Free Republic

Peace on earth, good will toward men. Fine sentiments. But as citizens of a republic, can we really assume we'll be held forever blameless for the actions of our government? Barack Obama, who if he were not in office would be applying for a Community Development Block Grant to stage anti-war rallies in Chicago, just authorized sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. But it's OK: He promises to pull them out in 18 months -- soon enough to guarantee they can't actually accomplish anything. A few hundred of these young American men will be sent home in coffins or with...

Only "two rogue scientists," as the oh-so-reassuring Climategate Deniers would have us believe? Walter Williams, esteemed economics professor at George Mason University, last week summarized Climategate, to date: "New evidence proves that climatologists and environmental policy advocates have not only fed us lies (and) engaged in scientific and academic fraud, but committed criminal acts as well. Last month, Russian computer hackers obtained thousands of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England. CRU has the world's largest temperature data set. In collaboration with scientists around the world ... its research and mathematical models form...

By now, you doubtless know a dastardly hacker broke into the e-mail system at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain late last month, grabbing and making public more than 1,000 e-mails that expose how these "scientific experts," cited so often to confirm "man-made global warming," have been fudging their data, conspiring to remove global warming skeptics from the teams that "peer-review" their doctored data for publication, and advising each other to delete incriminating e-mails being sought under the public disclosure laws. Wow. I'm about as shocked as Claude Rains' character when he found out...

Retro clothes are not vintage clothes. Retro clothes are new-made garments designed to imitate or evoke the fashions of as bygone era -- often, the 1940s, '50s or '60s. Vintage fashion is the real thing: sturdy garments well made in America (usually by union labor, if that matters to you) that remind us of an era when all the best stuff, from movies to muscle-cars, was "made in the U.S.A." It's about nostalgia, yes, but in this unrelenting recession it's also about the "recessionistas" -- that's what Alison Houtte calls her growing new customer base -- realizing they can get...

I posted on Nov. 11 at www.lvrj.com/blogs/vin/ a response to a letter-writing government schoolmarm who contends she should not be held responsible for the failure of her young charges to learn anything, since it's all their parents' fault. I answered, in part: "Teachers from 1620 through 1950 didn't go home with their kids to tuck them in, either. Yet Americans with eighth grade educations through all those centuries could read, write, spell and do basic arithmetic well enough to run circles around your pathetic charges ... even if today's pathetic inmates sit through a full 12 years of your progressively...

Early in the morning of Dec. 5, 1999, off-duty Las Vegas police officer Dennis Devitte was one of the customers at Mr. D's Sportsbar & Grill, at Rainbow and Oakey boulevards, where he and some pals had gone to hear the band Pigs in a Blanket. A little after 1 a.m., three armed robbers charged through the back door with guns drawn and their faces covered with T-shirts or bandanas. "I'd only been in the bar a short time and was talking to friends," Mr. Devitte later told an interviewer for the International Association of Chiefs of Police. "I saw...

A "push in Congress for broader gun rights is threatening to derail Amtrak and stall a transportation spending bill," wrote Walter Alarkon on thehill.com on Oct. 25. "Gun-rights advocates in Congress are pressing appropriators to keep a provision that would let Amtrak passengers check in handguns with their baggage." The provision, which calls for withholding $1.5 billion in Amtrak funding if the policy isn't implemented before April, was inserted into the $68.8 billion Senate transportation and Housing and Urban Development spending bill as an amendment. All 40 Republicans, 27 Democrats and one admitted socialist voted for the amendment, sponsored by...

Oct. 25, 2009 Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal VIN SUPRYNOWICZ: In 1942, it came down to one Marine It's hard to envision -- or, for the dwindling few, to remember -- what the world looked like on Oct. 26, 1942, when a few thousand U.S. Marines stood essentially stranded on the God-forsaken jungle island of Guadalcanal, placed like a speed bump at the end of the long blue-water slot between New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago, the most likely route for the Japanese Navy to take if they hoped to reach Australia.On Guadalcanal, the Marines struggled to complete an airfield....

How gratifying to hear from so many veterans in response to my Oct. 25 column on Mitchell Paige and Guadalcanal. I heard from Clayton Fisher, 87, of Henderson, who served under Chesty Puller in the 1st of the 7th Marines, receiving his first purple heart at Guadalcanal (the night before the action I described in my column) and his second at Palau. I heard from Gordon Williams, now 92, who served on the destroyer Porter (DD356) in the Battle of Santa Cruz, which was being fought over the same two days -- Oct. 25 and 26, 1942 -- as the...

It's hard to envision -- or, for the dwindling few, to remember -- what the world looked like on Oct. 26, 1942, when a few thousand U.S. Marines stood essentially stranded on the God-forsaken jungle island of Guadalcanal, placed like a speed bump at the end of the long blue-water slot between New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago, the most likely route for the Japanese Navy to take if they hoped to reach Australia. On Guadalcanal, the Marines struggled to complete an airfield. Japanese Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto knew what that meant. No effort would be spared to dislodge these upstart...

Unemployment continues to tick upward. Small businesses forgo profits on two-for-one deals just to keep the doors open. But we're in recovery. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the guy who couldn't get around to paying his own taxes, says so. After all, government is doing all it can to speed the recovery, isn't it? "Fed keeps key rate near zero," the Business page headline screamed on Sept. 24. Low interest rates should get things "stimulated," shouldn't they? Then, three days later, over a Washington dateline, "Jobless benefits extension backed: Lawmakers voted 331-83 to extend jobless benefits by 13 weeks in 27...

Imagine you've offered to help a teenager prepare a report on American politics of the 1970s. You start reading the 36-year-old reports of the scandal that began when some very unusual burglars were caught breaking into the Democratic campaign headquarters at Washington's Watergate Hotel. But something strikes you odd. In all the discussions of who financed these undercover operations, who ordered them, who stood to benefit from them, one name is curiously missing. In none of the stories can you find any mention of one "Richard Nixon." Wow! What kind of a time warp have you entered? Has someone been...

Dozens of times a week now, we receive e-mailed letters very similar to the following, which arrived at the newspaper Wednesday, signed by one Mary White on Russell Road, Las Vegas: "I am disappointed in the media and the RJ for not reporting on all the undercover journal reporting done on Acorn by ordinary citizens," Ms. White opines. "You guys are only interesting in making Obama president and turning our country into communists. I am look thru Sundays paper for any real news like what is reported on Fox News and Glenn Beck and am hugely disappointed. I cannot buy...

Touring the country to peddle his collectivist schemes, President Barack Obama made stops in New Hampshire and then in Phoenix during the month of August. At several of these events, a handful of those who gathered outside the halls to protest wore firearms. No one got arrested, since no one brandished their firearms in a threatening manner. They just wore them, safely slung or holstered, which is still perfectly legal in both New Hampshire and Arizona. The fact that many Americans need to be re-acclimatized to the normalcy of an armed citizenry was quickly revealed by the nearly hysterical rantings...

The main point that probably deserves further mention about last week's Dead Kennedy Funeral Parade was the behavior of the press, which wept and moaned and gnashed its collective teeth with hardly a dissenting soul to say, "Enough, already," as though the corpse of a pharaoh was headed for its final hoedown with the sun god. I'm surprised they didn't decide to embalm the guy so people could troop past and touch the yellowed cadaver like they've been doing with Vlad "The Impaler" Lenin in Moscow for the past 70 years. It was all further evidence that statism has now...

The most revealing moment in Edward "Ted" Kennedy's political life came Nov. 4, 1979, just three days before he would officially launch his challenge to a sitting president of his own party, Jimmy Carter. In a televised interview, CBS News correspondent Roger Mudd asked the already stout Massachusetts senator a "giveaway" question, a question about as tough as a quiz show host trying to help break the ice with a nervous contestant by asking, "What color is grass?" Roger Mudd asked: "Why do you want to be president?" Ted Kennedy, 47, was about to challenge an incumbent president of his...

There are thrift shops in town with signs up, seeking to buy Michael Jackson LPs and other "related material." They do this because people have been coming in since the "King of Pop's" untimely demise, asking to buy Michael Jackson stuff. I understand. But are Michael Jackson LPs a good investment? Unless they're signed and you have some reason to believe the autograph is legitimate, no. LPs by an artist as popular as Mr. Jackson got pressed out by the hundreds of thousands. There were a couple of Jackson Five singles (45s) released on the "Steel Town" label in 1968...

Our hummingbird has returned.She's a black-chinned, I believe, not the world's most colorful model. But she has a distinctive habit of hovering down to look us right in the face, one at a time, as we sit out in the back yard to watch the sunset. "Checking in," we call it. Perhaps she, too, wants to make sure we're still the same strange creatures who always maintain the feeder full of sugar water. (Never use honey.) Last year she raised a couple of pipsqueaks in the cherry tree, in a nest perilously low given the area's cat population. So...

Taking away their surplus at gunpoint is 'only fair' Posted by Vin Suprynowicz Wednesday, Jul. 22, 2009 at 05:27 PM WASHINGTON (AP) - Obama to tell nation that health reform is key to economic recovery, controlling deficit," said today's 3:06 p.m. news flash. No, actually, the key to economic recovery and controlling the deficit is giving me 10,000 ounces of gold, a nice bungalow on Maui, and all the unblended Scotch whisky I can drink. This is hilarious. This guy is convinced they'll believe ANYTHING. If having government pay for just the health care of the poor and the elderly...

A recent column on the euphemisms used by proponents of illegal-immigrant amnesty brought some irate buzzing from all seven members of the Young Anarchists' League. As near as I can figure, I'm "not allowed" to call for the enforcement of current immigration laws -- or possibly of any laws, even those few (like the immigration laws) enacted within the powers delegated to Congress under the Constitution -- because any such enforcement of the law amounts to some kind of "collectivist police state fascism" against people who have "not initiated force or fraud." I'm not sure how you cut through a...

There is one good thing about the lunatic "global warming" catechism now taught our youth in the mandatory government youth propaganda camps : When they are finally forced to admit that the globe has been cooling again, not warming, for the past decade, yet proceed to demand precisely the same remedies for "global cooling" (which they will cleverly dub "climate change") as they did for "global warming" -- that is to say higher electric bills, more government controls, taxes sufficient to cripple our industrial economy and generally lower our standard of living in keeping with the world socialist doctrine that...

Yes, enforcing the laws against illegal immigration might involve men with handcuffs leading away the nice lady who brings you chips and salsa at your favorite Mexican restaurant. I am not thoroughly happy with that prospect, since I agree it certainly seems young Maria is doing us no immediate harm, merely seeking a better life for herself and her kids, and I do enjoy the chips and salsa. Nor am I happy with the prospect of my friends who "look Mexican" being stopped and asked to "show their papers." But while this might all argue for a restored "bracero" program,...

Today, the socialists have taught most Americans to expect lots of things -- government schools, government fire and police protection -- are and should be "free." They're not. Everything has to be paid for. Is free health care "a right"? You can't have a right that imposes an obligation on anyone else. (Jury service is slightly problematical, though because jury service can be -- ought to be -- voluntary, that needn't be a problem.) If I have a right to medical care, do I have a right to put a gun to the head of a doctor and threaten to...

Here in America, citizens and other legal residents have every right to stage rallies, protests and demonstrations on any topic that tickles their fancy. But they ought to say what they mean. It's reached the point where some of these characters use so many misleading code words that you need some kind of politically correct secret decoder ring. And I wonder if the folks who cover such events for our newspapers shouldn't provide us with a little of that cryptanalysis. "A coalition of labor, business, faith and immigrant rights leaders gathered in downtown Las Vegas on Monday to launch the...

The forces of political correctness once vowed that, should they ever take over, their free expression on all kinds of issues -- from gay rights to amnesty for illegals to space aliens inspiring the pyramids of ancient Egypt -- would no longer be censored. Censored? Heck, spouting the PC line is now mandatory, as many a professor lately hauled before a college Star Chamber on charges of having "given offense" now learns. Internationally renowned Austrian economics professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe used a standard textbook example of investment time preferences in a classroom lecture at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, a...

I've had some requests for follow-up on the group of local residents who met for lunch in North Las Vegas on Sunday, May 17, and then proceeded to a downtown park -- adjacent to the North Las Vegas police station -- to pick up trash. (See http://www.lvrj.com/blogs/vin/Gun_owners_announce_plan_to_open_carry_in_North_Las_Vegas_this_Sunday.html) The idea was to conduct a demonstration of their right to carry firearms openly on their hips, the way U.S. Navy vessels occasionally transit the Bosporus and other international waters to demonstrate we still have a right to do so. Click here to find out more! Billy Logan, who bills himself as "NRA...

First, if the earth was warming at a rate of about 1 or even 2 degrees per century in recent decades, there are reasons to believe that's slowed or stopped. One of those reasons is that the "global warming" fanatics have abruptly shifted their rhetoric, adopting instead the new nonsense euphemism "climate change." This is a clear attempt at inoculation: If it turns out the globe is indeed cooling again, they will merely take their same pre-set, ulterior agenda -- huge energy tax hikes to finance bigger government, cripple capitalism and destroy the freedom-giving automobile, instead forcing everyone to pile...

The Charleston Antique Mall is one of those seven-day-a-week outfits that rents out space to 45 or so independent antique vendors. Think Victorian furniture, Depression glass, Coca-Cola collectibles, old Elvis records. Proprietor Cal Tully says the mall is doing fine, despite the current economic squeeze -- maybe because of it. (Full disclosure: The brunette sells vintage fashion and collectible used books and records at the Charleston Antique Mall, her four rooms in the northeast corner comprising "Cat's Curiosities." I help out with the books.) But the Charleston Antique Mall has a problem -- a problem not of its own making....

American gun owners, en masse, are "casting their ballots" on how much they believe Barack Obama's campaign-trail promise to "not take away your guns." They're driving the price of ammo through the roof, swarming gun shows, hauling away cases on hand trucks, leaving the floors of the ammo suppliers' booths as naked as a wheat field after the locusts pass through. Glen Parshall at Bargain Pawn in North Las Vegas reports "I got 20,000 (rounds of) .223 on Saturday and by Tuesday it was more than half gone. And that's only because I limit customers to a thousand rounds per...

" 'Stimulus' packages always fail. A 2004 UCLA economic study revealed that FDR's New Deal prolonged the Depression by seven years. Ten Japanese stimulus bills between the 1992 real estate crash and 2000 poured billions into infrastructure; unemployment is still twice that in 1992 (Bamford, TWTW 2/14/09.) Japan accumulated the largest public debt in the developed world, totaling 180 percent of its $5.5 trillion economy. Its future generations will have paved-over rural areas, and an enormous tax burden. (Downsizer Dispatch 2/10/09.) "Infrastructure does not generate goods to sell abroad. And when the project is done, so are the jobs, writes...

Kevin writes in from Buffalo, N.Y., in response to my March 15 column, "Prohibitionists force pain patients to live in agony": "Mr. Suprynowicz, Thank you for this article. As a chronic pain patient, I find it more and more difficult to get prescriptions for the medication I need to have a quality of life worth living. "We chronic pain patients do not expect to ever be pain free. We only want to be able to live life without being treated as second class, drug seeking addicts. A few people abuse the system but the chronic pain patient pays the horrible...

John Browning's Model 1911 pistol, an engineering wonder for its day, still serves as a design platform for much modern pistolsmithing. Old examples, especially with military markings, are now highly prized on the collector market, where they can bring hundreds or even thousands of dollars each. Yet 16 years ago, early in the Clinton administration, the politicians declared our government would no longer sell into the civilian after-market pistols being retired from military armories. Instead, "Guns & Ammo" magazine reported in 1996 that since Bill Clinton took office in 1992 the government had resumed for the first time in 15...

About a year ago, a writer for one of the town's less-than-every-day papers infamously reported with regret that the Reading Room bookstore at Mandalay Place inside the Mandalay Bay was closing, leaving Las Vegas without any independent booksellers. Las Vegas was not and still is not without independent booksellers, needless to say, and I'm not merely talking about the Philadelphia-based (and markedly upscale) Bauman's Rare Books, which moved into Sheldon Adelson's Palazzo last year. Check out www.usedbookslasvegas.com/Open_Shops.html.

I "just finished reading the article on Excessive Force on page 2B," wrote in Ron the Former Police Officer, earlier this month. "Another person was apparently injured in a police confrontation, followed by the usual lawsuit. As a former police detective, I have a solution on how to avoid 99 percent of all injuries, lawsuits, and deaths sustained as a result of a police confrontation," offers Officer Ron: "When stopped by an officer, do as he asks. Never run from the police, never fight with the police, never get into a shouting match, don't try to escape from custody. Simply...

A Southern Nevada lawyer told the Nevada Supreme Court this month that pharmacists, at the least, had a duty to call physicians to voice their concerns before dispensing a narcotic painkiller to a woman who killed a man in a 2004 vehicle crash in Las Vegas. Lawyer Phil Aurbach told justices that Nevada pharmacists continued to fill prescriptions for Patricia Copening even after being warned by a state task force that she might be a prescription drug abuser. Aurbach asked justices to reinstate the wrongful death case he seeks to file against seven chain-store pharmacies that filled Copening's prescriptions. District...

As luck would have it, I was up well before the doorbell rang at 7:45 a.m. Thursday. Three guys had arrived in a white truck with a ladder. "We're here to install the new thermostat." "The what?" "The new thermostat. Clay sent us." Ah. We'd recently purchased a new rooftop heater and air conditioner. The guy had told me he'd throw in a free digital thermostat, since I'm such a good customer. (Since I rarely haggle, paying the asking price for such stuff, I suspect there are portions of the country where "a good customer" is an alternative spelling for...

Fortuitously, I recently stumbled on a copy of Henry Hazlitt's "The Failure of the 'New Economics,' " 1959, reprinted 1973. The "New Economics" referred to by the esteemed Mr. Hazlitt -- who replaced H.L. Mencken as editor of The American Mercury in 1933 and joined The New York Times in 1934, writing financial and economic editorials there and later a bylined weekly financial column well into the 1960s -- is Keynesianism, the economic doctrines of the Briton John Maynard Keynes which are still widely taught in American college economics courses. The top blurb on the back dust jacket panel caught...

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: "Vin, thanks for the refreshing article 'Greenland and the polar ice cap are melting.' I am often irritated by articles claiming that we need to reduce man-made CO2 gas to save the planet from global warming. It is amazing that there are so many people (including government leaders) who believe we can alter global...

Last month, Los Angeles Times columnist Tim Rutten penned a column on the recent tumble of the nation's 401(k) tax-deferred retirement accounts. (Since October 2007 our 401(k)s have lost a third of their value -- a cumulative $1 trillion.) "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 Madoffs of the world." The problem, according to Mr. Rutten, is that "in 1978, when Congress amended...

Peggy Brown, a retired local 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." She stood in line at the DMV for her temporary permit so she could drive it out for a new smog check. So far so good. But then the battery died. "A jump start got it running long enough to get it to Pep Boys for...

I see where the newspaper published without notable dissent (lead story, Page 2B, Jan. 16) another one of these cooked-up "report cards" on how Nevada is doing, this one from a Henderson-based outfit calling itself the Children's Advocacy Alliance. As usual, the finding was: "We suck." Oh, the state scored an A-minus for infant and child mortality and a B-plus for alcohol and tobacco use. (Apparently that means most Nevada infants have not yet taken up cocktails and cigars. I told you the casinos would suffer for taking away all those comps.) But after that our grades pretty much went...

On Dec. 31, the daily Miami Herald editorialized: "The Bush administration last month gave the National Rifle Association a parting gift by lifting a decades-long ban on concealed weapons in national parks. "These harmful new rules could take years to undo," warned the suntanned statists. "Make no mistake, though, they must be taken off the books before they can do too much damage. ... "Beginning on Jan. 9, Everglades and Biscayne national parks ... and the dozens of federal wildlife refuges and forests in Florida will be open to visitors packing guns. Under the new rule, anyone in Florida with...

Constant Californian writes to respond to my piece on the global cooling of 2008: "You may be aware of Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish scientist who was long skeptical of global warming," he writes. "He is not anymore. His complaint is with what he perceives as hysteria, and unsound policy. I wonder if your line of reasoning has more to do with ideology and your view of (proposed) policy, than a considered look at the science at work. The mechanism of global warming is well-established. ... "You write: 'It's getting colder. 2008 was the coolest year in a decade.' That leaves...

My relatives in New England are fighting their way out from under a giant ice storm. Here in Las Vegas it's been snowing all week, several weeks earlier than our usual one-day-a-year photo op of snow and icicles sparkling one of our palm-bedecked golf courses before melting away by afternoon. The National Weather Service calls it "a rare snow event." Why? It's getting colder. 2008 was the coolest year in a decade. The American mainstream press seem to know "team players" don't mention such inconvenient developments, but in the U.K., the esteemed Guardian reports, "This year is set to be...

America's great national holiday is July 4 -- celebrating the signing of the Declaration of Independence. But how long did that confederation of sovereign states formed in Philadelphia's Independence Hall to fight the Revolution really last? Only the brightest of today's young scholars are likely to recall that it passed away after only a dozen years, on June 21, 1788, when New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify the new Constitution. With Mr. Jefferson safely off in Paris, Alex Hamilton and the gang moved heaven and earth to convince a skeptical public that the stronger new central government they...

In this holiday season, it's hard to be hard-hearted. So you'll pardon me if this week I refrain from writing one of my usual missives condemning the waste, fraud, arrogance and generally thuggish behavior of our government masters. Instead, I'd like to take this opportunity, as the Christmas carols waft from the little radio over in the corner that cartoonist Jim Day locked into the "on" position sometime before 1990, till we've all wondered more than once whether it would be possible to short the thing out before it finishes "The Little Drummer Boy" (pa rum pum pum pum) one...

Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt -- the latter continued and amplified the former's policies in a kind of one-two punch, as revealed in Murray Rothbard's "The Great Depression" -- did all the wrong things from 1930 to 1938. In an environment of surplus labor but collapsing capital and credit, free-market entrepreneurs put people back to work by hiring men at low wages (giving them the pride of honest work, and the chance to make more as their skills improve) to make things consumers will buy at new, lower prices -- can-openers, washing machines, chicken wire, whatever. Instead, Roosevelt and the...

Medical doctor Tim Ryan (tfr.ryan@comcast.net) responds to my recent column on medical costs: "I have just such a medical practice in Cartersville, GA. I have the nicest office, most up-to-date EMR, digital EKG, next-day turnaround for any lab known to man and my prices are the lowest around. Office visit: $50. EKG, Labs, Injections, are all a small fraction of what you would pay anywhere. I make house calls. Check us out at thephysicianspractice.com. "I take payment at time of service only, have almost no overhead and pass my savings on to the patient. I have been open for 18...

Having been raised a Democrat, I know how Democrats pride themselves on their tolerance and sensitivity -- especially toward those with different views. Among the messages of tolerance and sensitivity I received from Democrats during the final days before the Nov. 4 election were the following: -- "You go ahead and do that, Vin." (vote for McCain-Palin, presumably.) "The rest of us pinkos will be busy running every branch of government and redistributing your juicy assistant editor paycheck." That's perhaps the one refreshing thing about this race. The socialists were at least out of the closet, admitting precisely what they...

The Nevada Democratic Party and its affiliated unions did a great job turning out voters for the Nov. 4 general election and placing in the hands of many of those voters endorsement sheets "recommending" how they might vote -- all the way down the ballot to the supposedly "non-partisan" elections for judgeships, School Board, etc. The Democratic Party also had huge success with its sleazy million-dollar direct-mail campaign against Nevada state Sens. Joe Heck and Bob Beers, who they targeted based on growing Democratic registrations in Senate districts 5 and 6 -- the overall goal being to seat enough Democrats...