The federal government has formed a new posse and pointed it west, which is how you know the problem has grown large enough to require both acronyms and airfare. The Department of Justice announced a “West Coast Health Care Fraud Strike Force,” uniting prosecutors from Nevada, Arizona, and Northern California with the usual alphabet of…

Buddy and I take a walk most mornings. Buddy does the walking, and I do the thinking, which is a fair division of labor since he has four legs and I have doubts. Our route progresses by a house where a man sits in the mouth of his garage. He is a quiet fellow. When…

In North Las Vegas, where education is a noble pursuit and parking lots are apparently graduate courses in poor judgment, Canyon Springs High found itself hosting a lesson no one had scheduled. It began, as many modern complications do, with “several people who were not students” loitering where students should loiter properly. School staff, who…

There are few things in this world more convincing than a man determined to be stupid, and fewer still more persuasive than a pistol that looks real at three o’clock in the morning. On April 25, in that cheerful hour when only bakers, burglars, and poor decision-makers are awake, a gentleman named Mitchell Nettles took…

Nevada’s latest audit of children’s facilities reads like a manual on how not to run one. Across 25 inspected sites, nine delivered conditions that would make a halfway house blush and a parent reach for a lawyer. At one foster home, inspectors found a loaded firearm resting in an unlocked bedroom, accessible to children and…

(Measured in Months and Excuses) I once knew a man who said the law was a grand and noble machine, precise as a watch, fair as a sermon, and twice as comforting. I did not argue with him, because a man so well satisfied ought not be disturbed. But I have since seen that machine…

I was sitting in a Nevada gas station, watching the numbers climb on the pump like a man scaling a ladder he couldn’t afford, when a letter blew in from Washington. Not literally, letters from Washington never travel that honestly, but the contents arrived just the same. Senator Catherine Cortez Masto has written to President…

In our enlightened age, we have solved many problems by inventing titles for them. A man is no longer merely a man when he is a “juvenile probation officer,” which is a long and respectable way of saying he is trusted to keep wolves away from lambs. It is an honorable post, provided the fellow…

There was a time when a man who didn’t like a thing declined to buy it. It was considered sufficient protest, and it had the advantage of requiring no press conference. But progress has been made, and now we solve our troubles by assembling a coalition and writing stern letters to people who process credit…

Las Vegas is a city that prides itself on bright lights, quick money, and the firm belief that consequences are something that happens to other people. It was therefore no surprise that, on a Tuesday night around 9:35 p.m., the laws of traffic and human decency were both tested at the intersection of Lake Mead…