Barack Obama, the Democrats' presumptive nominee for president, has spent his public career accumulating a consistent record of hostility toward gun rights. He's done this through his financial support for anti-gun groups, his voting record and his rhetoric. Of the recently overturned Washington, D.C., handgun ban, Obama had said last November that he believed the ban to be constitutional.

Proponents of gun rights claimed victory this week as the United States Supreme Court, in the latest of several 5-4 decisions, struck down Washington, D.C.'s ban on handguns. While the news is certainly welcome, the razor-thin margin by which this case was decided ought to be unsettling for those who believe in fidelity to the Constitution. This one was closer than it should have been.

A friend and NPRI supporter has called to our attention some recent comments by John Coleman, who founded The Weather Channel and is now with KUSI-TV in San Diego. Coleman has some harsh words for Al Gore and his brethren in the environmentalist movement, and makes the case (and a compelling one, at that) that there is a direct link between overblown global warming alarmism and skyrocketing gas prices.

Jon Ralston's blog post from June 11 contains a link to a letter written by Steve Martin of Nevadans for Fair Taxes, in which Martin takes the publicly funded Nevada Association of Counties (NACO) to task for using taxpayer dollars, at the behest of special interests (i.e. gaming and the teacher union) to lobby county governments to push for massive tax increases.

A Las Vegas Sun editorial published last weekend caught my eye for its sub-headline, which is dead-on accurate: "State government wrestling a budget crisis largely of its own making". Then I read the editorial.

In Reno this week, Republican presidential nominee-to-be John McCain took up the issue of Yucca Mountain, expressing his support for the creation of a nuclear waste repository there but also for reprocessing nuclear waste. McCain also said he'd push for the creation of an international facility for the purpose of storing nuclear waste from around the world.

In her May 18 column for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Erin Neff bemoans Gov. Gibbons' call for state agencies to cut up to 14 percent from anticipated 2009-2011 budget levels.

We at NPRI are thrilled, naturally, to have Rich Lowry delivering the keynote address at our 17th Anniversary Dinner (Sept. 23 at the Venetian). Lowry, who became editor of National Review before he'd even turned 30, is among today's brightest pundits, on politics and policy alike.

Deutsche Bank gaming analyst Bill Lerner made some solid points about the teacher union's gaming tax push on April 24 when he spoke to the North Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce. Unfortunately, he undercut his presentation at the same time by also indiscriminately parroting bogus talking points beloved by Nevada's zealots for "broad-based" tax schemes.

Just noticed today that our April 10 commentary asserting the fundamental inadequacy of government regulation got some cogent and really high-caliber support later in the month from two senior Brookings Institution economists.