He was for it before he was against it. That’s what it appears U.S. Sen. John Ensign was doing on the $104.6 billion transportation bill that passed the Senate approved 88-7, with Ensign voting no. President George W. Bush has threatened to veto the legislation, saying it’s too expensive. And Ensign apparently agrees.

Or at least he does now. He may not have agreed before, when he was ladeling some pork of his own into the bill, including $3 million to widen Blue Diamond Highway, the site of many traffic deaths. Ensign was right to seek those funds, since there are quite literally lives at stake. By ultimately voting against the bill, Ensign has set himself up to be accused of total callousness towards the red asphalt.

But it’s his own fault. It seems Ensign (and Bush) didn’t like the $3.1 billion for housing that was included in the bill that exceeded Bush’s recommendations, not to mention $600 million for Amtrack, $765 million for airport grants, and $631 million for highway programs.

Grand total of that "objectionable" spending: $5.096 billion. In other words, 4.8 percent of the total spending.

For 4.8 percent, Ensign votes against things that he himself put into the bill, including $3.8 million for Interstate 15 interchanges with the Las Vegas Beltway, and the Blue Diamond Highway widening. For 4.8 percent, Ensign sided with a tiny minority of Republicans, against a bill he’d previously supported.

It would be one thing if Ensign opposed all pork projects, and voted against the bill out of principle. And it would be another thing if Ensign supported the bill — even with the extra spending — by saying the funds for Nevada were too important to vote against the entire measure.

But no. Instead, Ensign puts his own pork in, but then decides to vote against it, because he just can’t abide an extra 4.8 percent.

Wait, you say! Perhaps Ensign was being smart, since he knew his earmarks would pass anyway, even without his vote. He may be trying to have his cake and eat it, too, but at the end of the day, he’s covered his ass and at the same time got Nevada the funds it deserved for much-needed projects.

That is a viable argument, but not for Ensign’s political smarts. It’s an argument for Ensign being, once more, totally full of shit.

If only there were someone, someone who was also elected to represent Nevada, available to call Ensign out on his tricks. Someone familiar with Senate procedures, someone who also knew full-well the needs that Nevada has, and had the state’s best interests at heart.

Yeah, it’s really too bad there’s nobody out there like that.

What’s that? You want a few more Quick Hits? Well, OK, if you insist…

» Oh, man. This doesn’t look good. Just as the Nevada Resort Association is trying to convince everybody that the gambling industry already pays its fair share of taxes, along comes word that the industry won a record $1.146 billion from gamblers in the month of July. Hell, it was so good, even downtown casinos saw an increase in win! That public education campaign is getting harder and harder all the time.

» Welcome to Nevada politics, Mr. Andrew Martin. Although the Nevada Democratic Party isn’t supposed to get involved in primaries, it usually does, getting behind the person perceived to have the best chance to win in lots of subtle ways. And that means Clark County Chief Deputy District Attorney Robert Daskas is getting the nod in the 3rd Congressional District race against Republican U.S. Rep. Jon Porter, not you.

However, Daskas has said publicly that he’s not going to answer questions or talk about issues until he’s finished prosecuting the most recent member of the Mack disorganized crime family to work his evil on our poor state, accused murderer and attempted murderer Darren Mack. Therefore, we feel it’s only right for us at Various Things & Stuff to abstain from writing about Daskas until such time that the candidate, you know, wants to be a candidate for purposes other than that of raising money.

As for Martin, it might help if he had somebody other than Joe Bifano running his campaign. The last time we heard from Bifano, he was idiotically suggesting the Regional Transportation Commission avoid buying a French-made bus because the French refused to go along with George W. Bush’s misbegotten war.

That is the same guy, right?

» Congratulations are due to the law firm of Kummer, Kaempfer, Bonner, Renshaw & Ferrario, on being named Nevada’s top law firm for land use and zoning law in The Best Lawyers in America, (2008 ed.) Four of the firm’s lawyers were named individually for their practice in zoning and land use — Chris Kaempfer, Mark Fiorentino, Robert Gronauer and Thomas Amick. (We at Various Things & Stuff have personally seen Kaempfer and Fiorentino perform more than once back when we were earning an honest living in the field of journalism, and we can say they definitely deserve the accolades.)

In addition, Managing Partner Michael Bonner was recognized as a leading lawyer in corporate as well as mergers and acquisitions law; partner Thomas Kummer was named a top lawyer in commercial litigation; Robert Crowell, Kathleen Drakulich and Steven Tackes were recognized for their practice of energy law; and John Brewer was named one of the leading lawyers in corporate law.

» And finally today, in news not so good for the legal profession, the State Bar of Nevada is notifying its members that $300,000 in missing, perhaps the subject of an embezzlement by an investment agent working for the bar.

"The Bar has been informed that an agent retained to invest the Bar’s savings is unable to locate three $100,000 certificates of deposit for which the Bar had advanced funds to purchase. The Bar filed suit against the agent, and obtained a restraining order to protect other certificates of deposit which were purchased with Bar funds," the attorney’s group said in a news release.

"The State Bar of Nevada has also notified the district attorney, the Nevada attorney general, the U.S. attorney and the Nevada Supreme Court of the potential embezzlement," the release concludes.

Man, if there’s anybody you don’t want to steal from, it’s the mob. But after the mob, it’s lawyers. After all, the mob will only kill you. Lawyers? You don’t even want to think about it. You’d be better off skin diving among great white sharks in a wetsuit made of recently harvested seal meat and scented with shark pheromones than stealing from lawyers.

Information about the guy dumb enough to allegedly steal from the State Bar wasn’t in the release, and a call to the group’s deputy counsel wasn’t immediately returned, but we’ll update you when we find out.

Hey, kids! Did you know it’s Constitution Day? That’s right: It’s the one day we set aside to celebrate the adoption of the Constitution of the United States as the governing document for the 13 formerly disparate colonies that eventually became the good, old U.S.A.

From what we hear, constitutional literacy is on the decline, and not just among people we elected to office. (Actual law adopted in violation of the Constitution: It is illegal in Clark County to stand and watch an illegal street race. True story!)

So we encourage all of our readers to visit the Constitution Center’s website (linked above) and find out more about the amazing document (and its amendments) that has created one of the greatest, most free societies on Earth. One good result of this might be the possibility that citizens can stand up when scoundrels, demagogues and charlatans tell us that we have to give up some of our freedoms for liberty, or simply ignore the principles that must guide this nation when they get a little inconvenient.

Just in the last few years, consider the assaults on the Constitution: The Bush administration has been spying on Americans’ overseas phone calls and e-mails, without warrants, provided they think you’re talking to a terrorist. The Patriot Act has allowed FBI agents to illegally enter your house, search your stuff and even put a monitoring device on your computer, again without warrants. (Significant abuses, to no one’s surprise, have been discovered, with related National Security Letters, which allow the FBI to seize personal records without a warrant.) At least one election — in 2000 — was decided by extra-constitutional means. Treaties signed and executed in accordance with the Constitution have been ignored and violated. Private property has been seized and handed over to developers. A high school kid pulling a stupid prank has had his rights to free speech curtailed.

Here in Las Vegas, courts have allowed casinos to ridiculously claim they can control the public-forum sidewalks in front of their properties. Street preachers, handbillers, petition circulators and protesters have been deprived of their rights to free speech, under laws passed by local governments. And the separation-of-powers concept enshrined in the state and U.S. Constitution has been flaunted.

Worst of all, most of these abuses have been perpetrated by those who have sworn an oath to "preserve, protect and defend" the Constitution. With friends like that, who needs enemies?

So check out the Constitution Center, and give the old girl a good read. It takes the animation of the citizens to breathe life into our founding document. Otherwise, it’s just a piece of extraordinarily well-cared-for paper in the National Archives building.

» Speaking of the Constitution, a sure-to-be-interesting lecture is planned for 7:30 p.m. tonight at the Barrick Museum Auditorium on the UNLV campus. University of Texas Professor Sanford Levinson will lecture on the topic of whether the Constitution adopted 220 years ago is still fit to govern a country that’s moved into the Information Age. Should we convene a new constitutional convention? The lecture is co-sponsored by the Office of the Provost, the William S. Boyd School of Law and the College of Liberal Arts. Don’t miss it.

» Still speaking of the Constitution, the Las Vegas Sun published a story wondering about the chances of impeaching President George W. Bush. It’s not likely to happen, especially with the opposition of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. (Ironically, if Bush were impeached along with Vice President Dick Cheney, Pelosi would become the 44th president of the United States!) But just because the Democrats don’t think they have the votes to do it — and are worried about being punished at the polls if they did do it — doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea. In fact, it doesn’t even mean Reid and Pelosi think it’s a bad idea! You can never really tell what those people are thinking.

The Sun went a little further in its coverage, too, asking a constitutional lawyer to actually draft the articles of impeachment. Hell, all somebody in Congress has to do now is cut and paste! Any takers?

» Still speaking of the Constitution, somebody who was mostly illiterate in what it says left high office Friday. Although he served as a judge and as the highest law-enforcement officer in the land, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales once said torture is OK under U.S. law and treaties (it isn’t) and that habeus corpus isn’t an individual right (it is).

But we’re finally safe, since he quit on Friday after he got caught fibbing to Congress in various pieces of testimony about various unsavory things he’d done while in office.

"Over the past 2-1/2 years, I have seen tyranny, dishonesty, corruption, and depravity of types I never thought possible. I’ve seen things I didn’t know man was capable of," he said in his farewell speech.

And that was just in the administration! Bam!

» And still speaking of the Constitution, one of the things the document requires the Senate to do is give advice and consent to the president on nominations to certain federal offices. And we think the Senate is going to have a somewhat harder time doing that for one Henrietta Holsman Fore, a former Las Vegas businesswoman who rose to head the U.S. Mint and become undersecretary of management at the U.S. State Department.

Fore has been nominated to become director of foreign assistance at State, but the nomination has been delayed because she had a role in the huge backlog of passports created when the U.S. government began requiring them for travel to Mexico, the Caribbean and other destinations.

But that’s nothing compared to this paragraph from an October Vanity Fair story about Bush’s bunker-like mentality (and actual bunker): "Or Henrietta Holsman Fore, nominated by Bush to replace Randall Tobias, deputy secretary of state for foreign assistance, after Tobias was forced to resign in an escort scandal? It turned out that Fore once told a college audience that she tried to retain black employees when she was president of a small wire-products company near Los Angeles, but that they preferred selling drugs; that Hispanics were lazy; and that Asians, while productive, favored professional or management jobs. (Her nomination is pending in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.)"

Ouch, baby. Very ouch.

As huge fans of good television, we tuned in to the Emmys with a sense of hope, a sense of anticipation that great shows would be rewarded with the recognition they so richly deserve. We tuned in anticipating that people like James Gandolfini, Stephen Colbert, Denis Leary and Tina Fey were going to be recognized for their amazing talents.

And we were mostly disappointed.

It’s not that we’re quibbling with the overall results. Gandolfini’s The Sopranos and Fey’s 30 Rock did win awards. And nobody can argue that Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart didn’t deserve an Emmy. But let’s put it this way: Not everybody who should have won did, and that irks us. (Especially since the damn show went on as long as the Oscars, which is way too long.)

So, on with our analysis:

First, Ryan Seacrest was terrible. Awful. Disaster on a plate. He should never, ever be invited back to host anything, including the birthday parties of youngsters. Ellen DeGeneres was funnier in one, short appearance than Seacrest has been in the last 10 years. Please, for the love of God and all that is holy, deep six this guy forever. Oh, and while we’re at it, can we be honest about something? Nobody, and we mean nobody, loves Raymond. So can Ray Romano, too.

Second, the censorship of speakers, including Romano, was unconscionable. So what if Sally Field thinks that if mothers ran the world, there would be no goddamned war in the first place? (She’s mostly right: She should have said if mothers whose children aren’t rich or well connected enough to be able to avoid military service ran the world, there would be no goddamned war in the first place.) But "goddamn" is not the issue, Fox. It’s the fact that we went to goddamned war for no goddamned good reason in the first goddamn place. And if that makes your standards and practices people wet their pants and press the dump button, well, too bad.

Third, take a look at a few categories, in which we list the people who should have won, followed by the people who actually did:

• Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series. Who should have won: Steve Carrell (The Office), Alec Baldwin (30 Rock) or Charlie Sheen (Two and a Half Men). Who did win: Ricky Gervais (Extras).
  
• Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series. Who should have won: Gandolfini (The Sopranos). Who did win: James Spader (Boston Legal).
  
• Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series. Who should have won: Fey (30 Rock). Who did win: America Ferrera (Ugly Betty).
  
• Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series. Who should have won: Mariska Hargitay (Law & Order: SVU) or Edie Falco (The Sopranos). Who did win: Field (Brothers & Sisters).
  
• Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series. Who should have won: Rainn Wilson (The Office) or Jon Cryer (Two and a Half Men). Who did win: Jeremy Piven (Entourage).
  
• Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series. Who should have won: Jenna Fischer (The Office), Holland Taylor (Two and a Half Men) or Conchata Ferrell (Two and a Half Men). Who did win: Jaime Pressly (My Name is Earl).
  
• Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series. Who should have won: Lorraine Bracco (The Sopranos). Who did win: Katherine Heigl (Gray’s Anatomy).
  
• Outstanding Individual Performance in a Variety or Music Program. Who should have won: Colbert (The Colbert Report), Stewart (The Daily Show with Jon Stewart) or David Letterman (Late Show with David Letterman). Who did win: Tony Bennett (Tony Bennett: An American Classic.)
  
• Outstanding Variety, Music or Comedy Special. What should have won: The Comedy Central Roast of William Shatner, Lewis Black: Red, White and Screwed or Wanda Sykes: Sick and Tired. What did win: Tony Bennett: An American Classic.
  
• Outstanding Writing for a Variety, Music or Comedy Program. Who should have won: The staffs of The Colbert Report, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Real Time with Bill Maher or Late Show with David Letterman. Who did win: The staff of Late Night with Conan O’Brien.
  
• Oh, and what’s up with Battlestar Galactica getting four nominations and no awards? C’mon, people, this is a great show, and to have it totally shut out is wrong!
  

Now, don’t get us wrong. We like Tony Bennett. He’s good. The question is, is he better than Stephen Colbert? David Letterman? Lewis Black? We suppose it all depends on your tastes. And that’s why we think the Emmys did get a couple things right. They are:

• Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series. While we personally favored Michael Imperioli (The Sopranos), we can’t argue too much with the choice of Terry O’Quinn (Lost). He’s good, too.
  
• Outstanding Comedy Series. We also like The Office, but the choice of 30 Rock was a good one.
  
• Outstanding Drama Series. We had to wait until the end of the night, well past 11 p.m., to learn that The Sopranos was going to get the recognition it deserved. This doesn’t make up for ignoring Gandolfini, Falco, Imperioli or Bracco in their respective categories. There’s no excuse for that. But The Sopranos buried every other show in this category, and if it hadn’t won, there would be no television justice.
  
• Outstanding Variety, Music or Comedy Series. We were disappointed that The Colbert Report was totally shut out all night, and Real Time with Bill Maher is an exceptional program that deserves recognition, too. But the choice of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart was a great one. (We also can’t stop laughing at the clip Stewart brought of President George W. Bush marveling that somebody like Osama bin Laden being unable to appreciate the joy of Hanukkah.)

That’s it for this year. We’ve been scanning our TV Guide for the fall schedule, and things look kind of bleak, especially with the cancellation or conclusion of shows like The Sopranos, Law & Order: Conviction, Heist, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Veronica Mars, The Class, Deadwood and others. Hell, if things keep going this way, we’re going to have to start reading at night!

Actually, that’s not too bad. After all, if we can do it while lying on a couch, we’re for it!