News

Lethal state

Nevada has retained its high ranking among states where women are murdered by men.

No other state comes close to Nevada’s rate of 2.62 per 100,000. South Carolina, in second place, is at 1.94 per 100,000. Nevada has been in first place in five of the last six years.

The states in the top five are all Southern states, plus Nevada.

Reid raises religion against Romney

In a conference cal with reporters last week, Harry Reid invoked a Mormon anti-Romney blogger and then agreed with the blogger’s description of Romney.

“He’s coming to a state where there are a lot of members of the LDS church,” Reid said, referring to Romney’s Sept. 28 visit to Nevada. “They understand that he is not the face of Mormonism.”

Romney and Reid are both members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Reid described blog comments by Gregory Prince, coauthor of David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism.

“He said that Romney has sullied the religion that he—Prince and Romney—share,” Reid said. “And he’s so disappointed that, in his [Prince’s] words, ‘It’s a good religion, and he’s hiding from it.’ ”

Reid said, “I agree with him.”

“Shame on them,” said U.S. Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a Utah Republican, to the Salt Lake Tribune, referring to both Prince and Reid. “Harry Reid seems to be making this way too personal and consequently throwing the religion under the bus for his own personal gain. That’s not where anyone should be going with this. He’s taking this two steps too far.”

In the Washington Post, writer Jennifer Rubin was harshly critical of journalists for not giving Reid’s comments more attention.

“This is disgraceful, and yet the media is mute,” she wrote. “The story is nowhere to be found in the mainstream media. ... Imagine if House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said that the president had ‘sullied’ the face of Christianity and is ‘not the face of Christianity’? He would be denounced in every newspaper, and his resignation would be demanded.”

In fact, the Reid remarks were carried on numerous mainstream news outlets, including CNN, Politico, Raw Story and USA Today, but it did not get the prominence that some other gaffe stories have received.

Syndicated religion columnist Cal Thomas recalled Reid’s previous unsubstantiated claim that Romney had not paid taxes for 10 years:

“In recent weeks, Senator Reid has violated at least one of the Ten Commandments—the one prohibiting the bearing of false witness. ... I’ll leave it to the Mormon hierarchy and their flock to judge among themselves and not in public discourse who is the better face of Mormonism.”

Forums scheduled

KNPB, the Reno public broadcasting television station, is running a series of candidate forums and candidate statements over the next month.

On Oct. 18 at 8 p.m., Democrat Samuel Koepnick and Republican Mark Amodei—will appear jointly in the northern U.S. House race for one hour.

On Oct. 19, Republican Greg Brower and Democrat Sheila Leslie will participate in discussing issues in the District 15 Nevada Senate race, also for an hour.

On Oct. 4 at 8:30, Oct. 25 at 8 and 8:30 p.m., and Oct. 27 at 1 p.m. the station will run programs in which candidates in numerous races are given 90 seconds to say anything they want.

The presidential forums on Oct. 16 and Oct. 22 (both at 6 p.m.) and the vice presidential forum on Oct. 11 (6 p.m.) will also be carried on KNPB, which broadcasts on Channel 5. These programs will all be 90 minutes long.

Barack Obama will be doing preparation for the first program in southern Nevada for three days before the first presidential program.

—Dennis Myers

Does it work?

A plan for assessing government effectiveness is ineffective

For those who think government programs live forever, the work of the Nevada by Legislature between its 2011 and 2013 Dennis Myers sessions may be a surprise. During last year’s legislative session, lawmakers enacted legislation sponsored by Washoe Sen. Ben Kieckhefer to create a panel to scrutinize state bodies and recommend whether to continue their existence. The panel did not take quite the form Kieckhefer wanted. Instead of a free-standing Sunset Commission, his bill was amended to create a sunset committee under the Legislative Commission. (The Legislative Commission is one of two bodies that handles legislative business when the full Legislature is out of session.) In addition, the bill was amended to change the phrase “all governmen-

“A lot of the time we get lost in the numbers.”

Sen. Ben Kieckhefer Washoe County Republican

tal programs and services” to “certain boards and commissions.”

At a meeting of the Legislative Commission last month, the chair of the sunset panel, Assemblymember Irene Bustamante Adams of Clark County, told her colleagues, “We identified roughly 170 entities that must be reviewed by the subcommittee over the next 10 years. … Thirty-seven entities were selected by the members during our first two meetings. … We reviewed 29. The other eight will be reviewed in future interims [the period between legislative sessions]. Of the 29 entities reviewed, we recommended terminating two boards, terminating one board and transferring its duties to another agency, continuation of seven boards with further recommendations, and 19 boards and commissions [be continued] with no changes.”

She said a state Committee on Cooccurring Disorders could be eliminated because it had accomplished its purpose—examining duplication and fragmentation in mental health services, and making recommendations to the governor and legislature. In fact, the Disorders Committee itself had recommended its own termination in July 2011.

The sunsetters also voted to eliminate a Nevada Commission on Sports, created to foster olympic, senior games, and Special Olympics activities, because it has been dormant for several years, and no one on the commission responded to requests for information.

The State Funeral Board—which now has the power to regulate funeral homes and burial businesses—will be changed to an advisory body and attached to the state Department of Health and Human Services, if the Legislature approves the sunset recommendation.

Seven bodies will be kept alive, with recommendations to the legislature for changes in them. Those panels are the Committee on Anatomical Dissection, Credit Union Advisory Council, Commission on Ethics, State Grazing Boards, State Board of Oriental Medicine, Well Drillers’ Advisory Board, and Board of Wildlife Commissioners.

State legislators Debbie Smith(left) and Ben Kieckhefer spoke at a mining convention this week. She’s a Democrat, he’s a Republican, but they agree on the need for changes in the Nevada budget process.

No seat at the table

Kieckhefer was not made chair or even a member of the committee, something of a slap to the sponsor of the original legislation.

“It turned into the Sunset Committee of the Legislative Commission,” he said. “That’s what it became. It wasn’t necessarily my original vision, but that’s what it became. ... I don’t know why they made the appointments the way they did. I would have liked to have been on it, but I wasn’t, so I focused on other issues this interim.”

He said his original idea was to examine state programs and whether they were succeeding and should be continued or shut down.

“It was something that I was struck with when I worked for the Nevada Department of Health and Human Services,” he said. “I worked there for two years and what I found was that there was not an ongoing review of what government does, whether we’re doing things efficiently, effectively. If we create a program, do we ever actually solve a problem with it or is it just to meet an ongoing need? If we create it to solve a problem, once it’s solved, I would figure that it would go away. We just don’t have a regular ongoing review of the functions of our government—if they’re creating the results that we expect, if we’re getting the return on our investment—and I think that’s something that we need to do.”

Anumber of legislators over the years have had similar concerns. When Cliff McCorkle of Reno was a state senator and sat on the Senate Finance Committee—as Kieckhefer does—he was always frustrated by the line-byline examination of agency budgets. He wanted to also scrutinize the agency’s functions.

“Instead of just looking at, say, a travel budget for an agency, let’s also look at what the agency is doing and how well it’s succeeding,” he said.

Kieckhefer makes similar comments: “I think a lot of the time we get lost in the numbers and one of the things that we are working on is transitioning to a more performance-based budgeting system so that I don’t worry about counting how many pencils the department gets but finding out how many constituents are actually being helped by the programs that we’re funding. I think we’re making progress in moving in that direction—that was