Barbwire by Barbano: Piggy-backing to play leap-frog

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ANDREW BARBANO
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   Everybody knows the dice are loaded.
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed.
   Everybody knows the war is over.
Everybody knows the good guys lost.
   Everybody knows the fight was fixed.
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich.
   That's how it goes. Everybody knows...
Everybody knows the scene is dead
   But there's gonna be a meter on your bed
That will disclose
   What everybody knows...
   Everybody talking to their pockets.
Everybody wants a box of chocolates
   and a long red rose.
   Everybody knows. Everybody knows.
That's how it goes. Everybody knows.

— Leonard Cohen, 1934-2016

By Leonard Cohen (1934-2016) & Sharon Robinson
© 1988 CBS Records, Inc.

I hope you understand I just had to go back to the island.
— Leon Russell, 1942-2016

Piggy-backing to play leap-frog
Second in a series. (First hereat)
Barbwire by Andrew Quarantino Barbáno / Expanded from the Sparks Tribune 10-16-2024 / Updated 10-16-2024 GMT / Expansions in blue /

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The Dean's List

The Dean of Reno Bloggers could very well be Andrew Barbano, self-described "fighter of public demons," who started putting his "Barbwire" columns online in 1996 and now runs 10 sites.

RENO NEWS & REVIEW, 11-9-2006

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Corporate interests and billionaires, including FOX News baron Rupert Murdoch's family, are funding a sly and cynical propaganda campaign to use womens' rights to erode Nevada voting rights.

Question 6 on the November ballot would write protection of a woman's right to choose into the Nevada Constitution. I supported the 1990 initiative that installed Roe v. Wade into state statute.

However, the 1990 referendum can be changed or wiped out with a single statewide vote. Constitutional amendments take a much longer process, usually about five years.

Corporate moguls are outright lying to voters that passing Ballot Question 3 will further protect women's rights.

Q-3 would morph today's election system into a five-reel slot machine. Cloaked in the sheep's clothing of open primaries, this voracious wolf will eat democracy alive.

Any gambling odds expert will confirm that you can play a five-reel slot for the rest of your life and never win. Long run, the house always wins.

Imagine a primary election with 25, 30 or more candidates in each race where only FIVE can survive to November voting. That will cement big money control much worse than even today after the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to allow corporate bank accounts to reign supreme by raining dollars on friendly pols.

Multiple choices among dozens of candidates was exactly how the Nevada State Assembly was elected for decades when apartheid Nevada was rightly nicknamed "Mississippi West." Everything old is new again.

I am sure that Q-3 supporters already have expensive cybertechs designing algorithms to skew multiple-choice primary balloting in their favor. Their techs could thus tell them how many candidates they would need to recruit in order to stack the deck for five they approve.

The cynicism and macho hubris necessary to latch onto one of the major 2024 deciding factors is simply mind-boggling.

Q-3 supporters are even doubling down by asserting that the current primary system discriminates against veterans and active military, another foray into fantasyland.

I am especially disappointed that some misguided pro Q-6 individuals and organizations are now packaging Q-6 and Q-3 together, falling for the false advertising.

Question 3 is a wolf in sheep's clothing. Friends of women's rights must not allow this synthetic wool to be pulled over Nevada voters' eyes.

BARBWIRE CONFIDENTIAL: (The following was distributed to Barbwire subscribers a few days ago.) The legendary Barbwire investigative reporting team, as usual, spared every expense acquiring inside information from a Republican-leaning tracking poll.

First, remember that it's a snapshot, a single frame in a motion picture. Nonetheless, it shows Q-3 trailing. Many organizations, including both major parties and several minor parties oppose it.

The Independent American, Green and Libertarian parties know they will never make it to a general election again if Q-3 monkey-wrenches the current process.

YES ON 3's TV campaign asserts that passage of Q-3 will protect abortion rights. Actually, Q-3 will facilitate election of well-monied anti-choice moonhowlers and passage of initiatives mega-funded by crytpofascists to ban abortion statewide.

Beware the wolf.

KAMALA KRASHES ON K-K-KOVID. I am now in my fifth year of COVID-19 self-quarantine. I only risk going out to medical appointments. Some people look at me funny for being the only one around wearing a mask.

Apparently, Dr. Vladimir Trump has convinced many that only wussy Democrats do so. I have had all my shots and have thus far beaten The Terminator. Some of my more gregarious friends have not been so lucky.

Breaking News —> Masks work!

And the plague is rampant once again. Be very afraid.

Trump Victory Would Be a Public Health Disaster
By Whistleblower Rick Bright/New York Times/10-10-2024

I'm still OK and raising hell, albeit at a distance. Anyway, you gotta be basically anti-social to write a column.

Kamala Harris could, and well may, lose next month's election by ignoring the biggest rap on Czar Donaldov: He personally condemned 200,000 to 500,000 Americans to death by choosing to ignore the pandemic until it was running wild.

When he was himself infected, he was saved by medical care unavailable to us peons. He came close to death but still downplayed the seriousness of the little wiggly beasties that don't care about your bank account.

He even secretly sent his pal Putin COVID tests when Americans were desperate for enough. (Confirmed by Russian government.)

Remember "it's no worse than the common cold" and "it will go away in warm weather"? How about suggesting that you drink chlorine bleach or the main ingredient in fish tank cleaner. (Two of his true believers tried it and one died.)

Dictators do everything they can to look like all-powerful, all-knowing gods. That's why T-Rump idol Xi Xin Ping withheld information about the origins of the plague and has grossly understated the number of Chinese dead.

If you control the media, it's easy. T-Rump's buddy Czar Putin long ago changed textbooks to teach the lie that Ukraine was always part of Russia. Now, much of Russia's population believes it and thus supports the current genocide.

I see so much inept campaign management at every level of U.S. follytix. Too many "managers" are kissups who keep their jobs by making always-insecure pols feel good.

I am sure that some suckup has told the VP not to remind people of T-Rump's plague because it's OMG! negative! and polling shows you need a positive image.

Result: a growing number of short-attention-span Americans really believe the economy was better under T-Rump. They choose to forget the national shutdown that didn't have to happen which tanked the economy and reverberates to this very day.

efore the plague, T-Rump tried to eviscerate the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) and Project 2025 promises instant replay if he wins.

Long ago, ruthless Rupert Murdoch said "Americans are retarded." The Fox News overlord has waxed wealthier for that twisted insight. Alas and alack, he's also oft been proven correct.

You really can fool some of the people all of the time — and that's usually enough.

CORREXION. My only sibling, my younger brother Larry, died a year ago this week. I mistakenly moved this item last week. Mea culpa. A memorial with friends and family happens in the Bay Area this coming weekend. My traveling days are over. Anyone in these parts who knew him may contact me for details.

Requiescas in pace, frater mei.

Get the latest booster jabs, stay safe and continue to pray for Ukraine and almost 100 other currently war-torn lands.

¡Sí se puede

Be well. Raise hell. / Esté bien. Haga infierno. (Pardon my Spanglish.)
être bien, élever l'enfer (Pardon my French.) Stammi bene. Scatenare l'inferno. (And Italian.)
_________________________

Andrew Quarantino Barbano is a 55-year Nevadan and editor of NevadaLabor.com, SenJoeNeal.org, DoctorLawyerWatch.com, BallotBoxing.US, ConsumerCoalitionv.org, ChantalCoalition.org, Rentvolution.org, MIssissippiWestNV.org and CesarChavezNevada.com among others. He is a longtime member of the Reno-Sparks NAACP and Sparks-based Communications Workers of America Local 9413/AFL-CIO. As always, his comments are entirely his own. Barbwire by Barbano has originated in the Sparks Tribune since August 12, 1988.

The Northern Nevada Central Labor Council/AFL-CIO inducted him into the César Chávez Nevada Labor Hall of Fame on April 5, 2024.

Electing Judas Iscariot
First in a series.
Barbwire by Andrew Quarantino Barbáno / Expanded from the Sparks Tribune 10-9-2024
Updated 10-9, 10-10 & 10-13-2024 GMT / Expansions in blue /

"I could elect Judas Iscariot. The name is familiar." — Boston Mayor James Michael Curley (1874-1958)

The legendary and corrupt Massachusetts pol won just about every elected office available to him, federal state and local.

He campaigned on the slogan "Curley gets things done." (Sound familiar?) He also did time in prison for mail fraud. (Also familiar?)

Nevada's 2024 Ballot Question 3 could easily be renamed the Governor Curley Memorial Election Law as it proposes to cement Curley's biblical axiom into the Nevada Constitution.

Follytix has always been my favorite sport going back to grade school. Us kids were taught that the person with the most votes wins. (Save for minor exceptions, of course, like Al Gore in Florida, 2000.)

Question 3 would permanently change all that. Civil rights activists have long reminded people that freedom in law (de jure) is not freedom in fact (de facto).

This old pol looks at de facto consequences.

So venture back with me now to a political strategy session which, based on a review of the proposed law, I am sure happened in some form.

Thank you for coming to this presentation, gentlemen. I hope you found the steaks and cigars to your liking.

I am sorry to report that our power is waning despite the effects of imposing a 120-day legislative session every two years and our successful campaign to require term limits on Nevada officeholders.

Witness the fact that the state's picayune gaming tax, the envy of our colleagues worldwide, has not been raised in more than 20 years.

As our mining industry colleagues showed us, Nevada has always been a sweet corporate cookie jar.

Term limits served us well to blunt the force of the "one-man, one-vote" U.S. Supreme Court decision and the growing influence of wrong-headed voters who relocated from other places.

Back in those heady times, each of Nevada's 17 counties had its own state senator and we owned the place. It was more unrepresentative than the U.S. Senate. Tiny Esmeralda counted for as much as Clark or Washoe. Ah, those indeed were the days.

One-man/one-vote was implemented in the 1972 election. Before then, Nevada actually had multiple choice elections — for the State Assembly. In Clark County, the top nine finishers went to Carson City. In Washoe, the top eight. Voters had to choose among two or three dozen candidates.

That's how Democrat Keith Ashworth of Las Vegas became the first Democratic Assembly Speaker in memory.

We nonetheless maintained multiple choice elections in the senate. In Washoe districts, two Democrats and two Republicans went to each general election ballot. The top two were elected. Same thing in Las Vegas for the next decade. Republican dominance was diminished but still a major force. [1]

We correctly forecast that the Las Vegas area would produce a plethora of woman lawmakers, which reached its height when Nevada elected America's first female-majority legislature in 2018.

That uppity dominance (break in recording for applause and laughter)...Thank you, thank you. As I was saying, that uppity dominance has produced increasingly negative results for our companies.

We were warned in 2017 when the legislature ratified the feminist Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which our predecessors had killed precisely 40 years earlier.

Thanks to President Trump's leadership, the public is now convinced to do something even if it's wrong, as the old joke says.

With a burgeoning feminist majority in southern Nevada and Reno-Sparks becoming increasingly liberal, we need to take action.

Get out your checkbooks and we will qualify a ballot initiative for ranked-choice voting like Maine and Alaska.

We can defend it by noting that conservative Alaska elected a woman Democrat to Congress over former Republican Gov. Sarah Palin thanks to ranked-choice. No one will remember that Palin committed suicide by failing to research the issue and simply instructing her supporters to check only her box. The Democrat won by accumulating more second, third, fourth and fifth-place preferences.

We will cloak our wolf in the sheepskin of open primary elections which will allow us to flood the ballot with dozens and dozens of candidates.

Only the top five among many will advance to the general election. In every case, this tilts the playing field in favor of the golden rule — the one with the gold makes the rules.

Most money wins and that will mostly be candidates favorable to us. We will never mention that this situation will make it almost impossible for those pesky third parties to make it to November.

This strategy will negate the increasingly aggressive legislative Amazons who are hurting our businesses. We will run ads including some creative lies — I'm sorry, let's call them "terminological inexactitudes" as they say in the British Parliament where you can't use the L-word.

For instance, we are toying with creating the fiction that the current system discriminates against veterans and active military members.

I trust you will help us cloak the wolf so that we may treat you to delicious lamb chops and genuine Havana cigars at our next meeting.

AND THUS, November Ballot Question 3 was spawned. Beware the wolf.

UPDATE 10-10-2024 GMT: YES ON 3 launched a new TV ad a few days ago outright lying about how the current election system is unfair to veterans and active military. On Oct. 8, they started a spot stating that passage of Q-3 will make sure that Nevada women will not lose abortion rights. Actually, Q-3 will facilitate the circulation and passage of initiatives funded by megabucks zealots and crytpofascists to ban abortion statewide. Beware the wolf.

BARBWIRE CONFIDENTIAL—>
UPDATED 10-13-2024 GMT: Tracking Poll sez Question 3 fading.

This column broughta lotta calls. I am jumping up and down while sitting. I can't tell you from where, but less than an hour ago (c. 22:21 GMT 10/12), I received unimpeachable insider info that Question 3 is polling badly. The game's afoot!

Stay tuned!

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WHEN PLUCKY PINK PREVAILED. The last basically wall-to-wall union win in northern Nevada history happened 30 years ago this year at the downtown Reno Flamingo Hilton (now the Montage condos at W. 2nd and Sierra).

Culinary Union Local 86 was a shadow of its former self after fighting and winning an exhausting and expensive 20-year legal battle with a John Ascuaga-led regional consortium of union-busting hotels and restaurants starting in 1972.

By 1994, most of those businesses no longer existed. Ascuaga's Sparks Nugget was one of the few survivors.

Ascuaga tried to keep quiet that he long had a union contract with the Carpenters Union for his in-house staff.

Ironically, it was the carpenters that jumped into the breach when hotel-casino workers started calling unions. After a hard-fought campaign, we won. I was honored to have performed media and communications services.

Hilton pulled an Ascuaga and fought signing a contract with all of its corporate money and power. Then, they pulled a Wal-Mart and closed the hotel, in part, I'm sure, to avoid a ground-breaking and ego-eroding union contract.

Hilton had also acquired what is today the Grand Sierra, so downtown didn't much matter to them at that point.

Alas, loves labours lost.

ADIOS, BRO. My only sibling, my younger brother Larry, died a year ago next week. A memorial with friends and family happens in the Bay Area next weekend. My traveling days are over. Anyone in these parts who knew him may contact me for details.

Requiescas in pace aeternam, frater mei.

WHERE WOKE GOES TO DIE. The legendary Barbwire investigative reporting team has, as usual, spared every expense spiking a story from Florida.

We found absolutely no truth to the rumor that Gov. Ron DeSatanist has ordered the printing of an emergency supplement to all public school textbooks blaming woke Democrats as very probably to blame for Hurricanes Helene and Milton.

Maybe this got started when madcap Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Green, D-Georgia, actually said this week that Democrats control the weather. Again with those Jewish death lasers from Mars perhaps, Congresswoman?

Get the latest booster jabs, stay safe and continue to pray for Ukraine and almost 100 other currently war-torn lands.

¡Sí se puede

The Northern Nevada Central Labor Council/AFL-CIO inducted him into the César Chávez Nevada Labor Hall of Fame on April 5, 2024.

[1] Redistricting in the 1971 Session of the Nevada Legislature was characterized by greater acceptance of population-based apportionment and the establishment of single-member districts in the Assembly. The primary advocate of single-member districts was Frank Young — a three-term Republican Assemblyman from Clark County — who is credited with accomplishing this change through careful preparation, energetic campaigning among his colleagues, and parliamentary skill.

The Senate resisted this change and retained multiple-member districts largely because that system protected incumbents in both Las Vegas and Reno who lived in close proximity to each other. Incumbent protection was another major characteristic of the 1971 redistricting effort. Under the new single-member district system in the Assembly, this factor resulted in some odd boundaries that were more reminiscent of the more traditional partisan gerrymander.

(Political History of Nevada, 12th Edition, 2006; issued by Barbara K. Cegavske, R, Nevada Secretary of State; published jointly with the Research Division of the State of Nevada Legislative Counsel Bureau; pages 401-402) [Emphases added.]

Breaking News —> Masks work!

And the plague is rampant once again. Be very afraid.

Trump Victory Would Be a Public Health Disaster
By Whistleblower Rick Bright/New York Times/10-10-2024

The Used Car Presidential Campaign
Barbwire by Andrew Quarantino Barbáno / Expanded from the Sparks Tribune 9-18-2024 / Expansions in blue

Countless forests have been mulched and endless gigawatts of electricity frittered by the legions attempting to explain the unshakeable affection of MAGA moonhowlers for their godhead. {MORE}

Smoking Guns—> Project 2025 under T-Rump: NYTimes.com posting

Author Steven Rattner's website version

Ain't we a pair?
Dennis Myers & Andrew Barbano inducted into César Chávez Nevada Labor Hall of Fame
Barbwire by Andrew Quarantino Barbáno / Expanded from the Sparks Tribune 4-10-2024

Betty J. Barbano
2-7-1941 / 12-27-2005
Remember her laughter

Larry Barbano, Frater Mei
1947-2023

To Die For
My daughters were born 65 years ago yesterday. Alas, their youth was cut in twain.
Barbwire by Andrew Quarantino Barbáno / Expanded from the Sparks Tribune 1-17-2024

Web Xtras & Smoking Guns—>

Why the science is clear that masks work
By Zeynep Tufecki / The New York Times / 3-10-2023

Breaking News —> Masks work!

And the plague is rampant once again. Be very afraid.

Trump Victory Would Be a Public Health Disaster
By Whistleblower Rick Bright/New York Times/10-10-2024

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For all the news you never knew you needed to know 'til now: Tell your friends and friendly enemies to subscribe to Barbwire Confidential for warm laughter, cheap thrills, hot scoops and occasional cold logic at BallotBoxing.US/ Cheap at twice the price. (Hush Hush!)

Barbwire dark foreshadowings unfortunately have a way of becoming reality. I thus suggest inoculation by signing onto the HushHush! list at BallotBoxing.US/ It's cheap as well as enlightening entertainment. Thank you kindly for your support.

$75 dead or alive: Still crazy after all these years
A mass murderer becomes famous on TV a century later
How come nobody noticed 'til now?
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the 2-21-2018 Sparks Tribune

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory owners Max Blank and Isaac Harris. Is not Mr. Harris eerily familiar to television junkies?

From the Emmy-winning opening slate of the blockbuster "Cheers" television series. Combined with its "Frasier" spinoff, it lasted 20 years.

The "shirtwaist kings" immigrated from Russia and made a fortune manufacturing "Gibson Girl"-style blouses. (Photo, "The American Experience"/PBS)

The Emmy-winning opening slate of the "Cheers" television series before the "slate" of creators is superimposed. Looks like Mr. Harris' dead ringer (at left) is having a bloody good time.

"Who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?" — Chico Marx disguised as Groucho Marx in "Duck Soup" (1933)
Back to the story of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist holocaust

Triangle tragedy recalled as requiem
"The Fire in My Mouth," a new oratorio by Pulitzer honoree Julia Wolfe, premiered with the New York Philharmonic Jan. 24
By Michael Cooper / The New York Times 1-23-2019

Wasting workers where everybody knows your name
Barbwire by Andrew Quarantino Barbáno / Expanded from the Sparks Tribune 10-18-2023

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Andrew Barbano is a 55-year Nevadan, editor of NevadaLabor.com and SenJoeNeal.org; and former chair of the City of Reno's Citizens Cable Compliance Committee. He was the longtime executive producer of Nevada's annual César Chávez Day celebration and has been a quarter-century member and 10-year officer of the Reno-Sparks NAACP. As always, his opinions are strictly his own. E-mail barbano@frontpage.reno.nv.us.

The Northern Nevada Central Labor Council/AFL-CIO inducted him into César Chávez Nevada Labor Hall of Fame on April 5, 2024.

Barbwire by Barbano moved to Nevada's Daily Sparks Tribune on Aug. 12, 1988, and has originated in them parts ever since.
Whom to blame: How a hall-of-famer's hunch birthed the Barbwire in August of 1987
Tempus fugit.

Betty J. Barbano
2-7-1941 / 12-27-2005

Larry Barbano, Frater Mei
1947-2023

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