The House of Representatives on Dec. 8 honored lame-duck, one-term Nevada Congresswoman and permanent, lifetime UNLV politics professor (gubbimint jobs are like that) Dina Titus by enacting on a voice vote her bill to provide federal funding to schools and food banks to supply weekend meals to “low-income” children. Previously budgeted at $10 million per […]
When the Obama administration took over financially ailing General Motors instead of allowing the bankruptcy courts to reallocate the bloated firm’s assets to sharper entrepreneurs, more than one wag dubbed the resulting state-socialist enterprise “Government Motors.” Since then, GM has geared up production of pricey “hybrids” that supposedly cause less pollution — until one considers […]
Since few of us can actually wade through and comprehend a federal budget (or even a 2,000-page “health care law,” as written), most political decisions are based on “narratives” — histories of how we got here, reduced to a few easy-to-remember sentences. The problem is, if we get the “narrative” wrong, bad outcomes grow far […]
Barack Obama, who regularly attended a Muslim school and Muslim religious services with his mother’s Indonesian husband when he lived in that country as a youngster, told Indonesians in their own language last week as he re-visited that country with his thousands of courtiers — his $200-million-a-day royal entourage — that “Indonesia will always be […]
Do we live in a free country, or a police state? In a free country, police (to the extent they’re needed — more private property rights and less “public property” would vastly increase the ratio of private security guards) live under and must obey the same laws as the rest of us. In a police […]
As with motherhood and apple pie, both of the major parties in Washington pay lip service to America’s proud tradition of independent small business, historically the creator of the majority of American jobs. But just as the veil was lifted from the isolated, cocooned world in which our rulers live when a photo opportunity once […]
Here in Las Vegas nine days ago, President Obama, who ran on a promise of post-partisan “change,” made a campaign swing in support of 23-year U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, who has spent 40 of his 70 years on the public payroll. A passage in Mr. Obama’s Friday speech at UNLV seemed somewhat disconnected from most […]
“The heads of President Barack Obama’s national debt commission painted a gloomy picture Sunday as the United States struggles to get its spending under control,” The Associated Press reports. Republican Alan Simpson and Democrat Erskine Bowles told a meeting of the National Governors Association that everything needs to be considered — closing down the federal […]
As with many Constitutional provisions, “recess appointments” have come to be used in ways the founders didn’t intend. Presidents now use recess appointments to get a desired appointee into office — at least for a time — over the objections of recalcitrant legislators, especially when the Senate is in the hands of the opposition party. […]
In the past, if anyone asked whether the folks in charge in the nation’s capital were certifiable lunatics, or whether policy decisions were being made by superannuated college kids with no experience out in the real world, who apparently stayed up too late last night, smoking too much dope and listening to too much heavy […]