Penny PressNevada, USA Volume 17 Number 49 AUGUST 13, 2020

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CreditsPublisher and Editor: Contributing Editors:Fred Weinberg Floyd Brown Al Thomas Doug French Robert Ringer John Getter Pat Choate Ron Knecht Byron Bergeron

The Penny Press is published weekly by Far West Radio LLC All Contents © Penny Press 2020

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THE PENNY PRESS,AUGUST 13, 2020 PAGE 2

By MARILYN SINGLETON, MD, JDSpecial to the Penny Press

The excoriation of Attorney General Barr at the congressional hearing was as low as politicians could go on the lack of humanity

and civility scale. The Barr hearing was more like a Roman circus than a search for answers to important national issues. If this is what congress calls performing their duty under the Constitution, we are in for real trouble. Finger wagging, talking over, showboating, and developing soundbites for their reelections are not a search for truth.

It appears some congresspersons had been to a training session where they were told to call Attorney General Barr “Sir” as an expression of contempt, not respect. Chairman Nadler advised him that “our members expect sincere answers today and our country deserves no less.” However, unfriendly congresspersons continually asked questions in the form of statements and as Attorney General Barr began to respond, the congresspersons instantly interrupted him by “reclaiming their time.” To his credit, Attorney General Barr calmly responded, “but this is a hearing. I thought I was the one that was supposed to be heard.” Accusing someone of a crime and then gagging him officially crosses into Stalin’s henchman’s “show me the man and I’ll show you his

crime” territory.Two moments sank to a new

low. Referring to Attorney General Barr’s kind words about the recently departed John Lewis, Rep. Cedric Richmond obnoxiously declared, “you should [sic] really should keep the name of the honorable John Lewis out of the Department of Justice’s mouth.” Descending into the realm of subhumans, Chairman Nadler refused to grant Attorney General Barr a 5 minute break after hours of grilling. Refusing someone a (likely bathroom) break is a tactic straight out of enhanced interrogation techniques for dummies.

The next day, during a congressional hearing on anti-competitive activities, the four “Big Tech” CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Alphabet (Google)

were treated with kid gloves by all but a few congresspersons. Perhaps to protect a large source of campaign donations, denials of bias were allowed to go unchallenged despite evidence to the contrary.

Concurrently, physicians trying to save their patients’ lives are being “cancelled.” YouTube removed as “misinformation” videos of the physicians who advocated for the use of hydroxychloroquine for early treatment of COVID-19, based on their extensive personal as well as international treatment successes. Hydroxychloroquine is an FDA-approved medication with a 65 year history of safety—not morning glory seeds.

With all the garbage on Twitter, the removal of the physicians’ video based on the justification that it did not comport with World

Penny PressNEVADA USA 16 PAGES VOLUME 17 NUMBER 49 AUGUST 13, 2020

Penny WisdomThe stories of lawlessness are over-blown. —Eric Garcetti, Mayor, Los Angeles

The Conservative Weekly Voice Of NevadaInside:Pelosi So Full of CrapHer Botox is Brown

See Editorial Page 6

RON KNECHT PAGE 5FRED WEINBERG PAGE 6ROBERT RINGER PAGE 7DOUG FRENCH PAGE 9MERRILL MATTHEWS PAGE 10ROBERT ROMANO PAGE 11CHUCK MUTH PAGE 14

Lowering the Barr

Commentary

Continued on page4

THE PENNY PRESS,AUGUST 13, 2020 PAGE 4

Health Organization (WHO) recommendations seems extreme. Recall that WHO also did not recommend wearing masks, the new Holy Grail of COVID-19 prevention. And are we to believe the same crowd who excoriated President Trump as racist for blocking travel from China at the end of January while they were encouraging people to frolic in crowded Chinatown in late February?

Let’s look at a couple of examples of accepted medical tenets that were initially dismissed. Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian physician, famously was ridiculed for advocating handwashing after performing autopsies before touching living patients. In less than 6 months after handwashing was instituted, post-partum (childbirth) fever mortality rates dropped 90 percent, from 18.3 percent to less than 2 percent. Despite the evidence, he was vilified and eventually was admitted against his will to an insane asylum where he died 2 weeks after being severely beaten. Now, failure to wash hands is unthinkable.

More recently, in the mid-1980s Dr. Barry Marshall was convinced that stomach ulcers were caused by bacteria, rather than the stress, acid, and spicy foods theory. Resistance was fierce: “Everyone was against me. But I knew I was right.” Finally, he drank a Petri dish with some thousand million bacteria, including cultured Helicobacter pylori and shortly developed documented stomach ulcers. Dr. Marshall received the 2005

Nobel Prize for this discovery.Given that other prior coronaviruses, MERS (2012) and SARS (2003)

still pop up, it is likely that the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 will be with us for the foreseeable future. Accordingly, physicians want safe, affordable (less than $30 per full treatment), readily available COVID-19 treatments for their patients. Hydroxychloroquine—not a big Pharma moneymaker—is effective for many patients, and physicians with experience simply want to educate others about another weapon in the fight against an ugly virus.

The vitriol and disregard for fact-finding on the part of congresspersons and the dissembling on the part of the social media giants leaves one wondering: Do the people who savaged Attorney General Barr and gave big tech a pass want people to live in fear of living life? Do they want people to be unemployed and dependent of the government for survival? Do they want children to stay home from school and regress from normal childhood development? Do they want the country’s economic boom to remain in the rear view mirror? Would they allow people to needlessly die in order to gain political power?

Dr. Singleton is a board-certified anesthesiologist. She is Immediate Past President of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS).

Do Those Who Savaged Barr Want People to Live In Fear of Living?Continued from page 3

Communism and Millennials, Progressives and LiberalsThis originally appeared in 2017

In the 100th anniversary of communism last month, three points stood out.

First, polls say half of America’s millennials would rather live under socialism or communism than capitalism.

Second, the reality of communism was, horrifically, exactly the opposite of the naïve view held by today’s young and by many people around the world in the last century.

Third, the essential faults and failures of communism also characterize all government to some degree, especially democratic socialism, progressivism and statist liberalism.

The starry-eyed ignorance of communism’s supporters then and now stemmed from the false belief that capitalism (private property and free-market systems) are based upon and promote predatory behavior. So, they must be responsible for poverty, misery, exploitation and war. Communism and other coercive collectivism, in their view, are structured for equality, fairness, prosperity, peace and tranquility.

That was the premise and the promise. The reality?

Via famines and starvation caused by forced collectivization, plus executions, mass murder and war, state communism killed

perhaps more than100 million people: 65 million in China, 30 million in Russia, and 10 million elsewhere. Further abuses included massive deportations, forced emigration, forced labor camps, police-state terror, and systematic and brutal denials of human rights, liberty and justice as part of their social engineering.

Ultimately, it collapsed from these monstrous facts and because it couldn’t provide economic growth and human wellbeing comparable at all to what private property and market systems do. Indeed, communism produced great equality only by making nearly everyone poor relative to living standards enjoyed under capitalism.

Even though hundreds of millions suffered or perished, many American young people embrace this nonsense due to their ignorance of history and the stupid, evil dogma they’ve been taught in our education systems.

The falseness of communism’s promises are seen in its reality as it unfolded in 1917’s Bolshevik revolution and others. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels promised “from each according to his ability to each according to his need.” But Vladimir Ilyich Lenin said the ends justify the means – any means. Then Joseph Stalin in Russia, Mao Zedong in China, Pol Pot in Cambodia, the Kim dynasty in North Korea, plus Fidel Castro and other tyrants in Latin America, Africa and Asia took Lenin’s viciousness and ran amok with it.

The reason communism fails lies in the logic of Marx, Engels and Lenin that is essential to its actual practice. Marx and Engels sketched a long unrealistic plan of development that would require a dictatorship of the proletariat among other things before the nirvana of sweet, tranquil communism arrived. The practitioners had no patience for all that and believed they could

take a short cut to the end state via especially harsh means.

The problem for communism is similar in kind to that of lesser forms of coercive collectivism, even if much worse in degree. Simply put, each system promises ultimately to deliver good results, but in order to get there it must first break a few eggs. This is the essential nature of all government: It promises to deliver net benefits to society, but in order to develop the means to deliver benefits, it must first do some human damage to real people.

Thus, public spending will help the needy and deserving poor and will provide the benefits of education, transportation systems, etc. But to do so, it must first tax people. Similarly, regulations will protect some people by diminishing rights of others.

The damage from taking money and rights from people is always unavoidable, but the benefits from subsidies, public goods and protection for others are uncertain and contingent. So, leftists, politicians and bureaucrats dwell on the promised benefits in order to obscure the uncertainty that purported benefits will actually materialize and exceed the costs and damage necessitated by their plans. Limited-government libertarian conservatives are the adults who are focused on acknowledging the cost and damage and restraining government over-reach to assure that the actual benefits are greater than the costs.

Progressives and statist liberals chafe when one points out what they have in common with socialists and communists. But the further we go down their road, the more millennials will learn the truth of limiting government instead of being its booster.

THE PENNY PRESS,AUGUST 13, 2020 PAGE 5

The Penny Press Tips Its Cap To:Joe Biden, who picked Kamala Harris as his running mate. This will place the complete and total hypocrisy of the Democrat party on full display for America’s voters and despite the cynicism of the Washington establishment, we’re simply not that stupid. This also gives us a chance at voting and throwing up at the same time. Like Joe, she’s an empty suit.

President Trump whose campaign sued Nevada as promised to stop its totally unregulated mail voting plan. Under the Nevada plan, ballots will be indiscriminately mailed to all registered vot-ers and their last known address without an absentee ballot request.

The Penny Press Sends A Bronx Cheer And A Bouquet of Weeds To:

The Big 10 and Pac-12 conferences for taking the pussy way out and canceling the 2020 football season. If NASCAR can run with fans and others can play without, this shows that University Presidents have no cojones whatsoever. www.pennypressnv.com

Tips Of Our Cap and

Bronx Cheers

RON KNECHT andJAMES SMACK

Commentary: Ron Knecht and James Smack

Watching Nancy Pelosi on Fox News Sunday, I have come to the conclusion that she is so full of crap that her Botox is brown.

She told Chris Wallace, “I just recall a prayer that says: Pray for those who are hungry, pray harder for those who will not feed them. Pray for those who are homeless, pray harder for those who will not give them shelter. Pray for those who are sick and lonely, pray harder for those who will not give them comfort.”

By those standards, pastors such as Joel Osteen, should send a tsunami of prayers towards Pelosi’s San Francisco home because she, in essence, said we should pray for her.

She, cynically, pushed a $3,000,000,000,000 (YES, THAT’S TRILLION) bill through the House two months ago which had absolutely zero chance of even being taken up in the Senate and then refused to “negotiate” for two months.

What she did, was bet that the Republicans would be forced into a corner when the $600 per week addition to unemployment insurance ran out.

Apparently she hasn’t spent much time in a Las Vegas sports book.

And the President simply took Pelosi’s bet off the board by taking executive action very similar to the actions Pelosi’s patron saint, Barack Obama (“I have a pen and a phone”) used to take.

She really thinks the average American is as dumb as did Hillary Clinton. During that interview she said that they (her Democrats) would come down a Trillion if the Republicans would come up a Trillion.

As Jerry Lewis used to say, “HEY LADY!”

We DO understand how much a Trillion dollars is. We also understand that when you piss it all away on your pet projects, the only people who get something are your campaign contributors.

There’s another factor.

When you tell us that President Trump didn’t handle COVID19 well, you’re clearly rewriting history. Back in the early days, when Trump stopped travel from China, you were dancing around Chinatown and calling Trump a racist. Have you forgotten that?

You, madam, are a hypocrite and a moron.

And then, there’s her great white hope in the 2020 election, Joe Biden.

He responded to the written threat from what can only be described as the Democrat Black Intelligentsia by naming Kamala Harris as his running mate.

Joe thinks that selecting Harris will bring him the black vote. The same black vote whose kids are being shot to death in Chicago. Really? Let’s do something unusual. Let’s go to Pilsen and Canaryville in Chicago and actually ASK black mothers.

Hell, let’s ask Joe. “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”

That’s what this senile old man said. And when a black CBS reporter asked him if he had taken a cognitive test, he said, “No, I haven’t taken a test. Why the hell would I take a test? Come on, man. That’s like saying to you, before you got on this program if you had taken a test were you taking cocaine or not. What do you think, huh? Are you a junkie?”

Well, here’s what Joe doesn’t know. All of us on Medicare do so once a year. And I can guarantee you Joe’s on Medicare.

Watching this campaign is like watching an episode of Family Feud.

One can only hope that Kamala is up to it.

FRED WEINBERG

THE PENNY PRESS,AUGUST 13, 2020 PAGE 6

OPINIONFrom The Publisher...

Pelosi So Full of Crap Her Botox is Brown

THE PENNY PRESS,AUGUST 13, 2020 PAGE 7

Trump’s Presumption-of-Knowledge Challenge

Presumption of knowledge is an unconscious habit of the mind. In his book Confessions of an Advertising Man, legendary advertising giant David Ogilvy cautioned, “Never underestimate the reader’s lack of understanding of words you may not think to be difficult.” I would expand on Ogilvy’s thought by saying it’s a mistake to presume people know things just because you do.

Presumption of knowledge is especially dangerous in politics, where potential voters are inundated with lies and misinformation 24 hours a day. One of the biggest reasons Democrats have been able to control the political agenda in the United States for decades is because they are master messengers. They don’t presume that the listener knows something that may seem obvious to them, so they break everything down into simple terms and — following the advice of infamous Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels — repeat their lies over and over again until people eventually believe them.

By contrast, Republicans have neither the skills nor the courage to communicate even the most obvious truths. They seem to believe that the information put out every day by conservative media giants like Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levine, and Sean Hannity are well known to the general public. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, what these and other conservative commentators actually do is preach to the choir, because the overwhelming majority of people tuning into their shows already agree with their beliefs.

I became convinced of this some years ago when I was having a friendly little debate with a liberal business acquaintance of mine (“Dan”). He and his wife were highly educated, highly paid healthcare-industry consultants, which afforded them an upscale lifestyle. In the midst of one of our debates, frustrated by his automaton-like repetition of Democrat talking points, I asked Dan if he ever watched Fox News (which at the time was much more conservative than it is now), to which he replied, “Not if I can help it.”

That may sound like an innocuous remark, but it wasn’t, because it reminded me again that a majority of the population voluntarily cuts itself off from a lot of important information that could impact their lives. They do so not only by getting their “news” from propaganda outfits like CNN, MSNBC, and the New York Times, but by refusing to tune in to conservative media outlets to hear facts that are ignored by the mainstream media.

The classic example of this was the lack of scrutiny given to Barack Obama, even though he had a well-documented public record of being a Radical Left, anti-American agitator. He was able to win the presidency not only because Republicans ran pathetic John McCain against him, but because they mistakenly presumed that most of the public knew about his Marxist past. Ditto when the GOP ran Mitt Romney, another wimpy apologist, against Obama the second time around.

Which brings me to today and Joe Biden. Plain and simple, Biden is the most flawed presidential candidate in my lifetime. (I use the term presidential candidate loosely, because everyone — on both the right and the left — realizes that he is not the real Democratic candidate, but merely a placeholder for his running mate and the Democrat elites who would be calling the shots if he were to become president.)

That said, so long as Basement Joe is technically the Dirty Dem candidate, voters need to be reminded of the old adage: Be careful what you wish for, or you may get it. In other words, it’s critical to make certain that independents who are planning to vote for Biden clearly understand what they will be getting should he become president.

Unfortunately, thus far Donald Trump and his campaign team have shown little interest in exposing Biden’s atrocious record. Oh, sure, the president drops a snide comment here or there about Biden’s racist remarks, his decades of corruption, or his support for abortion-on-demand, but it’s almost gratuitous.

The fact is that an occasional jab won’t do it. Making the presumption that most voters know about Biden’s checkered past and his newfound love for Radical Left ideas is a big mistake. They don’t. You can’t expect people to

remember every sound bite they hear, which is why repetition is so important.As just one example, Trump should be pounding away daily at the potpourri

of Biden’s racist comments and actions over the years, e.g., “They’re gonna put ya’ll back in chains” … calling Barack Obama “the first sort of mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean” … his warm and fuzzy eulogy of segregationist Strom Thurmond … his shoddy treatment of Anita Hill … his reference to African-American felons as “predators” who are too sociopathic to rehabilitate … his praise of one-time KKK member Robert Byrd … and, most recently, his classic admonishment, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”

Above all, there are pointed questions that should be repeatedly directed at Biden, both through campaign ads and by Trump personally. A handful that come quickly to mind include:

1. Why are you against poor inner-city parents having the opportunity to send their children to schools of their choice?

2. Why did you sponsor the 1994 Crime Bill that led to the mass incarceration of minorities?

3. Why do you, a professed Catholic, support unrestricted abortions?4. Why have you not spoken out about the Black Lives Matter and Antifa

violence in New York City, Portland, Seattle, and other U.S. cities?5. Do you agree with Black Lives Matter’s stated intention to dismantle the

nuclear family?6. Why have you plagiarized so many other people’s words so many times

throughout your career?7. Are you willing to release a list of your potential Supreme Court

nominees so people can evaluate your judicial philosophy?8. Why was your son Hunter being paid $83,000 a month to sit on the board

of a Ukrainian energy company even though he had no experience in either energy or the Ukraine?

9. Why did China invest $1.5 billion in a private equity firm in which your son Hunter was a partner?

And, arguably, the two most important questions of all:• why are you afraid to take a cognitive-function test administered by a

non-partisan professional?• Are you willing to assure the public that you will debate me, in person, at

least three times — or do you intend to use the coronavirus as an excuse to stay hidden away in your basement?

The last question is critical, because Biden’s puppet masters are prepared to do almost anything to avoid even one face-to-face debate with Trump. They know full well that Biden would hit the canvass in the first ten minutes of the first debate and it would be the end of his placeholder campaign.

In fact, it would be so bad that the Dem elites might even try to slip in a substitute candidate for Biden before the election. Could Hillary’s fantasy about the Dirty Dems becoming so desperate that they would beg her to step in at the last minute become a reality?

The word is that the Trump team is coming out with new Biden attack ads this week, perhaps starting today. I hope so, because the president cannot afford to continue making the mistake of presuming voters know all about Basement Joe’s flaws. In clear, easy-to-understand terms, Trump and his campaign ads should pound away at those flaws relentlessly between now and November 3.

I’m not saying Trump should not continue to talk about the coronavirus, the ongoing China threat, and his significant number of accomplishments, but I always believe in taking the most certain path to a positive outcome. And in this case the most certain path to victory is not only to make the election a referendum on Joe Biden, but to do so by presuming no knowledge on the part of voters — which means stating every fact simply, clearly, and repeatedly.

Done correctly, it could result in a Trump landslide — and, best of all, mass apoplexy for Democrats. ROBERT RINGERRobert Ringer (© 2020)is a New York Times #1 bestselling author who has appeared on numerous national radio and television shows, including The Tonight Show, Today, The Dennis Miller Show, Good Morning America, ABC Nightline, The Charlie Rose Show, as well as Fox News and Fox Business. To sign up for a free subscription to his mind-expanding daily insights, visit www.robertringer.com.

Commentary: Robert Ringer

THE PENNY PRESS,AUGUST 13, 2020 PAGE 8

THE PENNY PRESS,AUGUST 13, 2020 PAGE 9

Commentary: Doug FrenchUnder Water

VegasInc.com shouted this headline yesterday “Amid pandemic gloom, Las Vegas housing market ‘on fire.’” The median price for an existing home set a new record at $330,000, a long ways from the 2012 median of $118,000.

“The Las Vegas housing market is not just a bright spot in the economy, it’s on fire,” said Tom Blanchard, a local agent and the president of the LVR group. “Local home prices are at record levels, with historically low interest rates, strong demand and a tight housing supply driving the market.”

With Las Vegas in a bad way with tourists, conventioneers, and gamblers in short supply, unemployment is high and mortgage delinquency was “18.18 percent in the second quarter, down from 18.61 percent in the previous quarter and from 18.89 percent in fourth quarter 2009,” reports the Las Vegas Review-Journal, “the second-highest mortgage delinquency rate in the nation, trailing only Miami.”

It seems incongruous. For decades, buying a house was the American thing to do. Houses

always go up in value, it was claimed. Every month’s payment meant some money was going into a sort of savings. Buy as much house as you can afford was the advice, the bigger the house the bigger the gain.

That wisdom has become situational, at best. Whether one wins or loses at the housing game has turned into a matter of timing. Gone are the days when you finished school, got a job at the plant in town, got married, bought a house, and stayed there until old age.

Jobs don’t last forever and neither do marriages. Having a house isn’t the problem, but the mortgage that goes with it serves as a ball and chain, hindering job and other opportunities that arise in other places.

Ryan Dezember was offered a job reporting on the real estate market in Mobile, Alabama and the rest of the Redneck Riviera during the early 2000s boom. He wrote his story “My 10-Year Odyssey Through America’s Housing Crisis,” in the January 26, 2018 edition of the Wall Street Journal. That piece and others he wrote for the Mobile Register and WSJ have been cobbled together to form his book, “Under Water: How Our American Dream of Homeownership Became a Nightmare.”

Dezember bought his home near the Gulf Coast at the wrong time, given that a divorce, job offers in other cities, hurricanes, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and a housing crash would be forthcoming. He was a homeowner at 28 and happily a renter at age 38. “We are the Foreclosure Generation,” he writes. Only 52 percent of 38 year olds are homeowners these days. For those born in the 1950’s 61 percent of 38 year olds owned, while those born in the 1960’s, 63 percent were owners.

The author’s struggle provides just one of the various storylines which run through the book, written in clean, journalistic style. He doesn’t walk away, but in considering it, he weighs the pros and cons that many in 2009 and beyond considered with mortgages totaling greater amounts than their home values. In Alabama, unlike California, lenders can pursue a borrower for the deficiency between what a home sells for at auction and the note amount. Dezember admits that his ex-wife might have been right when she wanted them to walk away and dare the bank to chase them. The moral question of strategic defaults is the subject of my book “Walk Away.”

Most interesting is Dezember’s chronicling of the boom, bust, and chicanary of the high rise condo development and sales business, which is just a couple murders, and some courtroom drama, short of reading like a John Grisham novel. Having been a lender to real estate developers,

the story is familiar. A developer needs zoning and favors are provided to those on the council who provide the required affirmative votes from city hall.

Banks agree to lend when a certain number of units are pre-sold. Friends and family are rounded up to put money down, never thinking they would ever have to close and take possession. Someone would buy their unit for a tidy profit long before the C of O is obtained. Unit prices would double or more as towers reached skyward. “It wasn’t unusual for Caribe units to change hands four or five timeless as the towers were going up,” Dezember writes. “It’s like when the NASDAQ was going crazy and you couldn’t lose,” a condo investor told the author.

Some lenders would actually provide letters of credit for a one percent fee to some buyers. For good bank customers the fee was waived, granting buyers a risk-free, no money down option on a yet-to-be-built unit.

America’s love affair with homeownership was fueled by the government during the Depression. In 1931, Herbert Hoover said, “To possess one’s own home is the hope and ambition of almost every individual in our country, whether he lives in a hotel, apartment, or tenement.” Hoover quipped, “they never sing songs about a pile of rent receipts.” FDR said a nation of homeowners “is unconquerable.”

America may be more vulnerable to attack these days, post housing crash. Dezember spends a good share of the book chronicling the rise of the institutional landlord. The Blackstones, the Blackrocks, and the Sternlights sucked up foreclosed homes by the thousands, clearing the market of people’s dream homes that became nightmares post 2006, when the housing market peaked. Mom and pop couldn’t compete with Wall Street functionaries with satchels full of cashier’s checks who kept biding, “Dollar over. Dollar over. Dollar over. Dollar over. He’d say it until other bidders gave up.”

“About 55 percent of owner-occupied U.S. homes are owned by people fifty or older,” writes Dezember, who wonders who will step up to buy from these baby-boomers when they look to sell.

Who will indeed. DOUG FRENCH

The Real Looting Has Shifted to Washington

No wonder prominent Democrats have been unwilling to criticize the looting that has plagued so many large U.S. cities. They were planning to do some looting themselves—of taxpayers.

We’re glad that President Trump and his coronavirus relief package negotiators, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, were willing and able to walk away from the hold up.

As Trump said after his failed discussions with North Korea last year, “Sometimes you have to walk, and this was just one of those times.”

This latest round of coronavirus relief negotiations was another one of those times.

Democrats thought they were holding all of the cards and could extract a $3 trillion raid on the taxpayer. Republicans thought a $1 trillion raid was enough.

To be clear: The reason Democrats are so willing to spend an extra $3 trillion, on top of the roughly $3 trillion Congress has already authorized in four separate bills, is they believe they will have a stronger case for raising taxes under President Joe Biden, who has laid out a plan for nearly $4 trillion in new taxes.

In short: A vote for higher coronavirus spending is a vote for higher

taxes.We are disappointed, however, that nixing the negotiations for now

means there is no pandemic-related liability reform, which was one of the most helpful proposals.

As the recent jobs report documented, companies are hiring again. And companies might be hiring even more if they were convinced that trial lawyers didn’t see their efforts to open safely as cash cow to be milked.

Whether Trump should have jumped into executive-order overdrive is another question.

If his four executive orders were essentially an effort to force Democrats, concerned they might not get any credit for helping struggling Americans right before an election, back to the table, then it might be a reasonable tactic.

But IPI strongly opposed President “Pen and a Phone” Obama’s foray into pushing out questionable, if not unconstitutional, executive orders when he couldn’t get a Republican Congress to do his bidding. We warned at the time that it would open the door for future presidents to double down. And here we are.

For our part, if the Democrats are not willing to cut their demands dramatically, then no deal is better than an outrageously expensive one. Another $3 trillion in spending is bad; $4 trillion in new taxes is worse. MERRILL MATTHEWSMerrill Matthews is a resident scholar with the Institute for Policy Innovation in Dallas, Texas. Follow him on Twitter @MerrillMatthews.

THE PENNY PRESS,AUGUST 13, 2020 PAGE 10

Commentary: Merrill Matthews

Is Joe Biden Trying to Lose the Black Vote Or What?

Is former Vice President Joe Biden trying to lose the African-American vote in November, or what?

In an interview with NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro on Aug. 6, Biden said the African-American community was not diverse with “different attitudes about different things.”

“What you all know but most people don’t know, unlike the African-American community with notable exceptions the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community with incredibly different attitudes about different things,” Biden said, drawing criticism for suggesting black Americans think uniformly.

President Donald Trump immediately took to Twitter to blast his opponent, writing, “After yesterday’s statement, Sleepy Joe Biden is no longer worthy of the Black Vote!”

Biden’s gaffe was just the latest in what is becoming a pattern of very derogatory statements towards black Americans on the campaign trail.

On May 22, Biden declared that black Americans couldn’t vote for President Trump, saying, “if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”

During a meeting with black mayors in Georgia last year, Biden said the problem in the black community was parents were illiterate, saying, “parents can’t read or write themselves,” according to the New York Times.

On Aug. 5, Biden even told CBS News reporter Erol Barnett, a member of the National Association of Black Journalists, that being asked if he would take a mental cognitive test would be “like saying to you before you got on this program, would you take a test whether you’re taking cocaine or not? What you do you think, huh? Are you a junkie?”

Suffice to say, if any Republican running for public office had made a single statement like this, the uproar would be deafening, with accusations of racism and calls for the party to withdraw its nomination.

But, Biden largely gets a free pass. One might chalk that up to media bias and surely that’s part of it.

But the truth is, Democrats take blacks for granted every single election. It’s clear as day, and certainly reflected in Biden’s analysis that African-Americans don’t have “different attitudes about different things.” And in Biden’s sense of entitlement that by virtue of being a Democrat he is owed black votes or else “you ain’t black.”

Biden was once the protégé of the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), who served as Senate Majority Leader from 1977-1981 and again from 1987-1989 with Biden’s support. Byrd who once chaired a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, was the epitome of the Democrats’ long history of embracing racial segregation. Biden, true to form, under Byrd’s tutelage, famously opposed busing of black students to schools in white neighborhoods by supporting a measure prohibiting the use of federal funds by Byrd, which passed into law in 1976.

That is a history that President Trump may be able to take advantage of. In 2016, Trump only garnered 8 percent of the black vote in the CNN exit poll, but now he’s making a bid to increase that number substantially in 2020.

In June, according to YouGov, Trump’s approval among African-Americans increased from 12 percent to 18 percent amid his law and order response to the riots that were triggered by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody.

And in early August, Trump’s support among blacks jumped from 10 percent to 12 percent, according to the Market Research Foundation.

Plus, Trump has a story to tell, with action on criminal justice reform including signing the First Step Act in 2018 and implementing Opportunity Zones to engage in urban revitalization.

And, prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, black unemployment had reached a record low of 5.4 percent in Aug. 2019, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, making the Trump economy the most equitable ever.

In 2016, Trump’s message to African-Americans was “what do you have to lose?” in supporting his candidacy. Now the question is what they have to lose in opposing it, and in 2020, the answer may be a lot. ROBERT ROMANORobert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government.

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www.pennypressnv.com

Commentary: Robert Romano

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Nevada Conservatives Can’t Fix the Democrat Problem until They Fix the RINO Problem

“Jessica” of the Nevada Republican Party sent out another of the GOP’s incessant fundraising emails this morning, this time clanging her tin cup for dough to support 5 unidentified Republican candidates running for the state Assembly.

The pitch opens with the following… “The Nevada Republican Assembly is the super minority right now, and if

we would’ve had the majority, AB4 would have never been rammed through by Democrats the way it was. We HAVE to take back the State Legislature and we need to start with the Nevada Assembly.”

She continued… “Putting it bluntly, if we don’t fill the Assembly with more conservative

Republicans, we’re going to keep losing in a big way.”OK, lots to unwrap here…First, AB4 – which Jessica failed to explain, as though the average Nevadan

knows what AB4 means the way they know what CIA, FBI and IRS means – was the vote-by-mail/ballot harvesting bill passed this week. So now you know.

Secondly, the Nevada Assembly is in the super-minority right now, just 13 out of 42 seats, for two reasons…

1.) When the GOP controlled the governor’s office and both houses of the Legislature in 2015, they used their majority, not to shrink government and cut taxes, but to pass the largest tax hike in state history. Taxpayers responded accordingly at the polls.

2.) The political brains of the Republican Assembly Caucus are incompetent, at best, and over the past two election cycles have lost numerous races they should have won.

Thirdly, it’s true that “if we don’t fill the Assembly with more conservative Republicans, we’re going to keep losing in a big way.” But that’s also the problem.

Of the 13 super-minority GOP members of the Assembly caucus, only three, maybe four, can be characterized as dependably conservative. The others, almost as often as not, consistently vote with the Democrats on important bills, giving them “bi-partisan” political cover.

Republicans who vote like Democrats are worse than Democrats who vote like Democrats because it ruins the GOP brand and confuses voters.

Worse, the three Assembly members leading the caucus’ political operation – Tom Roberts, Jill Tolles and Glen Leavitt – are all card-carrying RINOs (Republicans in Name Only). And the caucus’ executive director, Eric Roberts, probably should be sued for political malpractice.

Case in point: In the first special session last month, Democrats put forward a “resolution” calling for a federal taxpayer bailout of the $1.2 billion (and counting) budget hole created by the #SisolakShutdown.

And EVERY Assembly Republican voted for it!Which political Ensteins in the caucus thought this was a brilliant “strategery”? No wonder voters are confused as to what exactly Republicans supposedly

stand for. How can you blame Democrats for bad bills when Republicans vote right along with them?

Now, there IS a silver lining in all of this…There are, indeed, five Assembly races that are competitive and up for grabs

in November. And all five of the GOP nominees who won their primaries are conservative

candidates who have signed the Taxpayer Protection Pledge promising taxpayers they will “oppose and vote against any and all efforts to increase taxes.” They are…

• Assembly District 02 (Clark): Heidi Kasama• Assembly District 04 (Clark): Richard McArthur• Assembly District 29 (Clark): Steven DeLisle• Assembly District 31 (Washoe): Jill Dickman• Assembly District 37 (Clark): Andy Matthews

And if all five win – in addition to the ouster of tax-hiking Assemblyman Chris “The Weasel” Edwards by conservative Pledge-signer Annie Black in District 19 – conservatives should have the votes to oust RINOs Roberts, Tolles and Leavitt from their leadership positions and replace them with conservatives.

They should also have the votes to fire the entire incompetent, wishy-washy, heads-up-their-butts political and legislative caucus staff/consultants and replace them with conservatives who understand both the philosophical AND political aspects of running a minority caucus.

Oh, and there’s one other race that can help boost the number of conservatives in the Legislature…

While Roberts and Tolles don’t have a general election opponent, Leavitt (AD-23) does. And for a variety of reasons, he’s the “worst of the worst.” A RINO cancer on the caucus who thinks he’s Karl Rove but is more like Foster Brooks (ask your grandma).

Now, in addition to a Democrat in his general election race, there’s also a true conservative option: Bill Hoge, who is running under the Independent American Party (IAP) banner.

And Hoge’s not just a name on the ballot. He’s the real deal. A rock-solid conservative who years ago served in the California State Assembly (don’t worry; he’s a refugee, not a missionary) who has actually managed campaigns for other conservative candidates in the years since.

He’s got skills.He has also, unlike Leavitt, signed the Taxpayer Protection Pledge.Now consider Leavitt…The FIRST thing Leavitt did after winning the seat in 2018 was storm into the

caucus and demand that Assembly Republicans stop trying to repeal the Commerce Tax. And it’s been all downhill from there.

His American Conservative Union (ACU) rating for the 2019 session was a pitiful 63%.

Then there’s Leavitt’s “Endorsement” page on his campaign website. It’s a “Who’s Who” of tax-hiking RINOs, including…

• Former Lt. Gov. Mark Hutchison, who supported the largest tax hike in Nevada history

• State Sen. Joe Hardy (who enjoys the distinction of being the only incumbent legislator to have voted for both the 2003 then-largest tax hike in Nevada history, as well as the 2015 largest tax hike in Nevada history)

• Former Senate Majority Leader “Tax Hike Mike” Roberson, who shoved the largest tax hike in Nevada history through the State Senate in 2015

• Former Assembly Speaker John Hambrick and former Assembly Majority Leader Paul Anderson, who shoved the largest tax hike in Nevada history through the State Assembly in 2015

• State Sen. Scott Hammond, who voted for largest tax hike in Nevada history

• Soon-to-be-former Assemblyman Chris “The Weasel” Edwards, who voted for the Commerce Tax in 2015 before voting against it

• Former Assembly-critters James Oscarson and Melissa Woodbury, both of whom voted for the largest tax hike in Nevada history

• State Sen. Keith Pickard, the only Republican who, in the July special session, opposed the mining tax before supporting it before opposing it again (yeah, he’s reliable)

• Democrat Henderson Mayor Debra March and former Democrat Clark County Commissioner Mary Beth Scow

In addition, he’s been endorsed by the AFL-CIO and the Southern Nevada Building Trades unions.

Birds of a feather.Look, conservatives can’t fix the Democrat problem in the Assembly until they

fix the RINO problem in the Assembly GOP caucus. As such, the objective in November isn’t to get a Republican majority in the

Assembly – a virtual impossibility this election – but to get a conservative majority in the Republican Assembly Caucus.

So Bill Hoge for Assembly District 23 is my first personal endorsement for the 2020 general election.

So let it be written; so let it be done. CHUCK MUTH

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Commentary: Chuck Muth

THE PENNY PRESS,AUGUST 13, 2020 PAGE 15

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