Nevada’s newly elected U.S. senator, Catherine Cortez Masto, has already taken up the cudgel against the First Amendment previously wielded by her predecessor, Harry Reid. She put out a press release recently announcing that she has joined with other congressional Democrats to reintroduce a constitutional amendment that would overturn Supreme Court rulings that have held … [Read more...]
Retirement System Officials Should Respect Transparency
What do you do with a rogue government agency that spends billions in taxpayer dollars but constantly dissembles, denies, deceives, dodges and dithers to avoid public scrutiny and does so by spending still more taxpayer money? For years the Nevada Public Employees’ Retirement System (PERS) has attempted to conceal from the public any specifics about the amount of public … [Read more...]
This Little “Piggy” is Getting Fat At the Public Trough
Back in the 1970s Wisconsin U.S. Sen. William Proxmire began handing out his monthly Golden Fleece Award, recognizing wasteful spending by government agencies, such as a $4 million advertising campaign by the Postal Service to encourage Americans to write more letters to each other. After his retirement, along came Oklahoma U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn, who published an annual … [Read more...]
Education Savings Accounts Would Increase Public School Funds
Nevada’s education savings account (ESA) law is in dire straits thanks to a convoluted state Supreme Court ruling that said ESAs are constitutional but the funding mechanism devised by lawmakers was not and the fact that this year’s roster of lawmakers, who could fix that funding flaw, includes a majority of Democrats in both the Assembly and state Senate. Not a single Democrat … [Read more...]
Congress or Trump Could Undo Monument Designation
There is a word for what President Obama did this past week in declaring Gold Butte a national monument: dictatorial. In just more than a year Obama has unilaterally declared off-limits to productive economic uses 1 million acres of Nevada land — first the 700,000-acre Basin and Range National Monument straddling the border between Lincoln and Nye counties and now the … [Read more...]
Nevada Could be Ground Zero for Resurgence of National Defense
Nevada knows nukes, or at least we used to. First, the election of Donald Trump reignited the debate over the possible resurrection of Yucca Mountain as a nuclear waste repository. Now, with a simple tweet Trump has reopened discussions about the preparedness, or lack thereof, of America’s nuclear arsenal. “The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear … [Read more...]
Why We Have a Federalist System, Instead of a Democracy
Someone buy these folks a civics textbook and maybe a Cliff Notes version of the Federalist Papers. Yes, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by about 3 million more votes than Donald Trump, but she lost the Electoral College vote by 306 to 232. That is because the Electoral College is made up of 538 members — one for each senator and representative from each state, plus the … [Read more...]
Reid in Farewell Speech Calls on Press to Criticize … We Oblige
In what Harry Reid himself called “my final speech” this past week on the floor of the U.S. Senate, Nevada’s senator for the past three decades and minority or majority leader of Senate Democrats for more than a decade rambled for 77 minutes in his customary monotone through a disjointed litany of accomplishments and a painfully personal autobiography of his ascent from poverty … [Read more...]