U.S. Supreme Court photographed in a secured building
No further comment is required from me beyond my headline above on today’s U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing the manufacture of bump stocks that led directly to the massacre of 60 folks on October 1, 2017. That tragedy was along the Las Vegas Strip, seven miles from the New To Las Vegas world headquarters.
Illegal request for payment addressed to a Las Vegas dog
I’ve written it before, and I’m writing it again. National Committee for Volunteers Firefighters PAC is one dumb organization. Why? The outfit, which says it is based in Boston, keeps calling me at the New to Las Vegas world headquarters asking for money even though I’ve blistered it several times in this space (click here and here).
NCVF-PAC presents like a charity–it’s not–and has spent virtually none of the money raised nationally during its entire existence on its stated mission of, well, helping volunteer firefighters politically. (PAC stands for political action committee.) In the world of fundraising, making follow-up calls to a possible donor under these circumstances can’t get any more moronic. That’s why NCVF-PAC, which I call a faux charity, long has been a candidate for my running list of America’s Stupidest Charities, which you can see nearby on this page.
On top of this, the recent outreach to me violated a 2021 Nevada law prohibiting all fundraising for, among other topics, firefighting personnel within the state without first registering with the Nevada Secretary of State’s Office and making filings, on pain of incurring civil penalties. I checked, and there’s no registration in Nevada for NCVF-PAC. Never has been. Yet the presenting NCVF-PAC caller–not an actual human but rather a computer-generated voice using the bland name “Tom Evans” secretly monitored by a real person with soundboard technology–falsely told me when I asked point-blank that the organization was indeed registered to solicit in the Silver State. That strikes me as a possible separate violation of Nevada’s deceptive trade practices law.
NCVC-PAC and other faux charities make tens of thousands of illegal calls a year to my fellow Nevadans, some of whom, alas, fork over some hard-earned funds. Yet it’s my perception that the Nevada state government, which runs without a state income tax, is not exactly overstaffed with investigators or lawyers tasked with regulating these kinds of matters to protect the public.
So I decided to play along, with an appropriate twist, to see what kind of documentary evidence I could generate to prove beyond my own words that NCVF-PAC was illegally operating in Nevada. A few minutes later, I told a different computer-controlled NCVF-PAC voice, “Emma Thompson” (I’m guessing at the spelling) that a pledge card could be mailed. A name and an address were provided. Days later, the pledge card asking for payment arrived in the mail.
Addressed to my dog.
Yes! You can see part of the invoice letter nearby, with some identifying detail redacted. Carrizozo, my nearly 10-year-old basset hound, is being billed for $30 by NCVF-PAC’s cynically named “Fundraising Committee.”
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Mail ballot No. 2
Here at the New to Las Vegas world headquarters, I’m not one of those folks who thinks voter fraud is a significant problem, either here or around the country. I see efforts talking up the issue more as a campaign ploy by Republican- and conservative-leaning interests to suppress voting by Democratic- and liberal-leaning interests. It’s a sad commentary of what we’ve become.
Still, it’s not a good thing that for the upcoming June 11 primary elections in Nevada I was mailed two identical ballots a few days apart by the Clark County Election Department, each with a postage prepaid envelope for return. A little more worse, I now suspect election officials, who work for the Democrats who control the county government, covered up their incompetence. I think this is lest they give fuel to rival Republicans who have focused on absentee voting, nationally but especially in Nevada.
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The honorable members of the Supreme Court of the United States
Originally published last year, this post has been updated, revised and expanded in light of recent revelations
The New to Las Vegas world headquarters has obtained earlier drafts of the new U.S. Supreme Court ethics code announced in November 2023. To avoid bias, the court in conference had asked that the first version be written by AI “in the style of John Marshall Harlan.” He was the conscience of the Supreme Court more than a century ago with his dissents favoring civil liberties and equal rights.
But since unanimity was required in the court for the new code, the objection of any one justice required a provision to be struck. As the draft went through the review process, a large amount of extremely specific material was cut, leaving behind blander generalities.
Here is a leaked list of deleted passages and the justice or justices who vetoed them. Only Ketanji Brown Jackson, the newest justice, objected to nothing. It should be noted that the Supreme Court itself declared unanimously in Hustler v. Falwell, 485 U.S. 46 (1988), that political satire is protected speech under the First Amendment.
CANON 3(A): “A justice shall not display for public view, or allow to be displayed for public view, a flag or other other emblem on property reasonably under the control of the justice if that flag or emblem could be construed by others as an opinion on a matter before the Court or likely to come before it.” SAMUEL A. ALITO Jr. Continue reading