Vin Suprynowicz

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 first quarter, the team that’s whupping your ass with two minutes to play, the one that was in the basement last year, has been playing their FIFTH STRING QUARTERBACK. That’s right; their FIRST FOUR GUYS WENT DOWN IN THE FIRST QUARTER.

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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 Stop the Taking of Our Lands”) is an abomination, while the changes they want to make in the hard-won Constitutional Amendment are minimal, minimal …

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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, Inc., which promised to build on the site a big hotel and commercial-industrial project which would generate 3,169 new jobs and $1.2 million per year in new tax revenues.

A “public use” because it would generate more tax revenues for “the public,” see.

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On Sept. 28 a Clark County coroner’s inquest jury predictably found three Las Vegas Metro police officers did nothing criminal when they shot and killed West Point graduate Erik Scott as he exited a suburban Costco store shortly after high noon on Saturday, July 10.

Medical testimony established the 38-year-old Scott was stewed to the gills on prescription painkillers when he entered the Costco on July 10.

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Dutch politician Geert Wilders is considered by some to be the political heir to Pim Fortuyn, who was murdered in broad daylight in 2002 for his own political views by a Muslim extremist who evidently didn’t quite grasp the concept of “tolerance” which Dutch Muslims would now like to see imposed on Mr. Wilders.

For Mr. Wilders — a bleached-blond firebrand not know for his rhetorical moderation — is now on trial in Amsterdam.

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Last March, the Clark County School District announced that the federal Department of Education had selected Ron Montoya, principal of Valley High School, “as a recipient of the prestigious 2010 Educational Pioneer Award for his outstanding achievements and dedication to educational excellence. Mr. Montoya was also selected to serve as the keynote speaker for the national TRIO/GEAR UP Day celebration that took place in Las Vegas on February 27, 2010. Valley High School is the only school in the history of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) to be designated ‘High Achieving — Exemplary Turnaround.’”

In May, Mr. Montoya was named “Nevada Principal of the Year” by the Secondary School Principals Association of Nevada, and a finalist for the group’s national award. (In the end, someone else won that.)

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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 means.

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Very few cops ever start their day hoping to kill someone. Most times a police officer draws his weapon, it’s under duress, with only seconds to make a very tough decision. Most times, most cops get it right.

But it’s also possible for a cop to be high on steroids, or to act like an aggressive bully who has to be “in charge” at all times, to make mistakes, to kill people by accident through bad trigger control, or by escalating a situation into violence unnecessarily.

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Republican senators Tuesday used their slim 41-vote plurality to filibuster and thus block passage of a military appropriations bill to which Harry Reid and his Democrats had grafted various unpopular measures, including a precipitate repeal of the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy which is intended to allow homosexuals to serve in the armed forces so long as they keep their sexuality “in the closet,” and the so-called “DREAM Act,” at thinly disguised “camel’s nose under the tent” toward full immigration amnesty.

The “DREAM Act would grant legal status to immigrants younger than 36 who arrived in the U.S. as children, have lived here for five years, and are currently either in college or serving in the military,” the Monitor reports.

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Vin’s Web Grunt Note: This weekend, Vin Suprynowicz was awarded the Nevada Press Association’s “Editorial of the Year” award for the following editorial, which ran without a byline as the Review Journal’s lead editorial on July 8, 2009. When the Review Journal’s website publishes a link to this article on its website, I will replace the full story below with a link to the RJ website. In the meantime…

EDITORIAL: Firemen’s pensions past due for reform

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