Vin Suprynowicz

Steve Hill, a Las Vegas businessman and new executive director of the Governor’s Office of Economic Development, visited with us this month to discuss a new 178-page report from the Brookings Mountain West division, recommending new ways to diversify Nevada’s economy.

While Nevada still scores high (everything is relative, you understand) on its tax and regulatory climate, cost of living and transportation infrastructure, the report finds the state is held back by a low-skilled work force; an underperforming K-12 education system; relatively high energy costs, and a lack of startup capital.

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The congressional deficit-reduction “supercommittee” said Nov. 21 it had failed to reach an agreement on slashing the U.S. deficit by at least $1.2 trillion. That failure will supposedly trigger mandatory cuts to military spending and some social programs, starting in 2013.

Or, perhaps, when pigs fly.

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No one spent much time talking about the role of the Internal Revenue Service in causing the death of seven employees at a Wakefield, Mass., software company on the day after Christmas, 2000.

The defendant in the killings, Michael McDermott, 43, was convicted on seven counts of first-degree murder.

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And so, as beefy gladiators chase a pigskin down the field in Miami or Detroit, we settle into our living rooms, loosen our belts, wave off a second helping of pie, and remind the little ones this is the day we echo the thanks of the Pilgrims, who gathered in the autumn of 1621 to celebrate the first bountiful harvest in a land of plenty.

That first winter in the New World had been a harsh one, of course. Half the colonists had died. But the survivors were hard-working and tenacious, and — with the aid of a little agricultural expertise graciously on loan from the Wampanoag, the Narragansett, and the Mohegan — were able to thank the Creator for an abundant harvest, that second autumn in a new land.

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Shall we choose our next president based on who smooched who behind the bleachers in the eighth grade?

The presence on the GOP ticket of black businessman Herman Cain would take away the last likely line of Democratic attack against those who might decline to re-elect failed socialist poseur Barack Obama — that if you’re against him you must be a racist. Despite this, I can’t imagine who has enough contacts in the windy city of Chicago to dig up sealed court records and generate a pallid, Chicago-based bimbo eruption in an attempt to de-rail Mr. Cain’s doing-OK-in-the-flatlands campaign express.

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“The U.S. government has no evidence that any life exists outside our planet, or that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted or engaged any member of the human race,” the Obama administration said in a Nov. 4 statement.

Honest.

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The political cyncism of President Barack Obama — who’s been on a seemingly non-stop “jobs”-themed re-election tour for a month — as he now postpones for another two years the creation of thousands of high-paying, private-sector jobs building a pipeline to bring $15-a-barrel Canadian oil to American refineries, is stupefying.

The $7 billion, 1,700-mile Keystone XL project, proposed by Calgary-based TransCanada, would carry oil derived from Alberta tar sands to refineries in Houston and Port Arthur, Texas.

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Books make great Christmas gifts: No one ever complains they’re the wrong size or color.

Great books reveal themselves when their audiences expand beyond their assigned pigeonholes. Finally asking for guidance after dividing and quartering the fiction sections for 20 minutes, I can still remember having to crawl on my hands and knees through the cardboard “castle gate” into the kiddie section of a local Big Box bookstore, worried someone would think I had improper designs on the tiny tots gathered in the corner for their tea party, to find one of the early Harry Potter books, which at the time were still condemned to “the children’s section.”

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I called Clark County Sheriff Doug Gillespie’s office Nov. 1, looking for the official report on the Sept. 15 traffic accident involving Metro jail guard Victor Hunter, who died of a massive heart attack a block and a half from the jail (per the county coroner’s office), after reportedly being given a shot and told to drive home after he’d displayed every classic symptom of a heart attack on the job.

(His sergeant told the widow that Victor’s on-duty attack would show up on surveillance video at the jail, possibly the most videotaped building in the county. The head of the local police union also told me the video would be all-important. Let’s see how good you are — does Metro now claim there’s no more usable video of that event then there was of the Costco shooting of Army veteran Erik Scott on July 9?)

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A record 49 percent of Americans live in a household where someone receives at least one type of government benefit, according to the Census Bureau. That’s up from 46 percent in 1975 and 18 percent in 1940.

In fact, 63 percent of all federal spending this year will consist of checks written to individuals for which the government receives currently no services, the White House budget office estimates.

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