A Place Called Nye County, Nevada

    Perhaps many of you have not heard of it. I hadn't until recently myself. It has to be the place that my friend and co-host on the Mike Sax Show, Turbo Kitty-lives. Please listen to us 1-3 est. http://planamerica.org/index.jsp?contentPage=NewstandMedia.jsp

   We have been off the air the last week due to my power here in NY being down. This will change soon, I should be back by next Monday.

   In a place like this she often feels like a voice crying in the wilderness. While she is quick to stand up for the community-there are some good people who live here-the politics of Nye County are alas, fairly backwards in many respects. As one of the few liberal voices there she sometimes feels frustration.

   Her love and anguish for the community of Nye County is captured in her piece of Aug 23 "Nye County, Nevada, My Heart is Broken."

  Nye County has a way of making news for the wrong reasons. Just recently, in 2007, they mad news by attempting an English only law. Another law they came up with is the idea that you cannot fly a foreign flag without an American flag nearby. Yes really, this is not a joke-or not intended.

   More recently it has been the scene of the recall Shirley Matson! campaign. Ms. Watson is the county assessor but she has a way of saying some stuff that is, well, you'd almost want to believe she is not in her right mind to give her some credit, maybe suffering from temporary insanity.

   Some of her bon motifs are documented here. "The Nye County tax assessor, whose controversial stance on illegal immigration erupted into public view last week, will have a chance to plead her case in front of county commissioners on Friday.An agenda action item suggests that commissioners may attempt to discipline Matson. She used her office computer and her elected position to request that sheriff’s deputies check the immigration status of Hispanic workers building the county’s new jail.The Pahrump Valley Times discovered emails sent from Matson’s private email address to local residents, including prominent current and former town and county office holders, that described illegal aliens in extreme language — she called illegal aliens locusts, and pregnant Latinas the country’s worst enemies, and even seemed to suggest that uneducated Latinos are the cause of Autism and other developmental disorders."

    This is the tax assessor of Nye County; this is rather strange language to hear from a county tax assessor of all people.

    http://americasvoiceonline.org/blog/entry/Shirley_Matson_reprimanded_for_using_bigoted_language_to_describe_immigrant

   Then there is the person of the former DA of Nye County. "Nye County District Attorney Bob Beckett Arrested Again" announces a not uncommon headline in 2010. When Bob Beckett is your DA you're not surprised to here of him being arrested repeatedly for driving under the influence.

  http://www.lvrj.com/news/nye-county-district-attorney-bob-beckett-arrested-again-102447789.html

   Or being prosecuted for 40 counts of embezzlement.

    http://www.lvrj.com/news/nye-county-da-beckett-arrested-92897574.htmlhttp://www.lvrj.com/news/nye-county-da-beckett-arrested-92897574.html

    The newest example of enlightened leadership coming out of Nye County is a recent Townboard meeting in Pahrump which debated an "Action item to change the current phrase of , “Township of Pahrump, Representative Democracy” to “Township of Pahrump, Constitutional Republic."

    http://turbokitty.wordpress.com/

    This game of linguistics of course is similar to the game being played out in many parts of the country where we have the Republican Governor-abusive husbands who are trying to completely destroy and privatize the state. The abusive husband and chief of Nevada is Brian Sandoval.

    Nevada is not so different from some of these other states. As Kitty will be the first to tell you, there are some good public servants in Nevada, starting with U.S. Senator Harry Reid who she actually corresponds with regularly-that's the kind of man Mr. Reid is.

   As noted above, Nye County tends to be an outlier in all the wrong things, and in 2010 they were the most supportive of Sharron Angle's forgettable campaign.

    So the word games in Pahrump-'a constitutional republic not a representative democracy' crudely but accurately gives the blue print in so many of these GOP dominated states. It is very similar to what Mitch Daniels is trying to do in Michigan.

   Kitty also, not coincidentally, recently wrote a recent piece on Mitch Daniel's Michigan.

   So Nye County is what they want for us across this country. The only difference is there is far less awareness of Nevada on the national scene. Hopefully we can start to change that.