Mini-Muth’s Truths: November 18, 2010

John Ensign told POLITICO that he plans to run for a third term in 2012. As Steve Tetreault noted in the LVRJ, back in May Ensign said “he would not decide on re-election until early next year,” but now he says he’s been planning to run again “for a long time.”

Which is a polite way of saying he lied back in May.

And again, let us not forget that Ensign ran on a platform of limiting U.S. senators to two terms when he originally ran for Congress back in 1994, and actually voted for a bill to amend the Constitution to limit senators to two six-year terms.

Maybe Ensign had his fingers crossed behind his back when he made that term-limit pledge, just like he apparently did when he took his marriage vows.

The bones keep popping out of the Angle campaign’s closet now that the election is over. The latest bizarre story comes from an Angle insider who says rumors are flying about campaign finance mismanagement, especially from the “Island of Misfit Toys” southern Nevada operation.

According to a source, who wishes to remain anonymous for obvious reasons, says, envelopes containing donations were taken into a private office and opened behind closed doors. And it’s suspected that only checks were then forwarded to the Reno office for deposit, no cash.

Sounds like that skimming scene from the movie “Casino.”

As I wrote here the other day, there’s an old saying in Washington that “personnel is policy” and that Gov.-elect Sandoval hasn’t appointed any readily identifiable conservatives to his administration yet is cause for at least little bit of concern.

As a contrast, it was announced Wednesday that Florida Gov.-elect Rick Scott appointed Michael Cannon, the Cato Institute’s Director of Health Policy Studies, to his Health and Human Services Transition Team.

The Cato Institute, for those not familiar, is a rock-solid free-market, libertarian-leaning think tank in Washington, DC. Cannon’s appointment sends an unmistakable signal that Scott is dead serious about changing the status quo at HHS, while Sandoval’s reappointment of current Nevada HHS director last week signals it’ll be business as usual.

To be fair, Sandoval’s appointments and re-appointments have been of people generally considered knowledgeable and competent. But if you really want to shake up and/or re-invent government without raising taxes, you need to get people on board who share that philosophical belief system and objective.