Vin Suprynowicz

“U.S. Sen. Dean Heller of Nevada said Wednesday he would not rule out allowing tax rates to increase for higher-income Americans if it is coupled with substantial spending cuts … in a bid to avoid the ‘fiscal cliff,’” the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported last week.

Few bothered to read further down, where the newspaper reported Sen. Heller has also been in touch with retiring Congresswoman Shelley Berkley, seeking referrals to Ms. Berkley’s plastic surgeon and the designer who provided her with what the junior senator referred to as “that to-die-for wardrobe; do you think I could get away with wearing that shade of red? I mean, ooh, it’s positively carmine!”

The tax hikes, of course, will be real, as will the job destruction. The “substantial spending cuts,” on the other hand, will be pipe dreams. Spending will go up in 2013, and in 2014, and in 2015. …

This was the same day Nevada’s “Republican” governor, Brian Sandoval, announced he was going to cave in and agree to expand Nevada’s welfare Medicaid rolls by some 78,000 “not-actually-poor” Nevadans (earning up to about $31,000 adjusted) in keeping with the dictates of the vast tax levy known as ObamaCare, despite a Supreme Court ruling that governors don’t have to do so, based on federal promises that reimbursement from Washington will save the state $16 million over eight years.

When asked how we can count on those reimbursements not being slashed by a cash-strapped 2017 Congress, the governor said if promised federal reimbursements are ever reduced, the state reserves the right to pull out. Which — given the way stalwart Republicans respond whenever Democrats start to shriek that they’re abandoning sick people to die in the gutters — is kind of like saying we retain the right to secede from the union.

“I couldn’t sit here and defend to any of you $16 million that just goes away based on some ‘principle,’” the governor told the Review-Journal editorial board.

This is the same Brian Sandoval who announced back in August that the state was awarding tax breaks worth $89 million over 10 years to Apple Inc., in exchange for the computer outfit’s promise to locate in Reno a call center with 200 independent contractors and 35 Apple employees making at least $25 an hour.

So if Apple had settled for a mere $73 million in tax breaks, we could have afforded to keep fighting the federal health-care rationing that will be ushered in with the arrival of ObamaCare?

To give you some idea of what $16 million will buy, the federal share of the recent road-widening of Interstate 15 near Apex — a stretch of highway best known for the presence there of absolutely nothing — was $26.5 million.

As these gentlemen reenact the climactic final scene of the live daytime soap opera “Southwest General” from the 1982 Dustin Hoffman film “Tootsie,” in which the protagonist rids himself of his wig, his eyelashes, and even his accent — effectively making his character disappear before our eyes — perhaps it’s now appropriate to ask those who’ve been wringing their hands over the future of the Republican Party: “What Republican Party?”

Never has it been clearer that there are in fact merely two branches of the Incumbent Big Government Party, those being the Big-Spending Republicrats and the Big-Spending Demopublicans, who exchange places in a vastly expensive billion-dollar Dance of the Hours every decade or so, just to keep us guessing.

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Look on the bright side. We are going through a period of inoculation. I’m dead-set against the quasi-mandatory nature of government “shots,” but what’s the underlying doctrine? That in getting exposed to something in a less-than-deadly dose (even though we suffer somewhat in the short run) we develop considerable resistance to later exposure.

This is true, and not just in bacteriology.

And “shots” are one of the things against which we’re being inoculated, interestingly enough. Once they run out of smokescreens and are forced to admit many of our curiously burgeoning problems with allergies and even autism are linked to our relatively new practice of overloading infant immune systems with all these shots — often commingled with toxic mercury preservatives, mercury being a poison that generates symptoms almost precisely mirroring those of “autism” — I don’t believe I’d want to have my life savings in vaccine stocks.

If they’d left it at recommending four or five childhood vaccinations, they might have been fine. But they push for 20 or 30, the immune systems of an entire generation are ripe for collapse, and 50 years from now the term “government-mandated vaccination” will evoke the kind of shudders now reserved for “mandatory sterilization of the racially inferior.”

Those who oppose President Barack Obama’s policies are often accused or racism. Given that he’s been elected by majority vote twice — including the votes of vast numbers of economically ignorant white people who also don’t seem to care how many wedding parties we shoot up in Afghanistan — that’s clearly a cynical lie, carefully engineered to silence protest. Speaking only for myself, I’d be just as opposed to the regime of any narcissistic and sadly inexperienced white Communist pursuing the doctrines of Frank Marshall Davis and Saul Alinsky, while I believe I could rest a lot easier if the president were Thomas Sowell or Walter Williams, each of whom knows vastly more about economics than our current incumbent, while incidentally sharing without bitterness a heritage of racial oppression in America, which does not describe the vindictive millionaire Barack Hussein Obama.

But if you SHOULD happen to be a racist, the irony here would be particularly rich. Because I suspect Barack Obama’s brand of crony state-socialism will prove so poisonous to our economic well-being that the chances of another black leftist being elected to the presidency in the next 25 years will be slim indeed.

Meantime, watch the Global Warming gang seethe, as the prices of oil, gas and coal plummet and their beloved “green” technologies go belly-up. In about 12 years this same gang are going to try again to seize control of our entire industrial and transportation economy, on the grounds that we must race to combat the imminent crisis of The New Ice Age. At that point, they will likely be stripped naked and hauled around in circus wagons, with little children encouraged to pelt them with rotten fruit as they shout “Global Warming Deny-er! Deny-er!”

(They want to spell this word “denier.” A “denier” is, and has been for centuries, a low-denomination French copper or bronze coin.)

Paper currency? As the Continental Congress had little in the way of hard assets, they financed the Revolutionary War by circulating ever more worthless paper currency, until whole generations of 19th century Americans learned the phrase “not worth a Continental.”

This experience led to a demand by Americans for hard gold and silver coinage, or at least paper currency which could be readily redeemed for gold or silver coins, with any banker who could not redeem his notes being promptly jailed for fraud, assuming the arresting officers didn’t find a nearby tree limb more convenient.

This kept recessions short and inflation and currency fraud at bay for a almost a century and a half. Then Franklin Roosevelt was allowed to take away Americans’ gold in 1933, Lyndon Johnson stripped the silver out of our coinage in 1965, and we have since been in the process of being inoculated once again the danger of an irredeemable paper currency.

It’s Fudd’s Second Law of Opposition, I believe: If you push a pendulum hard enough, it WILL swing back and kick your ass.