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“Traveling is never a matter of money, but of courage.”—Paulo Coelho Sometimes it’s financial security that holds us back, other times it’s emotional security, but it takes courage to step outside your front door and head out into the world. … Continue reading →

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I am thrilled to have been asked to mentor on the celebrated Nevada SCBWI Mentor Program this year. I was part of the program as a mentee back in 2010/2011. It's pretty special to be asked back and to work with 2-3 mentees myself. The program was probably the one thing I did that really set my career on it's way. The friends and contacts I made are still strong and very much part of my life. Ellen Hopkins and Suzanne Morgan Williams did a marvellous job starting this program and it's as great as ever! Check out the line up of mentors for yourself. Maybe I will see you there? Applications are open ... spaces are limited. What are you waiting for?
http://nevada.scbwi.org/nevada-scbwi-mentor-program/

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YOU DID IT! THANK YOU! Maggie’s 31-Day Audiobook Crowdfunding Campaign has ended and we’re Over the Moon! You soared over the $3,000 goal and so the story will be narrated and produced by the great Tavia Gilbert. We can’t wait … Continue reading →

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Young vaulters are rising to new heights every day at Saddleback Pole Vaulting Club in Mission Viejo, California. They’ll get an added boost with a Mean Green Skypole like Maggie used to vault over the moon! Saddleback Coach Dan Cassidy … Continue reading →

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POLE-VAULTERS AND COACHES! GILL ATHLETICS is the Grand Prize Sponsor for the ongoing Maggie Vaults Over the Moon Audiobook Crowdfunding Campaign. The Grand Prize includes a Mean Green Skypole, a 15-foot Skypole Pole Bag, and a roll of the new … Continue reading →

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Just as sure as temperatures will skyrocket on the Kansas prairie this summer, vaulters will leap to new heights at Tailwind Pole Vault Club Summer Camps. In fact, tiny Jamestown, Kansas should change its name to PR City, because more … Continue reading →

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JAMESTOWN, Kansas – Tailwind Pole Vault Club has pledged a 2-Day Summer Camp, valued at $250, for a vault fan who contributes $225 to Maggie’s Audiobook Campaign! Tailwind Camps (with meals and snacks) will be held on multiple dates from … Continue reading →

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RENO, Nevada – Raise the Bar Pole Vault Club has pledged a 3-Day Summer Camp, valued at $275, for a vault fan who contributes $250 to Maggie’s Audiobook Campaign! The camp will be held June 24-26 in Reno. The campaign … Continue reading →

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By Elvin Lim

The Republican establishment is stepping up its attacks against Gingrich. It was coordinated today from a variety of quarters: Bob Dole, Peter Wehner, Tom Delay, William Buckley Jr., and Anne Coulter.

The very reason why Gingrich appeals to primary voters is the reason why he will not do well with independents voters in the fall. (And that’s an assessment coming from Anne Coulter.) Gingrich has fire, but placed alongside No Drama Obama, he’s going to look like a very unlikeable candidate. There’s hardly anyone who has worked closely with the former Speaker who has endorsed him — which tells us a lot about the guy. In the era of televisual politics, a bitter old man is not going to beat a likeable (or even less competent, if that is what Obama is) younger man. The Establishment from either party talks the talk of the virtue of debates, grassroots activism and decision-making, but in the end they care more about winning and nominating the most electable candidate than a tip of the hat to primary voters and “democracy.”

The fact that a coordinated strategy against Gingrich is happening within party ranks conveniently on the eve of the last debate before the Florida primary is particularly striking given that Gingrich doesn’t really have a fall back plan beyond Florida. Romney took a landslide victory in Nevada, the next state up in the primary calendar, back in 2008, so it is difficult to imagine that Gingrich would be able to pull an upset there, or in Arizona or Michigan on February 28.

But everything changes if Gingrich wins in Florida. Then the momentum will keep him going until Super Tuesday on March 6 when the South speaks and Gingrich will rise; and civil war will erupt in the Republican party. The Establishment will do everything to thwart him there, and that is why they are taking no chances and are already making headway. Mitt Romney’s superior debate performance tonight was also a reflection of a campaign in full knowledge that the Florida firewall must not fall.

A few days after the President’s State of the Union address, hardly anyone is talking about it because Obama’s fate in November will depend more on forces he cannot control than on anything he can do. Every single poll out there placing Gingrich and Obama in a head-to-head match gives the election to Obama — by a 12 point spread on average. If the Republican primary electorate delivers Gingrich to Obama, even Bob Dole and William Buckley think it’s going to be four more years.

Elvin Lim is Associate Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-Intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate wit

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By Peter J. Henning

A report filed by the Special Counsel to the Senate Select Committee on Ethics accuses former Nevada Senator John Ensign of a number of violations related to the end of an affair he had with the wife of a top aide who was also a long-time friend of his family. The aide, Douglas Hampton, was indicted on charges of violating the federal conflict of interest rules this past March, and there is a good chance Mr. Ensign will also be targeted by federal prosecutors.

Much like his former Senate colleague John Edwards is a target of an investigation based on payments to a former mistress, as I discussed previously, Mr. Ensign’s problem was not so much the affair but how he tried to keep it quiet through a secret pay-off. After ending his intimate relationship with Cindy Hampton, who worked as treasurer of his campaign committee, Mr. Ensign terminated both Hamptons and arranged for them to receive $96,000 from a trust fund controlled by his parents. How that payment should be characterized will be crucial in determining whether the former senator will be indicted by prosecutors from the Public Integrity Section of the Department of Justice, who have been investigating him for over a year.

The Special Counsel’s report reads almost like a prosecution memorandum, setting out the facts of the relationship between Mr. Ensign and the Hamptons, and offering assessments of whether his conduct constituted a violation of federal criminal laws. The former senator does not appear to have set out to purposely violate federal law, but his efforts to keep the affair quiet by placating the Hamptons with money and work for Mr. Hampton may well have led to Mr. Ensign to commit criminal acts.

The charges against Mr. Hampton involve alleged violations of 18 U.S.C. § 207(e)(2), which makes it a crime when a highly-paid member of a senator’s staff within 1 year of leaving the position “knowingly makes, with the intent to influence, any communication to or appearance before any senator or any officer or employee of the Senate, on behalf of any other person” in which the former staffer seeks action by a senator or staff member. Mr. Hampton had numerous contacts with Mr. Ensign, who assisted him by contacting government officials on behalf of Mr. Hampton’s clients.

While Mr. Ensign might try to plead ignorance of what Mr. Hampton was doing, the Special Counsel’s Report goes into great detail about how the former senator pressured companies to hire his former aide, all part of an effort to keep Mr. Hampton from speaking out about the affair with his wife. There does not appear to be much “plausible deniability” here for Mr. Ensign, so proving his knowledge and intent to provide assistance to Mr. Hampton would not appear to be difficult. In addition, a charge of conspiracy is quite possible, based on the interactions of Mr. Ensign and Mr. Hampton.

A more difficult issue, and one with much greater potential ramifications, is characterizing the $96,000 payment to the Hamptons after being terminated from their jobs with the Senate office and campaign. The money came from an Ensign family trust controlled by t

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By Sharon Zukin

Taking a position on Las Vegas is like taking an option on a company’s stock: if you like the place, you’re betting that free markets, human power over nature and boundless shopping opportunities will continue to rule the world.  If you don’t like it, you’re a killjoy…or a sociologist.

I made my first trip to Las Vegas in early November when the mood in America was sour.  Political candidates’ billboards shouted “Not the Incumbent!” and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was locked in a nasty battle for re-election against a Tea Party candidate, Sharron Angle.  I was prepared to show East Coast tolerance toward libertarians and to be agnostic about the casinos’ glitz and raunch, but I wasn’t prepared for the gigantic scale of the hotels, the almost total absence of a place to stroll along the Strip and the sense that there was no city—no urban “there”–there.

I had expected to find dark romance.  What I found was mega-hotels with 3,000 to 4,000 rooms dominating the skyline, multi-story parking garages for hotel guests and staff taking up a large portion of the “backstage” land and a growing reliance on shopping and dining to compensate for declining gaming revenues.

It was all tawdrier than I had imagined.  I came looking for James Bond but found suburbia.

Locals told me that when the Forum Shops at the Caesars Palace Hotel and Casino opened in 1992, it was the first high-end shopping center on the Strip and attracted residents as well as tourists.  It offers the same luxury brands as any upscale shopping mall, from Gucci and Tumi to 7 for All Mankind and my own New York favorite Scoop (eek!).  Until now it hasn’t had much competition, but since the opening of City Center down the Strip in 2009 the Forum looks even less exclusive.

In contrast to the weird appropriations from imagined landscapes that other newish hotels feature—the imagined Venice of the Bellagio, underscaled Eiffel Tower of the Paris Las Vegas and cockeyed iconic structures of New York New York—City Center offers cutting-edge design by some of the best contemporary architects, from Daniel Libeskind and Rafael Viῆoly to Kohn Pedersen Fox.  Libeskind’s jagged edges are the “point man” for the project as a whole, fronting the Strip and startling anyone who approaches City Center from the kitsch on either side.

More than a work of public art, though, City Center is a private-sector New Deal for Nevadans.  Promoted as a “center of gravity” for a city that has none, this giant construction project contains two luxury hotels (one without a casino, how exclusive is that?), office towers and shopping mall; it cost about $12 billion to build.  When it ran over budget and risked being shut down, Senator Reid stepped in to defend it, saving, it is said, 22,000 jobs.  Typical for all such projects, City Center benefits from large tax abatements from the state.

Though the critic Paul Goldberger has praised the quality of most of City Center’s buildings and its grand interior spaces, domesticating Libeskind’s wild imagination in a shopping center emphasizes how Las Vegas tends to make everything into an accessory of capital accumulation.  More than New York or London or Paris, Vegas is a city shaped by and for economic speculation.  Gambling

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I was at the Nevada Library Association conference this week. I gave two talks, one was a fairly standard talk about things you can do with very little money and staffing to beef up your library. The other was a topic I’ve been enjoying more lately, about the ethics of Library 2.0. Slides and notes and links are here. Aaron was talking recently about this slightly on Walking Paper… now that libraries have access to what we call “2.0 tools” how can we reign in some of the playtime and help direct people towards the most useful and/or appropriate uses of new stuff?

I showed off a bunch of Nevada libraries that were using interesting tools. By and large the larger libraries had integrated some interesting cloud-based tools to help deliver content on their websites. Other smaller libraries were hit or miss, some had interestingly integrated technology, others had a blog that hadn’t been updated in a year and a half. There is a great article in this month’s Computers in Libraries [note to infotoday staff: put this stuff online!] about what public libraries really are and are not using as far as technology generally [old school and new school tools]. The results are sort of what you’d think. Libraries in bigger population zones are using tech a lot — online catalogs, email contact form and website are standard — whereas small libraries are less likely to be using this. Interestingly, because of the population skew of urban vs. rural environments most people using libraries have access to OPACs and library websites, while only 80-ish% of libraries [by number] actually have these things.

It’s been making me think, this week, about what to do about the trailing 20%. The Nevada Library Association is smaller than the Vermont Library Association, it was great to get to hang around wiht some fellow traveler librarians.

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Top notch casinos, over the top hotels, world class restaurants, mesmerizing sights and vibrant nightlife awaits you in Nevada. Home to the gambling capital of the world, Nevada is an experience of a lifetime. Besides all these sights, attractions and activities, Nevada is also the home to some of the wackiest laws in the world. Sit back and enjoy these dumb laws that were supposed to protect its citizens but unfortunately turned hilarious.

1. In no matter how rich you are, please don’t ride you camel on the high way, unless you want to be jailed.
2. Did someone shot you do on your property! In Nevada you can hang that person because it is 100% legal! All dog shooters beware!
3. In Nevada do go out without you mask as it its illegal to walk the streets without wearing a mask.
4. In Nevada you can be jailed for buying drinks for more than three people.

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So if you read the papers at all, you know that even though things are tough, people use libraries like crazy. That said, libraries are getting funding cuts, despite, in many cases, increased use. This sucks. One of the things about living in Vermont is that there’s not that much to even trim from our budgets, but the state library (and the newish state librarian whose job I do not envy at all) closed one of Vermont’s very few regional libraries to the public and libraries who want to borrow materials now have to make appointments. This is at a time when library circulation in the state is up amost six percent and local tax support is up five percent. In other state library news

• Ohio’s libraries are looking at a potential 50% funding cut. The Shuttered Library blog has been set up to track this issue.
• The State Library of Michigan (almong with other Michigan state government offices) is implementing unpaid furlough days on Fridays through the summer.
• Pennsylvania will consider themselves lucky if they wind up with level funding after defeating a bill that proposed 50% cuts.
• Nevada State Library is cutting hours, from being open to the public 8-5 to being open 10-2.

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