What does prohibiting profit have to do with preventing the spread of a virus?

Today, we find the definition of arbitrary and capricious on page 3A of the morning paper.

Entertainment columnist John Katsilometes reports that a couple of bars in the valley have been told to end live music performances. The reason was spelled out in an email from a Las Vegas business licensing official to musician and owner of the Saddles N Spurs Saloon Bobby Kingston:

“Live entertainment which includes karaoke at this point is prohibited with a few allowances. You can have a singer, piano player, guitar player or small piece band that is there playing music at an ambiance level. There can’t be any ticket sales, admission fee or headliner advertisement for the entertainment & no dancing.”

What, pray tell, do ticket sales, admission fee, advertising and ambiance level have to do with preventing the spread of the coronavirus? Sounds like a bureaucratic aversion to profit rather than a demand for hygiene.

Saddle and Spurs Saloon owner Bobby Kingston, foreground, can’t understand why he can’t offer live music. (R-J pix)

What to do when the sun don’t shine?

NV Energy is urging its customers across the state today to conserve energy between the hours of 2 p.m. and 9 p.m. due to the heat wave.

Similar pleas are being made in neighboring California, but according to a Wall Street Journal editorial earlier this week the blame lies not just with the heat but with the choices the state has made in how it generates its electricity. As of 2018 California was generating more than 32 percent of its electricity with renewable sources — 21 percent from just solar and wind.

The trouble with those is that they generate when the sun shines and the wind blows, which may not be when customers are still using loads of electricity. In fact, power use continues apace after the sun sets and people settle in for an evening in front of the A/C and power up their entertainment units, computers, stoves, lighting, etc.

A WSJ news story notes that California’s grid operator called twice for emergency outages over the past weekend due to inadequate power supplies, in part because demand peaked as solar production began its evening decline.”California has been relying far more heavily on natural-gas-fired power plants, which, unlike wind and solar farms, aren’t dependent on the weather to produce energy,” story notes.

Democrats in California have called by generating 60 percent of the state’s power with renewables by 2030.

Nevada currently generates 22 percent of its electricity via renewables. Could that be a contributing factor to the conservation warning?

Nevada Democrats, too, have ordered that 60 percent of power in the state come from renewables by 2030. In November 2018, Nevada voters approved by nearly 60 percent a constitutional amendment that would require 50 percent of the electricity consumed in the state to come from renewable energy sources by 2030.

In the 2019 legislative session lawmakers passed a law requiring the same thing and Gov. Steve Sisolak promptly signed it.

The constitutional amendment is back on the ballot in November. If passed it would take two votes of the people two years apart to change it. At least the law could be changed if electricity users begin to tire of rolling blackout caused but a lack of power when it is really needed. The voters might also wise up to the fact that renewables, once all the subsidies are included, actually cost four times as much as natural gas-generated power.

Let’s hope the cooler temperatures in November don’t cause voters to forget the threat that came in sultry August.

Solar panels in Nevada

 

All-mail balloting rife with problems

What could possibly go wrong?

Just put more than 1.6 million ballots — and that was the number of active registered Nevada voters back in January, before the push to register voters prior to the November General Election — in largely unsecured mailboxes. No one would ever think to follow the mail carrier around and pluck said ballots from said boxes. Why that would be a crime.

But with the passage of Assembly Bill 4 on a party-line vote in a special session of the Nevada Legislature, already signed by Gov. Steve Sisolak, the governor can use the excuse of the coronavirus pandemic to order November ballots be mailed to all active registered voters. It’s not as if they are being dropped out of airplanes. And hopefully no county will do like Clark County did in the primary and demand that ballots be mailed to inactive voters who have mostly already moved from the addresses on file with the registrar of voters. That resulted in many blank ballots piling up in trash cans.

Surely there’ll be no problem with the part of AB4 that says that the validity of a ballot signature may only be challenged if “at least two employees in the office of the clerk believe there is a reasonable question of fact as to whether the signature used for the mail ballot matches the signature of the voter …” What is reasonable? “There is a reasonable question of fact as to whether the signature used for the mail ballot matches the signature of the voter if the signature used for the mail ballot differs in multiple, significant and obvious respects from the signatures of the voter available in the records of the clerk,” AB4 spells out.

Under previous law, it was illegal to “harvest” ballots. Only a family member or certain other persons were allowed to return a mailed ballot for a voter. AB4 allows the voter to designate anyone, though the law prohibits that person from failing to return the ballot or altering, changing, defacing, damaging or destroying the mail ballot. Who would ever do such a thing.

No one would ever be intimidated by their union shop boss, for example, into just turning over their blank but signed mail ballot. Nor would anyone, say at a nursing home, dare to collect such ballots. Turn in your ballot in exchange for a free beer at the neighborhood bar?

The law firm of Campbell & Williams has already filed suit on behalf of the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee and the Nevada Republican Party. The suit notes the new law authorizes ballot harvesting and that, along with other provisions, dilutes “Nevadans’ honest votes. Dilution of honest votes, to any degree, by the casting of fraudulent or illegitimate votes violates the right to vote.”

What could possibly go wrong?

 

Nevada churches denied the same capacity allowances given to casinos

Let’s get this straight, according to a 5-4 one-sentence U.S. Supreme Court ruling Friday, if a Nevada church were to hold a bingo night in its 500-seat auditorium, under Gov. Steve Sisolak’s diktat, 250 people could attend, since the governor’s orders allow 50 percent capacity for casinos, but, if someone were to say a prayer, 200 would have to leave, since the governor says only 50 people may attend church services.

Four justices thought that a little bit duplicitous.

Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in his dissent:

This is a simple case. Under the Governor’s edict, a 10-screen “multiplex” may host 500 moviegoers at any time. A casino, too, may cater to hundreds at once, with perhaps six people huddled at each craps table here and a similar number gathered around every roulette wheel there. Large numbers and close quarters are fine in such places. But churches, synagogues, and mosques are banned from admitting more than 50 worshippers — no matter how large the building, how distant the individuals, how many wear face masks, no matter the precautions at all. In Nevada, it seems, it is better to be in entertainment than religion. Maybe that is nothing new. But the First Amendment prohibits such obvious discrimination against the exercise of religion. The world we inhabit today, with a pandemic upon us, poses unusual challenges. But there is no world in which the Constitution permits Nevada to favor Caesars Palace over Calvary Chapel.

Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh, was equally incensed at the disparate treatment, writing:

The Constitution guarantees the free exercise of religion. It says nothing about the freedom to play craps or blackjack, to feed tokens into a slot machine, or to engage in any other game of chance. But the Governor of Nevada apparently has different priorities. Claiming virtually unbounded power to restrict constitutional rights during the COVID–19 pandemic, he has issued a directive that severely limits attendance at religious services. A church, synagogue, or mosque, regardless of its size, may not admit more than 50 persons, but casinos and certain other favored facilities may admit 50% of their maximum occupancy — and in the case of gigantic Las Vegas casinos, this means that thousands of patrons are allowed.

That Nevada would discriminate in favor of the powerful gaming industry and its employees may not come as a surprise, but this Court’s willingness to allow such discrimination is disappointing. We have a duty to defend the Constitution, and even a public health emergency does not absolve us of that responsibility.

The suit was brought by Calvary Chapel Dayton Valley, a church in Lyon County east of Reno. It wanted to conduct services for 90 congregants, about 50 percent of its fire-code capacity. According to Alito, it planned to ask attendees to adhere to proper social distancing of six feet separation, would cut the length of services in half, prohibit items being passed among the congregation, guide congregants to designated doorways along one-way paths, and to leave time between services so the church could be sanitized.

Do casinos require as much?

Justice Kavanaugh wrote in a separate dissent:

But COVID–19 is not a blank check for a State to discriminate against religious people, religious organizations, and religious services. There are certain constitutional red lines that a State may not cross even in a crisis. Those red lines include racial discrimination, religious discrimination, and content-based suppression of speech. This Court’s history is littered with unfortunate examples of overly broad judicial deference to the government when the government has invoked emergency powers and asserted crisis circumstances to override equal-treatment and free-speech principles. The court of history has rejected those jurisprudential mistakes and cautions us against an unduly deferential judicial approach, especially when questions of racial discrimination, religious discrimination, or free speech are at stake.

But Chief Justice John Roberts — joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — denied the church’s appeal without deigning to comment on such a significant constitutional matter.

Dayton Courier file photo

WSJ refuses to cave to cancel culture

Unlike The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal is not cowering to a cabal of its own staffers complaining about the content of its opinion section.

When NYT staffers complained that its own opinion section ran an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton that they felt needed “editing,” an opinion editor was forced to resign.

When 280 non-opinion page staffers of the WSJ and owner Dow Jones penned a letter to the publisher complaining about alleged inaccuracies in recent opinion pieces, the WSJ insisted penned a note to readers saying, “These pages won’t wilt under cancel-culture pressure.”

One graf of the letter stated:

So inform the readers of the differences. Also several of the alleged inaccuracies were matters of interpretation.

One of the complaints involved the failure to “fact-check” an op-ed by Vice President Mike Pence that was headlined, “There Isn’t a Coronavirus ‘Second Wave.’” The paper later ran a story correcting an overstatement of the amount of medical equipment distributed by the Trump administration.

The letter also faulted a column by Heather Mac Donald challenging the assumption of systemic police bias against minorities, saying the article drew an erroneous conclusion.

The WSJ note to readers declares:

As long as our proprietors allow us the privilege to do so, the opinion pages will continue to publish contributors who speak their minds within the tradition of vigorous, reasoned discourse. And these columns will continue to promote the principles of free people and free markets, which are more important than ever in what is a culture of growing progressive conformity and intolerance.

Good. Let loose the opinions and let the debate continue unabated, not gagged by the timid hand-wringers.

 

Consistency sacrificed for the sake of kowtowing

That’s Discriminatory — with a capital D.

A month ago The Associated Press edited its Stylebook to declare that the word black, “when referring to people in a racial, ethnic or cultural context,” should be capitalized in news stories. The Stylebook is almost universally followed in newsrooms. It is gospel.

John Daniszewski, AP’s vice president of standards, said at the time that this change conveys “an essential and shared sense of history, identity and community among people who identify as Black, including those in the African diaspora and within Africa. The lowercase black is a color, not a person.”

The AP said it would decide within a month whether to also capitalize white when referring to people.

On Monday, the AP announced it would not capitalize white when referring to people.

Daniszewski’s rationale was contorted.

“We agree that white people’s skin color plays into systemic inequalities and injustices, and we want our journalism to robustly explore these problems,” he wrote in a memo to staff Monday. “But capitalizing the term white, as is done by white supremacists, risks subtly conveying legitimacy to such beliefs.”

Legitimacy to white supremacists? What about consistency? What about equal treatment?

The dithering and navel gazing began shortly after the death of George Floyd, a Black man, while being arrested by police. This resulted in protests and riots and the tearing down of statues and the near universal presumption of systemic racism, though evidence of this was entirely lacking.

What’s fair is fair. This decision by AP is kowtowing to the blindly stampeding herd and distorting the language in an Orwellian manner, conveying editorialization instead of fair and objective reporting.

The definition of racism is: “prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalized.”

Marginalized?

This is tantamount to capitalizing Woman to recognize the gender’s significant contributions and hurdles, but lower casing man lest one propagates systemic and malignant masculinity.

 

Supreme Court is usurping the duties of Congress

Twice this week the allegedly conservative U.S. Supreme Court chose to legislate rather than litigate.

First, in the case of Bostock v. Clayton County the court found that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 barring workplace job discrimination on the basis of sex also covers homosexuals and transgendered, not just males and females, even though in 1964 no one knew what transgender was.

Now, in the Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California the court has decided Trump must state valid reasoning for withdrawing Obama’s executive orders that created DACA and DAPA — Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents. Both orders basically rewrote immigration law by allowing certain illegal immigrants to be immune from deportation as the law allowed.

In the first case Congress has had ample time to pass the so-called Equality Act that would do just what the court ruled, but it has not. Neither has Congress acted on proposals that would actually do what DACA and DAPA have done.

In the first case Justice Brett Kavanaugh succinctly wrote in dissent:

In the face of the unsuccessful legislative efforts (so far)to prohibit sexual orientation discrimination, judges may not rewrite the law simply because of their own policy views. Judges may not update the law merely because they think that Congress does not have the votes or the fortitude. Judges may not predictively amend the law just because they believe that Congress is likely to do it soon anyway.

On the immigration ruling Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in dissent:

Between 2001 and 2011, Congress considered over two dozen bills that would have granted lawful status to millions of aliens who were illegally brought to this country as children. Each of those legislative efforts failed. In the wake of this impasse, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under President Barack Obama took matters into its own hands. Without any purported delegation of authority from Congress and without undertaking a rule-making, DHS unilaterally created a program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). The three-page DACA memorandum made it possible for approximately 1.7 million illegal aliens to qualify for temporary lawful presence and certain federal and state benefits. When President Donald Trump took office in 2017, his Acting Secretary of Homeland Security, acting through yet another memorandum, rescinded the DACA memorandum. To state it plainly, the Trump administration rescinded DACA the same way that the Obama administration created it: unilaterally, and through a mere memorandum.

Today the majority makes the mystifying determination that this rescission of DACA was unlawful. In reaching that conclusion, the majority acts as though it is engaging in the routine application of standard principles of administrative law. On the contrary, this is anything but a standard administrative law case.

Back in 2015, when the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed an injunction issued by a Texas judge in response to a lawsuit filed by 26 states, Nevada was one of the states seeking the injunction due to the costs the executive orders imposed on the states.

At the time, then-Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt issued a statement saying:

“After careful consideration and extensive briefing, another federal court has once again upheld the states’ injunction, illustrating that the president, like everyone else, must follow the rule of law. Our Constitution establishes a process that must be followed when changing or creating new laws, and no one, regardless of title or position, is above the Constitution. It is encouraging to see the principles of the Constitution affirmed by a third federal court ruling in this case.”

In his original injunction, Texas federal Judge Andrew Hanen stated that “the states cannot protect themselves from the costs inflicted by the Government when 4.3 million individuals are granted legal presence with the resulting ability to compel state action. The irony of this position cannot be fully appreciated unless it is contrasted with the DAPA Directive. The DAPA Directive unilaterally allows individuals removable by law to legally remain in the United States based upon a classification that is not established by any federal law. It is this very lack of law about which the States complain. The Government claims that it can act without a supporting law, but the States cannot.”

According to Pew Research data from 2016, Nevada bears the highest cost in the nation to educate the children of illegal aliens, because fully 20.2 percent of all K-12 students are the  children of illegals. According to Pew data from 2014, Nevada has the highest ratio of illegal immigrants in its workforce — 10.4 percent.

Nevada is bearing the costs without the aid or authorization of Congress. This not how laws are supposed to be made.

DACA recipients celebrate in from of Supreme Court. (AP pix)

 

 

 

 

Governor’s reopening decision leaves workers in the lurch

Gov. Steve Sisolak has gone off half cocked again.

He has said that some of the businesses he ordered closed to prevent the spread of the coronavirus may reopen Saturday, but what if some workers fear for their health and that of their families? Will they no longer be eligible for unemployment benefits if they refuse to return to work? Will they have to take a pay cut?

According to the morning paper, Sisolak doesn’t yet have an answer:

As for employees concerned about being required to go back to work, Sisolak said that “is a very difficult situation.”

“If they’re offered their job back, and they don’t take their job back, their eligibility for unemployment comes into question,” Sisolak said, adding that the administration was working with Nevada’s federal delegation and the Labor Department on a fix.

“I want people to feel safe when they go back to work,” he said. At the same time, “a lot of people are going to go back to work and make less than the thousand dollars a week that they’re making now, and you can say, ‘Why am I gonna go back to work?’ Those are difficult situations that we’re going to be facing in the future.”

As for the high-minded life-is-more-important-than-profit stance Sisolak and other Democrats have taken, columnist Victor Joecks takes the current hypocrisy apart:

Make no mistake: Sisolak’s decision to move Nevada into Phase 1 will increase the number of coronavirus infections. “We would anticipate an increase in new cases if mitigation efforts are lifted,” state biostatistician Kyra Morgan said in an April email.

According to no less an authority than Sisolak himself, this is unacceptable.

“I am not going to allow our workers to be put in a position that they have to decide between their job, their paycheck and their life,” Sisolak said last month on CNN. “That’s not a fair position to put them in, and I will not allow that to happen.”

But that’s what he’s allowing to happen on Saturday. That’s what he did by allowing construction to continue on the Raiders Stadium — despite workers testing positive.

Sisolak isn’t the only one who’s promulgated this standard. “Georgia’s experiment in human sacrifice” was the headline of a piece in The Atlantic on the decision to reopen by Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp.

“I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: No one is expendable. No life is worth losing to add one more points to the Dow,” presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden tweeted Wednesday.

Sisolak’s actions on Thursday show how bogus this rhetoric is — and his own hypocrisy. Even he couldn’t live up to his own standard.

Yet the governor is requiring people to choose between a paycheck and their life without knowing all of the ramifications. Will unemployment be denied if they refuse to turn to work? That would be a key criteria in making such a decision.

Siam Square restaurant workers move tables to prepare for possible reopening Saturday. (R-J pix by K.M. Cannon)

 

Governor won’t even ‘permit’ discussion?

Many people are aghast that Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman has had the audacity to suggest the coronavirus shutdown might not have been necessary in the first place and reopening should begin soon — even suggesting Las Vegas could be used as a placebo or control group to compare the impact of reopening to staying shutdown.

People have called on her to resign, have called her suggestions reckless and deranged. A television interviewer called her ignorant for saying Las Vegas is not like China.

But what I found disturbing was a quote in the morning paper from Gov. Steve Sisolak, “I mean, there is no way I would even permit the discussion about using the city of Las Vegas as a control group in dealing with the spread of the coronavirus. That’s beyond the pale. I can’t even imagine someone even contemplating that.”

He would not “permit” the discussion? He would silence debate? You know what they call people who do that.

He further declared, “You cannot allow our citizens, our folks, to be used as a ‘control group’ in this unscientific experiment that she’s talking about, relating to the spread of the virus. That’s just simply not allowable.”

Unscientific? What are control groups? They are the ones who do not get the experimental treatment, but perhaps a placebo, so the effectiveness of the experimental treatment can to compared to doing nothing.

Goodman may well be wrong. Granted, she is probably wrong.

But somewhere someone needs to contemplate a gradual return to normalcy. Whether some businesses reopen tomorrow or six months from now there is likely to be an uptick in contagion. At which the doomsayers will declare, “I told you so.”

In a separate story in the morning paper Sisolak was quoted as being dismissive of suggestions by the Elko mayor in a letter in the Elko Daily Free Press that said the sparsely populated and less affected rural counties should not be treated in the same manner as the more densely populated areas.

Elko Mayor Reece Keener wrote in an open letter to Sisolak:

It is a given that we will see outbreaks and “hotspots” into the foreseeable future. This virus is tenacious and will continue to be a threat until we have either better medicines or a vaccine. However, we cannot and must not continue to put our lives and civil liberties on hold until it is deemed “safe” to resume a semi-normal state. If, and when we experience an increase in new infection rates, we will be prepared to dial things back accordingly in a measured response.

We accept the responsibility, and with this, we need the flexibility to have local decision-making authority for our reopening timetables and planning. Please consider that a “one size fits all” approach does not work for a largely rural and sparsely populated Nevada. A statewide extension mandate will further deepen the economic damage that we have already incurred, plus it will be a huge psychological blow to the citizens that have diligently complied with the orders. Crucially, a statewide extension will invite civil disobedience and unrest. As mayor, I do not want to place our police officers in the untenable position of having to enforce state directives that are unpopular and impractical for our community.

Keener also pointed out, “Despite the best of intentions, the models and projections have been grossly overstated.”

But the governor reacted by saying, “If you open up Elko County, and you don’t open up Clark County or Washoe County, and in Elko all the stores are open, the restaurants and bars, all the entertainment’s open, well, then the people from the other counties are going to go to Elko County because they’re tired of being locked up in their houses, and they want to experience that, and they’re all going to go back to their counties and then the virus is going to continue to spread. So that wouldn’t work.”

He added, “It’s not just that we don’t want them to open. It’s just that it has to be done in a way that it doesn’t negatively impact that county or the surrounding counties.”

And what way is that, pray tell, and when, if ever?

Las Vegas can’t reopen, Elko can’t reopen. Who can? When? How long must everyone cower in the corner?

Who will “permit” at least a discussion?

Mayor Goodman interviewed by Anderson Cooper on CNN

Editorial: Voters don’t need protection from free speech

Democrats never let the inconvenient facts get in the way of their blindly held firm belief that money is the root of all evil and the ultimate bane of democracy.

You know, beliefs like the one that the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission — that found a federal law prohibiting people from spending their own money to make their political opinions and desires known could not pass constitutional muster — was wrong, wrong, wrong.

The 5-4 Citizens United ruling overturned a portion of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law under which the FEC barred the airing of a movie produced by Citizens United that was critical of Hillary Clinton during the 2008 Democratic primary.

Democrats have been fighting against the ruling ever since, claiming it lets the rich and powerful and deep-pocketed corporations buy elections. They’ve even floated the idea of amending that portion of the Bill of Rights prohibiting Congress from abridging freedom of speech.

Of course, Nevada’s Democratic delegation to Congress has been in the thick of it. Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen have signed on as sponsors of the proposed amendment, which would allow Congress and the states to “distinguish between natural persons and corporations or other artificial entities created by law, including by prohibiting such entities from spending money to influence elections.”

Cortez Masto proclaimed, “A constitutional amendment putting the democratic process back in the hands of voters will help ensure that our government represents the will of Americans, not just the wealthy few.”

Rosen chimed in, “Our elections should be decided by the voters — but because of Citizens United, billionaires and corporate interests can spend as much money as they want to elect politicians to do their bidding.”

Pay no attention to the fact President Donald Trump was outspent two-to-one by the aforementioned Hillary Clinton.

Over on the House side Nevada Democratic Reps. Dina Titus, Susie Lee and Steven Horsford have co-sponsored the 600-page H.R. 1, dubiously dubbed “For the People Act,” which, along with other things, would require increased disclosure of donors and online advertisers.

All in the name of muting the power of money’s influence over elections.

Pay no attention to the facts just presented by the outcome of the Democratic presidential nominating process.

According to news accounts, former New York mayor and billionaire Mike Bloomberg recently dropped out of that competition after spending somewhere between $500 million and $700 million of his estimated $60 billion net worth. That netted him a grand total of 61 delegates out of the nearly 4,000 delegates awarded thus far.

Then there is the case of Tom Steyer, who is said to be worth a paltry $1.6 billion but spent more than $250 million of his own money on his failing presidential campaign through the end of January. He netted no delegates whatsoever.

Both of the these candidates were allowed the freedom of speech to disseminate their messages and arguments loudly and frequently. But as Justice Anthony Kennedy said in his majority opinion in Citizens United, “The First Amendment confirms the freedom to think for ourselves.”

The poor pliable voters don’t need to be protected from political speech. They can think for themselves — as the facts have again borne out.

A version of this editorial appeared this week in some of the Battle Born Media newspapers — The Ely Times, the Mesquite Local News, the Mineral County Independent-News, the Eureka Sentinel,  Sparks Tribune and the Lincoln County Record.

Branco cartoon