But Kenny’s case gets more and more intriguing, with the dispatches from the Review-Journal’s Adrienne Packer. Today’s story — detailing how Kenny, her accountant and the people paying her bribes set up an account in the beautiful Cook Islands — is especially interesting.

Our favorite part: After the FBI raided Cheetah’s, the strip club owned by bribe-offerer Mike Galardi, Kenny met with her attorney, Frank Cremen. (Man, how we wish we could have pierced attorney-client privilege to listen in to that conversation!) Afterwards, she turned to her accountant and asked, "Are you going to turn on me?" Ironically enough, Kenny would later do that very thing after having been confronted by the FBI with the overwhelming evidence against her.

Here’s the thing: After all the testimony, all the bribes, all the corruption, all the wiretaps, all the jail sentences handed down, it’s become clear that Kenny is the worst offender of them all. Brazen, shameless and perfectly willing to sell her own soul (or at least her body, as previous testimony about Kenny’s relationship with Galardi indicates) for money. Yet, there’s little doubt in our minds that Kenny will do the least amount of time of all.

The government will say it’s because Kenny cooperated so well that she’s only going to jail for a short time. They’ll say her relatively light sentence will encourage other white-collar defendants to roll early in an investigation in order to get a good deal from prosecutors. And they’re right about all of that.

But it saddens us that Kenny — arguably the most corrupt official Southern Nevada has seen, at least in the modern era — is going to walk away without ever really paying for her crimes, while lesser officials who did much less than she will spend more time behind bars.

» We suppose it all depends on what the meaning of "public" is?

The Las Vegas Monorail, as regular readers know, is looking for money to expand its current line to McCarran International Airport, to get more tourists riding the train. It’s looking at private sources of money to pay for the expansion, but since monorail bonds are in "junk" status, that’s going to be a tough sell.

So what about tax-exempt bonds, the kind that built the original train line? They’re issued by the state, although taxpayers are not underwriting them, nor would they be on the hook if the monorail went into default. The monorail considers that "private" financing, although we disagree. If a government is involved, the bonds aren’t private, we reason. (And it’s worth noting that the monorail could not have been built without relying on the state-issued bonds.)

Thus far, the monorail’s policy has been to eschew going back to the public teat for money for the McCarran expansion. Monorail CEO Curtis Myles said in the Feb. 3, 2006, Las Vegas Sun that he wanted to avoid using government bonds or public debt to build the monorail. (Bear in mind, however, that to Myles, tax-exempt, state-issued bonds are private.) Monorail spokeswoman Ingrid Reisman said in the Review-Journal Feb. 11, 2006, that "We have no plans to go to the public sector," if the monorail had trouble selling bonds. On Feb. 21, again in the R-J, Myles declared flatly "It will be privately financed." And on this very blog, back in December 2006, Reisman told us the monorail wouldn’t be seeking to use the state-issued, tax-exempt bonds that built the train the first time around.

That’s why we were surprised on Wednesday to see a story in the R-J in which Reisman allegedly said the airport expansion line would be paid for with those tax-exempt bonds. Curious, we called Reisman for an explanation.

First, the monorail isn’t seeking tax-exempt bonds for the expansion line, she said. (The line in the story was an error, and we’ll be scanning the R-J for that correction.) But, she added, that doesn’t mean the monorail won’t seek tax-exempt bonds for the line in the future.

"It’s not that we’ll never seek tax-exempt bonds," she said. But that’s just one of the options the monorail is examining.

For our part, we’re against tax-exempt bonds for the monorail. If it wants to call itself a truly private system, it should do what private businesses do when they need money: Get a bank loan, or issue taxable bonds to raise the money. If it can’t get money that way, the much-lauded free market is sending a message.

» U.S. Sen. John Ensign apparently didn’t heed the calls of local union members and vote to approve a bill that would have made it easier for unions to sign up workers. Ensign said he prefers the status quo, a secret-ballot election supervised by federal officials. "Secret ballots protect workers from intimidation, and this [bill] was political payback to big labor despite the fact that union members overwhelmingly support secret ballots," Ensign said. (The bill failed, 51-48.)

Right. Because we know that management never, ever attempts to intimidate workers when it comes to a secret-ballot election. You couldn’t picture, say, megalomaniac casino developer Steve Wynn getting all nice and apologizing for being such a dick in order to keep people from voting for a union, could you? (Actually, you don’t have to picture it: It actually happened!)

But Ensign didn’t just vote no and make lame press statements about this bill. Under his command, the National Republican Senatorial Committee actually produced a video and appealed to big business to raise money for Republican senators and Senate hopefuls, using the bill as an issue.

So, working men and women, remember: Not only does John Ensign not care about you, he also wants to raise money on your backs from the very people who seek to avoid the accountability and equity that comes when unions bargain collectively. Tuck that away, for 2012, when Ensign will up for his own secret-ballot test.