Why not? They’re fluffy, delicious and calorie-free! Here we go!

• Clark County’s Fire Chief Steve Smith wants companies to learn the importance of getting a “hot work permit” to avoid future fires like the one that was ignited at the Monte Carlo on Jan. 25. You know what an excellent learning tool might be, Chief Smith? A citation for people who did work without one anc caused a fire!
• Of course, no one in the Monte Carlo fire will be cited.
• Gov. Jim Gibbons is set to announce another set of budget cuts on Monday, as the projected deficit could be as high as $800 million. Does he know that once the state of Nevada cuts its budget to nothing, there’s nothing for him to be governor of anymore?
• On the upside, our governor problem would be solved.
• Speaking of Gibbons, my colleague Jon Ralston wrote a piece saying the word “insensate” perfectly describes the governor. We looked it up. It means, “lacking sensation; not feeling, or not capable of feeling, sensation; inanimate; without sense or reason; foolish; stupid; lacking sensibility; without regard or feeling for others; cold; insensitive.”
• To us, that seems like a lot of effort to describe the governor. What’s wrong with the classic “asshole”?
• We know U.S. Sen. Harry Reid is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And we know the LDS church discourages its members from imbibing any substance that alters a person’s state of mind. But when Reid describes the 2008 presidential campaign as “one of the most sensationally positive campaigns in the history of our country,” we simply must ask: Is he high?
• Hey, Review-Journal editorial page: It’s ruby slippers. We’d have thought you would know that…

Well, that was quick: A pair of ballot initiatives that would ostensibly have cleaned up government are being pulled. Did the conservative forces behind them decide that dirty government was OK after all?

Not really, says organizer Kris Munn. They’ll just try to find somebody in the state Legislature who will put the ideas into a bill in the 2009 session. He said Monday that “Both of these [initiatives] are near to my taxpayer heart,” but apparently, he didn’t have the heart to fight for them in court.

It turns out Nevadans for Clean and Open Government were scared off by a lawsuit filed by Nevadans for Nevada, an AFL-CIO group that pointed out the two initiatives were anti-union attack pieces in disguise. One, banning sole-source contractors from making political contributions, would have silenced unions in the political process, and the other, a ban on using taxpayer money on lobbyists, would have put local governments at a disadvantage.

Oh, and lurking in the fine print: Paycheck protection, which would have kept unions from being able to automatically deduct dues from members’s paychecks. That’s a longtime Republican wet dream, since they hate that any group of working people might get parity with big business.

You know, we think AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Danny Thompson is a great guy. First, he sues to protect us from that misanthropic failed congressional candidate Sharron Angle’s war on cops, nurses and firefighters (via property tax restrictions) and now he’s fighting anti-America right-wingers and their efforts to attack the First Amendment right of working people to petition their government for a redress of grievances. And he’s managed to keep local labor together despite a big split on the national stage.

Nice work, Mr. Thompson. Keep it up.

U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton just can’t seem to get past that big, giant, steaming, huge pile of horseshit she dumped on the public in recent days, which is to say, her wholly invented tale of braving sniper fire on a landing in Bosnia.

In reality, her visit to Bosnia was no big deal. But to hear Clinton say it, well, she was Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan. At least until the video surfaced of her walking, head held high, with daughter Chelsea Clinton, greeting people right on the tarmac in a ceremony she said was canceled due to sniper fire.

After first saying she “misspoke,” Clinton on Tuesday finally admitted she made “a mistake,” but only after saying “I had a different memory.”

“So I made a mistake. That happens. It proves I’m human, which, you know, for some people is a revelation,” Clinton said.

Awww, a self-deprecating remark, urging us all to move on. We will. But just one real quick thing first.

See, she didn’t make “a mistake.” She invented events that never took place. That’s not making a mistake. That’s telling a big fat fucking lie. And it doesn’t prove she’s human. It only proves she’s a big fat fucking liar. And sadly, that is not a revelation.

We missed it until Keith Olbermann noted it on TV Tuesday, but one of her remarks on the Excuseapalooza 2008 tour was made during an interview with the  Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. (”I was sleep-deprived and I misspoke,” she told the paper.) That triggered a distant memory for us, and so we checked.

Indeed, the Tribune-Review was one of the former workplaces of Christopher Ruddy, who is most famous for his work asserting that former White House deputy counsel Vincent Foster was murdered. (Official accounts concluded that he committed suicide in a park outside of Washington, D.C.) Ruddy expounded on his newspaper reporting in a book, The Strange Death of Vincent Foster: An Investigation, in 1997. He went on to found the right-wing website Newsmax.

Ruddy’s work asserted that not only was Foster murdered, but that it had something to do with his work in the Clinton White House. It found purchase in the Tribune Review, Olbermann noted, a paper owned by notorious right-winger Richard Mellon Scaife.

And Hillary Clinton sat for an interview with the paper. Perhaps she “had a different memory” of its coverage of the demise of her close friend and associate Foster?

Despite the lies, one thing has become clearer: We now know a little more about how far Clinton will go to become the Democratic nominee.

Carl Forti: ''Boo!''

Despite the bullshit you’re fed night and day, don’t think for one nanosecond that America’s elite political and business classes don’t pay attention to what you think.

Prime example: The kinder, gentler nut jobs over at the voracious, right-wing political advocacy group Freedom’s Watch have been scrambling for the past 72 hours to burnish their public image after finding themselves the latest target of anti-war protests held in front of the Venetian (and across the country) this weekend.

In a classic PR move, detailed here by the New York Times, Freedom’s Watch overlords (among whom Venetian owner and Las Vegas Sands Corporation Chairman Sheldon Adelson reigns supreme) announced they’ve hired former Mitt Romney political director Carl Forti to run their “issue advocacy campaign” this fall. Which is marketing speak for shitting bricks and using desperation hires in an effort to garner public support for their failed, exposed-as-batshit-crazy ideology.

Careful readers will remember Forti as the bloviating communications director for the National Republican Congressional Committee, where he personally directed the group’s 2004 and 2006 electoral smear campaigns (also here).

Granted, the overlords over at Freedom’s Watch likely don’t give two shits about the group of 100 or so locals who used their choice of Saturday’s venue as a sign of added dismay with Mr. Adelson. The more likely scenario is that the brain trust at Freedom’s Watch, along with nearly every other American conservative, knows the GOP is fighting an uphill battle both to hang on to the White House and to persuade Americans that more war is a good idea. They need a good hatchet man who can decapitate the eventual Democratic presidential nominee and terrify the rest of the country into a permanent state of combat. With his particular sociopathic skill set, Forti should fit right in.

Parker Posey

From free-spirit-turned-feisty-librarian in Party Girl to the demonic Darla in Dazed and Confused Parker Posey is truly the queen of indie films, and it looks like it’s destined to stay that way.

Fox network picked up Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino’s new series, The Return of Jezebel James, a half-hour of quirky comedy co-starring Posey and Six Feet Under’s Lauren Ambrose. But don’t look for it on your TiVo again; after a scant two weeks and three episodes, it’s been canceled. Four episodes, including “The Return of the Crazy Jackal Shillelagh Lady,” remain unaired.

Too bad the execs didn’t sandbag the uber-unfunny vehicle Unhitched. Here’s hoping it’s next on the hit list.

A rare photo of corporate-funded ''democracy'' in its natural state.

The latest batch of Election 2008 financial disclosure reports rolled in late last week, detailing the record-breaking amounts of campaign cash that each major presidential candidate raised in the last quarter. But a closer look at how much Las Vegans are ponying up to fund the lamest political show on Earth is revealing.

Among the report’s most revealing takeaways:

1. No surprise here, but Las Vegas led the state as ground zero in this year’s political fund raising war, at $9,873,552. Reno politicos came in second here in the state, donating $2,096, 901.

2. Of the Top 10 Nevada ZIP Codes in which voters have thus far donated the most, Vegas neighborhoods locked up each of the top five spots: 89109 (home to many of the biggest casinos on the Strip) at $825,213; 89117 at $721,678; 89113 at $696,048; 89134 at $567,969; and 89102 at $448, 559. Interestingly, residents in the Henderson ZIP Code 89074 nearly cracked the top five, giving $424,717.

In a bizarrely cruel twist of fate, former presidential hopeful, ex-Massachusetts governor and 2008 Nevada Republican Caucus champ Mitt Romney, despite pulling out of the race back in early February, still leads with the largest cumulative donation, at $783,020. Willard is followed by former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, at $574,390; U.S. Sen. Hillary “Duck-and-Cover” Clinton, D-N.Y., at $541,809; U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., at $357,864; and U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., at $343,378.

Follow the money here. Get local here.

If only our cars ran on spicy cutoff jeans.

Gotta love polls. They’re like a choose-your-own-adventure story, except they’re about things like national energy policy. And, also like choose-your-own adventure stories, polls also allow people to create their own mystical universe of infinite wishes in which an energy-independent nation happily crisscrossed with solar-powered vegan mass transit also has no gas taxes whatsoever! Those are more or less the findings of a new Pew Research Center poll released today.

Among the poll’s highlights:

• Nine in 10 Americans favor requiring better auto fuel efficiency standards, while substantial majorities also support increased federal funding for alternative energy (81%) and mass transportation (72%).

• Support has fallen for increased federal funding for ethanol research (57%, down from 67% in Feb. 2006).

• Voters are evenly split over promoting more nuclear power (48% against vs. 44% in favor).

• Voters are evenly divided over drilling for oil and gas in the pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (50% opposed, 42% in favor).

Of course, they just don’t want to pay for it.To wit:

• The public overwhelmingly rejects boosting gas taxes by a margin greater than three-to-one.

Dorkz! Perhaps most interestingly, an overwhelming number of Republicans, Democrats and Independents polled favored tougher auto emission standards and more research into alternative energy. Does this signal a tectonic shift in the American mindset when it comes to energy policy? Maybe.

Then again, we suspect they all would’ve also been in favor of perpetual motion machines and flying griffins filled with free Tootsie Rolls.

Gov. Jim Gibbons says he’s still working on a deal to allow three doctors to step down from the state Board of Medical Examiners, yet still retain their dignity. How? Well, he’s going to give them his personal official gubernatorial seal of being A-OK!

That’s right: Gibbons is willing to step up and tell everybody that the three doctors in question — Drs. Daniel McBride, Javaid Anwar and Sohail Anjum — did absolutely, positively nothing wrong in connection to the investigation of Dr. Dipak Desai and his Endoscopy Clinic of Southern Nevada (motto: Home of the Hepatitis! Allegedly).

“I am willing to state it has nothing to do with their professionalism and practices as medical professionals,” Gibbons generously offered.

Well, here’s a question, then: If Gibbons thinks so highly of these doctors’s professionalism, why the hell is he trying to force them to resign?!

But seriously, folks: How can these doctors resist this kind offer? A personal vouching from the governor? Why, that’s got to be worth something!

And it would be, if it wasn’t this governor, who has had to apologize, backtrack and otherwise wiggle out of almost everything he’s done since this crisis started, or at least two weeks months thereafter, which is when he decided to start throwing his gubernatorial weight around. Coming from this governor, a personal endorsement is roughly the equivalent of being called an ax murderer, and not in a good way. (UPDATE: Tip o’ the hat to my colleagues Anjeanette Damon and Jon Ralston, who each reported on Gibbons’s statement at the hearing last night that he actually found out about the crisis Jan. 2, which actually makes his pathetic delayed response inconceivably worse.)

Anyway, Gibbons says he’s worried that, because the three doctors have recused themselves because of business or personal ties to Desai, there could be a 3-3 tie when the matter comes before the nine-member medical board for a hearing. But once again, the governor seems unfamiliar with the board’s procedures and state law.

(That’s not to say he’s ignorant; we at Various Things & Stuff didn’t really know how things worked, either. So we did a little thing called research. Oh, yeah, we did it before we popped off about it, which is something the governor might consider one of these days.)

Anyway, it basically works like this: Two physician members of the board and one non-doctor comprise the “investigative committee,” which looks into medical malpractice and other matters with the help of in-house doctors and on-call specialists. Those members then make a recommendation to the full board, which deliberates.

But get this: The investigating committee members cannot later serve on the board when it takes up the matter they investigated. So that means there’s always the possibility of a 3-3 tie! Medical Board Deputy General Counsel Ed Kousineau, however, said he’s never seen that happen in his four-year tenure.

Not only that, but the law contains a provision for the governor to appoint “advisory” members to the board, too. All Gibbons has to do is select three non-conflicted advisory committee members, let them investigate, and let the remaining, non-conflicted board members decide the case.

You know, the way it’s supposed to work.

Only the most stalwart dare enter the Tomb of the Ancients.

Local preservation group Atomic Age Alliance has all the energy of a hell-spawned Yorkshire terrier, and it’s proven a useful trait in the group’s fight to save UNLV’s Maude Frazier Hall from the wrecking ball. One thing the group doesn’t have a lot of, though, is money — which is where you — meaning your money — can help.

The group is holding a fundraiser 6 p.m. March 27 at the Design Within Reach studio at 6539 Las Vegas Blvd., Suite C-110; phone number is 947-8100. There’ll be food, drink, a Modernism slide show, and jazz by the Thurston Howlies, named after the jowly rich guy on Gilligan’s Island who talked like he had an Italian loafer stuck in his throat.

It seems to us that U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton’s little Bosnia misspeaking is a bit more of a problem for her than she’s letting on. It wouldn’t be so bad, of course, had Clinton not rhapsodized so specifically about how “I remember” landing in Bosnia under sniper fire, running with her head down to her car and being ferried away to a nearby base.

Video, of course, shows that no such thing ever happened. Quite the contrary, it shows her mingling (along with her daughter, Chelsea) with local officials and even a little girl, all of whom braved the fictional sniper fire and all of whom had their heads high the entire time.

Two seconds of scrutiny is all you need to knock down this story: Would the United States Secret Service allow two key protectees to be exposed to such danger? They don’t discuss their methods of protection, but we’re reasonably sure letting your charges corkscrew into a dangerous landing zone and then running to waiting cars is not exactly in the manual under “good ideas.” But that’s just us.

Still, let’s give the former first lady the benefit of the doubt. She did, after all, visit 80 countries and she does, after all, utter “millions of words” every day. (God, don’t we know it.) So perhaps she was remembering another time, in another place were she had to land, skip an arrival ceremony and run to a waiting car? Certainly her campaign — with full access to her schedules and the principal herself — can produce records or even video of such a time?

Because the alternative is that she created an entirely fictional scenario for the sole purpose of boosting her foreign policy credentials at a critical time in the campaign, for the purpose of inducing voters to choose her over rival U.S. Sen. Barack Obama. There’s a phrase for that in politics: A big fat fucking lie.

We’ll be waiting for that video, Clinton campaign.

“And so the baton is passed. On the conservative side it passes from [the late writer William F.] Buckley to Ann Coulter. I do not know as much about the liberal side.” — R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., in an obituary for Buckley in the April issue of The American Spectator

Clearly, Tyrrell is gripped with so much overwhelming grief, he’s used the only device that still may raise Buckley from the dead to prevent his legacy from being trashed. Nice try, Emmett.

This is the first thing that comes up when you type ''joan casino'' into Google Image Search. We feel it is important that you know this.

For this week’s cover package on why there aren’t any good Vegas novels, we invited CL contribs and other writers to come up with premises for would-be Great Las Vegas Novels. Jarret Keene didn’t fucking listen. But it’s clear he has a future in alternative-lifestyle pulp writing. One of his many ideas, flung not unlike feces at a zoo:

Casino Queen: This is a GLBT-friendly time-travel adventure story about a drag revue headliner and Commercial Center bar owner named Cage, who seeks
to steal fashion tips from great women in history: Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, Greta Garbo. Fifteenth-century King Charles II has designs on our hero, however, and Cage soon finds himself dressed up as (the missing-in-action) Joan and leading a full-scale invasion of the Strip as standard bearer for the French army. The only thing in their way? A Liberace Museum employee who knows the truth about the new Maid of Orleans.

Of course, U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton will say anything to get elected! But that only makes it so much more fun when she gets caught telling whoppers. With cheese. Check out our colleague Hugh Jackson’s blog for the most hilarious campaign video in a long time.

This week in CityLife, Andrew Kiraly trades his editing desk for a gun turret long enough to pump some tracer rounds into Charles Bock’s ballyhooed novel, Beautiful Children, as part of a cover story on the pitfalls of writing Vegas fiction. Look for that fireball in the sky on Thursday morning when CityLife hits the stands. Meantime, if you need a long snort of Mr. Bock, that’s him wearing a True Value work shirt on the first episode of a new web-based book-chat show, Titlepage. Moderated by editor Daniel Menaker, this episode also features novelists Richard Price, Susan Choi and Colin Harrison.

Bock is by turns modest (”Hopefully there’s also some very hopeful, very human, best parts of ourselves in the book, and some jokes that don’t suck”), as determinedly unpretentious as his shirt (”I don’t even know if Vermeer is a painter … I think he is”), mildly cynical about his onetime home (”There’s a Guggenheim in Las Vegas, but it’s a status marker”) and somewhat less mildly cynical about his onetime hometown (Vegas is “where everyone knows everything about everything except a book”). It’s a pretty good performance overall.

As for the show itself, the production values are decent, the writers have ample time to talk and, hey, it’s about books.

We love this story from the Friday Las Vegas Sun, about how libertarians are worried that the government will get bigger in the wake of the hepatitis scare at the Endoscopy Clinic of Southern Nevada, or the mortgage foreclosure crisis.

Wayne Allen Root, whose full-time job seems to be the marketing and promotion of Wayne Allen Root, has this to say: “Yes, this scares the heck out of me because it’s not the solution.” And our friend Chuck Muth notes, “Every time a situation comes up, people say we need more government.”

Well, we’ve got a surprise for you, Chuck: This time, we’re not saying we need more government. Hell, just having the regular-sized government would be enough.

It was Republican Gov. Jim Gibbons, recall, who cut funds that would have paid for the Bureau of Licensure and Certification, funds that would have paid for inspectors to go out and make sure people such as Dr. Dipak Desai weren’t building 8,000-square-foot homes by (allegedly) reusing 50-cent syringes. And even if that money had been delivered in full, the bureau apparently couldn’t fill the positions it already had open.

If it had the money and the wherewithal to fill the jobs, might the problems at Desai’s Endoscopy Center of Southern Nevada been prevented? Perhaps. It was an inspection by the Southern Nevada Health District that finally uncovered the wrongdoing. And aren’t we glad that Big Brother was snooping into private-sector health care that day?

We don’t need more government. We just need the government we already pay for!

And please don’t give us the line that these problems are caused by government in the first place. Government did not make the doctors at the Endoscopy Center allegedly order nurses to re-use syringes and single-dose vials of medicine. Greed did. Government did not make the clinic staff allegedly fail to properly sanitize the equipment in the clinic. Greed did.  Government uncovered these alleged crimes. And we should all be glad that our big-government loving society paid for the medical cops who did the gumshoe work!

Some might argue that the poor doctors at the clinic were forced to cut corners, since the government-regulated insurance companies and Medicare pay so little for procedures. But don’t forget, this is our private-sector health care system we’re talking about.  It’s not “socialized medicine,” of the type that the Democrats want, which isn’t socialized medicine any more than the mandate to buy auto insurance in Nevada is “socialized auto insurance.”

The reason people clamor for more government when things go awry is that is inconceivable human beings would behave in such a depraved way. Who would grind up sick and dying cows and allow fellow humans to eat the meat therefrom? What kind of a doctor would knowingly expose patients to a deadly virus for want of using a cheap syringe? Who would engage in mendacious financial transactions that lead giant companies to bankruptcy, destroying the pensions of loyal workers to make a few more bucks? What kind of “public servant” would turn his back on his constituents to enrich himself? What giant, moneymaking corporation would take taxpayer money, knowing that poor students may not be able to attend college or working poor families may not be able to afford daycare as a result? What kind of a sick, twisted, sociopath would lie to an entire nation so this country could attack a sovereign nation under entirely false pretenses?

“There ought to be a law” is a natural reaction to that kind of inhumanity. But it’s also a short-signed one, since it seems no matter how many laws we pass, the evildoers keep finding ways to do their evil.

But that doesn’t mean we stop trying, especially if “down with Big Government” is the best our foes have to offer.