A controversial study on taxes will not be completed, because the top-tier research company hired to complete it “dropped the ball,” state Sen. Steven Horsford, D-Las Vegas, said today.

Moody’s Analytics missed deadlines in June and July to have two parts of a study on Nevada’s quality of life and tax structure finished. The company stopped returning phone calls from Legislative staffers, Horsford said, until a notice of default was sent last week.

After that, the two sides negotiated the completion of a final Nevada Vision Stakeholders Group report — which focused on the state’s quality of life, diversifying the economy, and improving education. (That report was supposed to be complete in June, but will now be turned in by September.) But a second critical part of Moody’s work, focused on the state’s tax structure, will not be finished, Horsford said.

“Unfortunately, they disappointed all of us by not performing,” said Horsford, who pushed for a quality of life study during the 2009 Legislature. He included the tax portion at the insistence of state Senate Minority Leader Bill Raggio, R-Reno. (Raggio couldn’t immediately be reached for comment on the news.)

Horsford said the company will not be paid it’s agreed-upon $253,000 fee, instead receiving less than $100,000 for the Vision Stakeholder’s portion only.

As for the information that could have been gleaned from the tax portion of the study, Horsford said lawmakers will have to rely on a series of older reports that looked at revenue collections in Nevada. The most recent major study was conducted in 2002, by a task force on tax policy that recommended creation of a business gross receipts tax. That proposal died in the 2003 Legislature, despite the backing of then-Gov. Kenny Guinn.

But previous studies of Nevada’s tax system have also concluded the state relies too heavily on volatile sales and gambling taxes, which have fallen markedly in the recession.

Horsford said senior management of Moody’s was not aware that the company had failed to meet its deadlines on the Nevada contract. “We’re shocked and disappointed,” said Horsford. “Senior management of Moody’s, they dropped the ball.”

The Nevada Vision Stakeholders Group was criticized in May, when a draft report released by Moody’s said Nevada should raise taxes. But the group later rejected that preliminary report, saying it failed to reflect the work of its members. Horsford said the vision group was not charged with examining state revenue, but rather quality of life issues.

Horsford said he’s not worried about criticism for the failure to produce a tax report. “Unfortunately, there were people criticizing this process before it began,” he said. But since Moody’s will receive fees only for the work it actually completed, taxpayers aren’t put the worse, he said.

Elizabeth Crum, editor of the Nevada News Bureau and a conservative blogger, has been tapped by National Review Online as part of the magazine’s coverage of the 2010 elections. Crum will be NRO’s Nevada correspondent, providing updates on the nation’s most-watched contest, pitting U.S. Sen. Harry Reid against former Assemblywoman Sharron Angle.

You can check out overall coverage here (right now, it consists of dispatches from Nevada, Colorado and Florida, but more states will be added) or you can skip right to stories about our own Nevada here. I’ve also added the NRO’s Nevada page to my blogroll on the SlashPolitics homepage.

Editor’s note: This column appears in this week’s Las Vegas CityLife.

“I don’t wear an R on my hat for Republican, and I don’t wear a D for Democrat. I wear a P, for people.”

– Former Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn

Since his tragic and untimely death July 22, Gov. Kenny Guinn has been lauded as a man of great compassion, great determination, great humility and great integrity.

Every word of it is true.

I recall this newspaper, and this writer, greeted Guinn’s election in 1998 with comic disdain. “Oh, my God! They elected Kenny,” we screamed on our cover, borrowing from South Park. “Those bastards!”

Over the next eight years, however, Guinn would go on to win us over, proving that when he said he hewed to no party label, he was serious. For this, he earned our respect, and that of the entire state. We came to know a man who truly did care about Nevada and its most valuable vulnerable citizens, and who had the courage to stand up on their behalf.

One of the more curious pejoratives leveled at Guinn after his 2003 call for a gross-receipts tax in Nevada was RINO, for “Republican In Name Only.” Implicit in the charge is the idea that no true Republican would ever endorse a tax increase of any kind, even if the object was to fund Nevada’s schools to a level considerably less than the national average.

But whatever you call Guinn, you can’t look at his legacy as anything other than an unqualified success. He created the Millennium Scholarship, which has enabled more than 60,000 Nevada students to get a college education. A diploma was what enabled Guinn to succeed, and he wanted to ensure that every child in Nevada had the same opportunity. What could be more Republican than that?

Guinn believed in the role of government to help people, especially schoolchildren and senior citizens. And it’s only in the last 40 years or so that his fellow Republicans would recoil from that idea. Guinn didn’t, and he governed like it.

It was not Guinn who left the Republicans, but modern-day Republicans — nihilists, really, using the cloak of a once-responsible party to conceal an irrational hatred of government — who left Guinn. He didn’t share their philosophy; doubtless, he probably didn’t even understand it. But Nevada benefited all the more because he didn’t.

Guinn was a throwback to a less partisan time, when Republicans and Democrats could argue with respect, and in the end find enough common ground to forge a compromise that served the interests of the people. The result may not have pleased the ideologically pure on either side, but it recognized that governing is often about finding the pragmatic balance of the possible.

Modern Republicans eschew all taxes, regardless of the benefits. They vote against unemployment benefits in hard times, even as real people (their constituents!) suffer. They pursue winning and holding office as an end in itself, instead of using that office to do the good and necessary things to serve the people who put them there.

Guinn was not like that, and we all are the better for it. More than one person has remarked since his death how badly we need more — not fewer — people such as Guinn. In the end, it was he who embodied what it means to be a real Republican, and his detractors who were the imposters. But more than that, Guinn was a statesman. For that, he’ll be missed most of all.

Funeral services for former Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn will be held at 10 a.m. today at St. Joseph Husband of Mary Catholic Church, 7260 W. Sahara Ave. They are open to the public. Guinn died on Thursday at age 73 after falling while cleaning pine needles from the roof of his Las Vegas home.

While Brian Sandoval, Jim Gibbons and Mike Montandon were fighting out the GOP primary, Rory Reid was quietly and efficiently raising money. And now we see to what use it will be put: Reid has a new ad that slams Sandoval on the subject of education, which Reid clearly thinks is an issue that plays to his advantage.

The ad is clearly designed to do what previous ads have not, which is to force Sandoval to engage with Reid. Up until now, Sandoval has been raising money of his own, but generally ignoring Reid except when we pesky members of the press call. But this ad could change all that.

A caveat: Sandoval has not “cut” education, or done anything else to it, for that matter, since he’s not in office. Reid is speaking here about the potential for problems should Sandoval get elected, should he fully implement his short-term deficit reduction plan, should teachers refuse the requested 4 percent pay cuts and thus leave officials will no choice but to do layoffs, and should he stick to his no-new-taxes pledge and thus be forced to balance a budget with a gaping $3 billion hole. In other words, there are a fair number of assumptions behind it.

It also betrays the frustration and even a slight hint of desperation exhibited by the Reid camp, which is clearly annoyed at being ignored by Sandoval, who was the front-runner the moment he entered the race and has remained so, although Reid has closed the gap sightly, according to the most recent Review-Journal/8NewsNow poll.

On the other hand, education is a key issue, not only for parents, but for the economic development of the state. A candidate who is callous toward education — as Sandoval is portrayed in this ad — is a candidate jeopardizing the state’s future, precisely the impression Reid seeks to leave with viewers.

Sharron Angle is very sorry for calling the unemployed “spoiled” by virtue of the fact they receive unemployment insurance compensation checks. So says the Review-Journal today, after Angle actually showed up for an editorial board meeting at the newspaper. The relevant line:

As for Angle calling the unemployed spoiled, she said, “It was a mistake. I apologized for it.”

Really? If it was a mistake, why then did Angle deny she ever said any such thing when she found herself in a much tougher forum, Face to Face with Jon Ralston? You’ll recall that in late June, Angle said on that program she’d never called the unemployed themselves spoiled, but rather blamed the system for “spoiling” them with lavish checks.

So why cop to the original charge now? Perhaps it was the well-known, laser-like interrogation of the editorial board that finally broke her?

At the very least, Angle stuck to her previous position that unemployment doesn’t help the jobless.

“I think we need to be very, very careful that we’re not incentivizing instead of providing safety nets for folks,” Angle said of the unemployment benefits.

We’re not “incentivizing” … what, exactly? All the exotic cruises, lengthy European vacations or African safaris that Nevada’s unemployed are taking on their staggering $300-per-week-average unemployment checks? Lucky for us, this is a problem only in the dark corners of Angle’s mind, not in the real world.

Angle also refused to back down from her mistaken characterization of opponent Harry Reid’s assistance to CityCenter as a “bailout,” although the project got no federal funds. (Reid did call banks on the company’s behalf, urging them to meet with MGM Resorts International  officials to discuss loans so the project could complete construction.)

“I still believe that’s simply what it is,” Angle said, defending her bailout description. “CityCenter is one of those businesses considered by the senator as too big to fail.”

Well, Angle might believe that unemployment benefits spoil jobless workers, offshore oil regulations lead to spills, Social Security is welfare, or the sun revolves around the Earth, but it doesn’t make it so. And yes, Reid has said repeatedly that had CityCenter failed, the impact on Las Vegas would have been devastating.

But here’s something interesting: According to Angle, CityCenter did not create any jobs!

Angle said no private business should get special treatment from the government. She noted that neither CityCenter’s opening nor the original $787 billion stimulus program has improved Nevada’s or the nation’s jobless situation, and unemployment has skyrocketed during the past two years.

So, nobody’s working at CityCenter? And nobody was hired to fill the jobs at other casinos when workers left to take jobs at CityCenter? MGM Resorts International is the state’s largest private employer, but isn’t it asking too much for the company to single-handedly solve the state’s unemployment problem, especially when Angle claims she’d have done nothing to help the company?

It’s little wonder Angle scurries off like a frightened rabbit when reporters approach her to ask questions.

Editor’s note: This post has been edited from its original version to correct an error.

By now, you’ve heard that U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn, one of our own John Ensign’s former roommates at the churchy C Street house in Washington, D.C., has turned over a number of e-mails to Justice Department investigators probing the fallout from Ensign’s affair with a staffer, without pain of subpoena. The Review-Journal reports today that Coburn wants to be helpful.

“Dr. Coburn has always said he will gladly cooperate with any official inquiry into the matter as he is doing now,” said Coburn spokesman John Hart. (Coburn is an ob/gyn.)

But that’s simply not true. In fact, Coburn said quite the opposite in July 2009, when he announced he would invoke various privileges (doctor-patient, priest-penitent) to avoid testifying about the events that transpired in Ensign’s affair, and Coburn’s own role in its aftermath.

“I was counseling him as a physician and as an ordained deacon,” Coburn said in a UPI interview. “That is privileged communication that I will never reveal to anybody. Not to the [Senate] Ethics Committee, not to a court of law, not to anybody.”

So, Hart is either unaware of his boss’s previous statements on the issue, which is bad, or he lied outright to the Review-Journal (which noted the contradiction in its story today), which is worse.

Of course, this isn’t the first time Coburn has violated his alleged privileges. He also spoke with the New York Times about the Ensign matter.

Coburn was heavily involved in the Ensign affair. According to Doug Hampton, Ensign’s former best friend and top staffer, as well as the husband of Ensign’s mistress, Coburn was present at the C Street house when Hampton confronted Ensign about the affair. Coburn also was allegedly a go-between, trying to arrange a money settlement between Ensign and Hampton that would have resolved the affair.

At the conclusion of the R-J’s story, however, Coburn denies being involved in any negotiations between Hampton and Ensign. But given that Coburn’s statements have been inconsistent and Hampton’s have always checked out, it’s likely true that Coburn did try to help the two men strike a deal.