Vin Suprynowicz

About a year ago, a writer for one of the town’s less-than-everyday papers infamously reported with regret that the Reading Room bookstore at Mandalay Place inside the Mandalay Bay was closing, leaving Las Vegas without any independent booksellers.

Las Vegas was not and still is not without independent booksellers, needless to say, and I’m not merely talking about the Philadelphia based (and markedly upscale) Bauman’s Rare Books, which moved into Sheldon Adelson’s Palazzo last year.

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It qualifies as an old schoolboy joke, by now, right up there with “Do you have Prince Albert in a can?”

Inform someone that the substance di-hydrogen oxide is so corrosive that a new steel nail exposed to the stuff will rust within hours; so deadly that a person attempting to breathe a pure di-hydrogen oxide atmosphere will die of asphyxiation in less than a minute. Now ask the subject whether he or she agrees this di-hydrogen oxide stuff should be tightly regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency — labeled as a poison, kept out of the hands of children, and so forth.

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President Obama last week accused the Bush administration of creating a “hazard to public health” by failing to curb food contamination problems. Mr. Bush’s successor announced he will form a “Food Safety Working Group” to “upgrade our food safety laws for the 21st century.”

Money came up. The president will ask Congress for $1 billion in new funds — for starters — to add FDA inspectors and modernize laboratories. He further announced the Agriculture Department is moving ahead with a rule change banning sick or disabled cattle from the food supply.

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“I just finished reading the article on Excessive Force on page 2B,” wrote in Ron the Former Police Officer, on March the 5th. “Another person was apparently injured in a police confrontation, followed by the usual lawsuit. As a former police detective, I have a solution on how to avoid 99 percent of all injuries, lawsuits, and deaths sustained as a result of a police confrontation,” offers Officer Ron:

“When stopped by an officer, do as he asks. Never run from the police, never fight with the police, never get into a shouting match, don’t try to escape from custody. Simply submit, but try to obtain all the info you can, i.e. why am I being stopped, etc. If you feel the officer is in error, there will be ample opportunity to contest the allegations later.”

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A Southern Nevada lawyer told the Nevada Supreme Court last week that pharmacists, at the least, had a duty to call physicians to voice their concerns before dispensing a narcotic painkiller to a woman who killed a man in a 2004 vehicle crash in Las Vegas.

Lawyer Phil Aurbach told justices that Nevada pharmacists continued to fill prescriptions for Patricia Copening even after being warned by a state task force that she might be a prescription drug abuser.

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In a speech before the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce Tuesday, President Barack Obama embraced merit pay for teachers, spelling out a vision of education that, The Associated Press reports, “will almost certainly alienate union backers.

“A strategy that ties teacher pay to student performance has for years been anathema to teachers’ unions, a powerful force in the Democratic Party,” continued Associated Press writer Philip Elliott. “These unions also are wary of charter schools, nontraditional educational systems that they believe compete with traditional schools for tax dollars.”

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“We are going to ban all earmarks, the process by which individual members insert pet projects without review.” — Barack Obama, Jan. 6, 2009.

Perhaps Mr. Obama is the leader of some political party other than that of Sen. Harry Reid, D-Hawthorne, and Dianne Feinstein, D-Barbary Coast.

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As luck would have it, I was up well before the doorbell rang at 7:45 Thursday morning.

It was garbage day, when we all celebrate the lobbying talents of Silver State trash-hauling employee Jennifer Simich, who somehow managed to convince then-Las Vegas Councilman (and former cop) Michael McDonald to land her outfit a zillion-year monopoly garbage contract. (No one known how she did it. Councilman McDonald swore under oath to the Ethics Commission that he and Ms. Simich weren’t “dating” at the time — though he did give her a big public smooch at the New Year’s Eve celebration downtown, that year. I mean — would a former Metro cop lie?)

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Fortuitously, I recently stumbled on a copy of Henry Hazlitt’s “The Failure of the ‘New Economics’”, 1959, reprinted 1973.

The ‘New Economics’ referred to by the esteemed Mr. Hazlitt — who replaced H.L. Mencken as editor of The American Mercury in 1933 and joined the New York Times in 1934, writing financial and economic editorials there and later a bylined weekly financial column well into the 1960s — is Keynesianism, the economic doctrines of the Briton John Maynard Keynes which are still widely taught in American college economics courses.

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Preening that Nevada could lead the nation in linking job creation to energy efficiency, state Senate Majority Leader Steven Horsford detailed his “green jobs” initiative to a legislative panel in Carson City last Friday.

SB152 would use federal stimulus funds to train an estimated 3,200 workers at a cost of about $3,500 each, and cover costs of weatherizing about 6,500 homes and upgrading government buildings and schools to make them more efficient, explained Mr. Horsford, D-Las Vegas.

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