Status Quo Joe Gets Another Meaningless Endorsement

Zzzzzzzzzz

The Status Quo Joe campaign intends on rolling out every endorsement it can from status quo establishment politicians. His endorsers tend to be uninspiring centrist, play-it-safe careerists who no one cares about one way or the other. In other words, turgid, vision-free political hacks like himself. For example, he's been endorsed by 5 current U.S. senators (and 10 former senators). They are all conservatives, basically from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party. With the exception of Bob Casey, all of them have "F" ratings from ProgressivePunch:

• Doug Jones (AL)- 2nd worst voting record among Senate Dems
• Dianne Feinstein (CA)- 14th worst voting record among Senate Dems
• Tom Carper (DE)- 7th worst voting record among Senate Dems
• Chris Coons (DE)- 11th worst voting record among Senate Dems
• Bob Casey (PA)- 17th worst voting record among Senate Dems

The biggest name among the ex-senators is Tom Daschle, the now disgraced former majority leader from South Dakota who is currently a corrupt anti-Medicare-for-All lobbyist-- a Biden kind of guy.

Among Biden's 20 endorsements from House incumbents, 13 are either Blue Dogs or New Dems and all but one has a putrid voting record. The 20th came in yesterday, Dina Titus of Nevada. Biden's p.r. machine is playing it up as a big deal. It isn't. Titus is another incumbent with an "F" rating from ProgressivePunch, another inconsequential backbencher.

“I’ve seen him up close. I’ve worked with him in Congress. I’ve known him for a long time,” Titus said announcing her endorsement on CNN.

“I think he’s the best qualified to be president of all the good Democratic candidates.”

Titus’s endorsement comes one day after former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, who served as agriculture secretary under President Barack Obama, endorsed the former vice president in the first caucus state.

Titus is the first sitting Democratic member of Congress to endorse a 2020 candidate in the four early voting states, according to the Biden campaign.

She joins 56 local leaders across Nevada who have endorsed Biden for president.

“I know Joe Biden is the candidate best prepared to defeat Donald Trump,” Titus said.

“I told my constituents that I would speak up about this race once I reached a decision about who will be our strongest nominee. Now I am making good on that promise. I’m excited to campaign for Joe Biden in Nevada and across the country.”

Nevada will hold its caucus, the third presidential nominating contest, on Feb. 22, following Iowa and the New Hampshire primary.

...The Titus endorsement is the first from a member of the state’s congressional delegation, who have been lobbied heavily by the candidates for their support in the first state with demographics that mirror a national makeup of gender, racial and religious populations.

Titus, a progressive with growing seniority in the U.S House, is an early boost to a Democratic candidate in a swing state that has trended Democratic in the past two election cycles. She endorsed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2016 over the more liberal Sanders.

Titus represents Las Vegas, a solid Democratic bastion and home to the politically powerful Culinary Union Local 226 that is critical to Democratic primary and general election victories in Nevada.

The powerful union opposes “Medicare for All” plans proposed by candidates such as Warren and Sanders that don’t allow for people to keep private insurance. The Culinary has negotiated for good health care benefits for members and their families.

Biden, for his part, supports expanding on the Affordable Care Act that was passed under Obama. Perhaps ironically, Titus was the first member of the delegation to support Medicare for All, a possible point of disagreement between the two.

But Titus applauded Biden for shepparding through Obamacare and being out front in gun violence and is well respected by foreign leaders.

I asked a friend of mine, a member of the Culinary Union, how meaningful her endorsement is. She told me it doesn't mean a think. "Most people couldn't even name her if you asked them who their member of Congress is. She's no good; she's no bad. She's nothing... People who do know her, would expect her to endorse a neo-lib like Biden. This is a very blue district; we have the right to expect someone who stands tall on progressive agenda. She doesn't."

Her district, NV-01, basically Las Vegas-- from MCarran to North Las Vegas (West Lake Mead Blvd)-- has a PVI of D+15. Although Hillary didn't do as well as Obama, she still beat Trump handily-- 61.6% to 32.6%. No need for a tepid centrist in this district.

Besides, this report by Marc Caputo in yesterday's Politico-- Biden’s senior Latina adviser quits in frustration-- is likely to be far more consequential in Nevada than the Titus endorsement. Vanessa Cárdenas is not just the most senior Latina Biden staffer, she's also in charge of out-reach to Latino, African-American and women’s groups. She quit last week and told friends that "she felt the campaign wasn’t heeding her advice on immigration as she tried to reach out to Latino groups that have had longstanding concerns with the former vice president’s rhetoric and record stemming from the Obama administration. One of them told Politico that "The campaign is just hyper-focused on whites in Iowa and African-Americans and it placed less value on Latino outreach. Vanessa kept banging her head against the wall trying to get them to take the community more seriously. And Biden just really won’t change when it comes to the way he talks about immigration. It became too much."

Nevada Electoral Action Is High In Las Vegas This Year-- Churn, Churn, Churn

Right-wing lunatic Cresent Hardy (left) is sporting a hipster look for his 2018 congressional run

The population of Nevada is 2,940,058. The population of Clark County (the Las Vegas Metro) is 2,155,664. That's where the state's people live. (The only other county with a significant number of people is Washoe--Reno and Sparks-- with 446,903 people.) Clark County elects 3 of Nevada's 4 members of Congress and last year there was turnover as voters ousted a GOP incumbent, Cresent Hardy, in NV-04, with Democrat Ruben Kihuen, and replaced Republican JoeHeck, who left his NV-03 House seat to run, unsuccessfully for the Senate, with Jacky Rosen. Kihuen ran as an unabashed progressive but joined the New Dems, ran up a miserable voting record (ProgressivePunch rates him a "D") and was forced to retire after being caught molesting women. Jacky Rosen is worse. She ran as a nothing and ran up one of the worst voting records in Congress-- ProgressivePunch rates her an "F"-- which, of course attracted Chuck Schumer's attention, who offered to back her in the Senate race against Republican Dean Heller.

That means the same two Clark County seats that flipped red to blue in 2016 are up for grabs again this year. Obama won both districts both rimes he ran. In 2016 Hillary and Trump had close elections. Trump won NV-03 47.5% to 46.5% and Hillary won NV-04 with a more comfortable 49.5% to 44.6%. The 3rd flipped from an even PVI to an R+2 and the 4th went from a PVI of D+4 to a D+3. This cycle's DCCC candidates includes extremely wealthy Mob-connected socialite Susie Lee among their shitty candidate in the list of disastrous Red to Blue program. She's beyond horrible and when she ran in 2016 (in the 4th district primary) she spent the most money ($1,492,274, of which $674,805 came out of her own bank account) and came in a distant 3rd behind Kihuen and Berniecrat Lucy Flores. So far there are 7 candidates running as Democrats in NV-03-- Lee (who was endorsed by EMILY's List and has no issues on her website, Jack Love, Hermon Farahi, Richard Hart, Guy Pinjuv, Steve Schiffman (who seems to be running for mayor of Jerusalem, not for the U.S. Congress) and Michael Weiss (who sounds like a Berniecrat)-- and 6 candidates running as Republicans-- Victoria Seaman, Scott Hammond, David McKeon, Eddie Hamilton Stephanie Jones, and Michelle Mortensen. Some of them may have dropped out by now. By the end of the 3rd quarter only 5 had raised any money:

• Susie Lee (D)- $315,178
• Victoria Seaman (R)- $114,008
• Scott Hammond (R)- $51,700
• David McKeon (R)- $39,695
• Jack Love (D)- $10,950

Now let's look at the 4th district, the bluer one, to replace the disgraced Kihuen. Democrats in the race so far include state Senator Patricia Spearman, Berniecrat Amy Vilela and high school principal John Anzalone. There has been constant chatter that both Steven Horsford, the district’s first representative (who was defeated by Cresent Hardy in 2014) and North Las Vegas Mayor John Lee, are also about to jump into the race. On the Republican side, GOP frontrunner Las Vegas City Councilman Stavros Anthony just announced he's getting out of the race, presumably to make way for Hardy, the ex-Congressman Kihuen had defeated in 2016. Anthony had already raised $141,145 by the end of the third quarter and probably as much by the end of the 4th (which hasn't been reported yet).

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

-by Noah

Once in a while, I come across a clip that is so fine and does such a good job addressing an issue of our time, that I just have to substitute it for the usual graphic style of a meme. Call this a meme of the day or a clip of the day. It doesn't matter. What's important is the conveyed message.

This clip was inspired both by recent events, most notably, the horrific shootings in Las Vegas, and, to a lesser extent, the response offered by a mentally ill former FOX "News" loon who glibly wrote off occurrences such as what happened in Las Vegas as simply "the price of freedom."

Election results still got you down? Have you tried thinking about the quantity of shrimp consumed in Las Vegas? (Part 2)

Part 2: Bring on the shrimp!

That's right, it's about time we talked shrimp.

"Since the election, I sometimes wake up at three or four in the morning, disturbed by dark thoughts, and when that happens I try my best to think of the surprising amount of shrimp consumed in Las Vegas every day. We all have our own way of dealing with this thing."

-- Calvin Trillin, in "Counting Shrimp," in the Jan. 16 New Yorker

by Ken

Okay, it's time to talk shrimp.

Last night we tried one way of dealing with the reality of that, you know, gentleman with the orange hair who is scheduled to swear an incredible oath before the week is over to become the leader of the, you know, Free World. We tried Google's proffered solution of denial, at least insofar as it can be managed via the Chrome browser, through the substitution of pictures of kittens for those of, well, you-know-who.

Well enough for those for whom the trick works. But some of us were left in need, and to plug the need we turned to that paragon of wisdom, Calvin Trillin, who in his New Yorker "Shouts and Murmurs" piece "Counting Shrimp" described his strategy -- what I would tend to call "changing the subject" -- as "what might be called replacement denial":

In order to avoid dwelling on a depressing or disturbing subject -- the sort of subject that can keep you from falling back asleep -- you concentrate on a subject that is so engrossing that it can drive the depressing subject from your mind.

SO WHAT'S THE DEAL WITH THE SHRIMP?

You're probably thinking that it quickly came to Calvin T, in a blinding flash: shrimp consumption in Las Vegas. Not so, however. First he went through a number of other "replacement denial" candidates:

• "the ramifications of a similarly surprising fact: the largest state east of the Mississippi, in land area, is Georgia"



But alas, "diverting ramifications were not forthcoming." He came up with just one: "that people who are asked to name the largest state east of the Mississippi tend to say that it’s Pennsylvania or Florida -- both states won by the man I was trying to put out of my mind."

• "the fact that Edna St. Vincent Millay's middle name is not an old family name, as people tend to assume; she was named for St. Vincent's Hospital, in Greenwich Village"



This worked for "a moment or two," but then left him search[ing] my mind for other poets with buildings in their names."


The poet's family would presumably have known this view (though it presumably looked better in 1892, when young Edna was born), but while a number of the buildings of the former St. Vincent's Hospital and Medical Center have been repurposed, the hospital itself is history.

• "a few more geographical surprises"



The one example we're given: "that the second most populous city in Illinois is Aurora."

Aurora, a suburb of Chicago, is a city predominantly in Kane County and DuPage County, with portions extending into Kendall and Will counties. It is located in the outer region of Greater Chicago in the U.S. state of Illinois. It is the second most populous city in the state,[3] and the 114th most populous city in the country.[4] The population was 197,899 at the 2010 census, and was estimated to have increased to 199,963 by July 2013.[5]

Once a mid-sized manufacturing city, Aurora has grown tremendously since the 1960s. Founded within Kane County, Aurora's city limits and population have since expanded into DuPage, Will, and Kendall counties. Between 2000 and 2003, the U.S. Census Bureau ranked Aurora as the 34th fastest growing city in the United States.[6] From 2000 to 2009, the U.S. Census Bureau ranked the city as the 46th fastest growing city with a population of over 100,000.[7]

In 1908, Aurora officially adopted the nickname "City of Lights," because it was one of the first cities in the United States to implement an all-electric street lighting system in 1881.[8] Aurora's historic downtown is located on the Fox River, and centered on Stolp Island. The city is divided into three regions, The West Side, located on the west side of the Fox River, The East Side, located between the eastern bank of the Fox River and the Kane/DuPage County line, and the Far East Side/Fox Valley, which is from the County Line to the city's eastern border with Naperville.

The Aurora area is home to an impressive collection of architecture, including structures by Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Bruce Goff and George Grant Elmslie. The Hollywood Casino Aurora, a dockside gaming facility with 53,000 square feet (4,900 m2) and 1,200 gaming positions, is located on the river in downtown Aurora. Aurora is also home to a large collection of Sears Catalog Homes (over 50 homes) and Lustron all-steel homes (seven homes). . . .

-- Wikipedia (links onsite)

Frank Lloyd Wright? Mies van der Rohe? Designed stuff built right there in Aurora, IL? Wow! Who knew? Perhaps people from Illinois's Second City.

It's at this point that he "settled on shrimp consumption in Las Vegas." And I think you'll see why this quickly eclipsed Georgia, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and even Illinois's renowned City of Lights.


ALL RIGHT ALREADY, LAS VEGAS? SHRIMP?

Okay, okay. "I had acquired my knowledge of Las Vegas shrimp consumption," Calvin T explains,

from one of those interstitial statements that “PBS NewsHour” flashes on the screen to give viewers a sort of bonus fact about the segment they’ve just seen. What had flashed on the screen, after a segment that took place in Las Vegas but had nothing to do with shrimp, was this: “60,000 pounds of shrimp are consumed per day in Las Vegas, more than the rest of the country combined.”

On the first night I put that fact to use, I’d awakened at about 4 a.m., thinking, Could it really be that American children are going to be raised to look up to a coarse blowhard who has boasted about assaulting women?

“According to no less a source than PBS,” I replied to myself, “Las Vegas consumes more shrimp every day than the rest of the country combined.”

There was a slight delay. Was it working? Not yet, because this thought came into my mind: His appointments so far—people who are opposed to the mission of the departments they’re supposed to lead—seem to indicate an attempt to find a fox for every henhouse.

I countered with: “Where did that figure, sixty thousand pounds of shrimp, come from? It was confirmed, in an Internetish sort of way, by some sites with names like Fun Facts About Las Vegas.”

Maybe it's just as well to go with NewsHour for Vegas fun facts. PBS's may not be as much fun, but at least they don't have to do with "prostition," or the "Cirque Du Soliel."


CLOSE, BUT STILL NO SLEEP RESTORER



"Had I chased away the depressing thoughts?" Calvin T asks. "Not quite."

I could still envision him as President, giving out the Medal of Freedom to some beloved old television star. Instead of a few graceful remarks of the sort we came to expect on such occasions from, say, Obama or Reagan, he’s boasting that the ratings of the star’s show were nothing compared with the ratings of “The Apprentice,” which, he explains at length, was shafted by the Emmy Awards because the Emmy Awards are definitely rigged.

But, he says, he "was ready for that."

“Saying that more shrimp is consumed in Las Vegas than in the rest of the country is not like saying that more toasted ravioli is consumed in St. Louis than in the rest of the country,” I said to myself. “St. Louis is about the only place where people actually eat toasted ravioli, so that would make sense. But think of all the shrimp consumed in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Aurora.”

"BUT IMAGINING THAT MEDAL OF FREEDOM
CEREMONY HAD STARTED SOMETHING"

At this point Calvin T takes a step back, and then he's ready for the final sprint.

Now I could envision a state dinner for the President of France, during which, in the room where the cellist Pablo Casals played so memorably for the Kennedys, the guests are being entertained by a tag-team exhibition from World Wrestling Entertainment.

“And consider the shells,” I said to myself, even before the thump of huge men hitting the canvas faded. “There must be mountains of shrimp shells, piled on the desert like slag heaps in a played-out coal county. Let’s say that there are thirty or so shrimp to a pound. That means peeling two million shrimp every day.” I could envision the shrimp-peelers, probably paid by the shell, peeling and counting: “One million four hundred and eighty-six thousand five hundred and eleven . . . one million four hundred and eighty-six thousand five hundred and twelve . . .” Long before they got to two million, I was asleep.

Yes, once upon a time the great cellist, conductor, and humanitarian Pablo Casals -- seen here whispering to President Kennedy, with Mrs. Kennedy looking on -- played at the White House.

#

Is There Any Actual "News" In The Michael Grimm Sentencing? Not For Our Brilliant Journalists

Friday, Brooklyn Federal District Court Judge Pamela Chen gave Mafia thug-turned-congressman Michael "Mikey Suits" Grimm, a very harsh dressing down-- very harsh. No one can ever accuse Pamela Chen of not being one harsh dresser-downer. "That this type of crime is common does not lessen its significance," the judge said. "Your moral compass, Mr. Grimm, needs some reorientation." She then gave him an astoundingly-- criminally-- light sentence, a mere 8 months, starting in mid-September.

My sister and her family live on Staten Island, and in 2010 redistricting seems to have put our childhood home in Brooklyn within one block of NY-11, the district that had elected and reelected Grimm, not despite his Mafia status but, at least in part, because of it. Growing up, my neighborhood diversity could be measured between Orthodox Jews, Conservative Jews, Reform Jews, Hasidic Jews and cultural Jews. And there were also a few Italians. Role models among people I knew ranged from successful Jews like Albert Einstein, Felix Frankfurter, Louis Brandeis, Arthur Miller, Jonas Salk, Sandy Koufax, Leonard Bernstein, Irving Berlin, Golda Meir, Samuel Goldwyn, George Gershwin and Jacob Javitz to, for a few, Bob Dylan. "The Italians" had a different set of role models: the Mafia. These were the days that the biggest names in New York were Lucky Luciano, Vito Genovese... Gambino, Lucchese, Bonanno, Profaci, Gigante... "Fat Tony" Salerno... I'd have gravitated to Fiorello LaGuardia, Arturo Toscanni, maybe Enrico Fermi if I was looking for a role model. But even many of the entertainers and politicians-- from Sinatra to slimy U.S. Senator Alfonse D'Amato-- were Mob-connected.

It wasn't until I became friends with now infamous murder victim Susan Berman that I came to grips with the fact that the Jewish immigrant experience included a hefty Mafia participation as well. Back to the earliest 1900s there were brutal Jewish crime organizations in NY, like Harry Horowitz's Lenox Avenue Gang, as violent and vicious as any other street gangs operating in the city. By the 1920s Arnold Rothstein was one of the country's top gangsters, the first to turn a variety of criminal enterprises into corporate endeavors. Detroit's top bootlegging gang, the Purple Gang, was run by the Jewish mob. Murder Inc. was a large Jewish-run group of killers for hire. And names like Meyer Lansky, Mickey Cohen, Dutch Schultz, Bugsy Siegel, Red Levine, Bo Weiberg, Moe Dalitz, Charles "King" Solomon, Abner "Longy" Zwillman, Jacob Shapiro, Jake "Greasy Thumb" Guzik, Joseph "Doc" Stacher, Hyman "Curly" Holtz, Louis "Shadows" Kravitz, Harry Teitelbaum, Philip "Little Farvel" Kovolick and Harry "Big Greenie" Greenberg, Hyman Abrams, Alex "Shondor" Birns, Israel "Ice-Pick Willie" Alderman (a Minneapolis associate of my murderded friend Susan's murderer father David "Davie the Jew" Berman) and Louis "Lepke" Buchalter, the head of Murder Inc., became notorious nationally.

Almost no one ever gets tried for being in the Mob-- not Al Capone, not Lucky Luciano and not Michael Grimm. But at least the prosecutors had a plan to make Capone and Luciano pay for their crimes. Long before Grimm ever thought about running for Congress, he was a Mafia mole inside the FBI, but he is also a mole for right-wing factions of the Israeli government and has been protected to a great extent by Bibi Netanyahu himself. Oh, and with all the talk about about the Jewish mobsters who helped build and run Las Vegas, how could I have not mentioned that long after the death of my friend Susan's father "Davie the Jew" Berman, who ran the Flamingo Hotel for the Mafia, the frontman for the Mob in Vegas is still Jewish: Republican kingpin Sheldon Adelson, who is determined to get another organized-crime-friendly Republican, Marco Rubio, into the White House.

No one calls Adelson a vicious mobster,  just a casino mogul

Maybe the DCCC Apologized To Sheldon Adelson Too Soon?

Organized crime figure Sheldon Adelson is now the #1 biggest donor to the Mitt Romney campaign and to the Republican Party. He also gave unprecedented $5 million dollar bribes-- walking around money-- to both Eric Cantor and John Boehner. Boehner, horrified, immediately turned the tainted cash over to the NRCC. Cantor has been using it to build personal power by electing preferred stooges in GOP primaries, like Richard Hudson over Tea Party fave Scott Keadle in North Carolina. Romney, the GOP and Cantor are reveling in all that Adelson cash knowing full well it's all suspect money and that Adelson is under investigation by the Feds for a life that is a veritable crime spree.

When the DCCC reported on a blog that Adelson runs a Chinese prostitution ring-- which a former senior executive in his sleazy gambling empire has testified is true-- Adelson threatened to sue and the DCCC immediately backed down and, tail between their legs, apologized. Yesterday Las Vegas Review Journal columnist Steve Sebelius suggested they shouldn't have and went on to list some of the known knowns about Adleson.

Adelson has elected not to sign a contract with the Culinary union, which is his right. But Adelson went further: When the Culinary staged a pre-opening protest at The Venetian, the casino's staff demanded police arrest demonstrators, and when officers refused, Sands sued. A federal judge determined the sidewalks outside Strip casinos are public forums, but Sands appealed that ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court before being rebuffed.

Or the time Adelson took offense when an event hosted by Temple Beth Shalom honoring then-Mayor Oscar Goodman was moved from The Venetian to the Four Seasons after Goodman refused to come to the casino because of the union dispute. Adelson confronted Rabbi Felipe Goodman in his office and spoke to him so harshly it brought the rabbi to tears, Rabbi Goodman later told the Review-Journal.

Republicans are fond of excoriating President Barack Obama for not being sufficiently pro-America. But where are their cries of outrage at the online video in which Adelson says it was unfortunate that he wore an American and not Israeli uniform during his military service?

"I am not Israeli," Adelson says. "The uniform that I wore in the military, unfortunately, was not an Israeli uniform. It was an American uniform, although my wife was in the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) and one of my daughters was in the IDF."

What about the irony of Adelson denouncing President Obama for "socialist-style" policies while, according to Forbes magazine, seeing his own personal fortune jump more than any other person in America under Obama's tenure?

"What scares me is the continuation of the socialist-style economy we've been experiencing for almost four years," he said. "That scares me because the redistribution of wealth is the path to more socialism, and to more of the government controlling people's lives."

Of course, Adelson's most lucrative casinos are in Macau, which is territory controlled by actual socialists. It's there that Adelson's company is under investigation for allegedly violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. But now, Adelson has pledged to spend millions electing the man who could appoint the next attorney general, who will oversee that investigation.

All of that to say this: There's no need to reach for salacious, unproven details to suggest Adelson isn't very nice. There's plenty to prove that case.

ProPublica has detailed many of the official probes of Adelson's worldwide crime empire, which, under normal circumstances would make even pikers like Romney and Cantor as wary of accepting Adelson's cash as Boehner was. He made his billions through organized crime, both in Las Vegas and, even more so, in China. He's caught the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Buck McKeon, in a gambling honey trap and although everyone assumes he uses the connection to benefit Israel, who's to say the classified information he gets from McKeon doesn't go straight to China? And late Saturday the Wall Street Journal and other publications started breaking the story that there are more charges pending-- criminal money laundering of immense sums of crime money, spanning the globe.

Federal authorities are investigating whether Las Vegas Sands Corp. [Adelson's company] and several of its executives violated money-laundering laws by failing to alert authorities to millions of dollars transferred to its casinos by two Las Vegas high rollers, according to lawyers and others involved in the matter.

The U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles is examining the casino company's handling of money received several years ago from a Mexican businessman later accused of drug trafficking and a former California executive subsequently convicted of taking illegal kickbacks, according to the people involved.

The probe comes as the casino giant, controlled by billionaire Sheldon Adelson, faces possible legal trouble on another front. U.S. authorities are also investigating whether Sands violated U.S. antibribery laws in its operations in the Chinese territory of Macau.

Senior Justice Department and Treasury officials say they have grown concerned in recent years about the risk that casinos could be used for money laundering and terrorism financing, and that compliance standards in the industry aren't strong enough. The Sands investigation could become an important test case of federal efforts to force casinos to become more like banks in knowing where customers are getting their money.

...The Sands money-laundering probe is focused on whether the casino and some of its executives ignored warning signs about two customers and failed to alert federal authorities about large quantities of money they had deposited, people familiar with the matter said. Both were so-called whales, the kind of big-spending gamblers who are heavily courted by casinos. Both spent the majority of their money at the Venetian casino, which is owned by Sands, according to court records and people familiar with the matter... The case has its roots in a series of money transfers in the mid-2000s by Zhenli Ye Gon, a Chinese-born Mexican national who owned three Mexican pharmaceutical companies and was a Vegas high roller, say several people familiar with the investigation.

In July 2007, Mr. Ye Gon was indicted in the U.S. on charges of trafficking products used to make methamphetamine, four months after Mexican authorities and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration raided his Mexico City home and found more than $205 million in U.S. dollars. He has said he is a legitimate businessman and didn't supply the illegal narcotics trade.

Mr. Ye Gon clearly had been a lucrative casino customer. He told the Associated Press in a 2007 interview that he would bet $150,000 a hand at baccarat during his gambling sprees, and that the Sands-owned Venetian casino gave him a Rolls Royce. He lost more than $125 million at Vegas casinos, including the Venetian, according to a 2007 affidavit by a federal agent who reviewed casino records, although $40 million of that was lent to him by casinos and never paid back.

It isn't clear whether prosecutors suspect Mr. Ye Gon was trying to launder money through the casinos to make it appear clean, or was simply transferring money there for gambling purposes. Either way, if the money was illicit, it could be considered money laundering, according to lawyers involved in the case.

In 2006, Mr. Ye Gon made tens of millions of dollars in transfers to Sands accounts from Mexican "casas de cambio," which are currency-exchange firms that have been the focus of several recent money-laundering probes in the U.S., several people involved in the case said. He transferred a total of around $85 million to casinos owned by Sands and other operators, court filings indicate. Prosecutors have told lawyers representing Sands employees that Mr. Ye Gon's use of Mexican exchange houses to handle such huge transfers was a red flag.

In a court filing, a DEA agent said a woman he described as Mr. Ye Gon's former mistress suggested Mr. Ye Gon used the casinos to launder money. According to the mistress, "the traffickers instructed him to use his bank accounts to send the money to Las Vegas where he could launder it and that the money in Mr. Ye Gon's accounts at the Venetian was drug money," the filing said.

...At the time of Mr. Ye Gon's arrest, another high roller, Ausaf Umar Siddiqui, then a vice president at retail chain Fry's Electronics with a salary of about $200,000, was making big bets at Sands casinos.

Sands received more than $100 million from Mr. Siddiqui through a circuitous route, according to court filings in a later criminal case against him for taking kickbacks from Fry's vendors. Filings in that case indicate that Mr. Siddiqui created a company called PC International LLC to receive kickbacks, then wired more than $100 million to two Sands companies, Venetian Marketing Inc. and WDR LLC, over a three-year period ending in 2008. That company also wired about $20 million to Destron, an MGM Resorts subsidiary, according to the filings.

...Federal prosecutors said that Mr. Siddiqui spent that money, and millions more, at the casinos, which gave Mr. Siddiqui huge lines of credit, free luxury hotel suites and free private-jet rides, according to court filings. Separately, documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show that Mr. Siddiqui used an internal Sands credit system that allowed high rollers to deposit millions of dollars in accounts in Las Vegas and then access the funds in Macau, or vice versa.

Federal agents arrested Mr. Siddiqui in 2009 on charges of taking illegal kickbacks. He pleaded guilty and now is serving a six-year prison term. Mr. Siddiqui's lawyer declined to comment on the probe.

That same year, the government's case against Mr. Ye Gon was dismissed after prosecutors found problems with evidence and witnesses. He still is being held in custody pending extradition to Mexico, where authorities want to put him on trial for drug trafficking and money laundering, according to court records filed in the extradition case.

Flabbergasted? Think these revelations require a comment or two? I'm dumbstruck that this stinking heap of garbage is buying our country. I'm at a loss for words. So I turned to singer/songwriter Elliot Astur and a song, "Dear America," that Ed Schultz played on his show:

The Boz asks: "Do Republicans really want Americans to suffer, alone in the dark?"

Power lines downed by an ice storm yesterday in Danville, Kentucky

"People are dead, thousands are without the basic amenities they need to live, and the Republicans voted en masse to ensure that disasters like these happen again."

-- The Boz, in a Boztopia post, "Alone in the Dark,
or the Winter of American Discontent"

by Ken

During the snow and ice storms yesterday that crippled much of the midsection of America. As Rachel Maddow pointed out on her show last night, the weather event, while severe, really wasn't more than an eminently foreseeable event: a severe winter storm in January -- and yet it turns out that we are apparently largely unequipped to cope.

Unluckily for him, but luckily (in the end) for us, our colleague the Boz found himself stranded, en route from Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles, "in a podunk motel in Nowheresville, Oklahoma -- literally, I had no idea where it was, apart from it being two hours outside Oklahoma City." He stopped there, he explains, "because the roads were getting progressively worse as I drove through the states. Arkansas and Oklahoma’s sections of Interstate 40 are in terrible shape -- full of potholes, cracks, and the like -- and that’s before the freezing rain, sleet, and mush turned the trip into a potential deathtrap."

Still, it could have been worse -- I had plenty of food and supplies, and a place to rest my head. Many Arkansans, Oklahomans, and more are without power, and they may not get it back for weeks because the grid is collapsing under the strain of the bad weather.

Amazingly, I had working cable TV, and I had C-SPAN in the background, listening to the House debate the stimulus bill that will supposedly jumpstart our economy. And if anything could keep me warm, it was the boiling of the blood from listening to Republicans attempt to barter down an already-weakened package to buy themselves more tax cuts for businesses that have already larded up on billions of our dollars.

I don’t know what’s more galling. It may be the idea that the supposedly richest, most powerful nation in the world can ignore the fact that we’re literally falling apart from the inside out. Or it may be that the party that brought you a global recession, the loss of billions of invested wealth, and two ongoing wars that cost us billions of dollars a month (Why doesn’t anyone bring up ending the Iraq war as a way to bring in more revenue?), has the gall to say that the only way to get us out of the hole they dug is to give them more money.

Not to mention that the corporatized media is bound and determined to ensure that any message they distribute to the public plays their tune and no one else’s. I was listening to the editor of The Hill ramble on the radio as I was driving about the need for “bipartisanship” and for Obama to reach out to Republicans, as if nothing is more important to the destiny of the country than to make sure the party that got its ass thoroughly kicked in the last election at least has a cookie and milk as consolation.

And what we get in Washingon, Boz writes, is "political Kabuki Theater," "where everything is done for the benefit of those who maintain power."

Outside D.C., however, the fundamental issues we face are larger than any single election or politician.

The stimulus is already stingy in almost every respect. It won’t bring us nationwide broadband investment. It won’t give us enough for smart power grids. It won’t cover enough for mass transit development. It doesn’t fund enough investment in alternative energy sources. It will help a lot, make no mistake -- anything is better than nothing. But ultimately, all it does is paper over the cracks in the foundation -- the proverbial Band-Aid on cancer.

Boz recalls a Nevada congressman boasting about the "boom economy" of Las Vegas. The boom doesn't look so impressive now given the deep distress of its leading industries, construction and tourism.

As David Sirota wrote not long ago, Vegas is a symbol of the unsustainable cycle of development we’ve been pushing for decades now. You can’t build a thriving city based on industries that can go belly-up so easily. You need investment in new technology, new ideas, and new determination to see them through.

He returns to the situation in Oklahoma.

A modernized power grid that conserves electricity and provides more power with less waste could help families across the states hit by the ice storm and keep them from freezing or using portable heaters. Rural broadband investment could create statewide Wi-Fi networks that could keep people in instantaneous contact and give them all the information they need to figure out how best to deal with the storm, instead of trying to parse out information from the useless weather television channels or the equally clueless local news. (Imagine if the digital television transition had taken place during this storm, and all the people who would be completely in the dark, literally and figuratively, as a result.) And better roads with more people working on keeping them clean and sanded would not only keep people like me on the move, but it would provide more jobs and more economic boosts for states that desperately need them.

19 people would still be alive and thousands of people would still have power just from improving the services and systems we have. More money for states means more jobs, which means more services, which means both more tax revenue and more consumption of goods. I’m not an economist, but this isn’t freaking neuroscience.

Instead of the vision we need for true economic stimulation, we’re getting endless speeches from smirking Republicans unironically quoting Margaret Thatcher as an invocation of our slide into socialism -- while many of these same people cast votes for TARP (both times) and every military action that’s drained our Treasury, wrecked other countries, and cost thousands of lives.

And the people who should be providing the vision as the majority are willing to provide business tax cuts that don’t work at the cost of more money given to programs that do work. Instead of throwing everything we have at full-scale national broadband investment (which alone could provide aid to everything from health care to green tech), infrastructure spending, and renewable energy development, we’re going halfsies.

And half-assing it won’t cut it for a genuine solution to our fundamental problem -- that our way of life is unsustainable and can’t continue.

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