Presidential visit: Barack Obama comes to Las Vegas

President Barack Obama is scheduled to arrive in Las Vegas today, a year after his last official visit. The president is currently on a national tour promoting his $450 billion jobs bill.

Mr. Obama is welcome. He will be greeted with respect. Las Vegans will even give him the benefit of the doubt, presuming that he means well for the country and is doing his best at a difficult job — despite the fact that he has twice publicly told American tourists and business travelers not to head for Las Vegas, using this city’s name as a synonym for wanton and irresponsible spending.

The president is here to push his latest jobs plan, by which he means more work for the Brotherhood of the Orange Cone, repaving every street and bridge in sight, while Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid blithely declares that “private-sector jobs are doing just fine.”

Meanwhile, Southern Nevada has lost 130,000 jobs and counting, even as local entrepreneurs, after assessing the added costs ObamaCare and carbon regulation will pile on their backs, quietly lock their doors and drive away.

The president’s latest jobs plan is, regrettably, more of the same gimmick-laden, government-centered, dead-on-arrival, tax-and-borrow stuff the “progressives” in Washington have been flogging for three years.

The only kind of capitalism now prospering in Washington is crony capitalism. Witness the $535 million in tax money flushed at solar-panel maker Solyndra, even after congressional watchdogs warned the outfit was headed down the same road as Pets.com.

And now, ABC News reports, “With the approval of the Obama administration, an electric car company that received a $529 million federal government loan guarantee is assembling its first line of cars in Finland, saying it could not find a facility in the United States capable of doing the work,” even after “Vice President Joseph Biden heralded the Energy Department’s $529 million loan to the start-up electric car company called Fisker as a bright new path to thousands of American manufacturing jobs.”

Hard-won U.S. taxpayer money plowed into American manufacturing jobs — in Finland?

Time for change, indeed.