Prostitution busts and misplaced priorities

Las Vegas police have been crowing about a two-year investigation (Operation Dollhouse) that resulted in the arrest of eight people for charges that carry probation (“Women nabbed in raid to stay,” Friday Review-Journal). What is the cost to the taxpayers for this investigation?

The police have determined that prostitution is a priority? What world are they living in? How about a two-year investigation dealing with car theft, gang violence or graffiti?

Let’s see an accounting for this investigation. How much did we spend to catch eight pimps? Why does it take two years? How many officers did it divert from serious crime?

Operation Dollhouse cost us dollars and safer streets. Sheriff Doug Gillespie, we have the finest police officers in the country. Use them wisely.

CHRIS RASMUSSEN

LAS VEGAS

City Hall

To the editor:

Seems the city of Las Vegas needs a “new” City Hall. Apparently all those pesky critters who like to tell the rest of us what to do need even more pesky people to get through all the pestering required to justify their salaries.

The only hope for the rest of the population is that the city doesn’t use the same contractors and architects Clark County used to build the “new” Regional Justice Center, which came in $100 million over budget and three years late.

BRUCE FEHER

LAS VEGAS

Cheap shot

To the editor:

Comics are meant to make us laugh, and I like a good yuk as much as anyone. But there’s nothing funny about the mean-spirited mistruths Garry Trudeau tried passing off as satire in a recent strip.

The “Doonesbury” creator made a worthwhile point in noting the multiple marriages among Republican presidential hopefuls, but his suggestion that Focus on the Family’s James Dobson isn’t concerned about the moral failings of those men is blatantly untrue.

It doesn’t take much effort to discover that Mr. Dobson has been plainspoken about the candidates’ weaknesses. He’s plainly said he couldn’t vote for two of the men to whom Mr. Trudeau referred — and grilled a third on his national radio show about the would-be candidate’s marital trespasses.

The allegation that Mr. Dobson would choose a political party over his principles is ludicrous. Mr. Dobson has been quite vocal about his disappointment over the moral failings of GOP candidates.

Mr. Trudeau appears to support gay marriage, as the cartoon’s second-to-last panel indicates. Maybe that’s why he took this unwarranted shot at Mr. Dobson — a vocal proponent of defending marriage as the union of one man and one woman.

KELLY McDONALD

HENDERSON

Quit whining

To the editor:

To all those parents complaining about their lives being disrupted because they may have to change or cancel their vacations due to the year-round school changes: Move on.

All those involved — i.e. bus drivers, kitchen crews, teachers and many others — will also have to change their schedules.

My family survived two years with one child in year-round, one child on session and one child in the nine-month program.

Try to plan a vacation around that.

It seems a large percentage of today’s modern parents are too involved with their lives and not their children.

DIANE MILLONZIE

LAS VEGAS

Nuclear power

To the editor:

A recent wire service article (“Anti-nuclear effort gelled in 1977 protest,” April 30) regarding anti-nuclear demonstrations 30 years ago at the Seabrook Station Nuclear Power Plant in New Hampshire portrays the protesters as pioneers in the peaceful resistance to an emerging technology.

What the article fails to note is that the real heroes of the Seabrook saga are the plant’s owners and the thousands of men and women who persevered through myriad legal, political and financial challenges to see the plant through its construction and licensing phases.

Today, Seabrook provides New England with billions of watts of clean, safe and economical electricity each year. The plant is part of the nuclear power backbone that supplies 20 percent of this nation’s electricity — all without greenhouse gas emissions or reliance on foreign oil.

To achieve energy independence, the United States needs more domestic energy sources such as Seabrook.

We can only hope that the same intestinal fortitude demonstrated by the builders of Seabrook Station three decades ago will allow the United States to once again prevail over today’s protests involving a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, thereby enabling a resurgence of nuclear-powered electricity in this country.

Ted Feigenbaum

LAS VEGAS