In Las Vegas, tomorrow is Nevada Day, when Lincoln invented a state to help win re-election

Posted on by October 24, 2024
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Abraham Lincoln in 1863

As the tighter-than-a-hangman’s-noose presidential race approaches its denouncement, Donald J. Trump and some of his fellow Republicans, despite the absence of evidence, are still complaining nationally about voter fraud in the 2020 race and predicting the same on November 5. This is especially true here in Nevada, where Republicans have especially groused about supposed future and past voting by non-citizens and non-residents. The GOP apparently thinks that most of these folks are in the tank for Democrat Kamala Harris, even though Trump’s name graces the top of the state’s tallest non-casino building just off the Las Vegas Strip.

As it happens, tomorrow is Nevada Day, the start of a three-day holiday weekend in Nevada. Government offices and schools are closed. Celebrated on the last Friday of October, it commemorates Nevada’s admission to the union in 1864 as the 36th state.

Why do I bring this up? Because Nevada actually became a state to help rig the 1864 re-election of Trump’s fellow Republican, Abraham Lincoln. Putting aside the party it favored, that sort of makes today’s claims of voter fraud pale by comparison. But there are some interesting parallels. Continue reading →

Near Las Vegas, Rutgers is playing USC, but not as oldest college football team

Posted on by October 28, 2024
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oldest college football teamSee update at end of story

On Friday, October 25, the University of Southern California football team will host Rutgers under the lights at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. The game will be the first gridiron match ever between the two, as well as the first ever for Rutgers in the City of Angels.

Both the Trojans and the Scarlet Knights are now members of the Big Ten (which for $ome broadca$t rea$on now ha$ 18 team$). Since becoming New To Las Vegas, I have learned that USC has a big following hereabouts. As for Rutgers, from which I have two degrees, I sometimes have to tell local folks what and where it is. For the record: New Jersey’s state university, the country’s eight oldest college, never a member of the Ivy League, located in the distant New York City suburb of New Brunswick, N.J.

Rutgers was founded in 1766 as a tiny church-related institution named Queens College with a charter signed by Ben Franklin’s illegitimate son. The institution is nearly twice as old as USC, co-founded in 1890 by a family harboring racist thoughts. (But to be fair, I should note that Henry Rutgers, for whom the school was renamed in 1824 after making  a big gift, was a slave owner.) Both schools have grown into major academic institutions.

However, I digress. Whenever Rutgers plays a new team in football, the scribes covering the opposition like to play up the role of Rutgers in what has been called the first college football game, against Princeton in New Brunswick on November 6, 1869. This is especially likely this week since the game otherwise is shaping up rankings-wise as a real yawner. Rutgers is 1-3 in the Big Ten (but 4-3 overall), while USC is 1-4 in the conference (and 3-4 overall). Both team are coming off losses this past weekend, but–since I am in Las Vegas–the early betting line has home-team USC as a 13.5 point favorite.

Still, using today’s political vocabulary, this ancient football history is simply fake news. I’m here to tell you that first contest way back when was not a football game as the term is now understood in the U.S. It was a soccer match.

Continue reading →

In Las Vegas, campaign flyer uses antisemitic imagery against U.S. Senate incumbent

Posted on by October 30, 2024
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campaign flyer uses antisemitic imagery

Republican Party, Nevada, 2024

The campaign flyer arrived in the mail yesterday at the New To Las Vegas world headquarters on behalf of Republican U.S. Senate challenger Sam Brown. It depicts a photoshopped image of Jacky Rosen, the Democratic incumbent running for a second term representing Nevada, with legs spread sitting in front of the U.S. Capitol surrounded by piles of hundred-dollar bills. “MULTIMILLIONAIRE AND CAREER POLITICIAN JACKY ROSEN GOT RICH IN WASHINGTON, While Voting to Make Your Life More Expensive,” the headline reads.

campaign flyer uses antisemitic imagery

Nazi Party, Germany, 1938

The copy doesn’t say it, but Rosen is Jewish.  And the set-up of the image bears more than a little resemblance to a drawing in The Poisonous Mushroom (Der Giftpilz), an infamous antisemitic children’s book published in Nazi Germany in 1938. The original cartoon depicts a Jewish speculator with legs spread sitting on a big, fat bag labeled (in German) “Gold” in front of the “Stock Exchange.”

Look at the two images nearby, and judge for yourself.

After World War II (and the Holocaust), the publisher of The Poisonous Mushroom, Julius Streicher, was convicted and hanged at Nuremberg for crimes against humanity because of his antisemitism. Prosecutors specifically cited The Poisonous Mushroom as evidence against him.

In my view, this political flyer as constructed, playing on ancient tropes linking Jews to ill-gotten money, is antisemitic as hell. But that’s not even the most shocking part. Besides the fact that it’s not very often that Republican campaign literature criticizes the accumulation of wealth, this wasn’t sent out by some crazy, third-party political operation.

It was paid for and mailed by the Nevada Republican Central Committee, the state’s main establishment GOP operation, based in Las Vegas. And according to its filings, a number of Jews made campaign contributions to the NRCC. Folks like Miriam Adelson, Steve Wynn, Jared Kushner and his dad. Do they know how their money is being spent? Continue reading →

Not far from Las Vegas, Texas hero-worshippers still have a spelling problem

Posted on by October 14, 2024
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Texas hero-worshippers

William Barret Travis

Once again a Texas media outlet has mangled the spelling of one of the state’s most celebrated historic figures, who partly shares my name. A story last week in The Highlander, a twice-weekly newspaper published in Marble Falls, Texas, invited the public to the dedication of a plaque commemorating the famous 1836 “Victory or Death ” letter written by William Barret Travis, commander of the Alamo.

Except that the story in several places incorrectly spelled Barret with two Ts.

The Highlander thus joined an impressive roster of prominent Texas media, politicians and organizations that over the decades have gotten the storied man’s name wrong in print–scores of times. The list includes–repeatedly and too numerous to cite individually–the state’s largest newspapers: The Dallas Morning News, Houston Chronicle, Fort Worth Star-Telegram and even the Alamo’s hometown San Antonio Express-News. Texas Monthly, the state’s most prominent magazine (which once declined to publish my letter of correction). Written statements from elected officials, including both of Texas’s sitting Republican U.S. senators, Ted Cruz and John Cornyn. Even, amazingly, the web page right now of something called the Alamo Letter Society, apparently based in the Dallas suburb of University Park, and the list of inductees into another something called the Texas Trail of Fame in Fort Worth.

Okay, I admit this is a rant. My grievance dates back to when I lived in Texas decades before becoming New To Las Vegas. I used to get asked a lot if I am kin to Travis or named for him (no and no). It was annoying because, as I will explain presently, I don’t consider Travis all that much of a role model.

But I think this repeated blunder by the powers-that-be says a lot about the shallowness of hero-worshipping in the Great State of Texas, if not elsewhere.

Continue reading →

Las Vegas gains in Forbes 400 members

Posted on by October 3, 2024
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Forbes 400The 43d edition of the annual Forbes 400 list was released today, and for the Las Vegas area it was good news if one likes proximity to conspicuous consumption. The number of local swells rose from four to six. No one fell off (like casino magnate Phil Ruffin did last year). This is fewer than the nine who graced the famous list of America’s richest eight years ago in 2016, the year I became New To Las Vegas. But Sin City this year at least has more than its cross-state rival of Reno, the self-styled “Biggest Little City in the World” with four entries each year.

Here’s the Las Vegas-area contingent:

Continue reading →

New book about Las Vegas delivers less than promoted

Posted on by September 30, 2024
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Vegas ConciergeNow this seemed interesting. Brian Joseph, who was fired as an investigative reporter at the Las Vegas Review-Journal, was writing a book entitled, Vegas Concierge: Sex Trafficking, Hip Hop and Corruption in America. Breathless pre-publicatio promised a broad look at how American society disregards sex trafficking victims, how Las Vegas is probably its center and in Vegas, “how self-interest corrupts news organizations and the corridors of power.”

Oooh. With hype like that, I expected something cataclysmic on the order of The Green Felt Jungle. That’s the 1963 exposé by Ed Reid and Ovid Demaris that laid out details of organized crime control of Vegas for the whole world to see. The international best-seller greatly embarrassed important state and local pooh-bahs, helping to spur government reforms that eventually drove out the mob and spur dramatic economic growth. I wrote about the book’s continuing impact last year, the 60th anniversary of its publication.

I have finished reading a reviewer’s copy provided by publisher Rowman & Littlefield of the 292-page Vegas Concierge, whose official publication date is tomorrow. To put it bluntly, I don’t think the book quite delivers on its promised premise to blow the lid off Sin City and America in this regard. But Vegas Concierge certainly has its moments. Continue reading →