Deregulator: Alive since '85!

Court to First Amendment: Drop dead The saga of the Nevada Supreme Court and the budget debacle gets more fascinating all the time. My buddy and colleague Vin Suprynowicz and my employer, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, may soon be sued by Supreme Court Justices Miriam Shearing, Bob Rose and Deborah Agosti for defamation because of a column Vin wrote about the high court's ruling that set aside a portion of the state constitution. (Read the column here .) From the news story: According to Suprynowicz's column, he had lunch on July 1 with a retired Nevada judge who told him: "The fix is in. Guinn went to Rose and Shearing on the Supreme Court some time ago and got their agreement that they'll impose the tax hikes. Agosti is wavering, but it'll probably be 6-to-1."This seemed a tad paranoid to me then," Suprynowicz wrote. "Now we know. The judge called it right." Later in the column, Suprynowicz wrote, "And so the thin veneer that had still d...

Boo-frickin'-hoo Terry Lanni, CEO of MGM Mirage, explaining why his gaming group is pulling out of both the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce and the Nevada Resort Association after the trade associations failed to convince the Legislature to enact the gaming industry's agenda during the recently concluded session: "We're tired of being rejected out-of-hand, of having heavy feet stomp on our hands and heads." Yes, let's shed a tear for the helpless, politically impotent gaming industry in Nevada, incapable of finding anyone in the establishment to listen to its tales of woe and destitution. We must all remember that Las Vegas was built by such hardscrabble entrepreneurs as Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky and Sam Giancana, who barely had two nickels to rub together when they decided to create a paradise in the desert. As Dr. Evil might say, "This is ri-god-dam-diculous." Addendum A bit of context may be helpful. The gaming industry has never been, shall we sa...

Recalling recalls Excellent cautionary points by my former colleague at Reason Nick Gillespie and my buddy Steve Hayward (guest-blogging at The Corner) on some of the unforeseen consequences of the Gray Davis recall campaign. Nick notes that the good government types are likely to use campaign "reform" laws to harass political activists; Steve suggests if the recall succeeds, it is likely to lead to the de facto transformation of California into something like a parliamentary democracy. In the future, whenever a governor's popularity swoons (Pete Wilson's polls were very bad in 1992 and 1993), the liberal special interest groups are likely to try the recall route themselves; they have more money and organization than the right in California. Meantime, in Nevada, my humble prediction is that attempts to recall public officials here will fail. Organizers of the recalls have targeted all six justices who voted to kinda, sorta suspend the state constitution. Had they s...

Sometimes you gotta take it like a man Gov. Kenny Guinn responds to The Wall Street Journal's July 2 (not July 15, as the press release states) editorial -- "The Republican Gray Davis," reprinted here -- with this whiny, interminable retort . To wit: As Governor of Nevada, I had a duty to uphold the laws of my state and brought a lawsuit as quickly as I could in hopes of forcing our legislative body to meet its constitutional responsibility to provide for a meaningful educational system in this state. For me, protecting my constituents and upholding the laws of this state did not warrant the sophomoric sarcasm that you attached to it. ... In closing, I am disappointed with your newspaper's ability to print accurate editorials. Perhaps, before writing about Nevada again, the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board should exercise its professional ethics and investigate the facts. Sure, anybody can be thin-skinned, but geez, gov. You think a Republican governor who won ...

I can't believe it's a law school Today, the Review-Journal published this op-ed by UNLV law professor Sylvia Lazos, defending Nevada's Supreme Court justices for their decision that may launch an outright political free-for-all in the Silver State. It's possible to imagine someone coming up with a reasoned defense of what the court did, I suppose, but this article doesn't do it. Money quote: During the civil rights era, initiatives amended state constitutions to delay or resist the implementation of bussing to integrate once segregated schools. These initiatives were struck down by federal and state courts. More recently, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down state constitutional amendments that would place term limits on congressional representatives and nullified attempts to place notations on ballots warning that a congressional representative had ignored the people's directive to serve a limited number of terms. The problem with this, of course, is that the a...

Results, results, results Today's column by Review-Journal Editor Tom Mitchell does more than summarize the distinctions between the editorial policies of the city's two daily papers on the issue of the state budget impasse, among other things. He offers a microcosm of the world views of the two papers. For the framework, you have to understand the argument made by Thomas Sowell in his book A Conflict of Visions , recently reissued by Doubleday. In this brief volume, Sowell argues that most political debates are conducted by people talking past one another, because the people participating in the debates have different "visions" or assumptions about the way the world should work -- views on justice, equality, rights, all depend on your vision. The two visions -- the Constrained vs. the Unconstrained -- guide individuals' world views, whether they realize it or not. While I can't do the book justice in a few sentences, here's a Sowell for Dummies summary:...