Opinion

If you think the patient dumping scandal at the state’s Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital has no effect on your health care, guess again.

Plenty of Nevadans rolled their eyes in response to casino magnate Steve Wynn’s closed-door conversations with leading legislators and with Gov. Brian Sandoval on Wednesday in Carson City — meetings at which he reportedly warned the economics of Nevada’s gaming industry are “not healthy,” and that future growth of the big players here will thus occur in other markets.

Years of urgent work by Nevada entrepreneurs, elected officials and gaming regulators paid off Tuesday when UltimatePoker.com opened for business, becoming the country’s first legal, regulated, real-money online poker website.

When more than 400 people die in a building collapse — as happened in Bangladesh last week on a nice sunny day, absent any earthquake or tidal wave — some police action is appropriate. It’s hard not to assume the builders and owners didn’t take some shortcuts in reckless disregard of human life and safety. And any government building inspector who signed off on the work should be in for some close questioning, as well.

Comprising a majority of the Las Vegas City Council’s recommending committee, Councilmen Stavros Anthony and Bob Coffin on Tuesday voted against a proposal from Councilman Bob Beers to get rid of a mandate that 1 percent of the city’s capital improvement budget be spent on public art.

When Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval called for yet another study of the Nevada Public Employees’ Retirement System — one that won’t wrap up until the current legislative session is over — he signaled he had no appetite to take on the issue before his re-election campaign, if ever.

Two words not often heard within the halls of government: You’re fired.

It’s been widely reported that Congress last week rescinded the sequester cuts from the budget of the Federal Aviation Administration, ending furloughs for air traffic controllers in response to howls of outrage from passengers forced to endure hours of delays at airport terminals and tarmacs.

Nevada’s schools desperately need more competition. That competition must go beyond school choice and into the unionized teaching profession, which has long been locked into an industrial-era wage scale that ignores performance.

The Mojave Desert tortoise is listed by the federal government as a “threatened” species, which allows environmentalists and their government allies to impose restrictions on land use in Southern Nevada, supposedly to protect the reptile’s delicate wild habitat.