Deregulator: Alive since '85!

Leaving Las Vegas After four eventful and often positive years here in Southern Nevada, my family and I are headed for other environs. I'll soon be writing editorials for The Press-Enterprise in Riverside, California, another page with right-thinking people who, well, are in California, which is where (it turns out) we really wanted to be all along. The folks at the Review-Journal were very good to me, in many ways. I'll miss a lot of folks there, both in the newsroom and throughout the operation. My pal Steve Sebelius penned a generous farewell post on his blog, Under A Naked Bulb. My former boss, John Kerr, was kind enough to let me to write a final column , which appeared Sunday. Don't know if I got the tone quite right. I e-mailed it to my wife, whose response was: "A little harsh, don't you think?" Oops. Maybe. Anyway, the sentiments hold. So long as Las Vegas remains a small town, politically and culturally speaking, the corruption and scandals will ke...

Calling all slayers In Romania, they still believe in vampires . And the need to slay them. The process doesn't sound nearly as nifty as it was on Buffy. Or as perilous, for that matter. (Hat tip to Infinite Monkeys .)

Radio, radio I've had XM in the car for nearly three months now, and couldn't be more pleased. For one thing, XM went totally commercial-free in February. None of the channels I heard ever played commercials, but XM was able to drop the ads without raising fees. Over the past few weeks I've broadened my listening patterns a bit, moving away from an overdose of blues and Americana and spending more time with the handful of stations that play AAA (what us geezers used to call "folk rock" or "country rock") and the "Deep Tracks" classic rock channel. As I've said earlier, this isn't true free-form radio, but I continue to be impressed and surprised by the variety of artists and tunes, the XM-exclusive, in-studio performances, and the absence of formatting straitjackets. I've heard blues artists on the Americana channel, Jimmie Vaughan playing a solo acoustic set in the XM studio, Richard Thompson on a half-dozen stations, new songs fro...

I took the test The Libertarian Purity test, that is. Scored a 73, the same as National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru , and slightly higher than not only the estimable Charles Murray, but also my friends John Hood and Steve Hayward , who were contributing editors to Reason when I worked there. (John's still on the masthead ... for now.) I wouldn't abolish the public schools ... or Social Security or Medicare (though I would let anybody who wanted to opt out of the entitlements do so as long as they surrendered any future claims on the programs). Guess I'm a right-wing statist. That's only one reason quizzes like this are worthless. They allow for no sense of nuance, and in this particular case, they're badly skewed. You get 5 points for advocating the abolition of all taxes, but only 1 for saying taxes in general are too high. Nuts. The quiz also reminds me of an essay written for Reason about 30 years ago by the incomparable Edith Efron called "Secular Fundam...

Coach Karl? Latest entry into UNLV basketball coaching rumor mill: George Karl, whose often under-talented NBA teams won 59 percent of their games in his 16 years as a head coach, and who cut his teeth coaching professionally in Spain, and then with the CBA. Oh yeah, and he played point guard at my alma mater, the University of North Carolina, in the early '70s. Karl has local grass-roots support, as Review-Journal columnist Joe Hawk points out , and there was some interest in bringing him here before Coach Spoonhour was hired three years ago. Hawk also notes that some boosters are uneasy with the presumed coronation of front-runner Lon Kruger, who "never stayed at a school longer than five years and won less than 60 percent of his games." Of course, Karl hasn't exactly set down firm roots anyplace he's gone, either. His longest tenure was with Milwaukee, where he coached seven seasons; but he went through three other franchises along the way. Must be something i...

Cautious approach Attorney General Brian Sandoval is confident in the correctness of his ruling that state employees can't serve in the Legislature, but isn't sure how to force the issue. In a meeting with Review-Journal editors on Tuesday, Sandoval said he would move forward cautiously because he did not want to bring a legal action before the state courts, only to have it bounced on a technicality (as happened decades ago to the last AG who tried to remove an executive branch employee from the Legislature). Given the haphazard jurisprudence we've received from the current batch of justices, a deft touch may be in order. Still, five of the six affected lawmakers say it's business as usual: They'll keep their tax-financed jobs and their legislative seats and run for re-election ... after which, they'll keep double-dipping in violation of the constitution. (State Sen. Ray Rawson, who faces an uphill primary re-election battle against Assemblyman Bob Beers, has s...

Splitting the baby Nevada Attorney General Brian Sandoval ruled today that some public employees were eligible to sit in the Legislature, but others weren't. Sandoval was responding to a request from Secretary of State Dean Heller to clarify whether the separation of powers clause in the state constitution prevented government workers from legislative service. Employees of state agencies (including the university system) cannot hold seats in the Legislature, Sandoval decided, but the separation of powers concerns did not apply to local governments. If the decision holds, six members of the 2003 Legislature, three Democrats and three Republicans, are no longer constitutionally eligible to hold office. The big losers are Senate Minority Leader Dina Titus, who teaches political science at UNLV, Sen. Ray Rawson, who makes a gajillion bucks teaching dentistry (that's right) at the community college, and Assemblywoman Chris Giunchigliani, who gets paid $70,000 a year to do something...

When you visit Vegas, wear the pants with the deep pockets The Review-Journal's intrepid Mike Kalil uncovers another Vegas scam: the long-haul cabbie. Last year, the local Taxicab Authority cited drivers taking riders on circuitous routes that boosted their fares on 174 occasions. While that's a miniscule proportion of the 23 million taxi rides offered last year, the number of long-hauls is much, much higher, because the citations reflect only the cases in which officers observed the practice, or riders were savvy enough to figure out they were being ripped off, and filed successful complaints. (Although as the story notes, cabbies who think their passengers are onto the plot are known to kick their customers out onto the streets.) Officials concede that cabbies are illegally taking in millions in extra fares from long-hauling. The most typical scheme is called "tunneling," when cabbies leaving McCarran International Airport take their Strip-bound patrons to their h...

Stress test The surprising resignation of UNLV basketball coach Charlie Spoonhour for stress-related health reasons has the school and its boosters scrambling for a successor. Finding a coach with the bona fides to meet the expectations of the boosters in advance who can then deliver a top-tier program on the court may be impossible. Spoon did a fine job restoring the program -- if not to prominence at least to respectability. After all, when he took over, the team was under NCAA sanctions and scholarship limits, and now the program appears to be clean for the first time ever. And each of his two teams won 20+ games. But fans who think a return to the glory years of Tark and the Shark Tank are a mere hire away are fooling themselves. Listen, the Mountain West Conference is awful. It was lucky beyond belief to have landed and kept coaches of the caliber of Utah's Rick Majerus (who also resigned earlier this year for health reasons) and Jerry Tarkanian. The schools aren't good en...

Moneyball goes Hollywood If you're a Dodger fan (I'm not), the team's hiring of Paul DePodesta as general manager should be cause for celebration. DePodesta, as this Rob Neyer column suggests, was the brains behind the wildly successful Oakland front office the past few years, when the team consistently made the postseason, even though it had one of the sport's smaller payrolls. (Take that, Mr. Steinbrenner.) DePodesta and his former boss, Billy Beane, are honor students from the Bill James school -- where numbers rather than hunches (provided by tobacco-chewing scouts) offer the best measure of on-field talent. Beane won with tightwad owners; fellow sabremetrician GM Theo Epstein won at Boston with deep pockets; DePodesta should also have a liberal budget in L.A. In a way, DePodesta is the latest extension of the longtime Dodger tradition launched more than a half-century ago by Branch Rickey, who ran the sport's first "scientific" front office. DePodest...

Da trade So A-Rod's going to the Yankees. As a card-carrying Yankee-hater who really likes a lot of the players on that club, I actually think this deal is pretty cool. I mean, only baseball would allow this sort of transaction to take place -- allowing the game's highest-paid player, who may end up being the best at any position of all time, in the prime of his career, to go to the team with the biggest payroll. This could happen in no other major professional sport. The all-consuming obsession for "parity" shared by basketball and football -- and the accompanying necessity for salary caps to make that happen -- is ruining those sports, leading to the constant roster churning which causes fans, as Jerry Seinfeld put it, to "root for laundry." Not in baseball. If The Boss wants to spend six times as much in player salaries as the owners of the Brewers or the Pirates, so be it. And the beauty part is, there's no guarantee the Yankees will actually win any...

Weasel alert A story in today's Review-Journal reports that, surprise, surprise, the record-setting, $833-million tax increase enacted by last year's Legislature is causing banks and small businesses to scramble. Non-banking businesses are chafing at the 0.7 percent payroll tax (which replaces the $100 annual per-employee "head tax"). Banks are reeling from both the new 2 percent payroll tax and the new $7,000 per-branch licensing fee. Hit particularly hard are Nevada's smaller, private banks, some of which may have to lay off employees or close branches in the more-isolated hamlets in the state. While no one who lives in this universe should be shocked, the response of pro-tax Democrats (sorry, I repeat myself) to the news is downright disgusting. Assembly Taxation Committee Chairman David Goldwater and Senate Minority Leader Dina "Cross of Gold" Titus are feeling the pain of hard-hit businesses ... a little. Both lawmakers say the taxes they preferre...

Now blogging ... My friend and colleague Steve Sebelius has finally entered the 'sphere. Under a Naked Bulb should be a fun site, and (I hope) offer some of Steve's edgy, lefty, outrage-fueled humor. Check it out.

Decadent West I'm not going to comment on Boob-a-Palooza, other than to second the sentiments of Crispin Sartwell : The halftime show will likely end up as a recruitment video for al-Qaida. Plus, the man has great taste in music. Anybody who can get George Jones and Rod Piazza and the Mighty Flyers mentioned on the L.A. Times' op-ed page is OK in my book. Four and counting So far, Brian Greenspun has used four columns to defend Harry Claiborne (OK, to be fair, in three of them he merely recycled columns written years ago by dad Hank). Meantime, the Media Watch column in this week's City Life reports on an amusing and bizarre partnership between the Sun and American Society of Newspaper Editors ... to study ethical decision-making. The Sun somehow came out with flying colors, notwithstanding, as CL pointed out, the paper's notoriety as an inbred vanity publication. How did this happen? Well, it may have something to do with the fact (author William Woo is) a longtime ac...

Doug, Dinsdale and Harry Us relative newbies (we're a few weeks away from being four-year Vegas residents) typically get reminders of what Las Vegas used to be whenever one of the old-timers passes on. This week, Harry Claiborne, former U.S. District Court judge and perhaps the most legendary criminal defense lawyer in Nevada history, took his own life at age 86. He had been suffering from Alzheimer's and liver cancer. One's not supposed to speak ill of the dead, but the praise and reverence that were slathered over this man after his passing was way overboard, when you consider what was Claiborne's true claim to fame: In 1986, as a federal judge, Claiborne was impeached by the U.S. House, convicted by the Senate, and removed from office because he accepted bribes ... from the owner of a whorehouse . Now it takes some doing to be removed from office by Congress, and indeed, Claiborne was the first judge in U.S. history to be convicted of crimes while sitting on the fede...

SOTU thoughts At Reason's Web site, my longtime friend and fellow Tar Heel John Hood offers this compelling argument why -- despite an uninspiring field of Democratic challengers -- a second Bush term may not be a sure bet. John's point goes beyond the apparent meltdown of Howard Dean and the emergence of seemingly more electable Democratic rivals post-Iowa: The problem for Bush and the Republicans is that if the security issue gets muted during the 2004 campaign, a good chunk of their political base will get uncomfortable. It is difficult to overstate the extent to which the limited-government, free-market faction of their coalition—including mainstream Reagan Republicans, old-style balanced-budget moderates, and small-l libertarians—have been dismayed by Bush's dismal record on federal spending and entitlements. Non-defense discretionary spending under Bush and a Republican Congress soared by nearly 19 percent in two years, a rate not seen in decades and one making Bill ...

Republican government No, I'm not talking about the State of the Union address, but instead today's filing of a petition asking the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene in the Guinn v. Legislature lawsuit. (Read the petition here .) The strongest point made by the brief is that -- by setting aside the supermajority requirement in the state constitution for the Legislature to increase taxes -- the Nevada Supreme Court has violated Article IV of the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees each state a republican form of government. While defenders of Nevada's crackpot decision claim there's no way the federal justices will get involved in a decision affecting only one state, Chapman University law professor John Eastman , who wrote the brief, cites a 1992 Supreme Court decision in which the justices said they might be receptive to such a case. Eastman also notes that if this decision stands, big spenders in the dozen-plus states that also have supermajority tax-increase requiremen...

The Sun weighs in The Las Vegas Sun publishes a superficial front-page feature today on public employees in the Legislature. It's long on information but woefully short on analysis. The point of the story seems to be that barring public employees from legislative service will change the Legislature, but it doesn't really explain how ... or argue why anyone should care. The story mentions that there's a concern that dual service might violate the separation of powers clause in the state constitution, but then brushes aside that argument because the Legislative Counsel Bureau -- the Legislature's hired legal help -- has ruled the provision doesn't apply, so the story abandons the issue entirely. (The LCB also decided in 2002 it was OK for an employee of the state Department of Transportation to sit in the Legislature and hold both jobs. Amazing.) It also completely ignores the question of home rule, which is (or should be) the basis on which the forthcoming opinion b...

Separation talk I'll be on radio and in cyberspace next week, appearing on KNPR-FM 's "State of Nevada" public affairs program Monday the 19th. The topic: public employees in the Legislature. My buddy and R-J colleague Steve Sebelius is the guest host, and the other guests are City Councilwoman Lynette Boggs McDonald, Assembly Speaker (and Henderson cop) Richard Perkins, and Senate Minority Leader (and UNLV political science professor) Dina Titus. The show was taped Tuesday, will air at 9 a.m. and 6 p.m., and will be available as an audio stream on the Web site sometime that morning. My radio voice was a bit rusty, so I hope my presentation was OK. For those who can't or won't listen to the program, you're probably familiar with the arguments Boggs McDonald and I make, primarily this: The separation-of-powers clause in the Nevada Constitution prohibits employees from any state and local agency from simultaneously serving in the Legislature. Perkins and Tit...

Delay of game The City Council decides to punt the public employees issue, delaying its vote until Attorney General Brian Sandoval rules on the constitutionality of dual service. (The decision is expected by the end of the month.) During the council debate, Lynette Boggs McDonald reiterated the principal reason city employees can't also be lawmakers: The state constitution forbids it. City attorney Brad Jerbic all-but-ratified her view, which may have persuaded Mayor Oscar Goodman to vote the right way. (Goodman also noted that whatever Sandoval decides [IMHO, Sandoval -- establishment to the core -- won't find anything wrong with double-dipping] would merely interpret state law and could easily be overruled in court.) Meantime, council members Janet Moncrief, Michael Mack, and Lawrence Weekly -- with collective IQs perhaps reaching the triple digits -- remained oblivious to any potential conflict with the state's governing document ... notwithstanding the fact that Boggs M...

The Williams Saga, next chapter Haven't we been here before? Wednesday, the Las Vegas City Council will decide whether to establish policies governing city employees who wish to serve in the Legislature. City Manager Doug Selby says the council will have two options: Ban city workers from the Legislature altogether, which would conveniently comport with the state constitution; or let city workers serve a second master but force double-dippers to take unpaid leave while they're in Carson City and take other steps to minimize potential conflicts. The former is, of course, the only legitimate choice. But given statements made by council members over the past couple of months, it's impossible to say how many (other than Lynette Boggs McDonald, who gets it) are smart enough to figure this out. Meantime, the Las Vegas Sun, oblivious as usual, opines in favor of the latter option, completely ignoring the state constitution ... in fact, failing to even mention that rather germane...

Mickey Kaus shows his coastalism I got XM satellite radio for the car this year (Thanks, Santa!), and it's been a wonderful thing. I did this for a couple of reasons: 1) I have eclectic music tastes; 2) I enjoy listening to radio in the car, because I appreciate the possibility of hearing something surprising (rather than music recorded by me): but 3) Vegas radio blows. You'd think a city of more than 1 million people would offer something interesting on the dial. But no. UNLV doesn't really have a college radio station. The campus possesses a frequency, and it broadcasts jazz during the week. I love mainstream, "straight-ahead" jazz, the kind they play on my favorite station, K-Jazz (Long Beach State). But the jocks at KUNV determine the playlists, and (when I'm listening, anyway) more than one actually think "smooth jazz" is something you can listen to without projectile vomiting. The other stations in town are your basic Infinity/Clear Channel lo...

Henderson fixes the BCS Thanks to the CBS/SEC hookup, I saw LSU play a bunch this year, and for my money, they were the nation's best college football team. The Tigers improved as the season went along and played their best in the big games. OTOH, AP columnist Jim Litke claims that "Southern Cal could beat [LSU and Oklahoma] -- back-to-back -- and still make it to the beach in time to catch the sunset." Who's right? We'll never know, thanks to those wacky folks who devised the BCS. Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese, who was in charge of this year's circus, admits the current system is flawed, but until the college presidents agree to some sort of playoff, any system could fail to determine a "true" national champion. But changes will be proposed. Among them: An additional game pitting the two top-ranked winning teams of BCS games; elimination of computer rankings; and keeping the current system in place but with the guarantee that only teams that...

Snow addendum The Review-Journal's Web site is offering a bunch of photos taken by staff photographers and readers of the recent snowstorm. The link is here .