Editorials

As bad as the downtown soccer stadium deal is — and, oh, is it plenty bad — the way in which the city government and the Las Vegas City Council got it done is even worse.

This page writes about public records issues so frequently because government can get away with just about anything if it succeeds in blocking access to documents and data. Two stories from last week are instructive in the lengths agencies will go to deny scrutiny of public-sector shortcomings.

We hear it every election cycle: Fat-cat Republican donors buy elections and are singlehandedly destroying the political process. But these same critics are always noticeably silent when the numbers come out showing which donors shelled out the most cash and where their donations really went.

The rising cost of higher education is a crisis, but in more ways than you might think. Yes, ever-higher tuition bills price many students out of a university education. But increasing college costs also compel students to take out ever-higher amounts of taxpayer-backed student loans. And, as Jason Delisle pointed out in a Wednesday Wall Street Journal op-ed, an ever-higher number of those loans will never be fully repaid.

We live in amazing times. We have access to an unprecedented amount of technology, which gives us equally unprecedented access to information. We can find out virtually anything we want or need to know, anytime, virtually anywhere we go, and we can share our findings — and our thoughts and opinions about those findings — with countless people, many of whom are doing the same exact thing.

The Nevada Supreme Court’s absurdly large caseload usually delays rulings at least a year, sometimes more. But justices haven’t used the court’s backlog as an excuse for unresponsiveness. When an unusually urgent appeal is filed, the court will move it to the front of line to resolve the matter as quickly as possible.

Assemblyman Harvey Munford’s bill draft request to boot Bishop Gorman High School’s sports teams from state playoffs is a terrible idea. Not only is the proposed legislation bad policy, it’s an overreach indicative of the poor prioritization that has plagued previous Nevada Legislatures.

If the 2015 Legislature wants to reward nonperformance, then by all means lawmakers should boost the budget of the Nevada Commission on Judicial Discipline.

The Keystone XL pipeline appears dead for the duration of Barack Obama’s presidency. After dancing around the topic and delaying any sort of action on the project for years, the president provided a concrete position during his year-end White House news conference on Dec. 19, saying that Keystone XL would provide “not even a nominal benefit” to U.S. consumers.

Last weekend, New York City police officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu were ambushed while sitting in their patrol car, executed by a lone shooter. The attack certainly resonated here in Las Vegas, where on June 8, Metro officers Alyn Beck and Igor Soldo were ambushed and killed by two shooters as they had lunch at a pizza place.