Archive for November, 2009

Foreign buyers see value, Americans walk right by

Sunday, November 29th, 2009

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 […]

‘The time is right!’ … to hand them billions

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

In the early 1870s, Thomas Alva Edison declared “The time was right” to introduce the stock ticker and the printing telegraph. It was. Americans, grasping the benefits of his inventions and finding them affordable in relation to those benefits, willingly purchased Mr. Edison’s inventions; he and the capitalists who invested in the enterprise grew rich.

America’s proud heritage: ‘uneducated, illiterate, barefooted, gun-toting hayseeds’?

Sunday, November 22nd, 2009

Aiming for brevity, trying to avoid long strings of documentation already presented many times, 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 […]

‘I think hate speech has no place on our campus’

Monday, November 16th, 2009

Jim Gilchrist, founder of the Minuteman Project, is one of two panelists scheduled to appear at a Nov. 19 forum sponsored by Flipside Productions, an enterprise of the Associated Students of the University of Nevada, Reno. The other panelist is Miguel Acosta, a member of an immigrant rights organization in New Mexico.

One thing stops multiple murderers: a gun

Sunday, November 15th, 2009

Early in the morning of December 5, 1999, off-duty Las Vegas Metro police officer Dennis Devitte was one of the customers at Mr. D’s Sports Bar, at Rainbow Boulevard and Oakey Drive, where he and some pals had gone to hear the band Pigs in a Blanket. A little after 1 a.m., three armed robbers […]

Eminent domain? ‘Never mind’

Thursday, November 12th, 2009

Pfizer, Inc., announced this week that the company will be closing its former research and development headquarters in New London, Conn. — the project for which the city of New London infamously used its power of eminent domain to seize and ultimately bulldoze the homes of Susette Kelo and her neighbors, after that seizure was […]

Members of Congress channel John McEnroe

Wednesday, November 11th, 2009

When a reporter for CNSNews.com last Thursday asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., where in the Constitution Congress is delegated the specific power to order Americans to buy health insurance — a mandate included in both the House and Senate versions of Obamacare — Ms. Pelosi responded: “Are you serious? Are you serious?” “Yes, yes […]

Guns on trains

Sunday, November 8th, 2009

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.”

‘What’s that you got hidden there, Jew boy. A book?’

Sunday, November 1st, 2009

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 […]