To insult idiots, call them ‘politicians’

At the so-called "Tahoe Summit" last week, our own senior U.S. senator, unpopular Harry Reid, in between cozying up to fellow moderate Dianne Feinstein (D-San Francisco) and ignoring a call to return the lake to the Washoe Indian tribe (which will probably be able to buy it soon, anyway, given the way Indian gaming is going), touted the so-called Travel Promotion Act, signed by President Obama in March, which the senator asserts will create 6,000 new jobs by drawing more foreign tourists to Lake Tahoe and elsewhere.

Under the law, "plans will be developed" to reverse a 10-year national decline in foreign tourism, the senator explained. The law is to be funded by new taxes on tourism businesses and a $10 fee assessed against each foreign visitor.

Next up: a government advertising campaign designed to increase the number of people visiting local 7-Eleven and Circle K convenience stores, to be funded by a tax on such convenience stores (which will thus force them to raise their prices, of course), accompanied by a new $10 admission fee to be charged each time a customer walks into a Circle K or 7-Eleven.

These Washington guys: You're not going to outsmart them when it comes to basic economics!

Alternatively, we could stop groping the gonads of our would-be foreign visitors, stop strip-searching them, stop making them take off their shoes and belts and hold up their pants with one hand like prisoners entering the hall for one of Joe Stalin's show trials, stop treating them like suspected drug dealers and money launderers, stop giving them trouble if they're carrying "too much currency" (that they aim to spend here, duh), stop seizing from said luggage any beverages or health or beauty aids that come in tubes or bottles larger than 4 ounces, and generally stop treating them as if they'd just been seized by pirates on the high seas.

Instead (in addition to re-legalizing commerce in plant extracts and thus eliminating most concerns about the fictitious crime of "money laundering," a crime that couldn't exist if we still made our money out of gold and silver as required by the Constitution), we could resume treating everyone in a civil manner, while profiling for additional scrutiny and questioning and if necessary disarming young Arab and Islamic men only, which is the way the sane nations of the Earth (which is to say, every one but ours) have responded to the fact that young Arab and Islamic men -- and only young Arab and Islamic men -- have taken to trying to blow up the airplanes of civilized nations in recent years.

But we could hardly expect anyone in Washington to embrace that solution, as it might work, leading to massive layoffs among the blue-gloved, petty-thief Gestapo goons popularly known as "Thousands Standing Around," whose vast salaries are now 41 percent paid with money borrowed from China.

And then where would we be?

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Have you seen the current application form for the "Governor Guinn Millennium Scholarship Program," which we were once assured would be funded entirely with money extorted by our state attorney general's office from the major tobacco companies, but which scholarships are now largely funded (just as we always predicted) with general tax revenues, making them nothing but disguised tuition reductions for docile and dumbed-down Nevada children who have received 11 annual social promotions while serving out their full sentences in the largest jobs program for unemployables ever created in the history of the world, the compulsion-based government youth propaganda camps?

The fourth line requiring applicants to "initial here" reads: "CITIZENSHIP STATUS / I declare that I am a citizen of the United States or that I have lawful immigration status, or that I have filed an application to legalize my immigration status, or will file an application to legalize my immigration status as soon as I am eligible to do so."

Who (other than citizens) could conceivably not be currently eligible to file an application to legalize their immigration status?

Illegal immigrants who are waiting for the lame-duck Democrats in Washington to slip through their next big amnesty bill after Nov. 2, of course.

Now, if the question merely ended after "or that I have lawful immigration status," we know full well our gleeful scofflaw state bureaucrats would accept such applications from illegal immigrants with a wink and a nudge, never lifting a finger to try to confirm whether such a claim were true.

But so arrogant, so scornful of the law and the wishes of the majority of tax-saddled Nevadans are the folks who put together this form, and who process the resulting applications, that they couldn't resist saying it out loud: "Illegal immigrants, please initial here. This means we won't come after you for claiming to be legal, even on the million-to-one chance that we ever accidentally found out."

They couldn't resist waving it in our faces: "Nyah, nyah, nyah! We made you pay taxes to cover their health care in the costly (and now bankrupt) emergency rooms. We made you pay taxes to fund their first 12 years of so-called 'education' -- including free breakfasts and lunches and even 'summer feeding stations' -- and now we're going to make you subsidize their college educations, too!"

The folks who composed this form, and anyone who hands out a college scholarship based on it, should be indicted as accessories after the fact to commission of a serious federal crime, and made to spend a few hot years in the nearest federal pen.

And to those who say otherwise, let's see you stand by your principles, just this once: Submit and vote for legislation to repeal all our immigration laws, disband the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and advertise around the world: "America's borders are open! Seeking another 100 million to 300 million undocumented 'guests' this year alone, preferably illiterate and without identifiable skills! No health screening! No bomb screening! No need to understand or embrace the principles of a limited constitutional republic! Level of civic involvement displayed by the residents of Bell, Calif., will be just fine! Sixteen years of free schooling! All your health care needs funded by U.S. taxpayers! We just can't go bankrupt fast enough, darn it!"

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal, and author of "Send in the Waco Killers" and the novel "The Black Arrow." See www.vinsuprynowicz.com/.