5,000. If you wanted to know the price of making a complete jackass out of yourself in front of the entire Nye County officialdom, now you have it. That and attorney’s fees. This is how much the state ethics commission decided to fine county Assessor Shirley Matson, who was found guilty yesterday of two out[...]

By Micki Bare – “Diamond in the Rough” For as long as I can remember, there were two kinds of people. There were those with a cultured palate, who savored escargot dressed in a white wine and garlic sauce with a side of lightly roasted rosemary asparagus. Then there were those without such a discriminating[...]

By George Will WASHINGTON — Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, a Reagan appointee to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, is a courtly Virginian who combines a manner as soft as a Shenandoah breeze with a keen intellect. His disapproval of much current thinking about how the Constitution should be construed is explained in[...]

By Dana Milbank WASHINGTON — You knew government bureaucrats were living large when they hired a medium. And this mind reader who helped government workers communicate with the dead was just the beginning of the scandal involving the General Services Administration’s $823,000 spending spree in Las Vegas. There was also the $75,000 bicycle-building exercise, the[...]

By Micki Bare – “Diamond in the Rough” No takesies-backsies Ol’ Man Winter! Here it is the middle of April, our tax paperwork has been completed, our winter clothes are stored and our summer vegetable and herb garden is planted. Now that we are nearly a month into spring, I guess Jack Frost decided he[...]

By Dennis Myers – “Against the Grain” In the 1980s there were a number of substantial news stories on the mob connections of U.S. Senator Paul Laxalt of Nevada. The Miami Herald in 1981, the Wall Street Journal in 1983, and Mother Jones magazine in a cover story in 1984 all published major reports. A[...]

Everywhere you turn, it seems like someone’s always trying to nickel and dime you. Nickel and dimed: That’s life in the great recession. Middle-aged Americans will probably not be telling their grandchildren about how they had to save every scrap of food, every reusable piece of plastic or metal or wood, or about how they[...]

By Dana Milbank WASHINGTON — Mitt Romney is developing a Mirlande Wilson problem. Wilson, for those not acquainted with the name, is the Maryland woman who claimed to have a winning lottery ticket worth $218 million. She had agreed to buy lottery tickets with money pooled from her co-workers at McDonald’s, but then she claimed[...]

By George Will WASHINGTON — Amelioration of today’s drug problem requires Americans to understand the significance of the 80/20 ratio. Twenty percent of American drinkers consume 80 percent of the alcohol sold here. The same 80-20 split obtains among users of illicit drugs. About 3 million people — less than 1 percent of America’s population[...]

By Chuck Muth So here’s the story: Sen. Harry Reid D-Nevada nominated a liberal judge, Elissa Cadish — who once wrote that she didn’t believe there was an individual constitutional right to keep and bear arms — for a judicial vacancy on the federal bench. However, per Senate tradition, unless both home-state senators agree to[...]