Ira Hansen’s newspaper writings over the years spared no one.
Heath Morrison troubles
and complete investigation could occur. … Distrust of the federal government was at an all time high prior to the bombing. Afterward, public sympathy shifted the other way, masterfully manipulated by the Clinton Administration.” Those are just the tip of the iceberg.
Former Washoe County schools superintendent Heath Morrison’s departure from the superintendency of the CharlotteMecklenburg schools in North Carolina, purportedly to care for an ailing mother, has become a subject of considerable dispute. On Nov. 4, Andrew Dunn and Ann Doss Helms reported in the Charlotte Observer that Morrison’s resignation was preceded by an investigation of a “culture of fear” during his tenure, including alleged mistreatment of school district workers. Two days later, the school board accepted his resignation on a 6-to-3 vote. He served for a little over two years of what was supposed to be a four-year tenure. He denied knowing anything about the investigation before he resigned. The school board chair has called for an investigation to track down whoever leaked news of the “fear” probe. Like former Washoe superintendent Pedro Martinez, Morrison was a graduate of the Broad Academy, which trains school administrators to use business principles in education.
Women
Evolutionary gap closed University of California, Davis researchers say they have found a “dolphin-like” amphibious ichthyosaur in China. “The fossil represents a missing stage in the evolution of ichthyosaurs, marine reptiles from the age of dinosaurs about 250 million years ago,” said a campus statement. “Until now, there were no fossils marking their transition from land to sea.” “But now we have this fossil showing the transition,” said Davis scientist Ryosuke Motani. The ichthyosaur is the official Nevada “state fossil,” and there is a state park in central Nevada where such fossils were located—plus a popular local beer named for the beast.
Virgil Getto 1924-2014 Longtime small counties leader Virgil Getto died at age 90 on Nov. 6. Getto was a national officer of Future Farmers of America in the late 1940s and for many years was a prominent Churchill County rancher, serving on the county school board, in the Nevada Assembly and Senate, and as a Nevada presidential elector. A Western Nevada College building in Fallon is named for him. As a state legislator, Getto defended the state medical school’s use of animal testing and helped push through legislation allowing the school to use tissue samples from about-to-be-euthanized dogs in animal shelters. He opposed water raids by Clark County on the small GETTO counties. He sponsored a $47.2 million ballot measure for wetlands preservation and state parks development that passed in 1990 with a 100,306-vote margin. “It’s been 12 years since we put any money into the state parks,” he said. Getto was elected to the Nevada Assembly in 1966 and served until 1976. In 1975, rebellious Assembly Republicans dumped Douglas County’s Lawrence Jacobsen as party floor leader and forced an unwilling Getto to take the job. In 1978, he returned to the Assembly until being appointed to the Senate—again, reluctantly, because he preferred the Assembly—in December 1980 to fill a vacancy. He served out the Senate term and then ran again for the Assembly in 1982, where he stayed until 1988. Then he ran for the Senate and served until 1992 when he stepped down for good. After all that, he had been a first termer four times, which, however, was not a record (that honor went to Horace Coryell, a first termer six times from 1889 to 1907). At one point, Getto represented a huge district that included five Nevada counties and parts of three others.
—Dennis Myers
8 | RN&R |
NOVEMBER 20, 2014
On paper Republican leader left a trail Nevada Assembly speaker-designate Ira Hansen would be one of the most controversial speakers in Nevada by history. Dennis Myers In a surprise, he was named by the new Republican majority as their candidate for speaker on Nov. 7. If elected in February, he would be the first Washoe speaker since Robert Barengo in 1981 and the first from Sparks since Chet Christiansen in 1961. The GOP members passed over Assembly Republican leader Pat Hickey of Reno to choose Hansen. It was treated as a victory for the more radical wing of the party, which took over the Clark County and state party organizations in 2012, cutting presidential candidate Mitt Romney loose from state GOP support.
“King Jr. is as low as it gets, a hypocrite, a liar, a phony, and a fraud.” Ira Hansen State legislator
For excerpts from Ira Hansen’s writings on Israel, go to our Newsview blog.
While members of the GOP caucus talked about a united front, they selected as speaker a legislator who is one of the most contentious public officials in the state. Hansen doesn’t like blacks, gays, Israel, many Republicans, and most Nevadans—he once wrote that newcomers to the state, who constitute four of every five Nevadans, should accept Nevada as it is or leave.
Hansen has opposed Republican presidential nominees Robert Dole and Mitt Romney (“way too liberal”), and other Republicans at lower levels. While he is very conservative, his views sometimes overlap with others with whom he normally has little in common. He agrees with civil libertarians about the threat to expression from hate crime laws. He agrees with liberals about corporate welfare and threats from redevelopment power. No Nevada official has ever given the public a more detailed blueprint to his thinking than Hansen. For many years, starting on May 11, 1994, he wrote a column for the Sparks Tribune. In these columns, his viewpoint evolved very little. In fact, some columns ran unchanged time and again as the years passed. His strong views found other forums, too, including radio talk. A Reno News & Review article about his removal as a talk show host at KKOH after he advocated better treatment for Palestinians (“How Ira Hansen got the boot,” Oct. 4, 2001) drew attention quickly after his nomination as speaker and reportedly freaked out Las Vegas billionaire and GOP sugar daddy Sheldon Adelson, an Israel supporter. In one instance, shortly before the execution of Timothy McVeigh, Hansen argued that the Clinton administration was responsible for the Oklahoma City explosion, with McVeigh either innocent or a dupe: “Claiming the building was a public hazard the government began tearing it down long before any reasonable
“Women, historically, have been the nurturers and mothers while men have been the providers and defenders,” Hansen wrote approvingly in 1997. “So what happened between 1960 and 2001?” he wrote four years later. “Major social changes that negatively affected the family. Childbearing was reduced to an average of two kids. ... Divorce rates skyrocketed. ‘Child care’ became an industry. Child abuse skyrocketed. Thanks to the ‘sexual revolution’ and the ‘women’s liberation movement,’ women chose to act as foolishly as men, and illegitimacy also went through the roof. … Abortions get about one out of every four children conceived.” On a battle over a Supreme Court nomination, Hansen wrote, “As usual, it boils down to the issue of murdering unborn children, given the clinically sterile title of ‘abortion’.” Also in 1997: “Today, when Army men look at women in the ranks with ‘longing in their eyes’ it very well may constitute ’sexual harassment.’ The truth is, women do not belong in the Army or Navy or Marine Corps, except in certain limited fields.”
Race Hansen has said he keeps a Confederate battle flag on the wall where he writes his columns. “I fly it proudly in honor and in memory of a great cause and my brave ancestors who fought for that cause,” he wrote. Hansen tends to use the term “Negro” and often does not capitalize it. In one column, he described Washoe Republican Sen. Maurice Washington (whom he supported) as black but in the same column called President Obama (whom he opposes) a “negro”—lower case. Hansen has repeated, legitimately, the well known stories about Martin Luther King’s plagiarism as a student, using them to try to discredit his later work. On several occasions, including in King Day columns, Hansen has also cited as factual rumors about King’s private life about which nothing reliable is known, particularly given the efforts of the FBI to plant misinformation about King with journalists. Hansen provided nothing like chapter
