Editor's note: Yes, the Weekly is owned by a company that also employs several of the pundits evaluated here. However, the editors did not try to shape writer David McKee's opinions, nor did we change his evaluations, tempting though it was.
Venue: Las Vegas Sun; author of Murder in Sin City: The Death of a Las Vegas Casino King
Shtick: Breslin-esque gumshoe who takes on the powerful, the greedy and the wicked, on behalf of the little guy.
Pounding the Pavement: A Marquette University graduate, German has written for the Sun for the past quarter-century. A 2003 award recipient from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.
Made His Bones: ... by raising questions early and often about the death of Ted Binion, laying much of the groundwork for the eventual prosecution (and initial conviction) of Sandy Murphy and Rick Tabish.
Hot Type: "To Rizzolo, you have to own a strip club where patrons who get too frisky with dancers have unexplained accidents after they leave your joint—like falling down in the parking lot and breaking their necks. It helps to have a reputed mob figure or two on your payroll to witness these mishaps."
Achilles Heel: Apologist for fallen authority figures like impeached Judge Harry Claiborne and ex-Horseshoe bosses Becky and Nick Behnen.
Bottom Line: If you never cease to be dumbfounded by the corruption, naked avarice, social irresponsibility, spinelessness and corporate string-pulling that delineate the Nevada political landscape, German's your guy. He regularly upholds the concept of a social contract in a town where libertarianism is a G-string that barely conceals the rampant encouragement of selfishness, social Darwinism and the encouragement of the populace's worst instincts.
Writing with a chip on his shoulder, German plugs away at such ongoing fascinations as corruption in boxing, and taxicab companies that would apparently rather put video monitors in their rigs to spy on the drivers more than to ensure their safety.
While many colleagues get bogged down in "process" stories, German keeps his eye on the bigger picture, namely the interlocking corporate/governmental agendas that shape policy in Sin City. And speaking of sin, German is probably the only pundit to hammer the LVCVA for wanting to have it both ways: Depicting Las Vegas as a sinkhole of debauchery in its ad campaigns, then howling sanctimoniously when outside media report the ugly truth behind the glitzy Strip façade.
Although generally liberal in his views, German has inveighed against legalization of marijuana possession. He's also drawn fire for his closeness to private investigator Tom Dillard, whose probe of the Binion murder (financed by the victim's sister) was regularly documented in German's columns—something that briefly landed German on the witness list in the Murphy/Tabish trial. He's also engaged in an ongoing catfight with Murphy/Tabish confidante George Knapp.
Tag Line: Stopped appearing on KLVX Channel 10's Nevada Week in Review after an on-air spat with Jon Ralston.
Rating: 3 typewriters
Venues: Las Vegas Review-Journal; KVBC Channel 3; author of several books, including Running Scared: The Life and Treacherous Times of Steve Wynn and Of Rats and Men.
Shtick: Rumpled observer of the events, whether mundane or bizarre, that make Las Vegas the wonderful/horrible place it is.
Pounding the Pavement: Smith has been the R-J's "Bard of the Boulevard" since 1990. His freelance bylines have graced everything from the Los Angeles Times and Reader's Digest to Cash Magazine of Switzerland.
Made his Bones: ... with Running Scared, which marked Smith as one of the few media figures willing to portray Wynn as a deeply flawed human being and ruthless businessman rather than a benevolent, visionary demigod.
The Critics Rave: "Smith captures a sense of recent history and continuity for a town that seems to have little use for either."
Dissent: "Smith consistently adopts Goodman's view of a world in which government prosecutors are evil, informants are the lowest of lowlifes and pornographers and killers are colorful." (Jon Ralston)
Hot Type: (regarding virtue czar William Bennett's gambling jones) "Who knew that the 'Moral Compass' was magnetically drawn to the video poker machines and that the kiddie heroes guide included a chapter on Amarillo Slim? What next, The Sports Book of Virtues and Hot Slots for Moral Tots?"
Bottom Line: That rara avis, a native Nevadan (fourth generation, to boot), Smith represents the gold standard among local columnists. Four bylines a week is a daunting hurdle, but Smith consistently clears the bar in terms of quality, not just quantity. Possessor of the best sources in town, he's as apt to listen to Joe Blow as to Bob Stupak, and if there is such a thing as the average Las Vegan, Smith is his or her voice.
Smith is also a reliable oracle when it comes time to speak truth to power. His July 23, 2003, summary of the fiasco that was the 2003 Legislature was the best single précis of that farcical episode of Representative Democracy in [In]Action. When the house-of-cards finances of the Castaways collapsed on Super Bowl Weekend, it came as a surprise to few (Mike Shustek excepted), but only Smith had the inside dirt on just how bad things were. But he's just as attentive to smaller scandals, as when a National Guardsman's family was dispossessed of its home by a callous, inept mortgage company.
Achilles Heel: Rose-colored view of Oscar Goodman and the days when the Mob ran Vegas.
Tag line: Was supplicated to run against then-County Commissioner Lance Malone in 2000. (Smith ultimately declined.)
Rating: 5 typewriters.
Venue: Las Vegas Review-Journal
Shtick: Soft-spoken aunt who urges you to mind your manners, then surprises you with a naughty joke.
Pounding the Pavement: The Arkansas native got her start at the Christian Science Monitor and has covered Nevada since 1976, first with the Review-Journal. After a decade, she defected to the Reno Gazette-Journal's Vegas bureau (a bureau of one), returning to the R-J in 1990.
Made Her Bones: ... through decades of diligent, shoe-leather coverage of local affairs, particularly of state government.
George Harris' Love Machine: "I've never found Jane Ann to be an honest reporter."
Hot Type: "Republican activist Tony Dane is illogical, homophobic, a self-admitted liar and, some would say the worst of all, a telemarketer."
Achilles Heel: Despite years as a regular on Nevada Week in Review, Morrison is still new to in-print punditry and it shows in a lack of individuality to her prose.
Bottom Line: Following decades as the beat reporter par excellence, Morrison was elevated to columnist a year ago. Perhaps because she's seen so much of Carson City during her Nevada tenure, Morrison seems to shy away from the temptation to be yet another political mover and shaker, although she's not afraid to call offending politicos on the carpet (as in the excerpt above).
Having already drawn the wrath of axe-wielding, plaid-shirted anti-tax obsessive George Harris, amplified via a score of Internet echo chambers, any jaundiced feelings Morrison may have for local politics are understandable. For now, human-interest stories dominate her thrice-weekly column, such as the tale of the woman who got an offensive billboard removed from her neighborhood, not by targeting the advertiser but the company from which he was renting the space.
This doesn't preclude her from occasionally breaking a story, as when she learned that local firefighters were double-dipping, just as she had previously exposed featherbedding at CCSN and Supreme Court justice-wannabe John Mason's ersatz claim to having been one of the Surfaris. (It was a "Wipeout" for him.)
As the recording angel of news events, Morrison's prose has photographic quality, as witnessed by this 1997 excerpt: "Women wept and men cursed in frustration Friday as the Assembly Judiciary Committee listened to countless criticisms of the Clark County Family Court, its administration and judges." The community figures she goes one-on-one with nowadays as columnist emerge with comparable "face." But Morrison's own viewpoint and tone of voice remain elusive. Not only does she love cats, she is one—of the Cheshire variety.
-30-: Knew Bill Clinton (not biblically) when he was still a bachelor.
Rating: 2 typewriters
Venues: Las Vegas Sun; Las Vegas One's Face to Face, The Ralston Report, InBusiness Las Vegas, Ralston Flash e-newsletter; author of The Anointed One.
Shtick: Alliterative, apoplectic, omnipresent adversary of Oscar Goodman.
Pounding the Pavement: Born in Buffalo, New York, the Cornell graduate joined the Review-Journal in 1983, covering the cops, and quickly moved up to the political beat. For the next 15 years he would be an R-J institution, later transferring his allegiance to Greenspun Media Group.
Made His Bones: ... even though well established as Nevada's most visible political commentator, when he published The Anointed One. It portrayed Gov. Kenny Guinn not only as a handsome dunce but also as a Trojan horse wheeled into Carson City by a cabal of special-interest "fixers."
The Critics Rave: "The state's most prominent political pundit." (San Francisco Chronicle)
Hot Type: "I don't like to waste time and space swatting at gnats. But when boastful bugs can make their buzz louder by being amplified by ingenuous, ignorant columnists who give credibility to anyone who will patronize them and by segments of the public they are able to exploit with their sound-bite silliness, it's hard to keep silent. (Not that I have that problem very often.)"
Achilles Heel: Ubiquity. All-Ralston/all-the-time risks devaluing "brand equity" through his very inescapability.
Bottom line: A one-man industry, Ralston has been dubbed "the John McEnroe of Nevada journalism." Ralston's reliable exclamations of "Gimme a break!" don't decry bad line calls but political rhetoric that sets off his B.S. detector. Of late, the latter has been directed with particular persistence at Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman. A longtime critic of the cozy dealings in Hizzoner's office, Ralston is on a roll after digging up a shady Downtown land dealing involving members of Goodman's family and staff.
Goodman has long since joined the "Chicken List" of local luminaries who have shunned the hot seat on Face to Face. It doesn't always benefit you to appear on the show, either. Ralston recently seated bitter political rivals David Goldwater and Lynette Boggs McDonald cheek by jowl. (The resultant show was a masterpiece of choked hostility.)
The danger of reaching such punditry prominence is that one becomes part of the Establishment in the process, as when Ralston—who rails against the Yucca Mountain project in print—was reported to be counseling the state's GOP legislative caucus to cut the best deal with the Feds they could manage. For that matter, Face to Face often serves to decant those bottomless vessels of conventional wisdom, Billy Vassiliadis and Sig Rogich.
One of the top prose stylists in town, Ralston peppers his diatribes with erudite references to Sartre, Swift and O. Henry, among others. His labyrinthine locutions are also—as you've noticed—an irresistible invitation to pastiche and parody.
Still, when too many of us still yawn at the wink-and-nod way in which businessmen and politicians wash each others' hands in Nevada, Ralston performs a public service by forecfully bringing it to our attention.
Tag Line: Wendell Williams got busted (by Ralston's producer) for using a "handicapped" space while doing a Vegas One guest shot.
Rating: 4 typewriters
Venues: Las Vegas Review-Journal; Las Vegas Mercury, Early Line e-newsletter.
Shtick: Deadpan chronicler of political pratfalls.
Pounding the Pavement: Worked his way through various California newspapers up to the Sacramento Union. Between 1993 and 1999, he hopscotched between the Las Vegas Sun, the San Bernardino Sun and CityLife, eventually landing at the R-J as a political columnist.
Made His Bones: ... covering conflict-of-interest issues involving the California superintendent of public instruction, which prefaced that official's expulsion from office.
The Critics Rave: "Sebelius, who knows this issue [Yucca Mountain] inside out, neatly summed up the political baggage of both parties in the space of a single column." (Columbia Journalism Review)
George Harris' Love Machine: "Sebelius is only for free speech that benefits his masters in government, the Culinary Union and the unionized casino."
Hot Type: "The Committee for Truth in Politics, whoever the cowards may be, are liars, charlatans and scoundrels, who aren't even smart enough to know the difference between a liberal and a libertarian, who could be bested in composition by Clark County fourth-graders and whose capacity for deviousness is matched only by their intellectual dishonesty on a galactic scale."
Bottom Line: The Great Stone Face of Nevada pundits, Sebelius' specialty is to take on a political position or figure, then demolish it/them through the inexorable piling up of one inconvenient fact or trenchant argument or another, punctuated with poker-faced humor. His rumbling gravitas is familiar from Nevada Week in Review, which regularly offsets him with Jon Ralston in a kind of Mutt-and-Jeff act.
A libertarian of the liberal persuasion, Sebelius is nonetheless a free-speech absolutist who favors the broadest interpretation of the Second Amendment. His coverage of marijuana issues in Nevada is reproduced on myriad pro-hemp and pro-cannabis websites. Though he's about as close as the R-J comes to having a "house liberal," the measured judgements of Sebelius are a far cry from the knee-jerk impulses of the bygone Barbara Robinson.
He's also a reliable barometer of the more absurd weather fronts pushing through Nevada politics, as when he observes, "Good Lord, how bad is it when you have to make things up to attack Bob 'Shoot-from-the-Keyboard' Beers?"
For those who can't afford Sebelius's online Early Line newsletter, some of its contents are cannibalized into his weekly Democracy in Peril column in the Mercury. Despite its red-alert title, said column doesn't contain quite enough civil liberties-related content as one might like.
Sebelius can wax earnest without becoming embarrassing, as witnessed by his eloquent tribute to men and women in uniform last Memorial Day. Given the extent to which the R-J has become a sock puppet for the Bush administration and the fringe of the Nevada GOP, Sebelius provides needed ideological ballast.
Achilles Heel: Was too quick to discount the allegations against Janet Moncrief that emerged after her election, although some of the accusers were fairly toxic themselves.
Tag line: Appeared as a witch doctor in The Third House, a burlesque presented during the last legislative session.
Rating: 4 typewriters
Venues: Las Vegas Review-Journal; Financial Privacy Report; Shotgun News; writes a syndicated column, The Libertarian; author of several books, including The Ballad of Carl Drega.
Shtick: Tireless scourge of the ZOG.
Pounding the Pavement: This erstwhile rocker worked his way westward through a series of papers, beginning with the Hartford Advocate and his own Providence Eagle, ultimately riding shotgun on the R-J's editorial page from 1990 onward.
Made his Bones: ... by being on the scene to cover an armed insurrection in Elko County aimed at bulldozing public lands and sensitive environmental areas. Made more headlines in the 2000 election cycle by asking candidates if they'd force Jews to wear yellow stars, were it the law of Nevada.
The Critics Rave: "This volume [Send in the Waco Killers] ... is why words exist. It is the seminal work of the past five decades. It will change lives." (Author Bill Branon)
Party Pooper: "Remember, freedom is just another word for being able to shoot taxmen and judges through the head!" (Las Vegas Sun review of Waco Killers)
Hot Type: "[A]s we all know, Washington doesn't get its money from taxpayers. Rather, legions of little elves in striped pants and top hats dash about in the pre-dawn mists, gathering up all that moolah, which forms like dew amidst the mushrooms of Foggy Bottom."
Bottom Line: When not pining for the return of the gold standard or defending the right of the Jarbridge Shovel Brigade to own thermonuclear weapons, Suprynowicz cranks out a weekly R-J column advocating the law of the jungle. In the Suprynowicz world, there is no problem that cannot be solved by guns. Genocide in Sudan? Air-drop M-16s to starving mothers and children. Airplanes being hijacked? Let passengers shoot it out at 30,000 feet.
A serial apologist for polluters, Vin howls about "racial quotas," gay marriage and those uppity single moms. Taxes are "the organized theft of the property of the productive class" and public schools are "unionized government propaganda camps" that breed "creeping socialism."
Typical Suprynowicz demagoguery was on display in a 2000 Libertarian column describing his interviews of local candidates Dennis Nolan and Terrie Stanfill. " I do not mean to imply," he began loftily, that Nolan furtively changed into SS togs when alone or that Stanfill "secretly sneaks out late at night to attend Communist cell meetings," while implying precisely those things, a gambit as old as Cicero.
"I'm sure most of their neighbors would testify these are both fine folk," Suprynowicz waxed piously, before adding that "so too were the faceless clerks and functionaries who kept the trains running on time in Italy and Germany in the 1930s." This is discourse of the lowest order.
Achilles Heel: Can't handle disagreement. Dissenting viewpoints are characterized as those of "traitors," "Nazis" and "simpering socialist bed-wetters."
Tag line: In his bio, Suprynowicz implies that New Hampshire Gov. Jeanne Shaheen "was promptly defeated for re-election" after she penned a denunciation of The Ballad of Carl Drega. Inconvenient fact: Shaheen (who Suprynowicz refers to as "Sheehan") stepped down as governor after three terms to run—albeit unsuccessfully—for the U.S. Senate.
Rating: 1 typewriter