947. After a brief burst of publicity, the matter faded from light until publication of the 1980 book The Roswell Incident. Its uncredited co-author, Stanton Friedman, just died at age 84 after a lucrative career spreading the gospel of Roswell and other events like supposed alien abductions through paid lectures and writings.
Long before becoming New To Las Vegas, I lived in New Mexico and had occasion more than two decades ago to delve at length into the bona fides of the Roswell Incident. I interviewed some of the folks involved and even Friedman, as well as some of the other researchers, proponents and skeptics. I took a hard look at what could be proved.
Now I’m not here to pass judgment on other UFO incidents; it’s a big universe we live in and, notwithstanding the limitations of the laws of physics, who knows what might be out there? But I am here to tell you that absolutely nothing extraterrestrial happened around Roswell. Zip. Da nada. Goose eggs across the board. The only extraordinary element I found was the ability of the Roswell Incident to turn alleged little green men into actual big green dollars for an army of enthusiasts including certain authors and some of the residents of Roswell.
In August 1996, I published my investigative findings in Crosswinds, New Mexico’s largest alternative newspaper, co-owned and edited by my good friend, Steve Lawrence. Sadly, both Steve and his publication are now deceased. The lengthy story was entitled “Now where was it those aliens crashed?” The text is reproduced below after the break. Were I writing it from scratch today, I’m not sure I would change very much beyond updating (although I did make a few modifications to accommodate this online format, including insertion of some links). A later article by me in 2001 also in Crosswinds debunked the Roswell Incident even more.
The New Mexico map illustrating this post was published with my 1996 story. Please refer to it as you read, as it pretty much gives away the Roswell store. Continue reading →
Eddie didn’t give me his last name when he called the New To Las Vegas world headquarters recently. Since he was a interactive computer rather than a real person, it’s possible he didn’t have one.
But he got straight to the point. He was calling on behalf of Police Officers Support Association, which he described as a project of Law Enforcement for a Safer America PAC [political action committee], based in Sarasota, Fla. He pressed for a pledge, saying, as I heard it, that donations would go to two missions: (1) supporting political candidates, and (2) helping families of fallen officers.
Okay, I said. How much goes to political contributions and how much goes to families of fallen officers?
Here in its entirety was Eddie’s response: “Okay. Goodbye.” Click.
If you think that seems a little suspicious, so did I. Fortunately, it didn’t take much research through the online records of the Federal Election Commission, where PACs make filings, to see why Eddie or the human undoubtedly monitoring the call might not have wanted to answer my simple double-barreled question.
According to its filings, LEFASA raised $1.09 million in 2018, a major election year. Here’s the amount spent on political contributions: $0. Here’s the amount spent on families of fallen officers: $0.
Updated on May 8, 2019, and again on October 3, 2019. See end of post.
I can hardly wait for the movie version.
According to testimony in an ongoing New York bribery trial involving college basketball players, corrupt sports agent Christian Dawkins was in a fancy blue-hued suite at the fancy Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas in July 2017. He had to get an $11,000 cash payoff to a Texas A&M player whom he hoped to rep–fast. So he and several others went to a store in the Cosmo, bought a pair of sports shoes, stuffed the bills into the shoes, wrapped the shoe box and shipped it via FedEx, also from the hotel.
What happens here, stays here, they like to say in Las Vegas. Don’t believe it. It’s only a marketing slogan, anyway, dreamed up by a vendor for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Bureau as a cheeky way of promoting the, ah, attractions of Sin City.
And the premise is often false–so often, in fact, that I have started a list, It Didn’t Stay Here. It consists of individuals in trouble somewhere else for something that happened in Las Vegas. You can see the full list nearby. Why, it even includes Donald J. Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Dawkins is now nominated to the list, along with a slew of assistant college basketball coaches implicated in testimony as doing something untoward in Las Vegas, like taking envelopes full of cash for players Dawkins hopes to represent (a big no-no in the supposedly amateur world of college sports). Theyinclude Tony Bland of USC ($13,000), Preston Murphy of Creighton ($6,000), Corey Barker of TCU (also $6,000) and Oklahoma State’s Lamont Evans ($4,500). Continue reading →
Backside side of the famous Welcome To Fabulous Las Vegas sign on the Strip
It’s a question I hear all the time when traveling, conducting business on the phone or interacting on social media. I tell someone my home is in Las Vegas. The response often is an astonished pause, followed by a breathless, “What’s it like living in Las Vegas?” Or something to that effect. It happened to me during a family trip to Georgia in February, when I was in Los Angeles last month judging a journalism competition, while chatting up someone on the phone in New York last week, and in a Facebook exchange with a long-time friend this week.
It’s almost as though I said I lived in Baghdad, or Pyongyang, or maybe the Moon.
The astonishment, I suspect, has a number of sources, all grounded in the notion that Las Vegas has a reputation as a despicable place not fit for habitation by normal folks (which, of course, helps make it a great place to visit). This reputation perhaps includes perceptions of excessive summer heat, poor air quality, bad local morals, accident-prone drivers, crime, the October 1 massacre, inadequate medical care and under-performing schools.
The “Sin City” nickname probably doesn’t help. Nor does the famous marketing slogan, “What Happens Here, Stays Here.” Nor the 1995 movie “Leaving Las Vegas,” featuring Nicolas Cage’s Oscar-winning performance as a down-and-out Hollywood scriptwriter who moves to Vegas to successfully drink himself to death. (When remembered, the upbeat 1964 song fest film, “Viva Las Vegas,” starring Elvis Presley and Ann-Margret, cuts a bit the other way, and Ann-Margret does live now in Las Vegas.)
Some of these factors are undoubtedly valid. But there are 2 million people living in the Las Vegas metro area (a statistic that often surprises people from elsewhere when I cite it), compared with all of 18 at the start of the 20th century just 119 years ago. (Don’t take my word; click here to see the single handwritten U.S. Census enumeration page listing everyone in 1900 in Las Vegas.) The Clark County School District, which includes all of metro Las Vegas, is now the nation’s fifth largest by number of students (another eye-popping number for some). There must be a reason why so many people are here and indeed growing rapidly in number. Continue reading →
The phone rang at the New To Las Vegas World Headquarters. The cold caller said her name was Grace Miller. She sought a donation by me to the Childhood Leukemia Foundation, headquartered in far-away Brick, N.J., and asked if I would make a pledge.
I said I would be happy to review any literature she could send me. This apparently was not exactly the answer she hoped to hear. We had a back and forth. But after Miller could not get me to commit to a donation–on what likely was a recorded line, which would be used against me should I decline to pay–she terminated the call.
This afforded me the chance to locate online CLF’s latest financial filings, for the year ending December 31, 2017. They might help explain the extreme urgency of Miller–not actually a person but an interactive computer-generated voice monitored by a human–to get a sight-unseen pledge from me. By CLF’s own filings, the charity spent more than 75% of the money donated on fundraising costs, dwarfing the amount left for, say, helping kids fight illness, the stated mission. Indeed, according to the filings, of CLF’s total expenses for the year, just 21% went to the mission.
Since donors usually want the bulk of their gifts to go to the cause, these are terrible financial efficiency ratios for a charity. How terrible? CLF won’t agree to be evaluated by the Better Business Bureau Wise Giving Alliance, a charity watchdog group that says no more than 35% of donations should be spent on fundraising expense, and no less than 65% of the total budget on the mission. Not sending the BBB paperwork is a huge red flag for would-be donors.
On top of all this that, CLF was soliciting illegally in Nevada. With a few exceptions not applicable here, a 2013 Nevada law prohibits non-religious charities from seeking donations in the state without first registering with the Nevada Secretary of State’s office and renewing that registration annually. CLF does not come up in the online database on the Secretary of State’s website as ever being registered. I confirmed this by calling the main office in Carson City. Nor, I was told, was an application from CLF being processed but not yet in the system. Continue reading →
It’s anyone’s guess whether, before next year’s presidential election, Donald J. Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr. will appear on the same platform to debate the great issues of the day. But they both are now on the same platform–right here.
Those of you who follow this space know that I have a long-running feature, “It Didn’t Stay Here.” It consists of stories about folks in trouble elsewhere for something that happened in Las Vegas. It’s a pointed refutation of “What Happens Here, Stays Here,” the well-known marketing slogan of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitor’s Bureau. The full list is nearby.
In 2017, New to Las Vegas, I nominated Trump for the list after a 2013 video surfaced of him partying along the Strip with Russians and Rob Goldstone. He’s the British publicist who later set up the infamous June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower between Donald Trump Jr., brother-in-law Jared Kushner, then Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and a clutch of Russians supposedly bearing gifts in the form of Kremlin-sanctioned dirt on Hillary Clinton.
Vegas has a funny way of popping up at the most unexpected of times. On Friday, prominent Las Vegas politician Lucy Flores wrote an essay for the New York Magazine website “The Cut” saying then-Vice President Biden inappropriately smelled her hair and kissed her on the back of her head at a 2014 Democratic campaign rally in a Las Vegas union hall during her unsuccessful bid to be Nevada lieutenant governor. Biden “touched me in an intimate way reserved for close friends, family, or romantic partners—and I felt powerless to do anything about it,” she wrote. At the time Flores was 35 year old; Biden was 71. (Click here to see photos of the rally.) Continue reading →
Green Book 1962 edition (courtesy New York Public Library)
The name of the Best Picture Oscar-winning movie “Green Book” comes from a published guide to places where black travelers and tourists could stay without being hassled on account of their race during much of the 20th century after the advent of automobiles. In the movie, the Green Book was used to help guide real-life characters–black pianist Don Shirley (played by Mahershala Ali, who won his own Best Supporting Actor Oscar) and his white driver/bodyguard, Tony Vallelonga (portrayed by Viggo Mortensen)–across the deep South during a 1962 concert tour.
The South, of course, was infamous for its racial intolerance. So it’s easy for folks in other parts of the country to look back and smirk. However, the Green Book–its full name was the Negro Motorist Green Book–quickly came to cover the entire United States.
And it proved to be an interesting measure of racial comity. Based on the paucity of listings in most places, few regions came out looking good.
It was Alice on the phone again at the New To Las Vegas world headquarters. She was shilling again for United Breast Cancer Foundation, imploring me to make a small pledge “for the ladies.” I kept saying I first wanted to review any literature she might care to mail me. On what likely was a recorded line, that was not a condition that pleased her, as it would not be possible for UBCF to follow up with a letter demanding I make good on my oral pledge. After going back and forth, she finally ended the call by beseeching me to tell three women to get mammograms.
Alice was not a real person but rather a voice generated by an interactive computer using artificial intelligence and monitored by a real human. This technology still has a way to go. In my opinion Alice wasn’t all that responsive to my remarks and actually came across as a little slow on the uptick.
Which I would say much the same about UBCF, which is based in Huntington, N.Y. After Alice called me a year ago, I researched the charity, saw how little of the cash donations went to items I considered meritorious, and wrote a withering post. Now I’m getting called again by UBCF and still being asked for money. So I’m nominating UBCF to my long-running list of “America’s Stupidest Charities.” It’s a roster of nonprofits that solicit me for a contribution after I already have strongly criticized them in a public post. Really, can it get any dumber than that? You can review the list elsewhere on this page.
Alice’s call gave me an excuse to dig up UBCF’s latest available financial filings and conduct a fresh analysis. I was able to find the audited financial statement and IRS Form 990 filing for a later period, the year ending December 31, 2017, on the website of the North Carolina Secretary of State. (Despite a state law, the Nevada Secretary of State’s Office doesn’t post online meaningful financial filings). It’s still not a pretty picture. Continue reading →
Allstate Insurance is out with its latest annual rankings of the nation’s 200 most populous cities with the best and worse drivers. It’s not good news for the Las Vegas area.
