The backers of a 2016 ballot initiative to create a state law requiring criminal background checks for all private party gun sales — something not required by federal law — are asking the courts to fix a fatal flaw that they themselves created. Failure to comply with the Background Check Act requirement would carry a penalty of up to a year in jail and a $2,000 fine — if it … [Read more...]

President Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency has pulled the plug on the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, which called for power plants in every state to reduced carbon dioxide emissions by 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030 — a not so thinly veiled plan to destroy the coal industry. It was a senseless and futile gesture that would have cost Americans dearly while doing … [Read more...]

Gov. Brian Sandoval has been crying about a paper cut as though it were an amputation. Ever since Attorney General Adam Laxalt stated that he would run for governor next year and one of his platform positions would be the repeal of the 2015 commerce tax, Sandoval has been lobbying brickbats, even though Laxalt suspended his campaign announcement just hours after the Mandalay … [Read more...]

The House Committee on Natural Resources this past week approved a bill sponsored by Utah Republican Rep. Rob Bishop to rein in the powers granted by the Antiquities Act of 1906 that allow a president to unilaterally create huge national monuments. The bill advanced on a party-line vote of 27-13, with Democrats in opposition. The bill, H.R. 3990, the National Monument … [Read more...]

In 2015 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service determined that years of science-based protections by federal and state land use plans had substantially reduced risks to more than 90 percent of the greater sage grouse’s breeding habitats across its 173 million-acre range. Thus, its extinction no longer imminent, the breed was removed as a candidate for listing under the … [Read more...]

It looks like a tax reform proposal that could have resulted in lower income tax rates for Nevadans is swirling down the drain. The Los Angeles Times is reporting that congressional Republicans are considering jettisoning a part of President Trump’s proposal that would eliminate IRS deductions for state and local taxes. Dropping the deduction would generate $1.3 trillion in … [Read more...]

The Luddites are tossing legal wrenches into the economic machinery. A pair of self-styled environmental groups has filed a lawsuit in federal court in an attempt to block oil and gas leases on tracts on Bureau of Land Management public land, claiming hydraulic fracturing or fracking might somehow jeopardize aquifers and all manner of wildlife. Fracking is the process of … [Read more...]

Welcome to the coming mobocracy. It appears we are rearing a generation that already has all the answers, knows what needs to be said and done and will brook no deviation from the preordained norm. The debate is not an option. In the face of a deluge of anti-free speech activities, including actual riots, on college campuses across the country, Brookings Institution … [Read more...]