Here are some observations, wrapped in the delicious, flaky crust of truth and baked at 400 degrees for 30 minutes in our extra-special, super-secret spices, the very recipe for Quick Hits!

• Oh, just quit already! Clark County Recorder Frances Deane is not going quietly into that good night, and Metro Police aren’t quite ready to cast her in irons. So, naturally, she’s returning to work, where, we hear, she’s not exactly the favorite boss in all of Las Vegas.

Clark County Manager Thom Reilly, sensing disaster, says he told her she should step aside, and he says Deane agreed. (She denies it.) Given the relative credibility of the two, we’re inclined to think that Reilly is telling the truth, and Deane decided she didn’t want to step down, perhaps out of fear that leaving for more than 30 days would constitute “abandonment.”

But Deane’s abandonment is exactly what the recorder’s office needs right now. Deane cannot possibly be effective with criminal charges pending against her. (Hell, they took away her computer when they seized a bunch of other evidence. She can’t even sit at her desk and play Solitaire!) Plus, contrary to Deane’s assertion that almost all of her employees “adore” her, the truth is that her presence in the office will be even more disruptive than normal.

Deane, however, can hang on almost forever: She can be arrested, booked, charged at a preliminary hearing or indicted by a grand jury, and be on trial and there’s no legal way to get her out of office. (Obviously, nobody figured on having an alleged criminal serving in an elected position, much less one without a sense of shame or guilt.) Until she is actually convicted of a felony, or her term expires in January, she cannot be forced from office.

Wonderful little system, isn’t it?

• So now it comes out. Attorney George Chanos wasn’t the best and brightest candidate for attorney general when Gov. Kenny Guinn appointed him to the job. He was just a warm body to fill a Republican slot. Or so implies Pete Ernaut, a Guinn advisor who spoke to the Las Vegas Sun for today’s editions.

“It wasn’t like there was a bunch of A-list candidates beating down the door,” Ernaut told the newspaper. “How do you know when you appoint someone whether they’ll carry through with their promise” to run for the job?

Well, maybe if they had at least one A-list candidate, things would have gone better.

Ernaut was responding, in part, to the criticism from Sig Rogich, Republican uber-consultant who helped get Guinn elected. The two have since had a falling out, since Rogich is advising U.S. Rep. Jim Gibbons, who nobody likes.

“What is shows is there’s no real political acumen in the governor’s mansion these days, no political compass,” Rogich told the Sun. Ouch, baby. That’s just mean.

• The voice of the people is only rarely the voice of God, but one quote from a prospective (and later dismissed) juror in the G-sting case probably sums up the feelings of a lot of Las Vegans. “One some level, I think all politicians have corrupted themselves,” the would-be juror said, according to the Review-Journal.

Maybe not all, but the list is sure as hell getting long.

• We were going to rag on U.S. Sen. Harry Reid for being such a total wuss with respect to U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold’s attempt to censure President George W. Bush for using the U.S. Constitution as toilet paper, but our friend Hugh Jackson has already said it best on his blog.

Sen. Reid: America can do a lot better.

• And finally today, Review-Journal reporter Joan Whitley, who penned some downright mind-numbing stories for the lamentable Living section in her day, has joined the paper’s special projects team. And her project today was to commemorate pro-open records Sunshine Week with a story about the noble battles fought by us in the media to get access to government documents.

Alas, as her story unwinds, we learn about the noble battles of “the news staffs of the Review-Journal and KVBC-TV Channel 3.”

Um, doesn’t she know that there’s another newspaper in town (it’s called the Las Vegas Sun, we think) and at least three other television stations? And that they all have had open-records and open-meeting battles? And that one of those stations, KLAS Channel 8, is well-known as the best, most in-depth hard news station in the berg?

Oh, and for full disclosure purposes, we’ll do what Whitley didn’t: Report that we at Various Things & Stuff employ a Channel 8 investigative reporter — George Knapp, the city’s best — in our other job, editor of a little paper called CityLife. We’ll also report that the R-J and Channel 3 have (or perhaps had; we’re too busy to keep up on such things) a cooperative relationship when it comes to news, in which Channel 3 would read R-J headlines on its late newscasts, which is about the hardest Channel 3 news ever gets.