Why Same-Sex Marriage Matters

I suspect most who read this blog support marriage equality or at least some form of civil unions. But if you don't or if you know lots of people who don't, I'm reposting with permission here a lovely essay written by my friend Jack LeVine. Jack lost his husband, J.J., on Tuesday afternoon after more than 30 years together. J.J. had emphysema.

J.J. died within hours of the Nevada Senate voting to pass a domestic partner law by a 12-9 vote, two short of enough to override a threatened veto by Gov. Jim Gibbons. It's on to the Assembly now, where State Sen. David Parks believes he has a veto-proof majority. Whether he can persuade Gibbons not to veto or pull two more votes over in the Senate to override remains unclear, but this debate so often takes place in the sanitized environs of media debate.

This, then, is the practical reality. This is a real couple. And, as a side note, I'll be on Nevada Week in Review tonight on VegasPBS discussing this issue as well.

Here's Jack's blog post after J.J. died. Jack blogs at VeryVintageVegas.Com. Grab a hankie.

A Memorial: James J. Pechacek 1954-2009

April 22nd, 2009

My husband passed away on Tuesday. Actually, he was my Fiance. We’d been engaged for 33 years. He tried to hang on long enough for us to get married. That goal helped keep him alive for the last several years. He’d have been perfectly content with “domestic partnership”.

JJ was a very private person. Few of you ever met him, nor even knew of his existence. Those who did were indeed, very privileged.

JJ was the counter balance force in my life. We were polar opposites in so many ways. He was a meticulous stickler for details, a deep thinker, a slow responder. He prided himself on his rationality, and his memory. JJ was the best “phone a friend” walking encyclopedia that anyone could have ever hoped to have known. And though he didn’t think so, he was the cutest little puppy in the world.

JJ was the first fan of Vintage Vegas. He’s the one who made me believe 20 years ago that we could create a vibrant, energetic, fun urban core. When we first moved to Las Vegas 1985, he’s the one who only wanted to live downtown. He’s the one who pointed out the first “mid mod” homes that I soon fell in love with. We didn’t know the words for mid mod, but JJ’s the one who showed me why they were important. JJ was my biggest supporter, my most ardent fan. And he was my most vocal critic. I’m so going to miss him.

JJ liked his privacy and his anonymity. I was most shocked on Sunday when he told me that I could tell some of our story in public….as long as it was to make a point.

We met in 1975. We were both 21 year olds. He was hitchhiking to Florida. I was driving the semi-truck. I stopped to pick him up in Louisville, and was in love before we got to Nashville. He wanted to be a Gypsy. I wanted to be rich. He wanted to see the great cities and buildings and mountains and rivers and I wanted to meet a couple of million interesting people. We both got what we wanted.

It’s been a long, exciting, and fun journey since then. We’ve been rich and poor and rich and poor again. We’ve been healthy and sick. We’ve been fun loving and furious. We were a couple thru lots of thick and thin. We were PARTNERS. That’s the word we used to describe ourselves. And in our minds and in the reality of space and time we were married. We were married because we said we were. We could have cared less what any church might have thought. That our government considered us second class citizens… mattered a lot.

It was crushing to me yesterday when the coroner’s office didn’t have a category that described us for the death certificate. They wrote that he was SINGLE. They said I WASN’T THE NEXT OF KIN!

Back in January, the hospital recognized the legal power of attorney and other forms that had cost us thousands of dollars in legal fees. Most “not married” couples don’t have those papers ready when they need them. Many couldn’t afford them in the first place. We were fortunate in that regard. Without them, they would wouldn’t have even had to let me into the room.

There’s a thousand things, both big and small that require “the stamp of recognition” from our various governments. Social Security Survivor benefits, taxes, inheritance rules, property rights, parental rights, and on and on and on. This is no small matter to the lives of many millions of Americans.

And that brings us to the irony of the timing of JJ’s passing. Within a few minutes one way or the other of JJ’s death….The Nevada Senate passed “Domestic Partnership” legislation. JJ would be very proud of them. Many of our best friends are in Carson City this week to tell our stories, and to lobby for passage of the bill. JJ wanted me to go, but I couldn’t leave him alone for 3 days. I’ve asked them to deliver a copy of this obituary for me.

Our governor has said that he’ll veto it if it passes. Why? Because “he doesn’t believe in it” is the only answer he has. JJ believed in it and so do I. I hope you do, as well.

One of JJ’s final requests was that I tell you our story and that I ask all of you, in his memory, to PLEASE call or write the Nevada Legislature, AND THE GOVERNOR and tell them that you support domestic partnership legislation. For that matter, tell the Congress and the President as well.

All JJ wanted was that I be recognized, at the barest of minimums, as his LEGAL “next of kin.”

Wynn on Buying Bellagio: "Perhaps"

For those of you fascinated by Steve Wynn -- and who isn't? -- my pal and colleague Jon Ralston nabbed The Man (does Wynn have any commonly used nicknames?) on his "Face To Face" interview show for two half-hour episodes this week. The first, focused on gaming business matters, aired today on Las Vegas One and is now available online through the Las Vegas Sun's website because Ralston is also a Sun columnist.

There was lots in here and, aside from Charlie Rose, Wynn doesn't sit for lengthy TV interviews with anyone other than Ralston. And you know he likes Jon because, just as he does with me at least once or twice an interview, he chastizes the host in that loving way of his. (This time it comes in the start of segment 2 when Ralston compares Michael Milken to Bernie Madoff. Hoo boy.)

But what did he SAY, you wonder? Well, I encourage you to go watch, but here's some of the stuff I picked out:

1. Reacquiring Bellagio or Mirage: The first time Ralston asked, the answer is, "Well, I guess it depends on price." Then there's some discussion of what a great board Wynn Resorts has, and how they might be able to "be helpful to people on the Strip who perhaps would be better served by unbundling." I love that. Can you imagine? "Hello, Kirk? Remember that stuff you bought out from under me? Well, since I'm such a nice guy, let me help you by taking it back for a song. No, no. Don't thank me! Nothin' to it! What are friends for?" Ralston asked point-blank if Wynn wanted Bellagio or Mirage back and Wynn replied: "The operative word is perhaps. Maybe. Under certain circumstances. Conditional." Conditional on maybe Kirk Kerkorian rolling over in the grave he hasn't even begun inhabiting yet, perhaps? Wynn also went on a bit about the Mandalay Bay-Luxor-Excalibur in the same breath, but I couldn't make heads or tails of whether he was thinking about buying them or simply taking the opportunity -- helpful guy that he is -- to point out another way that the MGM gang spent too much.

2. Unbundling like it's 1999. As he did in my most recent interview with him, Wynn endorsed the "unbundling" of MGM Mirage, citing Vegas' storied history of "smart groups of guys fightin’ it out, getting the best deals by having to compete for advantages, entrepreneurial zeal." But I liked this one bit where he said, "I think an unbundling of the Mirage Company is a good idea." Hmmm. Wasn't that what we used to call it back in the day? A slip?

3. Madoff is worse than Hitler? As mentioned earlier, Ralston got Wynn going about Milken and Madoff. Wynn was explaining that Mike Milken, whose junk bonds financed Mirage, was his mentor in terms of explaining why having proper capitalization keeps companies afloat in rough times. Ralston wanted to challenge him on Milken but steps in it about Madoff, sending Wynn over the edge. Wynn defended Milken and said he'll go down as "the most important figure since Bernard Baruch on Wall Street." As for Madoff, whom Wynn never heard of until his scheme collapsed: "That’s one of the worst people in the history of the world. This man destroyed, over a 10-year period, destroyed his friends, women, charities, folks with their case money. How this guy didn’t get killed by somebody is beyond me." Yikes! Not sure what "case money" is but I listened to it a few times and that's what he said.

4. Good MGM, Bad MGM. The nicest thing Wynn can say about MGM Mirage is that there are "very smart people" there who did what everyone in the business world was doing at the time. He also said that MGM with CityCenter and Las Vegas Sands with Macau "undertook projects of such overwhelming scope and ambition that they have no real precedent or historical models to rely upon. They were groundbreaking products." Except that he doesn't mean any of that in a good way. "When you start a project without having enough money to finish it," Wynn said, "I find that to be [long, long, long pause] mystifying. I don’t know what to say except" and here I must simply try to SHOW you what he did.


He plays with his lips!!! Classic!

5. It's like he read this week's Strip Sense! With that amusing maneuver, Wynn goes on the attack. "Suppose there's a strike! Suppose there's an attack! Suppose the economy goes to hell!" he said, his voice rising. "What do you do? Tell everybody to go home? Oh, gosh, golly, sorry. … you look like a ninny. You’re supposed to understand that stuff happens. ... I have found it surprising that my brilliant colleagues have somehow managed to forget those things on occasion and now they’re paying a price for it." Now, what was it I wrote in the last two paragraphs of this week's Las Vegas Weekly column again?

6. One last, great quote. Wynn, bemoaning the lousy room rates he's getting for Wynn and Encore right now, said of these resorts: "This is not what they were built for." I think he really meant to say, "This is not WHO they were built for."

There's lots more and I encourage everyone to race to the Las Vegas Sun and watch it. I would've loved to have embedded the video of today's episode here -- it's in four parts -- but there doesn't seem to be a way on the Las Vegas Sun's website to do so. Weird, that.

Ralston's second show with Wynn should appear online tomorrow and promises to be more about politics and state budget issues. According to Jon's own summary of this interview, Wynn refers to Gov. Jim Gibbons, the Republican who promised Wynn he'd support the 3 percent room tax increase if the public voted for it only to let it become law without his signature, as "an unusual man." I wonder if he makes more funny faces when he says that.

Every 76 Seconds, Lovin' Happens In Nevada!

As I expected from my reporting in The New York Times in January, State Sen. Bob Coffin has introduced a bill this week to tax legal prostitution in Nevada. The state has inserted itself in a massive budget hole and Coffin hopes Nevada can lick up some bits and pieces from a business that hasn't had to come up with any dough for all these years. The lovelies shown here are just some of the wares at the Moonlite Bunny Ranch, by the by.

What's interesting here are Coffin's numbers. He estimates that taxing each legally sold sex act $5, the state could raise $2 million a year. That's 400,000 legally sold sex acts sold per year, or about 1,096 a day. Also, 45 an hour! A legally sold sex act is occurring in this state every 76 seconds!

That does seem high, doesn't it? I mean, there are only 225 licensed legal prostitutes in the state. They'd have to be awful busy. But I suppose it also brings up what the definition of a sex act is. I mean -- hide the kiddies -- if fellatio and intercourse occur in the same encounter, is that two acts? Is the prostitute running a mental tally in her head to figure out how much tax to, uh, assess?

Gov. Jim Gibbons reacted to SB369 by telling the Associated Press' Brendan Riley, "I'm not a supporter of legalizing prostitution in Nevada. So by taxing it, there's a recognition of the legality of it. And that's all I want to say."

Um, but it IS legal. I'd like to not pay my speeding tickets and not recognize the legality of speeding limits, but that's not working out so well for me or my auto insurance bill.

The governor's missionary-inspired (he's a Mormon!) position isn't really that relevant anyway because any tax would have to be approved by a supermajority of the Legislature, which means that it's also a veto-proof majority. And Coffin's bill isn't likely to pass anyway; as I wrote in January, both the House speaker and state Senate majority leader oppose it.

Still, the hearings could be very colorful, particularly when lawmakers must answer some of the questions I've posed here.

The Gibbons Podcast Lie Makes The R-J

On Feb. 6, I made this prediction:

Mark my words, though: The Review-Journal and others will write tomorrow that the governor is podcasting. I'm trying so hard to educate this town, but some folks read what I say and do the opposite out of spite.

Well, it actually took four weeks, but in today's R-J, political scribe Molly Ball (and my friend, or so I hope after this...) did exactly that. The headline: "Gibbons embraces podcasts." She's not the first, the Las Vegas Sun's Charlotte Hsu also took the bait and called these things podcasts weeks ago, but Ball's sin is particularly egregious because (a) I know she reads this blog and (b) her piece was 1,500 words specifically about the use of the technology, which means her entire story was based on a fabrication and/or a misunderstanding.

Gov. Gibbons does not podcast. And it's offensive that the Nevada media helped perpetuate this lie. The governor is recording video speeches and posting them on the Internet. That's all. His staff didn't at first offer it in a format that made it viewable on an iPod, but they at least fixed that.

Yet that still doesn't make these podcasts. In order to be a podcast, users must be able to subscribe to it. Don't take my word for it. Here's the Wikipedia definition, which states: "Though the same content may also be made available by direct download or streaming, a podcast is distinguished from most other digital media formats by its ability to be syndicated, subscribed to, and downloaded automatically when new content is added."

OK, so you're dubious of Wikipedia's accuracy, even though a thousand geeks would fix it in an instant if someone wanted to post something inaccurate about a topic like this. Well, fine, but PodcastAlley.Com uses the Wiki entry as its ultimate reference on the topic. And it's also basically the same way podcasting is defined in the book "Tricks of the Podcasting Masters" by Rob Walch, who co-hosts the now-podfaded interview program Podcast411. And the Review-Journal's brilliant tech guru Al Gibes trusts Podcast411 because he sent his reader(s) there nearly three years ago to get more info about the medium.

Everyone who is actually involved in this technology agrees on the definition. And neither the governor of Nevada nor a political writer for the Las Vegas newspaper are qualified to redefine it.

Why does it matter? Well, newspapers are supposed to care about accuracy, or so I thought. The paper's editors wouldn't allow someone to refer to a psychiatrist as a psychologist because that would be inaccurate and because there is a substantive difference between the two. Same here.

And in this case, the governor is misusing an important technological term for political image, to make himself seem au courant and populist. This isn't cutting edge; politicians have been making videos and putting them on their websites for many years. Most even go the extra step of posting them on YouTube, but not Gov. Gibbons!

So the story here is not that the governor is breaking into a new medium, it's that the governor is lying to the public about what sort of media he's using, either out of ignorance or on purpose. This is not a small matter of semantics; it would be like the R-J pretending it was a TV station and...oh, wait. Oops. Bad example.

What's more, though, Ball's piece, despite its length, was incomplete in addition to being inaccurate. Even if this were a podcast -- which it's not! -- Gov. Gibbons wouldn't be the first in Nevada anyway, but you'd never know that from this story. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., has had two podcast feed in iTunes, one from when he was still Minority Leader way back before the 2006 election and a more recent one that offers four video podcasts -- real podcasts that users could subscribe to -- last year. So he's been in the game since before Gibbons was even elected.


Newly elected U.S. Rep. Dina Titus, D-Nev., has a podcast feed that dates back to 2007, but it appears that she never really put any actual shows into it. (Those three files there appear to be test files and cannot be played or downloaded anymore.) In fact, that's all that comes up when you search "Jim Gibbons" in iTunes, probably because Titus was then running for governor against Gibbons.


It appears that Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., at least has a podcast feed, although you get errors whenever you try to read more or subscribe to it.


And Ball totally misses the chance, while she's in the neighborhood of new media, to note that Ensign is now a prolific Tweeter.



Also Tweeting: Harry Reid and U.S. Rep. Dean Heller, R-Nev. Not Tweeting? Gov. Jim Gibbons.

Neither Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman nor U.S. Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev. have podcasts or feeds or Tweet -- too bad because God would they be entertaining -- but both have appeared on my podcast at least twice.

Oh! Oh! Oh! And guess who else doesn't have a podcast? Why, the Las Vegas Review-Journal! (They do Tweet, though, to their credit.) But it's only a matter of time before they start calling RJTV a podcast! Hooray! In the meantime, not surprisingly, Ball had nobody in their online division to backstop this story and forewarn her she was buying a line of bull from the governor. (I did so on Feb. 6, but I guess she didn't care.)

Look what RJTV did today:


The saddest part is, it's so easy and free to create a feed to put these files into it. It would take all of about 10 minutes. And the result would, more likely than not, be a lot more viewers who aren't going to think to go to the state site to get Gibbons' latest but would listen or watch if it came to them directly. I know I would.

Technology is your friend, sir. Try it.

Will You NOT Come To Vegas...

...if it costs you 3 percent more per room night?

The Nevada Assembly today by a 35-7 passed a room-tax increase of 3 percent for Washoe and Clark counties. The move is supposed to raise $233 million for the cash-strapped state.

Lots of Republicans voted in support and even Gov. Jim Gibbons, a read-my-lips kinda guy himself, has included the money in his budget. But some of the seven who voted against it think this will further doom the tourism industry. To wit, the AP reported:

"Our tourism-based economy here in Nevada is hemorrhaging jobs," said one of the GOP opponents, Assemblyman Ty Cobb of Reno. "I think it's going to hurt rather than help."

Look for the R-J editorial board tomorrow to praise the seven dissenters and predict doom. But I ask you, since so many of you readers here are tourists: Would you really not come here if your $100 room cost $3 more?

Just wondering. The State Senate still has to vote on this.

The Governor's Fake Podcast

I started to worry that podcasting was over when I got a press release today from Gov. Jim Gibbons' office announcing that he would start podcasting. The headline, in fact, read "Governor Starts Podcasts."

I had even intended to offer a little rare blogger praise for Gibbons, already ahead of the game as a renowned and enviously talented text-messager, because the governor had made it to the podosphere before that cutting edge news organization whose editorial page shills for him.

Except then I went to see what they were calling a podcast. And it turned out, they don't actually know what one is. My first clue ought to have been the last line of the press release: "The videos can be viewed by double-clicking on the “podcast” link or the message can be saved to a computer or handheld device by right-clicking and saving the video file to your computer or device." Hmm. No talk of RSS, subscribing or iTunes.

But I went to the web site and was encouraged by that purple icon that usually takes you to iTunes on just about every other website.

No can do. What happens when you click there is you get a 9-minute video that you have to save to your computer. I'm not going to get into the politics of his statements; others are better at that than me. It's certainly compelling viewing -- although very echoy -- if you care about the state's budget or even if you just want to see a highly unpopular politician get snarky in a too-cool-for-school black turtleneck. Maybe he got that style point from my recent look on NWiR, which was necessitated in my case by a particularly bloody shave?

But, Mr. Governor, what you've got here is not a podcast. It is a video file available for download. That's all. A podcast is something that people can subscribe to, receive via RSS feed and expect on a regular basis or whenever there's a new episode through iTunes, Zune or some other aggregator.

Mark my words, though: The Review-Journal and others will write tomorrow that the governor is podcasting. I'm trying so hard to educate this town, but some folks read what I say and do the opposite out of spite.

Update: The file downloaded as a Windows Media Player file that plays through my Real Player. When I tried to drag it into my iTunes, it actually didn't even work. So it looks like there's more to be done before I can even use it on my portable device. Thanks, Guv.