Vin Suprynowicz

Imagine you’re unhappy with the performance in office of some incumbent politician. You throw your hat in the ring and proceed to spend months raising the hundreds of thousands of dollars necessary to wage a viable electoral challenge. Or, maybe you’ve spent decades of hard work amassing the private, after-tax savings necessary to fund such an effort on your own.

In response, your state government takes hundreds of thousands of dollars extracted from taxpayers against their will — including, ironically enough, taxes you yourself have paid — and hands that money to the politician you’re attempting to defeat, explaining it’s “not fair” that you’re raising and spending more money than your poor, pathetic opponent, who only starts out with all the name recognition and other advantages of elected office.

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President Obama on June 9 called for sharply limiting Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip, following the May 31 deaths of nine Turkish blockade runners when Israeli forces blocked an uninspected shipment from Cyprus to Gaza, as they repeatedly warned they would.

The White House also announced a $400 million aid package for Gaza and the West Bank.

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A rather heated debate seems to ensuing — in fact, it ensues about every 90 days, merely growing louder at each iteration — about whether the Congress should again “extend unemployment benefits” for the unemployed.

The question that draws the most attention, understandably, is whether this is a good idea. As usual, the main question is of less concern to me than a supposedly “minor, related” concern.

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“Constitutional amendments we’d like to see” is usually an ineffective game.

But this one keeps occurring to me. It’s about 600 words, but I still believe it passes the basic test of comprehensibility, despite being in three parts. It also gives us a litmus test to determine who — if anyone — in the political world REALLY favors smaller government.

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If I invoke the phrase “Greek debt crisis,” do your eyelids start to grow heavy?

Do you somehow find it difficult to summon up a fresh wave of outrage if someone mentions that when Barack Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (better known as the Democratic Tax-Hike Justification Front) convened for its second monthly meeting last week, Congress was already 41 days past its April 15 deadline for passing a budget resolution — scared to death to admit, in an election year and the third year of the Second Great Depression, just how much new debt and spending they intend to crank up?

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The creatively goofy leftists at the “Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada” have emerged from their ongoing Frantz Fanon reading group long enough to press the cities of Reno and Las Vegas to support a boycott of Arizona over the new state law there instructing local police to do what they were already allowed to do — call federal authorities if they believe they’ve encountered an immigration violator in the course of their duties.

Oh, the humanity!

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When Americans boys are sent off to war — when war is thrust upon us, as it was on Dec. 7, 1941, and again on Sept. 11, 2001 — we ask our young men to put their lives on the line. Then, the college debaters in charge at the White House proceed to spend more time worrying about how to avoid civilian casualties (actually proposing to award medals to soldiers who manage to avoid hurting anyone) than we do mobilizing to grind our brutal assailants into the dust of history.

When our leaders suck their thumbs and decline to commit “too much force” (a few years back it was Mr. Aspin refusing to send tanks to back up the rangers in Mogadishu, today it’s a, Afghan “war” with a pre-designated surrender date) because it would “look bad” and the polls “might turn against them,” one can’t help but wonder if America has ANYONE left in long pants still willing to take over.

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“Vin, sometimes you run excerpts from letters that arrive at your desk, but you rarely run an entire letter, much less an uninterrupted series of letters from the same writer, which would give us a better idea of the thought process of a typical reader.”

Yes, and there’s a reason for that. But since such requests continue to pour in, hereinafter please find the COMPLETE, UNEDITED, UNREDACTED e-mails received here over a three-hour period, earlier this month, from one of our more faithful correspondents, the brash, insightful, uninhibited lady we like to call Ms “Ella Mae Brewer” (not to be confused with Ella Mae Morse, who was someone else entirely, and whose 78s are well worth collecting.)

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What ever happened to Mark OToole?

No, not the Mark O’Toole with the apostrophe before the “T,” bass player for the rock band Frankie Goes to Hollywood. We’re talking about the vocalist Mark OToole who won Ed McMahon’s Star Search competition back in 1994, came to Vegas, put together a band, and has played almost every Strip casino since — the guy who was mentioned several times over the years in the “Best of Las Vegas” balloting for best lounge singer in town.

“At first I did Country, and then I switched over when country died about 2000” to a more traditional lounge repertoire — Sinatra, Dean Martin, Barry Manilow, Mark says.

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I don’t know how it facilitates a sober, studious, academic environment to allow kids at Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill, Cal. to EITHER wear American flag gear or paint their faces and bodies in red, white, and green to celebrate Cinco de Mayo (a fun Mexican holiday but still a fairly minor one, the date of an insignificant victory over the invading French no longer even observed as a federal holiday in Mexico, instead having apparently grown popular in this country after being promoted as a marketing gimmick by the distributors of Corona beer. If Mexicans hate the French so much why do they keep playing Mariachi music?)

Though perhaps it’s my use of adjectives like “studious” and “academic” in connection with a modern government-run high school that’s really absurd.

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