We keep telling you people that the smoke banners won’t stop until all smoking materials are fully extinguished in all places everywhere in the entire universe. And you keep calling us paranoid. But you know why we keep telling you they’re out to get us? Because they actually are!

In a Las Vegas Sun story this weekend about how poor people who just want to be left alone are widely ignoring their fellow citizens who demanded via ballot initiative they stop smoking for their own good while sitting inside food-serving establishments, the chief enforcer of the smoke ban let something slip.

That doesn’t mean the smoking ban talk will end with resolution of this problem.

The future, [Souther Nevada Health District attorney Stephen] Minagil said, is no smoking anywhere inside — including the big casinos.

And here the big casinos did all they could to get out of the smoke ban (while at the same time totally not minding that neighborhood bars — i.e. their competition — got royally screwed). See, big casinos? They’re coming for you next!

We keep saying it, and maybe now the big casinos will listen: There is only one way to deal with such people: You must constantly fight them, because they will never stop in their zealous mission to stamp out every cigarette, cigar and pipe in the world!

The Review-Journal’s Saturday story, quoting U.S. Sen. Harry Reid as saying that former Boyd Law School professor Jay Bybee would never have been appointed to the federal bench had the Senate known he was the author of a particularly vicious memo on torture, is somewhat unremarkable. Reid, after all, said much the same thing four years ago when the controversial memo was first revealed.

The upshot: Bybee is a dick, but since we didn’t know that before he was confirmed to a lifetime appointment as a judge of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, there’s nothing much we can do. If only we knew. (We’re paraphrasing, of course.)

Then again, maybe somebody did know: We located an old Review-Journal story about Bybee’s confirmation hearing containing this line: “Some senators want to explore what role Bybee has played in forming Bush administration policies in government secrecy, the handling of detainees and other aspects of the war on terrorism, according to Senate officials.” (Emphasis added.)

A Las Vegas Sun story published the same day agrees, quoting then minority Judiciary Committee member U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy thusly: “Leahy said he was interested in Bybee’s position on issues that trouble civil rights activists, including the Justice Department’s stance that terrorist suspects be tried in military tribunals; the department’s use of local police to make arrests for civil violations of immigration laws; the department not detaining al Qaida suspects under rules of the Geneva Convention; and ‘who knows how many other controversial policies.’” (Emphasis added.)

So perhaps Reid only thinks there was no concern about Bybee’s civil rights record, when in fact there was. There’s precedent: Reid voted for the war in Iraq based on the administration’s case at the time, a vote that a score of his fellow senators didn’t make, based on information they had at the time. But no matter; Reid is right to suggest — in 2004 and now — that more information would have changed things.

No such grace can extend to U.S. Sen. John Ensign, the man who nominated Bybee at the time (despite concerns from civil rights groups, gay and lesbian groups and people concerned about government secrecy). Even now, knowing about Bybee’s torture memos, Ensign said, “He’s one of the best judges we’ve ever had. So I stand by him. Period. … It’s a legal opinion. He was giving his best legal advice. That does not take away from his brilliant mind.” Suffice to say, praise from Ensign for brilliance is faint praise indeed, and to the superseding indictment of why Ensign is unfit to stand on the Senate floor we may now confidently add moral idiocy.

But in our research of Bybee’s background, we learned a few other interesting things. For example, did you know that in October 2001, when Bybee told the Senate that he’d be a good boy in the Bush’s administration’s Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel, he was almost certainly lying? How do we know his promise not to “trample civil rights in the pursuit of terrorism” was false? Or that his statement that the United States made a terrible mistake in interning Japanese Americans during World War II was just posturing on his part?

Well, we know he was lying because less than a year later, he was writing that it’s not really torture unless the “extreme acts” cause pain on par with death or organ failure. And death or organ failure is way worse than putting somebody in a camp, right. Ergo, Bybee was lying to the committee.

(Sure, you can object he was only talking about enemy combatants and not American citizens, and thus the protections of the U.S. Constitution don’t apply. But that falls flat when you realize he was trying to memo us right out of the Geneva Convention, which by law the president and all forces under his command are obligated to follow. So, objection overruled!)

We say all that to say this: Why in God’s name is this dishonorable, morally bankrupt affront to the law and all who practice it still featured on the UNLV Boyd School of Law website as a professor? We understand he doesn’t teach there anymore, but that’s the least of the reasons his visage should be forever excised from any place where civilized people go to study the rule of law, a rule that Bybee did his very best to undermine while working for the worst, most murderous administration in United States history.

Boyd, we’re waiting: Take the Bybee picture and bio down!