5:44 am July 24th, 2012
Making national news, another heavily tax-subsidized alternative energy operation — the Amonix solar manufacturing plant in North Las Vegas — went belly-up last week, closing its 214,000-square-foot facility a year after it opened.
A designer and manufacturer of concentrated photovoltaic solar power systems, Amonix received $6 million in federal tax credits for the North Las Vegas plant and a $15.6 million grant from the Bush-era U.S. Department of Energy in 2007 for research and development.
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| Category: 2012 Election, About Town, Energy, Media, Science | Comments Off on Another one bites the dust
4:21 am July 22nd, 2012
The Charleston Antique Mall, at Charleston Boulevard and Interstate 15, closed April 30. It was not voluntary. The state Department of Transportation deployed its powers of eminent domain to seize and destroy the building — originally the local 7-Up bottling plant, then for a time the “Red Rooster” antique mall — to make room for the “Project Neon” widening of I-15.
Business owners Cal and Michelle Tully found a new location, the former Peter Piper Pizza premises next door to Arizona Charlie’s, at 560 S. Decatur.
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| Category: "Redevelopment", About Town, Private Property | 5 Comments »
4:32 am July 20th, 2012
Diane Keaton had enough of a hit with the 1987 romantic comedy “Baby Boom” to generate a short-lived TV spinoff. A high-powered New York management consultant, Keaton’s character inherits a legacy from a distant British cousin — but it’s not money, it’s a baby girl.
After some amusing attempts to fit a baby into her chic yuppie lifestyle — arriving at a business luncheon, she attempts at one point to check the infant at the coat-check stand — Keaton buys a ramshackle Vermont farmhouse, sight unseen, and retires to the country.
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| Category: 2012 Election | 1 Comment »
4:39 am July 4th, 2012
How are we doing, safeguarding those “unalienable Rights” with which we are “endowed by our Creator” — in support of which 56 patriots solemnly pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred Honor, 236 years ago?
We remain free by many measures. Americans can still pretty much live where we want, work where we want, drive where we want. In fact, for women and racial minorities, many of those liberties have expanded, compared to 70 years ago. We can all be proud of that.
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| Category: 2012 Election, 2nd Amendment, Big Brother, Drug War, Due Process, Free Speech, Groundhog Day, Immigration, Law Enforcement, Literacy, Medicine, Middle East, Nevada, Taxation, Transportation | 1 Comment »
5:09 am July 1st, 2012
In twin op-eds in the Las Vegas Review-Journal of June 22, Patricia Vazquez, a professor of English at the College of Southern Nevada, and Fatma Marouf, co-director of the Immigration Clinic at UNLV’s Boyd School of Law, argued that illegal immigrants should no longer be referred to as “illegal immigrants.”
“Our country has a principle of respecting the presumption of innocence as a fundamental right. Yet we allow journalists to carelessly wield the word ‘illegal,’ effectively passing sentence on the person before a judge has done so,” argued Ms. Vazquez.
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| Category: Big Brother, Due Process, History, Immigration, Law Enforcement | 15 Comments »
5:00 am June 19th, 2012
Summer jobs for teen-agers are disappearing.
Fewer than three in 10 American teenagers will hold jobs such as running cash registers, mowing lawns or busing restaurant tables from June to August, this year.
The decline has been particularly sharp since 2000, with employment for 16-to-19-year-olds falling to the lowest level since World War II.
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| Category: Economics, History, Nevada, Welfare | 3 Comments »
5:03 am June 17th, 2012
Jeffrey Armstrong is a soft-spoken guy, of evident Caribbean origin. He’s the owner and sole proprietor of “The Smoke Zone,” a rented storefront next to the Quizno’s on Rancho Boulevard just north of Charleston — though it’s one of several similar “RYO (Roll Your Own) Filling Stations” in Southern Nevada.
The basic pitch? Cheap cigarettes.
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| Category: Big Brother, Drug War, Economics, Taxation, Welfare | 1 Comment »
4:52 am June 3rd, 2012
I see where Kyle Gillis of the Nevada Journal posted a piece last week on the dogged fight of local prison guard Patrick Mendez against the dangerous hoplophobe policies of the College of Southern Nevada — until recently dubbed more appropriately the “Community College of Southern Nevada.”
(www.npri.org/publications/pub_detail.asp?id=922.)
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| Category: 2nd Amendment, About Town, Nevada | 1 Comment »
5:22 am May 27th, 2012
My May 10 essay described the frustrations of Las Vegas entrepreneur Raj Patel in trying to “do it by the book” and bring two Indian chefs here to help him expand his restaurant enterprises in Las Vegas.
Although the Labor Department agreed the work visas would help create American jobs, and the Immigration Service OK’d them, the two men were turned down after brief, 10-minute interviews at our embassy in New Delhi.
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| Category: 2012 Election, About Town, Immigration, Nevada | 3 Comments »
5:44 am May 24th, 2012
After a time, it became difficult for anyone to leave the Soviet Union or its captive slave states: You could be shot.
Initially, though, Comrade Lenin’s Bolsheviks were somewhat more sweet-tempered: For a few years after 1917, greedy capitalists who owned things were free to depart — just as long as they left all their stuff behind.
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| Category: Big Brother, History, Immigration, Private Property, Taxation | 3 Comments »