We know how it goes people. You’re all set to watch the third season of Dexter, and it’s just getting to the good part, when the Netflix DVD craps out because the last person who rented it used it as a Frisbee/coaster/screwdriver, and now it won’t play! So, you dutifully report the problem to Nextflix, but you can’t watch Disc 2 before you see what’s on the end of Disc 1, so now what the hell are you going to do for weekend entertainment?! We feel your pain. And that’s why we’re writing with a solution: Nevada Week in Review with Mitch Fox! (And you thought we were going to say, “read a book,” huh?)

Now, there are no serial killers, no blood and nobody nearly as hot as Jennifer Carpenter on Nevada Week in Review, but this week’s episode does contain some exiting topics, including U.S. Sen. Harry Reid’s efforts to get a public option into the health care bill pending on Capitol Hill, plummeting sales tax revenues and the possibility of a special session, a major airline cutting back on flights to and from Las Vegas, and Senate candidate Sue Lowden’s unfortunate utterances on a right-wing radio show that are coming back to haunt her.

Join yours truly, freelancer Steve Friess, Review-Journal political reporter Ben Spillman and Las Vegas Sun reporter Rick Velotta for all the news. The show airs tonight at 7:30 p.m., and repeats at 7;30 p.m. Saturday and noon Sunday on VegasPBS Channel 10.

Lately it seems that Apple’s hype machine is focused on one product that has yet to formally exist: the Apple Tablet. Seen by many as the savior of the publishing industry, the Apple Tablet has been the center of rumors about everything ranging from Apple courting the Australian news industry to the company pairing up with digital comics distributor LongBox in order to bring the funny pages to a computer screen.

So what happens when Apple doesn’t seem to interested in the online publishing market?

As content creators gear up for a major battle in monetizing the web  — News Corp. honcho Rupert Murdoch indicated his company would be charging for all content by next year — it’s hard to see exactly how Apple’s tablet would revolutionize the industry beyond offering a color screen and persistent Internet connection wherever you are. With thousands of sources for news, it’s a wonder whether the iTunes store will save newspapers as people continue to expect things for free on the Internet.

This week, Google and its trepidatiously imagined (here, by me) legions of unsleeping nanobot code-makers roll out a new feature — one specifically designed for all the music-related queries the world’s most comprehensive search engine says now account for a full 20 percent of its most popular requests.

In partnership with MySpace, imeem, Lala, Pandora, Rhapsody, EMI, Sony Music, Universal Music Group and Warner Brothers Records, Google’s new music-finding algorithm looks to be so integrated within the site’s current structure that it doesn’t really need a name. “Google Music Search Feature” is all you’ll find, but it’s automatic, not something on a separate page.

Here’s the official tutorial:

The coolest part is that, for many searches, all you have to do is enter a lyrical snippet — maybe the only phrase you could catch over the PA in a chaotic dive bar — to be instantly taken to a page where your mystery song is identified and even given a little “play” arrow designation. Click and hear. Click and buy if you want.

Of course, this seems to work especially well for music distributed by EMI, Sony, UMG and WB as well as on anything with enough of a YouTube presence to reach the top of the results page.  And, in general, as it’s always been with search engines, the more prominently featured a particular lyric in a song, the better your chances for quick answers.

For example, a title search for “Safety Dance,” the 1982 club smash from one-hit wonders Men Without Hats, yields four separate play button links at the top of the list: one for the Dailymotion.com video of a sweaty, urgent live performance, and three separate YouTube links — one for the original music video, and two clips of Scrubs character Turk pointlessly possessed to recite lines from that song  in the tragically unfunny fashion favored by a TV show that could have been something, but instead opted for random infusions of high-visibility, pop culture recognition “humor” à la Family Guy and ended up sucking accordingly. Still, Turk’s throwaway 15-second 2006 rendition has garnered more than half the YouTube hits of the 1982 original.

Ah, but there’s the rub. Simple recognition is everything when it comes to any search engine whose results always ultimately depend on what the internet community collectively remembers best. A Google search for “we can dance if we want to” (the first line of “Safety Dance,” repeated throughout the song) yields similar results as the title itself. But a search for “I can act like an imbecile” (occuring only once in the song, despite its awesome meter-forced pronunciation) yields no magic play button links at all — just a zoo of dry references, largely to blog and forum postings from other confused searchers. You’ll find your answers here, sure, but it’ll take a little more digging around, which is exactly what Google is trying to rescue us from with this new algorithm.

Bottom line: Despite the new feature’s limitations, it’s easier than ever to find the music in your head on the internet. Now if they’d just find a way to salvage the wounded feelings of master researchers who’ve, until now, taken such pride in their ability to uncover the esoteric music information they need faster than everyone else.  Google, you’re doing that whole “bring everyone closer together” thing again, and it’s total bullshit.

U.S. Sen. John Ensign has been shunned by former staffers, including a top campaign aide who’s been with him for a long time, according to a story posted today on Politico. The story, by writers John Bresnahan and Manu Raju, quotes former campaign adviser Mike Slanker saying “Bottom line, we left as quickly as we logistically and professionally could, but there were bills [and] invoices that had to be cleared up.”

Well, sure, the guy’s a slimy, hypocritical, lying adulterer, but his money still spends. No need to rush out, you know.

It’s understandable why Slanker — who has helped Ensign for years, including during the senator’s disastrous, eight-seat-losing stint as head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee in 2007 and 2008 — would want to leave. After Ensign had an affair with Cynthia Hampton, a campaign aide, he asked Slanker to find work for her husband, Doug Hampton, who worked for Ensign in his official Senate office. Funny thing: Ensign initially lied to Slanker about why he was moving Hampton out of his office. Only later, after Hampton told Slanker about the affair, did the pair jointly confront Ensign, who finally confessed.

It’s one thing to lie — or at least creatively interpret the truth — on behalf of a candidate. It’s quite another to be lied to by that candidate. Slanker was later quoted saying the situation “makes me sick to my stomach.” And that’s saying something, coming from the guy who once called a woman who grew up in the city of Henderson a carpetbagger when she campaigned for a congressional seat in the city of Henderson.

Other staffers, including Ensign’s chief of staff and director of communications, have fled his office, too, the Politico story says, perhaps to escape the political taint that comes from having worked for a guy who would sleep with the wife of his good friend (and employee) and then lie to everybody in the world about it. Even on Capitol Hill, it seems, that kind of douchebaggery is beyond the pale.

But, what does that say for the people who are still working in his office?

So apparently there’s a controversy brewing over whether somebody tried to kill U.S. Sen. Harry Reid with a car bomb, back in the days when after Reid served as chairman of the state Gaming Control Board Commission. Of course, the incident in question was well-documented at the time: A wire was found connecting the engine of Reid’s car with the gas tank. Had a spark traveled the length of that wire, the car would have blown up. Metro Police investigated the incident at the time, and it was in all the papers.

But apparently, that’s news to some Republicans, including right-wing talk show host Heidi Harris and the woman now running to unseat Reid, ex-Nevada Republican Party Chairwoman Sue Lowden. They were joking around on Harris’s show the other day, when Harris exclaimed that — despite living here her whole life and talking to sources — she’d never heard of the Reid car bomb attempt, thus raising the scintilating possibility that it never happened. Lowden agreed with Harris as they ticked off car bombings that they had heard about, including journalist Ned Day and Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal.

Now, it shouldn’t need to be said, but we will anyway: We don’t establish truth based upon whether certain people have heard about something. We establish truth through research, empirical evidence and the scientific method. Using those techniques, it’s easy to determine that, in fact, there was an attempt to kill Reid in 1981. (The Reid campaign was kind enough to put out a web video ad attacking Lowden for how she handled the subject. And here’s an old Review-Journal clip helpfully posted by the newspaper documenting the incident, too.)

But we had to laugh out loud when we read Harris’s defense for her inexcusable ignorance in the R-J today: “All I’m doing is raising questions. I’m not an investigative reporter. I don’t have time to spend hours of my life digging up old police reports,” she told the paper.

Yeah, that’s it. She’s just raising questions. She didn’t say the incident never happened. All she’s doing is raising questions about whether it happened. Just like us: We’re not saying that Harris is mentally retarded. We’re just asking if it’s possible that she may be mentally retarded. We’re not psychiatrists or medical doctors. We don’t have time to spend hours of our lives giving extensive developmental disability aptitude tests.

Too harsh? Not really. See, back in 2006, Harris was the co-host of a little show that once aired on KTNV Channel 13 called Political Insiders. Occasionally, Harris would flub a fact here or there, and, when confronted about it, she gave the exact same reply then that she gave the R-J on Tuesday: I’m not a trained journalist; I don’t know about the standards and practices of journalism. And while that’s manifestly true, one doesn’t have to be a trained journalist to know the difference between the truth and a lie, or to at least care about the difference.

But what’s Lowden’s excuse? She actually is a trained journalist, having worked at KLAS Channel 8 as a reporter and anchor. It may very well be possible that she worked in news back in those days and never heard about the attempted Reid car bombing, but it’s questionable. Why? Well, we didn’t move to town until 1993, and we know about it. So, again, what’s Lowden’s excuse?

Now, it may be too much to expect that somebody entrusted with time on the public airwaves would care enough about truth and facts to actually do research before going on air and bringing the logorrhea. (We don’t think so, but hey, this is talk radio, not NPR, right?) And it most certainly is too much to expect that a candidate for Senate would give her opponent even the slightest advantage, say a story that makes him look like a tough, mob-fighting gaming regulator. But facts are facts, and now, thanks to a couple folks who didn’t seem to care about them, everybody knows that Harry Reid was once targeted for murder, and survived. And that’s a fact.

UPDATE: The Las Vegas Sun’s Lisa Mascaro was kind enough to provide links to the police report and the bomb squad log entry on the Reid incident.

There’s a moment in This Is It where the self-proclaimed King of Pop stops a rehearsal number because his ear monitors are too loud. To prove his point, he makes a fist and brings it toward his ear, his hand shaking. His show director, Kenny Ortega, asks if anything can be done. Jackson glumly says, aside from the volume, no, but he’ll adjust. It’s the first and only time Ortega, also the film director, allows Jackson to be seen as vulnerable.

It’s also a rare moment of drama for the de facto concert film. No doubt viewers will be expecting some acknowledgment of the tragedy that was Jackson’s death on June 25 at age 50. But This Is It doesn’t go there, not once. Ortega used over 100 hours of taped rehearsals to simulate what Jackson’s comeback concerts in London (which shared a name with this film) might’ve looked like, interspersed with behind-the-scenes footage of auditions, film tapings and show participant chatter. It’s revealing from a show production standpoint, with Jackson being the focus about 95 percent of the time. What the picture forgoes is any sense of narrative outside the show’s setlist, or emotional dynamic from Jackson beyond the performances themselves. And so, like the rehearsal footage itself, This Is It is just a tease of what could have been.

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Last week, the National Women’s Law Center released a report on the practice of gender rating among health insurance companies. Turns out Montana is the only state in the nation that prohibits companies from charging young women more for health coverage — standard practice among major insurers.

Women already pay more for hair cuts and dry cleaning. Why not insurance? Company chiefs argue that they should be allowed to charge women more because they are the only gender vulnerable to the medical condition known as pregnancy.

That’s cold comfort for women who want to purchase an individual policy. Only 13 percent of those even offer maternity coverage, and the ones that don’t still charge women more, at least until they turn 55.

Gender is a bigger contributor to health insurance costs than smoking, according to the center’s research. A non-smoking woman under age 40 in Nevada can expect to pay between 4 and 40 percent more for her insurance than a man the same age who smokes.

Health insurance companies already offer wellness discounts that encourage customers to eat right, stop smoking and exercise. If pregnancy is such a terrifying financial prospect, then they should do the same for birth control. Or else they’re going to have some problems. Evidently, insurance executives have the right to act like sexist troglodytes. But they can’t do anything about the 19th Amendment, and women’s ability to push for health reform that’s fair to everyone.

A few months ago, the inestimable U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders appeared on the equally inestimable Rachel Maddow Show, fronting a very simple premise: Conservative or moderate Democrats who didn’t believe in a public option in the health-care debate should still vote for cloture, so as to allow the measure to have an up-or-down vote on the floor with a simple majority needed for passage. (The bill itself will only need 51 votes to pass; but ending debate, dubbed “cloture,” requires 60 votes.)

We agreed with Sanders: A vote to end debate is not a vote to approve the bill itself, and cloture-voting Democrats could stipulate that their vote is meant only to end debate and have a debate on the issue in the main. Regular people could easily understand that.

But it proved too much for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who sees cloture as his only method to ending the dawning possibility that sick and poor people in America may suddenly be eligible to get health insurance. During an appearance before reporters today, he said that cloture equals a vote for health care. “At some point the majority leader [Nevada's own Harry Reid] will try to move to proceed to the bill, and I think it’s appropriate to make the point at the outset that a vote on cloture on the motion to proceed to this bill will be treated as a vote on the merits of the bill,” he said.

Of course, that’s not true: A vote for cloture is a vote to end debate, that’s it. A person could be completely intellectually honest by voting to end debate on the health care measure, but then voting against the bill on its merits on the floor, since those are two entirely separate things, as any fool can attest. (Besides McConnell, that is.)

But his remark did give Reid spokesman Rodell Mollineau a chance to expose McConnell’s flawed logic while at the same time deliciously taking apart recent Republican cloture maneuvers. To wit:

“We are glad that Senator McConnell has made clear his position on cloture votes.  By his logic, Senate Republicans’ vote last week against proceeding to the defense bill means they don’t support our troops in a time of war.  By his logic, if Senate Republicans vote later today against proceeding to the unemployment insurance bill, it means they could care less about the thousands of Americans who are losing the relief they need every day.  Thank you, Senator McConnell.  Democrats couldn’t have put it any better.”

Bam! We like this Mollineau fellow. We’ll be watching him. He’s got a future in politics, we think.

We’ve been tough on U.S. Sen. Harry Reid on this blog, mostly because we assume that when one is the leader of the Democrats, and when the American people overwhelmingly put the Democrats in charge of the executive and the legislative branches of government, they want Democratic things to happen.

And Monday, they did. Reid, after apparently searching all weekend — fruitlessly — to find a 60-vote consensus on the public option, decided to do it anyway. This is called leadership, even if Reid is backed by a majority in polls who say they want the final health-care bill to include a public plan.

Sure, Reid’s compromise will have an opt-out for states. And sure, some states will opt out, denying their residents the option to get into a lower-cost government insurance program, leaving them at the mercy of an insurance industry that will soon wield a mandate that every American sign up for care.

But Reid has been saying for months that a public option would be part of the final package. It would have been easy to go back on that promise — certainly, President Barack Obama did, saying on the campaign trail it would be part of the plan, but later saying it was entirely optional. That backtracking is why many liberals and progressives are growing more disenchanted with the man they hoped would change the tone of Washington politics.

Reid took a risk with his announcement, the risk of being painted as too liberal for Nevada by his conservative critics. But for those progressives disappointed in the pace of the health-care reform debate, Reid restored a little faith, in him and in the process to work for the people for a change. (Reid’s push to end insurance industry anti-trust exemptions is another cause for celebration.)

It’s still a long way until the bill reaches Obama’s desk. There are many hurdles to overcome, including a Republican filibuster assisted by the loathsome Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. The House must pass its own version, and the two versions must be reconciled. It may very well be the final version looks significantly different than the version Reid talked about on Monday, and got criticized for today. But for the present moment, everybody — especially progressives and liberals — should be grateful to Harry Reid for doing the right thing.

We were all excited recently when we saw casino mogul Steve Wynn tell the Review-Journal that he wasn’t going to stop speaking out against the Barack Obama administration and its handling of the economy, the recession and various stimulus plans. After he showed up on Fox News Channel and in the R-J with critiques of the president and his policies, we frankly had a few questions.

So, we sent off a request to interview Wynn, noting that he’d said this in that R-J story: “I feel very strongly about this, and it needs to be discussed. I plan on speaking up every chance I get. Every businessperson ought to speak up or things are going to get much worse.” (emphasis added)

After a few e-mails and phone calls, however, we’re sad to report that Wynn very nicely and professionally declined. “After review, he has decided to respectfully decline participation in this opportunity,” a spokeswoman wrote to us.

We’re disappointed. It would have been a fun and engaging conversation, we think.

Anyway, we see that our colleague J. Patrick Coolican was able to get an interview, and he asked some of the same questions that were on our mind. So, if you missed it, enjoy.

In the meantime, we’ve asked Wynn’s people to consider our e-mails a standing request to get some face time with Wynn. We’ll let you know what happens.

Back when U.S. Sen. Harry Reid allowed Democratic traitor Joe Lieberman to not only remain in the Democratic caucus, but to keep the chairmanship of the Homeland Security Committee, we told some of our associates that Reid would regret not taking the slippery bastard out. Sure enough, that day has come.

Just one day after Reid announced that he’d put forth a health care bill that includes a public option (with an “opt-out” for states that didn’t want to participate), Lieberman announced he’d join Republicans and block the bill, according to Politico.

Lieberman joining the Republicans is not really news — he did it back when they all voted for a needless war in Iraq. He did it when they nominated John McCain and the least qualified vice president in living memory in 2008. And now, he’ll do it on health care.

After the election — when it was time for Lieberman to face the music for breaking a promise not to attack Barack Obama on the campaign trail, which of course Lieberman broke because he’s a lying sack — some Democrats wanted blood. They wanted Lieberman kicked out of the Democratic caucus, or at the very least stripped of his chairmanship of the Homeland Security Committee. But Reid balked, with his people spinning the tale that Reid would need Lieberman in the caucus in the quest for a 60-vote, cloture-ending supermajority.

Well, what’s happened to that supermajority now? It’s gone: Lieberman has defected to the Republicans. Again. That means Reid now needs a Republican vote for his plan, and that’s going to be hard to find.

We knew if Lieberman were allowed to continue in the caucus, he’d stab the Democrats in the back again. If this latest incident isn’t enough to convince Reid to take away Lieberman’s chairmanship and send him packing — to a party with which he’s obviously more comfortable — we don’t know what is. But the message is clear: When you need Joe Lieberman, he’s snuggling with the GOP across the aisle.

UPDATE: Rachel Maddow is a prophet!

UPDATE 2: Politico confirms that Lieberman will vote to end debate, just not for a final bill with a public option component. That means he’s still a dick, but not as big of a dick as he could be. He’s a semi-dick. Quasi-dick. Dick-light. You get the idea.

“The stage is but a platform shoe,” said Bono in 1992 when justifying U2’s Times-Square-on-wheels roadshow, Zoo TV. And the diminutive singer would know. Still, the master of rock ‘n’ roll one-liners would be hard-pressed to find the proper footwear analogy to properly describe the set-up for his band’s current 360 Tour, which drew some 40,000 people Oct. 23 at Sam Boyd Stadium. He’s called the four-legged, skyscraping structure The Claw and, now, The Space Station. Either way, it’s ridiculous — and it somehow brings the Irish quartet closer to the nosebleeding fan 10,000 bodies away. It does so by extending out into the stadium 360 degrees. The legs o’ lights literally meet the side bleachers, and the ramp circling the stage — the two connected by moving bridges — goes from endzone to damn near the 50-yard line. Throw in a stretching, 500,000-pixel video cylinder hovering above the band and no one was missing anything.

Bono in particular needed the lights, ramp and screen to lure those fans in because he wasn’t doing such a hot job of it himself. Though flanked by three of the best musicians in pop music — The Edge’s post-punk/clarion-blues sound has been influential of late with guitarists half his age; bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen remain inextricable and unflappable — Bono occasionally appeared lackadaisical, tired and even lazy. Sometimes he’d merely stroll the ramp while appearing to sing to no one in particular. Sometimes he’d clip a phrase, flatten a note or just talk out a lyric. And sometimes he just seemed winded. Interestingly, when drawing Vegas performer parallels to each member of U2, he called himself out as Wayne Newton, a performer criticized in recent years for his own live vocal shortcomings.

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I knew there was something I liked about East Fremont Street’s new, broader sidewalks, improved lighting, talking robo-crosswalks and eyeball-searing Fremont East District sign: This common-sense street revamp just happens to be a piece of forward-thinking urban design. The shocking idea of creating urbscapes where cars, bikes and people can all move around easily looks like its starting to catch on in bigger burgs, most recently St. Louis. There, the city recently mocked up a walk-friendly street on its popular South Grand thoroughfare, and the results have been encouraging.

Before:

South Grand, the test site, is a busy street lined with restaurants and shops. But traffic, signage, and aging infrastructure are a problem. Drivers routinely speed, and the street saw 80 accidents and one pedestrian death in the first eight months of 2009. Alderman Jennifer Florida, whose ward includes the west side of the street, points out that one major intersection has no cues at all for pedestrians to cross.

After:

The new design reduces four traffic lanes to three, changes the timing of traffic lights, adds curb “bulb-outs” to reduce the amount of yardage pedestrians need to cross from 56 to 40 feet, and increases lighting and landscaping. About $2.7 million in federal stimulus funds have been awarded for the work.

Next Las Vegas candidate? I nominate the University District. But, uh, not quite this much.

The popular vote is a fine way to elect a president, but it’s no way to confirm a scientific theory. Take today’s Review-Journal. It had one Associated Press story about the decrease in the percentage of Americans who believe the world is getting warmer. Only 57 percent of those polled said they believe that humans are causing temperatures to rise, down from 71 percent a year ago. The article makes clear that any uncertainty among citizens about global warming is not shared by the scientific establishment.

The poll was released a day after 18 scientific organizations wrote Congress to reaffirm the consensus behind global warming. A federal government report Thursday found that warming is upsetting the Arctic’s thermostat.

Then there’s this article in the local section of today’s paper. The one about how this past September was the hottest on record. The author refers to the “deep divide over the issue of climate change,” which is, one assumes, a reference to the AP story. Unfortunately, the story uses that divide as its premise, which is pretty disingenuous, since the AP story makes it clear that the uncertainty is confined to the general population. And 20 percent of them also believe the sun revolves around the earth.

Is that enough to constitute a “deep divide?” Probably not, but it’s definitely enough to convince me that I shouldn’t abandon my trust of peer-reviewed scientific research every time the Pew Center comes out with a new poll.