Vin Suprynowicz

I never thought of the desert town of Pahrump a bastion of Political Correctness, but new Nye County Assessor Shirley Matson seems to have stirred some PC ire, west of the mountain, by sending a quasi-official email to Nye County Sheriff Tony DeMeo, asking to him to determine whether allegedly non-English-speaking laborers working to build the county’s new Pahrump jail are U.S. citizens or otherwise qualified to work on such a government project.

That is, whether they’re illegal aliens.

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On Dec. 20, 2007, the most likely setting for American military intervention on everyone’s minds was Iran, not Libya.

(Like waiting to mount your favorite horse on the merry-go-round, don’t despair — just wait awhile and it’ll come ’round again.)

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It seemed so easy. No need to wait for dull-witted consumers to decide on their own, based on free-market price signals, to make changes in their household fixtures and behavior that might save them some money on their gasoline, water, and electric bills.

That could take forever! Instead, an elite blessed with vastly superior wisdom and knowledge and wisdom simply convinced the state and federal legislatures to issue edicts. “Stroke of the pen; law of the land; kinda cool!” as one of Bill Clinton’s viziers once enthused.

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Eighteen-year Las Vegas police officer Laurie Bisch keeps running for sheriff against her boss, Doug Gillespie. She says her independent attitude sometimes makes her feel “like a woman without a country” when she goes to work — though other officers have been known to approach her in private and thank her for raising issues others fear to confront.

Officer Bisch was recently assigned to the Bolden Area Command, which is headquartered on a side street just southwest of what used to be known as Drive-By Corners: the intersection of Lake Mead and Martin Luther King boulevards.

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As we saw last week in the “Girl Scout cookies” case out of Savannah, Georgia, government — which was supposed to provide a level playing field by providing courts of law and barring interstate tariffs but otherwise stay out of the way — is destroying our economy, largely to protect the jobs of all its various taxmen and enforcers, who cruise around looking for “violations,” in pursuit of the chimerical goal of seizing or destroying “undeserved wealth.”

About the only way I know to determine whether anyone is earning “more than they deserve” is to see if the employers could hire anyone for half the money to do the same job. Unfortunately for the levelers, the results of this test are not likely to move most folks closer to the median, because the fact is some folk have talents, skills, and energy levels that place them way above the mean, while many others (especially if they got trapped in the government youth propaganda camps) simply don’t.

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Hundreds of felons now clog Nevada prisons — serving sentences of one to 10 years on charges of “felony burglary” — for offenses as “minor” as stealing food from Walmart or clothes from T.J. Maxx.

A bill debated March 2 before the Assembly Judiciary Committee would make these non-violent, “category B” felons eligible for an earlier hearing with the Nevada Parole Board, potentially letting them out before they serve the minimum sentence and thus saving the state government hundreds of thousands of dollars.

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I’ve been editing newspapers long enough to have seen at least two waves of “bubble” job applicants.

Back in the late 1980s, in Arizona, I advertised some relatively low-paying, modest-benefit newspaper jobs — stuff for which we would normally have expected to receive a dozen applications. Instead, we got 50. Many resumes had been jimmied around to stress work on the student newspaper in college, maybe a part-time radio job. Once you’ve looked at a few hundred resumes you begin to easily spot gaps, omissions, euphemisms.

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On Feb. 22, one week ago, Bible missionaries Scott and Jean Adams, 70 and 68, of Marina del Rey, Calif., and traveling companions Bob Riggle, 67, and Phyllis Macay, 59, of Seattle, were shot and killed aboard the Adams’ 58-foot sloop The Quest by Somali pirates in the Arabian Sea between Somalia and Iran.

The four had been taken hostage when their boat was boarded by the pirates last Friday. Pentagon officials say the four were murdered during negotiations as the sloop was being shadowed by a flotilla of U.S. warships and drone aircraft.

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One unidentified businessman claimed to be uncomfortable about relocating to a Nevada county where brothels are legal, so U.S. Sen. Harry Reid lectured state legislators in Carson City Wednesday (to a response of deafening silence) that Nevada should outlaw and close the 28 legal brothels that now pay local taxes and fees — some of them representing a hefty share of local tax revenues — in eight of Nevada’s rural counties.

Local brothel owners report the businessman in question finally decided to locate his business in Storey County, anyway. Meantime, I don’t believe it would be an exaggeration to say hundreds of complaints pour in here annually from tourists harassed by newly arrived Mexican “guest workers” earning some minimal income by aggressively handing out little cards with phone numbers and color photos of “direct to your room” naked babes to tourists strolling the Las Vegas Strip — the card-pushers showing no hesitation in pushing the cards on family groups including young children and ancient grannies.

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If anyone wondered why the forces of the Left have been so over-the-top during the past two years, shrieking in the face of all contrary evidence that the Tea Party movement — everyday Americans seeking some restraint on government spending and taxation — was in fact some far-right league of racist lynchers, the logic finally started to come clear last week.

First in Wisconsin, but quickly spreading to Ohio, Indiana, and elsewhere, new Republican governors elected with Tea Party support have shocked the complacent political class by showing evidence that they mean to actually do some of the things they campaign on.

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