President Obama comes to Las Vegas — shish, boom bah!

So, President Obama is heading to Las Vegas to talk more about his "everything goes" domestic energy policy.

Do you know why he's headed to Vegas? Because the press corps here for the most part can't find a discouraging word (or question) to ask the president when it comes to energy policy.

Someone may serve up a Yucca Mountain question, let the president play to the Nevada crowd, and then fail to follow it up with key questions about what this means for the national development of nuclear energy. Is he for nuclear energy (like he says he is) or not? And how does that support mesh with the closing of Yucca Mountain?

I am sure no one will ask him whether he agrees with Sen. Harry Reid, who single-handedly killed a job-creating clean coal power plant in Ely. It was an absolute tragedy for for the state, which Reid has yet been held fully accountable. If Obama does indeed, as he said in the SOTU speech that we need an "everything goes" energy policy, why didn't the Ely project go? And based on the last time the press corps here really had a chance to delve into the underbelly of the administration's "green" energy policy, the Obama crew got out of town without one single critical question.

In fact, when Energy Secretary Steven Chu was in Las Vegas for Harry Reid's green energy summit he received no critical questions about Solyndra even though trouble for Solyndra was already well documented. A few days later, Solyndra went belly-up with Chu letting Solyndra Wall Street backers take a front seat to taxpayers in the bankruptcy. That's outrageous mismanagement by the Obama administration.

Maybe the president will get a Solyndra question tomorrow. A little late. But hope springs eternal.

But perhaps the most important set of questions reporters could try to pin the president down on is why we as a nation are subsidizing so many duplicative green energy proposals. When the president defends himself by saying it's a legitimate role for government to prime the pump of private enterprise with skunk works projects, I'm in agreement. That's a worthy deal.

That's not what Obama is doing with his green energy proposals. He's subsidizing massive, expensive duplicative projects to buy jobs and try to make his horrible unemployment rate look just a bit better. It's a re-election line, not a means to a potential economic end. And when I say buy jobs, I mean very, very expensive jobs that have no chance of sustaining themselves without federal dollars.

So I ask again: Why wouldn't Obama come to Nevada to talk about energy? The press corps here is little more than a cheer squad.

P.S.: Of course, I say all this with love toward my own newspaper, the Las Vegas Review-Journal. If there's any chance of a reporter giving Obama hell, it'll be an R-J reporter or an AP reporter. Not because they "hate" Obama, but because the fertilizer he's serving up these days stinks and people ought not be expected to eat it without someone yelling: "Hey, what the hell is this?"