No, we didn’t forget to take a gander at the papers while we were away in paradise (aka the great city of Los Angeles). Here’s a few Quick Hits that arose therefrom:

» A lot of people make a big deal about approval ratings. They cite President George W. Bush’s low-30s approval ratings (or even better, Vice President Dick Cheney, who hovers at 9 percent!) to prove they’re right about a particular issue.

Gov. Jim Gibbons, who was pegged at 29 percent recently, falls into this trap in this week’s Political Notebook in the Review-Journal. He says that other governors had low approval ratings, too, and that it’s no big deal.

Our point is this: If Gibbons is a crappy governor (just stretch your mind and accept that premise for a second) it wouldn’t matter if he had 100 percent approval; he’d still be a crappy governor. Conversely, if he was a great governor, he could have Cheney-class rankings and still be a great governor, no? The public is notoriously fickle about these things, and "approval" is a useless measure in almost all political calculations.

U.S. Sen. Harry Reid should learn this lesson, too. After Reid said recently "this war is lost," Cheney jumped on him with both cloven hooves for being a defeatist. In his reply, Reid mentioned Cheney’s 9 percent approval rating, as if to suggest Cheney was wrong and Reid was right. But that’s plainly ridiculous. Only on Wikipedia do we decide truth by collective accord.

What Reid should have said was this: Dick Cheney has been wrong about nearly every aspect of this war, from making up false connections between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and al-Qaida to the idea that we’d be greeted as liberators to the existence of WMDs to the notion that the insurgency is in its "final throes." He’s a joke! Listening to him would be like taking sartorial advice from a homeless guy who lives under a bridge and wears a box! Next question!

The only place approval ratings come into play is in the spending of political capital. When you’re not well-thought-of, you don’t have much to spend. And that puts both Bush and our good governor into the political poorhouse.

Not to mention that none of the governors mentioned in the Political Notebook are, say, under investigation by the FBI for allegedly using their former congressional offices to help defense contractors get fat contracts in exchange for free travel. That one is owned exclusively by Gibbons.

Oh, and not for nothing, but could perhaps Gibbons has a low approval rating because he fibs so much? For example, in Friday’s Review-Journal, he said this: "I’m disinclined to support new fees, but I have said I will review any request for fee increases on a case-by-case basis."

Technically, that’s what we call bullshit. Here’s a couple passages from the Feb. 14 R-J: "I always said the public runs this state. They elected me because I oppose tax and fee increases. If the public wants to implement a tax on themselves, that is up to the voting public. A vote of the public will supersede a governor’s reluctance to raise taxes," Gibbons said.

But wait, there’s more: "Brent Boynton, Gibbons’ director of communications, said later the governor was not encouraging legislators to simply hand the issue to voters without examining other options for funding highway construction.

"During the interview, Gibbons reiterated his no-new taxes pledge and added he considers increasing fees the same as increasing taxes.

"As a result, he is reviewing his earlier decision to allow the state Health Division to implement four fee increases.

"’We will probably pull them out,’ he said."

Now, does that sound like Gibbons will "…review any request for fee increases on a case-by-case basis"? Or does it sound more like he’ll review the truth on a case-by-case basis, and toss out any inconvenient ones?

» We knew university chancellor Jim Rogers was inviting trouble when he called recently for a personal income tax in Nevada. Them’s fighting words in this libertarian state!

Sure enough, the Review-Journal editorial page weighed in, slamming the chancellor for saying (we admit, wrongly) that Nevadans don’t pay any taxes now. (We’re pretty sure he meant to say we pay fewer taxes than some of our fellow Americans in other states.) The editorial goes on to say cut wasteful government spending to find the money to put into higher education.

And to think that Editor Tom Mitchell was writing just across the page lamenting that nobody teaches Aesop’s Fables anymore! The idea that the needs of the nation’s second-fastest growing state can be met by simply cutting waste is sure as hell a fairy tale!

Rogers isn’t the first to be slammed for the income-tax idea. Back in 2002, while serving on the task force that examined state tax policy, Las Vegas Sun Editor Brian Greenspun floated the idea, too. He got slammed as if he’d suggested the Earth was flat and the center of the universe, by people who believe that the Earth is flat and the center of the universe.

While a state income tax has little realistic chance of passing, it would accomplish one significant thing: It would provide a further nexus between the people and their government, and reinforce our favorite notion of late: You can’t get things like roads and schools for free.

But we think that if we’re going to talk about a personal income tax, we should also talk about a corporate income tax, which would include businesses like Rogers’ TV stations and Mitchell’s newspaper (which, by the way, is owned by the same company that owns CityLife, and this very blog). Corporations want to be treated as people under the law, don’t they? Well, how about a nice personal income tax for businesses that really do pay nothing on their gross receipts?

It’s only fair.

» We told you state Senate Majority Leader Bill Raggio was smart. For whatever it’s worth, he’s come out for Rudy Giuliani for president. (He was joined by U.S. Rep. Jon Porter, who was also pretty prescient in backing U.S. Rep. John Boehner for House Majority — now Minority — Leader when the disgraced Tom DeLay was forced to step down.)

That sly Raggio knows Giuliani is the Republicans only real hope, what with U.S. Sen. John McCain married to the worst foreign policy mistake in American history, and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney having held all possible positions on the central moral questions of our time. Giuliani is the most formidable candidate the Republicans have!

This totally interferes with our plans to subtly engineer a Romney-Sam Brownback ticket for the GOP, which is religiously nutty enough to win a primary, but way, way to nutty to take the general. Damn Raggio’s keen intellect!

» And finally today, the nice people over at KNPR-FM 89.5 this morning took a break from what seems to be an every-other-month fundraising drive to invite us to talk about our recent piece on taxes. We faced off with our old friend Chuck Muth, that wily conservative activist who lives now in Carson City. You can hear the discussion here, if you’re so inclined, but if you do, you should really become a public radio member.