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Chapters: Political Party Strength in Nevada, Nevada State Capitol, Supreme Court of Nevada, Secretary of State of Nevada, Donald W. Reynolds Governor's Cup, Nevada Territorial Legislature, Nevada Attorney General, Nevada Revised Statutes, Nevada Commission on Ethics. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 37. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: The following table indicates the party of elected officials in the U.S. state of Nevada: The table also indicates the historical party composition in the: For years in which a presidential election was held, the table indicates which party's nominees received the state's electoral votes. The parties are as follows: Democratic (D), Republican (R), Silver (S), Silver/Democratic (S/D), and a tie or coalition within a group of elected officials. ...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=17994856 ... Read more

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The Cornerstone of Everyday Life in Our State!:Carole Marshintroduces students to public service, forms of democratic government,the legislative process, political parties and other concepts in a fun,interactive way.Students learn terms such as electoral votes, franchise,suffrage, commonwealth and bicameral.Includes how our state'sgovernment works, number of Nevada representatives in the House, cityand county government facts, what the census tells us about our state, ourstate's electoral votes and more.Kids will be encouraged to participatein student government, learn how and why to vote, and learn how tobecome a legislative page.Includes reproducible activities, bibliographyand index + a glossary from Absentee Ballot to Zoning.Free teacher'sguide gives specific suggestions & instructions on how to get maxeducational value from this book. ... Read more

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Nevada women whose lives have been ignored by earlier historians now come to life through the pages of Anita Watson's meticulously documented volume. Into Their Own is a tribute to the late Jean Ford, founder of the Nevada Women's History Project and the Nevada Women's Archive and a Nevada State Senator from 1978 to 1982. She died in 1998.

Watson, an independent historian, has gathered revealing details from Ford's archive, and then as expanded that information with her own research. She traces the achievements of women in the state for more than a century, from the 1850s until the 1960s, focusing on the public activities and roles of Nevada women in five major areas: club and civic betterment, temperance, suffrage, politics, and women working outside the home. Throughout the decades of Euro-American settlement in Nevada, women worked for pay outside the home. The shift from the domestic domain into the public sphere was gradual, sometimes tumultuous, and usually visible. Into Their Own documents that shift using photographic images, the words, and the reports of and about the women involved. As such, it provides a valuable resource for students, journalists, scholars, and future historians. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (1)

Exciting at the beginning
I read the 2nd Edition, Revised, of this book and the account of Nevada from 1860 to 1900 was exciting because Nevada was a weird and exciting place during those years.but I did not find the account of 20th century Nevada too interesting, even tho the book devotes full attention to the political history of the state, which I would ordinarily have thought would guarantee my finding this a good book.For a really good state history, read History of North Dakota, by Elwyn B. Robinson.I found that state history (I am not from either Nev. or ND) unputdownable. ... Read more

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Murder, the Mob, prostitution, drugs, innovative (butillegal) financial dealings, and the brilliant use of technology forill-gotten gain, all have been involved in the schemes of unscrupulouscasino owners, employees, and gamblers throughout the decades of legalgambling. Gaming in Nevada is more stringently controlled thananywhere else in the United States, and in License to Steal,investigative reporter and editor Jeff Burbank provides a lively andhighly readable case history account of some of the mostsignificant--and most fascinating--cases adjudicated by the NevadaGaming Control Board and Commission during a pivotal time for thegrowing gaming industry.

It is the responsibility of these two agencies to review the licensingof new and established casinos, investigate reports of suspectedwrongdoing, and punish those found guilty. In providing a balanced andobjective yet very entertaining account of these sometimes complexcases, Jeff Burbank uses legal documents, meeting transcripts, insiderinterviews, and contemporary newspaper reports. The book is enhancedby the author's lively and informative recent interviews with keyfigures in gaming regulation, past and present. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Feeling Lucky?
If you've ever put a quarter in a slot machine, you might have wondered if the game is fixed or if you actually have a chance of winning. You know that the house always has an edge, but you assume you have a chance of winning, otherwise you wouldn't play, right?

In Nevada, where the economy depends on gambling, there are two regulatory agencies, the Gaming Control Board and the Gaming Commission. In general, the Commission licenses casinos and the Board enforces the laws regarding gambling. Together they have a responsibility to make sure the public has confidence in the gambling system.

Jeff Burbank used to be a business reporter for the Las Vegas Sun and then the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the two major newspapers in Nevada. He investigated the casino industry from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s. During that time there were a number of landmark cases that the Commission and the Board dealt with. In License to Steal, Burbank describes seven of the most controversial and entertaining cases.

One story tells of the casino owner who had a Nazi memorabilia collection that he liked to exhibit to a few hundred close friends from time to time. He'd throw a party, sometimes on Hitler's birthday, to show off the collection. The parties were held in his casino, but not in public view. Word got around (apparently the collection was really something) and the Commission wondered if it shouldn't do something, since one of their mandates is to ensure the licensees (casino owners and operators) don't do anything to give Nevada a bad reputation. It was a touchy problem: a lot of people were offended, but what about freedom of speech? And wasn't it somewhat hypocritical to censure someone for offensive behavior in Las Vegas, which has a bit of a reputation for bad taste? In the end, they fined the casino owner. Even in Las Vegas, there are limits to bad taste.

Another story explained how a slot machine manufacturer had programmed its machines to make it look as if losing spins had just missed being winners - "near misses." The owners claimed that the machine wheels would spin randomly, as they are supposed to, but that once the spin had randomly been determined to be a loser, the wheels would re-adjust to show a near miss. This made it more exciting for the player, who would play more. But the regulators thought it might compromise the appearance of randomness. They decided the near miss feature would not be allowed, but when the company appealed on the grounds that retrofitting thousands of machines would be too expensive, the Commission cut them some slack. They still went bankrupt.

Then there's the story about a Gaming Control Board employee who found a way to rig the slot machines he tested so they would pay off when a certain sequences of coins was fed into them. Burbank tells how the employee also learned how to predict keno draws, using a computer program, and was trying out the system in Atlantic City, when casino security became suspicious. This was different from the slots - he hadn't rigged the keno game, he was using an algorithm that found an element of non-randomness in the draws and exploited it. I'm not even sure that qualifies as cheating according to Commission rules, but it certainly does by casino rules. The casinos can make up their own rules and anything that gives a player an edge over the casino is considered by the casino to be cheating.

Once Atlantic City authorities notified Las Vegas authorities, the employee's boss at the Board examined the employee's office computer and examined the records of payoffs the machines he had tested and found he and his friends and relatives had been hitting regular jackpots on the machines. This caused a real public relations headache for the Commission and for the casinos. Just the fact that an employee of the commission had been rigging slots for several years was bad enough. But then ABC-TV reported that the employee claimed that commissioners had abruptly stopped an investigation into rigged machines, and that they knew that the jackpot for the Megabucks statewide progressive slots could be triggered from the central computer center, and that several other companies were programming the slots to display illegal near misses. These were claims that should have been investigated immediately and vigorously, if only to maintain the appearance of an honest system. But they weren't.

License to Steal is fun to read as a collection of eccentric character sketches and descriptions of clever scams. But it's also disturbing. The Commission and Board members are all political appointees and the casino owners contribute to most of the political candidates. So when you drop a quarter in the slot and pull the lever (or more likely slip a $20 into the currency scanner and press the button), are you playing a fair game? Or would you rather not know the answer to that question? ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

well-produced oral history of important Nevada Governor
The intended audience for this book is historians rather than general readers. At the same time, a reader with knowledge of this period would probably find the recollections of Grant Sawyer fairly entertaining.

You might call Sawyer the last "wild west" governor of Nevada. He describes the animus and snobbery Easterners often expressed toward Nevadans in the 50's and 60's, when they looked down their noses at us as Godless heathens. Of course, today Nevada is just one other sunbelt boomlet.

During Sawyer's administration the gambling industry was regulated, cleaned up and otherwise transformed into a modern industry. The most famous flash point in this process was the revocation of Frank Sinatra's gambling license, and the book sheds some anecdotal light on that moment.

Interestingly enough, JFK tried to intervene on his buddy Frank's behalf in the months just before his assassination, but Sawyer rebuffed Kennedy. (Maybe JFK was afraid Frank's mobster friend Sam Giancana would cut off his supply of loose women?)

Sawyer credits his Administration with two key accomplishments. Against the cow county opposition of the Nevada Legislature, the Governor championed the cause of civil rights, and used the powers available to him to try to end discrimination against blacks. He also was one of the few Americans of his era to denounce the tyranny of J.Edgar Hoover and his enabling co-dependent, Robert Kennedy.

(Few were the politicians willing to accuse Hoover of "Nazi tactics" in public. Grant Sawyer did.)

Sawyer has nice things to say about most Nevada politicians of his era with the noted exceptions of James Santini and Paul Laxalt. The former he considered a self-serving opportunist; the latter, an opportunist blabbermouth. But then Grant Sawyer is not the first prominent Nevadan to note that Laxalt was constitutionally unable to keep a confidence. (My high school English teacher said the same thing.)

The only minor lunacy I encountered in the book was Sawyer's anger that Columbia River water was being "wasted" by allowing it to flow into the ocean. I guess he thought it should dry up somewhere around Kelso and thus wasn't very salmon-friendly.

Must have been a lot of these books purchased as gifts because you can pick a used one up on amazon for a pittance, and the history-minded out there should do just that! ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from State Legislatures, published by National Conference of State Legislatures on July 1, 1995. The length of the article is 4030 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

From the supplier: The Nevada Assembly faced a quandary in 1994 when election results showed that membership was evenly split 21-21 between GOP and Democratic members. After two months of wrangling and partisan maneuvering, observers were surprised when both sides managed to craft a power-sharing agreement which created two co-speakers of the Assembly. They were even more surprised by the cooperation and collegiality this agreement has brought to the Assembly.

Citation Details
Title: One House two speakers. (Nevada Assembly)(includes related articles)
Author: Jon Ralston
Publication: State Legislatures (Magazine/Journal)
Date: July 1, 1995
Publisher: National Conference of State Legislatures
Volume: v21Issue: n7Page: p22(5)

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

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Chapters: Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada, Clark County Water Reclamation District, Truckee-Carson Irrigation District, Big Bend Water District. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 17. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: General Overview The Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada (RTC) is both the transit authority and the transportation-planning agency for Southern Nevada. As the Las Vegas Valleys population continues to increase daily, so too does traffic congestion and the RTC identifies transportation challenges and explores and implements both short and long-term resolutions while simultaneously promoting sustainability, air quality improvement, enhanced mobility and increased quality of life in the region. RTC Goals: Implement and update transportation systems that improve air quality; Research and develop full-integrated transit options: Incorporate transit system maps into regular geographic details; Secure funding for expansion, operation and maintenance of systems and routes; And increase public awareness and support of the RTC system. The RTC also administers programs that encourage sustainability, such as Club Ride Commuter Services that promotes walking, biking, carpooling, vanpooling and taking transit to and from work. As a public agency, the RTC has a great responsibility to the community and therefore recruits and retains only the best and brightest people in the industry. RTC representatives are motivated to achieve excellence and strengthen the agencys community investment by striving to attain key objectives. RTC Transit In 1983, state legislation deemed the agency capable of owning and operating a public mass transit system that today carries more than 64 million riders per year and expands as needed with careful planning to bette...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=861253 ... Read more

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A lively study of a state whose history has been marked by some odd aspects not anticipated by the Founding Fathers. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

twisted and deeply flawed
Let's concede at the outset that Gilman Ostrander's 1966 history of Nevada is a well-documented and oft-times nuanced book.

Unfortunately, his own prejudices against Nevada (and the Great Compromise contained in the U.S. Constitution) leave him chattering nonsense on more than one occasion.

Ostrander seems to believe that the frontier economy of the American West (as counterposed to the earlier agrarian trans-Appalachian frontier) must be characterized as "capitalist authoritarianism." It sounds nicer than "fascism," I suppose, but after flinging such phrases Ostrander never follows up with any analysis to backup or explain such a charge.

Hard to believe a San Franciscan trained at UC Berkeley and Reed could be such a social prude on divorce and gambling. I think he was mad because he believed that Lake Tahoe was being destroyed by Nevada. But that Lake is still here, and to the extent it remains imperilled one might credit that danger as much to the Golden State as to the Silver State.

Whether or not the US Senate should have been created or not - Ostrander is agin' it - it's hard to hang an indictment of the Great Compromise on a cartoonish rereading of the history of Nevada as he has attempted in this book.

It's also a shame some of Ostrander's successors remember the extreme characterizations in this book while forgetting the nuanced hedging that Ostrander includes out of his inherent intellectual honesty - for example regarding the character of such men as H.M. Yerington and George Wingfield.

I don't think this book is so much bad as buffoonish, and I think Ostrander conducted his scholarly investigations with some integrity. Perhaps if he had refrained from carelessly tossing so many stinkbombs, he could have done some useful teaching.
... Read more