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 […]
The common wisdom seems to be that four-term incumbent U.S. Sen. Harry Reid snatched a fifth term from Republican challenger Sharron Angle last month thanks to a better “ground game” that turned out a higher percentage of Democratic voters than the comparatively amateur Angle operation in Clark County (Las Vegas.) But did he?
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 […]
And so another election has come and gone. Nearly every concerned voter can be expected to emerge from the tumult in a state of adrenaline depletion: exuberance mixed with a few lingering doubts (still too early for REAL “buyer’s remorse”) over the victory of a favored candidate, puzzlement if not something closer to bereavement over […]
Imagine you’re a fan of a football team involved in a heated matchup with its greatest rival. Last year your guys won the championship, but now it’s the two-minute warning, your guys are down by four, and they just fumbled. Wait. You think that’s bad? You have no idea how bad things are. Since the […]
We adjourned last week just as former County Commissioner Bruce Woodbury was trooping into the newspaper’s offices Oct. 13, accompanied by Jacob Snow of the Regional Transportation Monopoly, Susan Martinovich of the Nevada Department of Transportation, et al. The group sang in harmony a two-part tune which insisted life under PISTOL (The “People’s Initiative to […]
In the beginning was Kelo vs. City of New London, the 2005 case in which a 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court decided it was an allowable “public use” for the decrepit 250-year-old city across the Thames from Groton, Conn., to seize private homes in the Fort Trumbull neighborhood and turn them over to chemical giant Pfizer, […]
Hoping to repeat the success of their 1994 “Contract With America,” House Republicans last week rolled out their “Pledge to America,” an extremely modest legislative agenda that calls for limiting federal spending, permanently extending all of the Bush tax cuts, and repealing President Obama’s signature health care law. And then “replacing” it … whatever that […]
Many of us went through a stage when we were embarrassed even to be seen with our parents or grandparents. They were just so … uncool. Their clothes were all wrong, the cars they drove were all wrong. Compared to the parents of our much more sophisticated and stylish friends, our families seemed such insufferable […]
Not so many decades ago, party “insiders” chose their nominees for various public offices in conventions. Some people complained this led to “cronyism.” Sometimes it did. But while the “party bosses” in those “smoke-filled rooms” might place loyalty to them and their party’s political philosophy (sometimes boiling down to little more than “more jobs for […]