Vin Suprynowicz

The Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada, working in tandem with an outfit called the “Western States Center,” has compiled a new report dubbed “Facing Race: 2009 Legislative Report Card on Racial Equality.”

The handout awards Carson City’s Democrat-dominated Assembly “an A-plus for 100 percent support for racial equity bills,” while exiling the state Senate to the racial-equity outhouse with a grade of “D-plus” — and even more vociferously condemning Nevada Gov. Jim Gibbons with a grade of “F-minus for signing only 43 percent of racial equity bills.”

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“Only two rogue scientists,” as the oh-so-reassuring Climategate Deniers would have us believe?

Merely a few phrases “taken out of context … from some 10-year-old-mails,” as Climate Guru Al Gore assured the TV hosts last weekend — at the same time he was insisting we can get all the energy we need through subterranenan heat exchange, since the temperature of the earth’s mantle, a few miles down, is “several million degrees”?

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In 2004, New Jersey Democratic Assemblyman Joseph Cryan had a brilliant idea. Only rich people get cosmetic surgery, right? So — if one of the goals of the redistributive state is to impoverish the rich, thus discouraging them from investing their money in job-creating businesses — why not tax cosmetic surgery? After all, a 6 percent tax on an industry raking in some $500 million a year should generate $30 million a year worth of succor to the drunken and disorderly … right?

The tax was enacted. But the measly $9 million per year it actually generates — less than a third of projections — wasn’t worth the controversy that followed, Mr. Cryan now says. Because the tax exempts “necessary” procedures such as the correction of birth defects, it spurred angry debate with doctors over the medical necessity of individual procedures, while chasing customers out of state. It has also prompted charges of discrimination against middle-class women, who turn out to comprise the majority of patients.

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By now, you doubtless know a dastardly hacker broke into the e-mail system at the Climate “Research” Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain late last month, grabbing and making public more than 1,000 e-mails that expose how these “scientific experts,” cited so often to confirm “man-made global warming,” have been fudging their data, conspiring to remove global warming skeptics from the teams that “peer-review” their doctored data for publication, and advising each other to delete incriminating e-mails beings sought under the Freedom Of Information Act — which happens to be a criminal offense in Britain.

Wow. I’m about as shocked as Claude Rains’ character, Captain Renault, when he found out there was gambling going on at Rick’s Place in Casablanca. Aren’t you?

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What was it like to go to a doctor in America 60 years ago?

The family doctor couldn’t offer high-tech diagnostic tests or treatments, mind you. But neither would you find the office full of employees negotiating on telephones with Medicare, Medicaid, or private insurers, trying to determine what treatments would be “covered,” and what percentage of the doctor’s real costs the “coverage” would pay.

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Retro clothes are not vintage clothes.

Retro clothes are new-made garments designed to imitate or evoke the fashions of as bygone era — often, the 1940s, ’50s or ’60s. Vintage fashion is the real thing: sturdy garments well made in America (usually by union labor, if that matters to you) that remind us of an era when all the best stuff, from movies to muscle-cars, was “made in the U.S.A.”

It’s about nostalgia, yes, but in this unrelenting recession it’s also about the “recessionistas” — that’s what Alison Houtte calls her growing new customer base — realizing they can get not only a distinctive look but also a better-made garment by “going vintage,” at a fraction of the price they’ve been paying for today’s toss-off foreign made garments at the big name stores.

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In the early 1870s, Thomas Alva Edison declared “The time was right” to introduce the stock ticker and the printing telegraph.

It was. Americans, grasping the benefits of his inventions and finding them affordable in relation to those benefits, willingly purchased Mr. Edison’s inventions; he and the capitalists who invested in the enterprise grew rich.

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Aiming for brevity, trying to avoid long strings of documentation already presented many times, I posted on Nov. 11 at www.lvrj.com/blogs/vin/ a response to a letter-writing government schoolmarm who contends she should not be held responsible for the failure of her young charges to learn anything, since it’s all their parents’ fault.

I answered, in part:

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Jim Gilchrist, founder of the Minuteman Project, is one of two panelists scheduled to appear at a Nov. 19 forum sponsored by Flipside Productions, an enterprise of the Associated Students of the University of Nevada, Reno.

The other panelist is Miguel Acosta, a member of an immigrant rights organization in New Mexico.

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Early in the morning of December 5, 1999, off-duty Las Vegas Metro police officer Dennis Devitte was one of the customers at Mr. D’s Sports Bar, at Rainbow Boulevard and Oakey Drive, where he and some pals had gone to hear the band Pigs in a Blanket.

A little after 1 a.m., three armed robbers charged through the back door with guns drawn and their faces covered with T-shirts or bandanas. “I’d only been in the bar a short time and was talking to friends,” Devitte later told an interviewer for the International Association of Chiefs of Police. Then, “I saw a ruckus at the end of the bar. …

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