Vin Suprynowicz

I’ve had some requests for follow-up on the group of local residents who met for lunch in North Las Vegas on Sunday, May 17, and then proceeded to a downtown park — adjacent to the North Las Vegas police station — to pick up trash. (See http://www.lvrj.com/blogs/vin/Gun_owners_announce_plan_to_open_carry_in_North_Las_Vegas_this_Sunday.html)

The idea was to conduct a demonstration of their right to carry firearms openly on their hips, the way U.S. Navy vessels occasionally transit the Bosporus and other international waters to demonstrate we still have a right to do so.

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Despite giveaways designed to win votes from coal-mining states and others likely to be heavily stomped, “Many environmental groups” still support the 940-page greenhouse gas permitting bill that was endorsed by the House Energy and Commerce Committee on May 21, because “it still creates a ‘cap-and-trade’ system,” The Washington Post reported May 26.

“This requires polluters to amass credits equal to their emissions and then allows them — and others, including Wall Street trading firms — to sell them on an open market if they cut their emissions, giving them a surplus of credits.”

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First, if the earth was warming at a rate of about 1 or even 2 degree per century in recent decades, there are reasons to believe that’s slowed or stopped. One of those reasons is that the “global warming” fanatics have abruptly shifted their rhetoric, adopting instead the new nonsense euphemism “climate change.” This is a clear attempt at inoculation: If it turns out the globe is indeed cooling again, they will merely take their same pre-set, ulterior agenda — huge energy tax hikes to finance bigger government, cripple capitalism, and destroy the freedom-giving automobile, instead forcing everyone to pile like lemmings into “mass transit” — and declare that an identical agenda is now needed to fight “global cooling” … and that we dare not waste any time in debate! Hee-haw!

Furthermore, even if the earth did warm a bit in recent decades, there’s no reason to believe man’s activities played a substantial role. Carbon dioxide is not a particularly effective greenhouse gas, nor the most prevalent. (Water vapor is.) Furthermore, the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide generated by man’s activities is infinitessimal. Astronomers tell us that when the earth undergoes modest global warming, Mars does, too. It’s unlikely Mars gets warmer because anyone there is burning coal or driving SUVS. The more likely culprit for the parallel warming of the two planets is solar activity.

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“Obama’s new rules will transform U.S. auto fleet,” read the May 19 headline.

“Some soccer moms will have to give up hulking SUVs,” explained Associated Press auto writer Tom Krisher, fanning himself to keep from flushing with excitement. “Nearly everybody else will drive smaller cars, and more of them will run on electricity. The higher mileage and emissions standards set by the Obama administration on Tuesday, which begin to take effect in 2012 and are to be achieved by 2016, will transform the American car and truck fleet.

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The Charleston Antique Mall is one of those seven-day-a-week outfits that rents out space to 45 or so independent antique vendors. Think Victorian furniture, Depression glass, Coca-Cola collectibles, old Elvis records.

Proprietor Cal Tully says the mall is doing fine, despite the current economic squeeze — maybe because of it. (Full disclosure: The brunette sells vintage fashion and collectible used books at the Charleston Antique Mall, her four rooms in the northeast corner comprising “Cat’s Curiosities.” I help out with the books.)

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Carson City Democrats and their clapping seals among the pundit brigade first ridiculed Nevada Gov. Jim Gibbons for showing some reluctance about accepting strings-attached federal “bailout” funds this winter — and then ridiculed him again when he finally agreed to take the handouts to ease the state’s budget woes (just as they had wanted him to), implying there hadn’t been any reason for his hesitancy in the first place.

It’s probably too much to hope that the skeptics will issue Gov. Gibbons an apology after examining the “stimulus-funds” squeeze play which the Obama administration is now pulling in California. But it’s one for the books, indicating just how “minimal” and “theoretical” and “benign” is the iron-fisted power Washington believes it has gained over the formerly sovereign states with these handouts — and where the new administration stands when it comes to a choice between balancing state budgets and giving taxpayers some relief on the one hand, vs. paying back the Democrats’ employee-union paymasters on the other.

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John Browning’s Model 1911 pistol, an engineering wonder for its day, still serves as a design platform for much modern pistolsmithing. Old examples, especially with military markings, are now highly valued on the collector market, where they can bring hundreds or even thousands of dollars each.

Yet 16 years ago, early in the Clinton administration, the politicians declared our government would no longer sell into the civilian after-market pistols being retired from military armories.

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American gun-owners, en masse, are “casting their ballots” on how much they believe Barack Obama’s campaign-trail promise to “not take away your guns.”

They’re driving the price of ammo through the roof, swarming gun shows and leaving the pallets and floors of the ammo suppliers’ booths as naked as a wheat field after the locusts pass through.

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The Interior Department is directing more than $300 million in federal “economic stimulus” money to the Bureau of Land Management to update its facilities, roads and trails and jump-start renewable energy projects across the country, said Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, honking and clapping like a trained seal here on Saturday, May 2.

Secretary Salazar said the 650 approved projects will “restore our landscapes and our watersheds” and help fulfill the Obama administration’s target for “renewable energy development” (i.e. — pretending they can generate enough electricity to keep America’s economy from collapsing, without using uranium or coal.)

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I always enjoy perusing the concise summaries of the increasingly ludicrous nonsense being peddled by our government lackeys when I open the monthly newsletters of the Tucson-based Doctors for Disaster Preparedness.

From the March newsletter:

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