Barbwire: Confessions of an altar boy

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

On January 16, 1959, two babies were born.
They became sisters in both life and death.

Larry Barbano, Frater Mei
12-18-1947 / 10-18-2023

Confessions of an altar boy
Barbwire by Andrew Quarantino Barbáno / Expanded from the Sparks Tribune 5-14-2025
Updated 5-15 & 6-5 & 6-6-2025/ Expansions in blue

UPDATE: WORLDWIDE LEADER? ACT OF GOD OR JUST A GARDEN-VARIETY IMPOSSIBLE DREAMER? ALL OF THE ABOVE? VERY POSSIBLY. Was Andrew Barbano the only advocate for an American pope? Google apparently says YES! At minimum, the Barbwire stumped and broke Google trying to find out. See for yourself. And please lemme know what you think.

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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

Tomorrow's news today —> Subscribe to Barbwire Confidential
TOP SECRET— HushHush!

Am I all alone in the world?

I have not conquered the world as we know it. I will leave that to the likes of President T-Rump and the power-drunk Muskatel mob.

I'll settle for conquering Google. Or at least asking the A.I. monster a question it could not answer.

I asked for web pages that published anything about an American pope before April 23, 2025, uploaded 4-22-2025. That's the date the Tribune printed this column entitled "Let it Be: An American Pope Francis2."

I tried several versions of the word search, and Google'a A.I. bot kept responding that since the new pope was not elected until May, it could not respond.

I am not so arrogant as to think that the idea of an American pope had never occurred to anyone in the world, so if you find any references, I'd like to see them.

I've broken my share of news over the decades, but until further enlightenment arrives, I will brag that I broke Google. Alleluia.

MISTS OF MEMORY. I am the product an excellent Catholic education system. As a schoolboy, I once served all seven masses from 6:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. one long ago Sunday at little St. Alphonsus Church in west Fresno.

Alas, they taught me too much. One lazy morning, I arrived early and was fully decked out in altar-boy black and white when the priest arrived. He was a guest of the parish from France, a little elf of a cleric.

He asked me if I had thoughts of the entering priesthood. I answered truthfully: "Yes, father, I have."

"Good," he responded. "We like to catch them young before they discover girls."

Huh? What? [[UPDATE: He was not a lecher, Just an old holy man reflecting the times.]]

I discovered girls in the first grade. I have written before about my second grade crushes on the two Mary Anns, one ebony black and the other Chicana. Forbidden love at recess.

There wasn't much to do back in the church sacristy while waiting for the priest to show up. Unlike some of my peers, I never snacked on unconsecrated wafers or altar wine.

There wasn't much to read, so I browsed the Sacristy Manual, a how-to of various ceremonies. I will never forget "The Churching of Women," a purification rite to sanctify new mothers after childbirth. I never could figure out what was dirty about new moms.

I doubt if that anachronism is still on the books, but it's emblematic of what Leo XIV is up against, a hidebound, stodgy institution that often forgets to "dance with who brung ya to the party," as southern football coaches often say.

The moonhowler wing of the church, which was just getting cozy with looming control of the U.S. government, just got a cold shower courtesy of a lifelong Chicago White Sox fan.

Last month, I was praying for a savior for my country, a counterweight to looming racist fascist dictatorship.

Sometimes, your prayers get answered.

Loudly.

HOW TO SUCCEED IN REAL ESTATE. Pope Leo's Chicago childhood home was purchased for $66,000 last year. The new owner just pulled it off the market for a little pricing review.

Perhaps symbolically, T-Rump's childhood home in Brooklyn, now in serious disrepair, once sold for $2.14 million and has since been downgraded to $835,000.

Depreciation means never having to say you're sorry.

AN INSECURE PRESIDENT. T-Rump's desire to accept a free Boeing 747 for his everlasting use reminded me of the aborted U.S. embassy in Moscow a few decades back. We had put a lot of money into new construction until the awful truth started to appear.

The place was infested with more listening and monitoring devices than bedbugs in a flop house. Some were actually embedded in the concrete pour.

After a lot of research, the State Department abandoned the multi-million ruble unfinished edifice because the spying infestation proved incurable.

T-Rump only cares about the biggest and bestest of all time, or at least what he can boast about. Our Mad King blithely ignores the anti-bribery clause of the U.S. Constitution.

Reminds me of something I heard from an egocentric lawyer long ago. "The law doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is what I can get away with in court."

Speaking of infestations...

ANTI-SOCIAL DISEASE. The Nevada Alliance for Retired Americans is organizing protests against MAGA threats to retirement. This Friday, show up in front of the Reno or Gomorrah South Social Security offices.

Marching starts at 10:00 a.m. PDT May 16, on the public sidewalks outside Social Security Administration offices. The Reno building is at 1170 Harvard Way across the street from the Reno main post office at Vassar and Harvard.

TRUTH IN ADVERTISING. Please pardon the oxymoron, but an insurance company commercial that has been irritating TV viewers for years accidentally tripped over the truth.

You've seen it, the one that asks "what are the three p's of life insurance?" Actually, it's the three p's of the insurance industry: Profit, profit and profit.

You don't need to be a prophet to have been personally affected by insurance p-p-p.

Get the latest boosters, mask up and continue praying for the oppressed, unenlightened and unvaccinated as well as Popes Leo and Francis, Ukraine, Gaza and the world's more than 160 currently war-torn lands, including ours.

¡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.)

Or, as they say in Poland, SOLIDARNOSC!

Andrew Quarantino Barbano is a 56-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 and former vice-president of the Reno-Sparks NAACP and a member 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. His first byline in the paper came in 1973.

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

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

Spring chickens and old buzzards
Barbwire by Andrew Quarantino Barbáno / Expanded from the Sparks Tribune 5-7-2025
Updated 5-7-2025/ Expansions in blue

Ah, 'tis spring, when chickens come home to roost and buzzards circle for the feast.

Nevada is now a red state and as such we can't bitch if Mad King T-Rump drives our economy into the ditch.

State lawmakers were just informed that we will be $190 million short in the 2025-26 fiscal year, so the always-skeletal state budget must lose a few more bones.

Our largest block of tourists, Canadians, are staying away. Wonder why?

I was mildly amused but not surprised when State Senate Minority Leader Dr. Robin Titus, R-19th Century, actually said on TV that Nevada's state budget as "bloated."

We have the smallest state government among 50 states and DC. Our number of employees has long been stagnant even though we have been one of the fastest-growing for decades.

Wanna get a job with the Nevada Highway Patrol (aka State Police)? First, you gotta do a few years as a prison guard in exciting metropolitan Ely.

Under the guise of "helping" impoverished Cow Counties whose mines have petered out, state lawmakers plunked prisons in Ely and Lovelock. Prisoners' families and lawyers were thus burdened with the time and expense of remoteness. At least Lovelock got OJ although I don't think that made any Pershing County economic development promotion guides.

Cow County welfare, while laudable, has backfired big time. The University of Nevada-Reno relocated its once-legendary national firefighter academy to Wells (where?) in northeastern Nevada.

Former UNR Prez Joe Crowley never did a survey to see if anyone would want to go there. Firefighters gladly came to Reno with their families for a week. But not to Wells.

Worse, poor construction of the facility resulted in an environmental disaster that caused it to close. University regents finally dumped it to the BLM.

Reno is now millions of dollars short and won't be hiring replacement cops anytime soon. Highway Patrol/State Police jobs pay so poorly they are running at about half-strength.

Nevada's holy grail of cop jobs is southern Nevada's Henderson PD where officers can make well above $100k per year. A lot of ex-Highway Patrol troopers work there.

MERUELO ROULETTE. This week, despite forecasts of budgetary disaster, the fantasyland known as Reno City Hall will consider handing union-busting hotel billionaire Alex Meruelo millions in corporate welfare tax breaks.

The Gomorrah South mogul who owns the Grand Sierra Hotel/Casino/Resort already has corporate welfare addict Brian Sandoval at his his beck and call.

In a Reno Gazette-Journal commentary a couple of weeks ago, the UNR president implored Nevada legislators to authorize humongous tax breaks to bring major Hollywood studio production to Summerlin near Henderson. He mentioned all his economic diversification successes when governor but never uttered the name Tesla. Wonder why?

Such rosy scenarios rarely result in living happily ever after.

The Muskatel Mob's battery plant east of Sparks has proven a corporate welfare pain and money drain for the Rail City, Reno, Fernley and Washoe County. Just try Interstate 80 East some morning.

Reno is upside down financially and still wants to hand Meruelo millions for the Sandoval-endorsed expansion of the Grand Sierra.

Meruelo has stated he's taking all the risk. It ain't necessarily so. Look at other examples. Because the downtown Reno casino district is a tax bust, Reno has owed the corporate welfare billionaire owners of the Reno Aces baseball team a million a year the city can't pay.

Reno also remains in debt paying off the Union Pacific downtown railroad trench. Washoe County financed $35 million to pay for its botched acquisition of the southwest hills Ballardini Ranch, debt which has ballooned like all of the above over the past two decades.

Why all this penurious public policy? Because the legendary Mississippi West is still a company town. Gamblers and miners call the shots and have gotten cheap and free rides for more than a century. The regressive sales tax surpassed the puny gross gambling casino tax years ago. (See the Barbwire Corporate Welfare Archives at NevadaLabor.com)

I shed no tears for the moguls and their minions. Save the moisture for the little people getting stuck with paying for the scraps.

When the chickens come home to roost, the roosters and buzzards eat well and the peons get bird flu.

How to become a Nevada welfare queen
Barbwire by Andrew Quarantino Barbáno / Expanded from the Sparks Tribune 3-12-2025

COLD REVENGE. Star Trek groupies, like me, are very familiar with the brilliant bit of scripting regarding Klingon justice: "Revenge is a dish best served cold."

Killer political cartoonist Ann Telnaes just got cold comfort in the form of her second Pulitzer Prize, providing her ex-boss, hairless Amazon Jeff Bezos, a delightfully cold shower.

Ms. Telnaes quit the Bezos-owned Washington Post after her cartoon showing Bezos, Facebook bookie Mark Suckerberg and other members of the broligarchy offering a 60-foot T-Rump bags of money. His 'toon necktie langoUrously brushed against their small minds.

Meanwhile, Mickey Mouse was drawn prostrate at the ogre's feet. (Disney handed T-Rump $16 million as tribute and settlement for the Orange Crusher's hissy-fit libel suit against Disney's ABC News. It stood no chance in court, but CEO Michael Eisner and Co. decided to bow to the Throne of the Golden Commode.)

The New York Times wrote "Ann Telnaes won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Illustration for 'delivering piercing commentary on powerful people and institutions with deftness, creativity — and a fearlessness that led to her departure from the news organization after 17 years,' the (Pulitzer) committee said."

The fake news New York Times, which does not publish political cartoons, printed Ms. Telnaes' censored opus (above) which I will post with this column at NevadaLabor.com along with the complete list of winners.

The Times is no virgin in this bawdy house ballet. After a quarter-century of delivering readable advice on the economy, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman quit the Gray Lady in objection of his columns being "toned down" for the past year. Gee, I wonder why.

Both Telnaes and Krugman are now available at Substack.com. I suggest subscribing. Payment is optional.

Get the latest boosters, mask up and continue praying for the oppressed, unenlightened and unvaccinated as well as Pope Francis, Ukraine, Gaza and the world's more than 160 currently war-torn lands, including ours.

¡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.)

Or, as they say in Poland, SOLIDARNOSC!

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

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

Conniving Corruption Contortions, Conniptions & Contradictions
Barbwire by Andrew Quarantino Barbáno / Expanded from the Sparks Tribune 4-30-2025
Updated 5-1-2025/ Expansions in blue

Might as well start this week's screed with dirty deeds done dirt cheap.

My erstwhile Italian fantasy girl is back in the news. I've never met her and have intended to keep it that way. Italian mothers always want their sons to settle down with a nice Italian girl.

Machine Gun Michele Fiore may be Italian but the nice part remains in the eye of the beholder. Apparently, Czar Dastardo Donaldov has a crush on her. He's a 34-counts of fraud convicted felon. She is but a piker and pauper by comparison. She raised $70,000 supposedly for a statue memorializing fallen police officers. The statue was never cast and she partied hearty with the money.

Perhaps out of birds-of-a-feather sympathy, Mad King Donaldov just pardoned her. What's a little monetary skulduggery between Republican soul mates, eh wot?

Michele was and remains an Italian comedian's dream girl.

She even got this column censored not once, but twice, a record as yet unequaled. Years ago, the Trib hired a (thankfully) short-term editor who was uptight about human female mammalia, aka tits.

I wrote two pieces relating an actual comic incident I witnessed at the Nevada Legislature The short-time boss considered the material "unsuitable" for the blushing violets who read the Trib. I got my revenge a little later. The busted busty Italiana soon created another embarrassment and a more enlightened editor never blinked when I included the scrubbed story. Online, I even posted mildly embarrassing photos she gave a Gomorrah South radio station. (Barbwire 3-10-2015)

There was a time when they would have been considered beneath the dignity of an elected official, but hey, we now live in the age of madcap Congresscritter Marjorie Taylor Green, R-Confederacy.

Michele is likewise quite a piece of work and a source of neverending juicy material for guys like me. During her two terms in the Nevada State Assembly, she was trucking with brothelmeister Dennis Hof and even staying at his Washoe Valley home, as were other GOP lawmakers. Hof later got himself elected to the assembly from rural Nevada and died of a heart attack on election night. ("State houses, courthouses & cat houses," Barbwire 7-31-2024)

I can't stand it anymore. Life is too short for admiration from afar. Michele, call me. I want to talk to you. The Tribune Blushing Violets Society anxiously awaits.

TRAIN TRICKS FOR TRIC. I asked Sparks City Hall if Mayor Ed Lawson has looked at commuter trains to the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center now that his toll road proposal has been nuked by Nevada lawmakers. All I got was that he's "looking at all options." Two weeks ago, I noted that there is apparently lots of downtime for the railroad tracks between Reno and TRIC. Two railroads currently go out to parts of the sprawling complex, so why not transport workers and reduce freeway congestion? Amtrak already uses those rails but it will take lots of political juice at all levels to get them to expand.

ELON WHO? Speaking of turning TRICS and tricks, former Nevada governor and current UNR President Brian Sandoval just tried to have his cake and eat it, too. Last Sunday, the Reno Gazette-Journal printed his guest editorial extolling his latest corporate welfare fantasy, taxpayer-subsidized movie studios in Gomorrah South.

Beneficiaries would be Warner/Discovery and Japanese-owned Sony, two poverty stricken corporations who sorely need our help. Mr. Sandoval never mentioned the amount of proposed tax giveaways now before lawmakers. (Assembly Bill 238, as in radioactive.) But that was not his worst sin of omission. He bragged about his record of diversifying Nevada's economy while governor but failed to mention the biggest recipient of his taxpayer largesse — his bosom buddy Elon Musk and the Tesla/Panasonic battery plant in Storey County. Gee, I wonder why?

THE DAY AFTER. Right next to Machine Gun Michele's photo on the front page of Monday's RGJ, President Sandoval "objects to Trump's higher ed interference." The story notes the Orange Crusher's freeze on billions of federal education grants. All well and good, save for no mention of the causes of Nevada education's chronic underfunding. Gamblers and miners don't pay their fair share of taxes. Combined with corporate welfare hemorrhages, the Washoe County School District faces a looming $7 million deficit.

SHEEPISHLY SPEAKING. South Reno has a flock of sheep eating potentially hazardous undergrowth as fire season approaches. Since Mad Czar Dastardo's budget assassins have killed local mosquito abatement spraying, I wonder: Can sheep be taught to eat mosquitos?

SHOE SALESMEN. Now that Reno City Hall has OK'd construction of rabbit warren apartments on the site of the former Lakeridge Tennis Club, the other shoe has dropped. Right onto the bucolic Lakeridge golf course with its multi-million dollar homes. Developers want to build a 100-room hotel on the site of a former driving range as part of other sorely needed attractions out there. Hmmm...a hundred rooms. The exact number city code requires to qualify for a casino license. I guess the legit media were too busy publishing press releases to notice.

SHOO-AWAY OR SHOO-IN?. Not far from Lakeridge, locals are fighting a Jiffy Lube across from Raley's at Mayberry and Hunter Lake Drive, a stone's throw from Hunter Lake Elementary School. It would be built on a lot now used for grocery store overflow parking. Raley's has a small footprint. Opponents are making the same arguments as their forebears who opposed the supermarket construction in 1971. The congested intersection is a typical hangover of farm-trail street design, totally inadequate for today's boomtown rats-in-a-cage auto destruction derby. Worse, today's cars sit higher, making pedestrians much harder to see. Fatality statistics reflect that reality. [UPDATE: The application was voted down.]

¡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.)

Or, as they say in Poland, SOLIDARNOSC!

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

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

Let it Be: An American Pope Francis2
Barbwire by Andrew Quarantino Barbáno / Expanded from the Sparks Tribune 4-23-2025, uploaded 4-22-2025
Updated 4-23-2025/ Expansions in blue

When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me,
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be.
And in my hour of darkness, she is standing right in front of me,
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be." — Paul McCartney & John Lennon, 1970

Listen up, guys. And I mean all you guys, the 138 old men in red robes who will soon spend a few days in the world's most exclusive frat house, illustrations by Michelangelo.

I am one of your flock. I received the fabled indelible marks on my soul which the church says makes me a member in vitam aeternam.

The United States has helped all of your countries over the past century or so. Now we need saving.

Don't just do it for us, do it for yourselves and your flocks. We are still the fattest, richest, most powerful country in the world.

Alas and alack, darkness has engulfed us. We have raised demons of our own making who spread the plague of ignorance.

We are paying a heavy price, but so are you, and all the weak and the meek who look up to you.

Just the mindless and cruel elimination of the U.S. Agency for International Development has already caused many of your children to die horrible deaths from starvation and preventable diseases.

We Americans of peace stand cold and naked in our hour of darkness.

We have lost our way and flail about in dire need of a leader who will guide us out of the wilderness before ignorance and fear engulf the entire world.

Let there be a United States pope and may he take the name of Francis the Second.

Powerful and symbolic, it will convey to the misbegotten that they follow the wrong path, a journey toward misery rather than mercy.

Mercy — If there is one word that defines the life of Pope Francis, that more than suffices.

Yes, our war machine continues to cause unconscionable harm in many of the unfortunate climes of this small planet.

But it has been and can be repurposed to light our way, to finally give peace a chance.

War is the most counterproductive addiction of our still-evolving species.

Small souls now use America's power to further the goals of the unenlightened, the self-centered, the greedy.

The merciless.

Francis saw the good in all of us and of this magical little world which blesses us as our home. God gave us each other to care for each other. Many wise prophets have come forth to teach us wisdom and mercy.

Alas, so many of us and our brethren have ears but will not hear, eyes that will not see, perpetrating wars in the name of their gods in order to enrich themselves.

Jesus left us with one over-riding and oft-ignored admonition: "Whatsoever you do to these, the least of my brethren, you do also to me."

America has been your shield for a century. Now, that shield has fallen to the soaked battleground.

You must help us pick it up.

The promise, the idea, the hopefulness of America still stirs the imagination of the world, especially the oppressed yearning to breathe free.

Francis saw the desperation caused by our lack of proper stewardship of our home. The dispossessed move by the millions into the wilderness.

Francis taught us not to react with fear but love.

America is a land of immigrants, going back to the first wanderers from Asia who crossed arctic ice and looked southward.

The north has prospered but the world's southern hemisphere still lies sore oppressed.

The Catholic Church long ago stopped growing in the north because of the narrowness of small men.

Help America rejuvenate our tremendous potential for mercy. We need only follow the better angels of our nature.

Give us an American pope. He need not be from your number, perhaps a humble priest who has demonstrated the resolve of a fatherly lion.

The past errors of the church's ways came thru common human weakness.

Please, shed the shackles of 5,000 years of the primacy of the primitive.

Embrace the enlightenment which radiates all around. And recognize the intrinsic — yes, God-given — value of all living things.

Send us new hope. We have proven how much good we can do and how much harm we can avoid.

Embrace the large to enhance the small. Wisely fill the Shoes of the Fisherman.

You may well not get many more opportunities.