Vin Suprynowicz

Steve McIntyre appears to have caught NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in a slight problem with the backup data for the outfit’s “2008 was the hottest October on record” globaloney. (See www.climateaudit.org/?p=4318.)

The GISS computerized maps seemed to show readings 10 degrees higher than normal all across Russia for the month in question, which seemed a bit odd, given that snow fell that month in an area of the United Arab Emirates where the people’s don’t even have a word for snow in their language, and that from the Dakotas to China, from the Alps to New Zealand, 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperature records were set in the month of October, 2008, according to Christopher Brooker, London Telegraph, Nov. 16, 2008.

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After decades of watching state welfare bureaucracies and their budgets increase by double-digit percentages, the economic slowdown finally hit.

Nevada Gov. Jim Gibbons announced late last year those budgets will have to be pruned by a modest 9.3 percent — some $2.3 billion — for the upcoming biennium.

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A few weeks after Proposition 8 was approved by California voters back in November — banning same-sex marriage there — Professor John Matteson apparently assigned members of his public speaking class at Los Angeles City College to address the issue.

Did the instructor actually expect all his students would adhere to the minority position — often mistaken for a majority viewpoint, by those walled up in today’s leftist academic preserves — on this controversial issue?

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It’s too early for the crow or even the mockingbird to put in an appearance, but mourning doves greet the gray first light as a family of Gambel’s quail stirs in the ground cover. The eastern sky shows faint yellow and pink as down near the mission the homeless guys roll out of their bedrolls — men who once made a decent living in the construction trades, back when Nevada was still a “can-do” kind of state.

Over at the courthouse, the first environmental attorneys show up with their carry-out coffee cups, just ahead of the crows, waiting for the windows to open so they can file their latest actions, banning any further attempts at human progress in Southern Nevada. First in line today are the grim reapers of the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity, suing agents of the federal government for allowing plans to proceed for the development of homes and a golf course at Coyote Springs, in northeastern Clark County.

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The mailbag being nearly full, and your loyal correspondent thanks to a sinus headache having been shuffling around this past week like the archetypal Vulcan in the old “Spock’s Brain” Star Trek episode (third season, original series), herewith some recent missives of interest:

Brian writes in:

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On Jan. 10, Los Angeles Times columnist Tim Rutten penned a column on the recent tumble of the nation’s 401(k) tax-deferred retirement accounts.

“There’s been little discussion of the way in which this economic implosion has exposed the utter failure of the now-ubiquitous 401(k) retirement accounts,” Mr. Rutten offered. “In fact, the entire 401(k) system looks increasingly like the sort of bait-and-switch con relished by the Bernie Madoff’s of the world.

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Peggy Brown, a retired poker dealer whom I’ve known for some years as an upstanding and truthful sort, writes in that her 2003 Dodge Neon was in storage for nine months while she was out of state.

When she got back, “I needed to get it re-registered and get new plates for it.”

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In the fourth and final installment of a series reporting results of a poll of nearly 70 Southern Nevada business owners and managers, published in Tuesday’s Review-Journal, 43 percent of respondents said local schools and colleges are “not at all effective” in preparing students for the workplace.

A startling zero percent — not a one — found the schools “very effective” at that task.

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Famously, the new president, Barack Obama, argued in his inaugural address last week “The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works. … Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end.”

Given that not even Ronald Reagan was able to shut down such obviously counterproductive federal programs as the Department of Energy and the Department of Education (Are American youths now “better educated” than when Jimmy Carter formed this Department of Schoolmarm Subsidies as a sop to the unions, 30 years ago?) — accompanied by the fact there is not a trace of evidence anywhere in Sen. Obama’s modest legislative history to indicate he has ever seen the need to so much as freeze the funding for a pointless government program, let alone “end it” — we may perhaps be excused a small chuckle at this attempt by the Senate’s most leftist recent alumnus to pose for an early fitting of his “Ron Paul” Halloween costume.

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The politically potent Culinary union Local 226 says its already gathered enough signatures to require a popular vote on the City Council’s current scheme to move Las Vegas City Hall to an abandoned casino site six blocks to the southwest of its current location — which would place it between the Clark County Temple to Government and the traffic fine collection/strip-search operation known as the “Regional Justice Center.”

The union actually threatens to place two measures on the ballot, possibly as soon as June. One would require voter approval for lease-purchase construction projects (that’s how the new City Hall scheme would be structured), while the other would actually repeal the city’s current redevelopment plan — otherwise scheduled to sunset in 2031 — giving voters the power to approve or reject individual redevelopment projects.
Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman responded Thursday that the city will fight both ballot initiatives. The mayor further said existing projects would continue no matter what voters say.

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