Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review.
Here we are, 2013, and everything’s the same, except that it isn’t.
Congress failed miserably at the fiscal cliff negotiations, exactly as predicted. It’s amazing. Even when the whole world is watching, those people can somehow find ways to help their friends. And then everyone acts all surprised when those dinosaurs are shown to be inept at doing voters’ business, but geniuses when it comes to corruption. It’s enough to make a nice guy cynical. Fortunately, the years of fighting off cynicism have made me a less nice guy, so we’re all going to be fine.
Did you notice I have a couple of new columnists? After her years in the Nevada Assembly and Senate, I’m sure Nevada’s liberal lioness Sheila Leslie needs no introduction. I was actually kind of surprised when she agreed to write the column for us. And I’m not that easily taken aback.
Chanelle Bessette is a new voice on the conservative columnist scene. I actually had a lot of very intriguing interest from more established conservative voices in this community, including former electeds, regular contributors and political activists. But one of the scruples we have at this paper is we’re committed to bringing new voices into the cacophony. I’ve been acquainted with Chanelle for a couple of years, and when I ran into her at a Libertarian rally, I thought she would be a good fit for us—and part of that is that I’m tired of assisting the lie that the radical right represents conservative thought. We’ll see. You’ll get an idea of where Chanelle is coming from in this week’s column.
Along other lines, Dennis Myers is on vacation so Tracie Douglas is filling in for him in the news section and other places.
Anyway, this is already shaping up to be one crazy year. I can’t think of a year that I looked more forward to getting underway than this one.