From Wikipedia:
Sharron Elaine Angle (born July 26, 1949) is an American politician who served as a Republican member of the Nevada Assembly from 1999 to 2005. She is the 2010 Republican nominee for the United States Senate seat in Nevada held by the current Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid.
Personal life
Angle was born in Klamath Falls, Oregon but moved to Reno, Nevada when she was 3 years old. Her father is a Navy veteran of World War II and served in the Navy Reserve during the Korean War. Angle attended public school in Reno and later obtained a BA in Fine Arts from the University of Nevada. During her senior year of college in 1970, Angle married her husband Ted, with whom she has two children and ten grandchildren. After graduating from college, Angle, a Southern Baptist Christian,worked as a substitute teacher for 25 years, ran a small Christian school for two years, and taught for five years at Western Nevada Community College.
Political career
Nevada Assembly
In 1998, Angle won election to the State Assembly. She served in the Assembly until 2005. During her time in the 42-member assembly, she voted "no" so frequently on matters of wide consensus that votes were often called as "41-to-Angle".
In 2003, Angle hired John Eastman of The Claremont Institute, to fight the Supreme Court decision when then Governor Kenny Guinn sued the Legislature to nullify the state constitution and allow a simple majority of the legislature to pass an $836 million tax increase in Angle v Guinn.
Angle used her personal funds to defend the constitutional two-thirds vote requirement to raise taxes. Angle with Eastman took this case to Federal District Court in Nevada which referred it to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and finally to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Legislature subsequently passed the $836 million tax increase.Angle ultimately prevailed. In 2006, the state supreme court reversed its 2003 decision and restored the Nevada Constitution's two-thirds vote provision.
In 2003, Angle attempted to arrange a trip to an Ensenada, Baja California prison to assess a drug treatment program implemented there and also in New Mexico called "Second Chance Program" which licensed its materials from Criminon, a program for rehabilitating prisoners using methods developed by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard."Angle sponsored legislation aimed at placing this program in certain women's prisons in Nevada.
In 2005, Angle was the sole vote against a bill that split the property tax abatement by applying a 3% rate to residential and 8% rate to commercial property. Angle claims that she voted no because the Nevada Constitution states that taxation must be uniform and equal and so could not vote against her oath of office to which she swore to "uphold and defend the Constitution".
2006 run for U.S. Congress
On August 15, 2006 Angle narrowly lost the primary for U.S. Congress in Nevada's 2nd congressional district which was vacated by Rep. Jim Gibbons. Nevada Secretary of State Dean Heller received 24,781 votes to Angle's 24,353. Gibbons' wife Dawn, a former State Assemblywoman herself, finished with 17,328 votes.
On August 25, Angle called for a new primary election because of cases in Washoe County, where Angle was the strongest. On September 1, the Carson District Judge denied Angle's appeal for a new election.
2010 run for U.S. Senate
On April 15, 2010 Angle received an endorsement for the U.S. Senate race from the Tea Party Express at a rally in the nation's capital. The next day, she received an endorsement from conservative talk radio personality Mark Levin.
The Washington Post reported on May 28 that Angle was in a "statistical dead heat" with her opponent, Sue Lowden citing a poll conducted by Mason-Dixon Polling & Research Inc. Using the same poll data, the Las Vegas Review-Journal speculated that Lowden would win 42 percent of the vote over Reid's 39 percent, and that Reid would win 42 percent of the vote over Angle's 39 percent with a margin of error "plus or minus 4 percentage points".
On June 6, the Las Vegas Review Journal reported that according to a new Mason-Dixon poll, Angle had "shot into a clear lead in the U.S. Senate Republican Primary" and predicted that she would win the nomination with 32% of the vote and would defeat Harry Reid 44% to 41%.
Angle went on to win the Republican nomination. A June 9, 2010, Rasmussen Reports post-primary poll showed Angle leading incumbent Senator Harry Reid by a margin of 50% to 39%.
Angle has been endorsed by many conservative individuals and organizations, including the Club for Growth, the Tea Party Express, Joe the Plumber, and Phyllis Schlafly of the Eagle Forum. A July 2010 poll showed Senator Reid leading Angle by 7 points.
Angle has been criticized for largely avoiding answering questions from the local press.
Scientology issue
During the primary campaign, Lowden took out a political ad criticizing Angle's alleged associations with Scientology and claiming Angle "pushed a bill favored by the Church of Scientology". Although the Las Vegas Review-Journal said that "no bill was ever introduced", the Las Vegas Sun noted that Angle's website credited her with a successful bill against psychotropic drugs in schools, a position also supported by Scientologists, and that Angle had accompanied celebrity Scientologists Jenna Elfman and Kelly Preston to promote the bill in the U.S. Senate. Angle herself promoted a similar bill in the Nevada Assembly, but was not successful.
During a KVBC-hosted debate on Face to Face with Jon Ralston, Angle was asked by Ralston "about recent whispers that an Angle legislative proposal to explore a program of massages and sweat-boxes for Nevada prisons was a strange foray into Scientology", a reference to her 2003 proposal to study the program implemented in Mexico and New Mexico. Angle responded, "This program had a recidivism rate of less than 10 percent. They aren’t massages. ... it was more of a karate chop. The sauna was a sweat box. When you’re in there with 30 guys, it’s not exactly a sauna."
Angle has repeatedly "refuted the rumor that she’s a Scientologist", stating that the controversy had been "largely distorted". Regarding these claims relating to Scientology, Angle told the Las Vegas Review-Journal, "The way to ruin a conservative is to pass them off as part of the radical fringe. They always try to marginalize me."
Positions
Education
Angle believes that the U.S. Department of Education should be eliminated, citing that the local approach had long yielded greater academic results, before the Department of Education was created in 1979. She claims the Department of Education is "unconstitutional" and should not be involved in dictating educational standards from such a distant location as Washington, D.C. She has also claimed, "The best education is the education that is controlled closest to the local level as possible."
United Nations
Angle believes in United States withdrawal from the United Nations, saying it is a bastion of liberal ideology and "the umpire on fraudulent science such as global warming."
Social policy
Angle supports the Federal Marriage Amendment to ban same-sex marriage. She believes that single-income households are the best way to raise a family.
Angle is pro-life and opposes abortion, including in cases of rape or incest.
In a June 2010 radio interview, broadcast statewide in Nevada, Angle stated that she had counseled young girls in "very at risk, difficult pregnancies" to consider other alternatives, by which they had been able to make "a lemon situation into lemonade".
Health care
Angle favors the gradual phasing out of Medicare and Social Security, and moving towards privatization, citing their current insolvency.
She has voted against water fluoridation of drinking water.
Financial reform
Angle favors a comprehensive audit of the Federal Reserve, eliminating the complete Internal Revenue Service code and abolishing Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.
Drugs
Angle has stated that she opposes legalizing marijuana and has stated that she feels the same about alcohol. When her spokesman was asked to clarify Angle's statement he responded that Angle doesn’t want to bring back Prohibition. “Sharron doesn’t want to make alcohol illegal,” he said, noting that Angle has never introduced legislation along those lines, and even voted against taxes on booze. “Alcohol is a legal substance, and adults can choose to imbibe,” Stacy said.
Global warming
Angle does not believe in anthropogenic global warming. "I'm a clean-air proponent," Angle stated. "I don't, however, buy into the whole man-caused global warming, man-caused climate change mantra of the left. I believe that there's not sound science to back that up."
Energy policy
As a long-term policy, Angle believes America must expand its own domestic energy supplies. She would legislate to repeal regulations that prohibit offshore drilling, drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and development of American-owned petroleum resources. In the Nevada State Legislature, she led efforts to reduce Nevada's high gas tax, which was the second highest in the nation. She would also have supported the three coal-fired plants in Ely.
After President Barack Obama secured agreement by BP to commit $20 billion to compensate victims of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Angle denounced the arrangement, calling it a "slush fund". When she was criticized for her comment, however, she retracted the term "slush fund" and said that BP should pay for the consequences of the spill.
She has long favored Yucca Mountain as a profitable center for reprocessing, not a nuclear landfill and dumping ground. In 2005, she voted for a resolution rejecting Yucca Mountain as a dead-end nuclear dump.
Second Amendment and rights to form a militia
Angle is quoted as saying: "What is a little bit disconcerting and concerning is the inability for sporting goods stores to keep ammunition in stock ... That tells me the nation is arming. What are they arming for if it isn't that they are so distrustful of their government? They're afraid they'll have to fight for their liberty in more Second Amendment kinds of ways?" and "That's why I look at this as almost an imperative. If we don't win at the ballot box, what will be the next step?"
Asked to comment on the issue, Angle spokesman Jerry Stacy said via email: "Sharron Angle does not advocate a revolution. Her goal is to go to Washington with other like-minded elected officials who understand the proper role of the federal government as already defined by our Constitution
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