Feeling low? Need an afternoon pick-me-up? How about a delicious Quick Hit, with ranch dressing? Here you go!

• Please, please, please, pick Fox News’ Tony Snow to be White House press secretary! Please! He’d be the perfect replacement for Scott McClellan, who Vanity Fair profiled this month as a bumbling, inarticulate, overmatched dweeb. Please pick Tony Snow!

• Mayor Oscar Goodman has ruled out a bid for U.S. Senate, very likely signaling he’ll never seek higher office, ever. We at Various Things and Stuff were not surprised; we predicted long ago he’d never run for anything but a third and final term as mayor before returning to the practice of law. Foolish, those who doubted us!

We were surprised, however, that Goodman told the Review-Journal he wasn’t going to run when there are still several weeks of publicity to be squeezed out before filing closes. We were prepared to wait until the last hour of the last day before Goodman confirmed our prediction.

A new mayor? Say it isn’t so!

“I was told I could make a difference in America, and I wanted to believe it,” Goodman said of solicitations from U.S. Sens. Harry Reid and Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.

Oh, that’s the mayor we know and love.

• Please! Tony Snow! All the way! We’re serious.

• What could possibly make the city’s plan to spend millions upgrading a public park, only to turn it over to a private manager to run, even worse? Going into debt to do it!

That’s right: The city plans to issue bonds, in part to pay for the Big League Dreams partial privatization of Freedom Park. (Oh, irony. How you taunt us!) The taxpayers will pay interest on $25 million in bonds for the city’s latest demonstration of poor management.

• We are not even kidding. We want Tony Snow! He’d be the perfect fit for the Bush administration! Hell, he could do the job from the Fox studios, even! (Not like he hasn’t been doing that since Bush got elected…)

• The Las Vegas Sun reports the private law firm investigating the other giant Las Vegas public lands giveaway — this to golf course mogul Bill Walters at Royal Links — is still ongoing, with no end in sight. In fact, Walters complains he’s not been contacted by anybody, even after the city surrendered 18,400 pages of documents.

Sounds like somebody’s getting nervous. Oh, by the way: There was no disclosure in the story that a.) the Sun-owning Greenspun family is business partners with Walters, and b.) the Sun paid for a study that claimed the deal was good for taxpayers, a study that was delivered to the council with the goal of influencing members in favor of Walters.

But if we had a dollar for every time the Sun skipped a simple but ethically required disclosure, we’d have enough money to buy the new Red Rock Casino.

• T-O-N-Y! T-O-N-Y! He can do it, yes he can, if he can’t do it, another criminally underinformed lackey willing to lie to cover up the missteps of an inept administration will probably get in there.

No, it doesn’t rhyme. But the truth sometimes is incongruous. Sorry.

Sorry about the late blog, readers. Man, what a day we had Wednesday. First, we jetted off on our private plane (CityLife maintains a Gulfstream G-550 for our use at all times) to Paris for a lovely dinner and some delicious Bordeaux with Janeane Garofalo. (Yeah, we date sometimes.) On the trip over, we talked about her recent star turn on The West Wing and her radio career on “Air America,” in addition to joining the Mile High Club.

Once in Paris, we had a delightful dinner. (Those French people can sure cook!) After avoiding a couple of rioting strikers, we dashed back to the airport where, much to my surprise, we encountered Uma Thurman, Janeane’s co-star in The Truth About Cats and Dogs. Wouldn’t you know it, Uma needed a ride back to America, and there weren’t any seats available. No problem, we said, ride back with us. (The Gulfstream in our configuration seats eight.) She accepted the offer, which of course led to a second Mile High Club joining, as you might imagine.)

Once we touched down in Las Vegas, the three of us headed over to the Mandalay Bay, where we gambled until dawn. We won $3.2 million playing blackjack. (Did we ever tell you we were great blackjack players?) After that, we all went to the spa at Mandalay Bay, where we finally bade the ladies farewell until our next bacchanalian trip, which we said would be to Fiji for a long weekend.

Now, readers, if you believe even a word of that story, you are in a perfect frame of mind to listen to former Clark County Commissioner Dario Herrera’s testimony in the G-string trial. It is only slightly more exaggerated than our tale of excess above.

First, Herrera flat-out said he’d never taken a payment from either Cheetah’s boss Mike Galardi or Galardi’s alleged bagman, Lance Malone. (This is before he admits to taking “a loan” of about $2,500 from Malone in order to buy new furniture for an apartment Herrera had to rent after his wife, Emily, threw him out for whoring around.)

But that, gentle readers, was back in the days when Herrera’s “selfishness, arrogance and disrespect” to his wife ruled his life. Now, we’re supposed to believe, he’s a new man.

And sure, you can understand how that can happen. After all, Herrera did vote against the interests of some big companies that gave him money. “Sometimes, people confuse that with arrogance, sometimes people confuse that with cockiness. But I prided myself on being fiercely independent,” Dario said, according to Adrienne Packer’s story in today’s Review-Journal.

Actually, we at Various Things & Stuff were pretty convinced that Herrera’s ethical problems — for example, soliciting an ambulance franchise for business while sitting on the very commission that was to decide if another franchise should be able to come to town — was proof of his arrogance and cockiness. But that’s just us. We fly to France and eat dinner with Janeane Garofalo, after all.

Herrera claims he returned from a weekend sojourn with his mistress, he and his wife fought (we bet; it’s about the only thing he said on the stand that sounds true) and he went out gambling, where he won $4,200 on the blackjack tables at the Treasure Island. With that money, he bought his mistress a $4,000 diamond necklace. No, that wasn’t Galardi bribe money. It was gambling winnings!

Herrera further claims that, despite a broken ankle that forced him to call in to the commission chambers for a key vote on Jaguar’s (another Galardi club), he somehow managed to drive down to Cheetah’s that very day. To get his bribe money? No, silly! To meet with Galardi about issues!

“I pride myself on being accessible. I was very aggressive about meeting the folks who wanted to meet with me,” he said. And that’s especially true if they were hot chick strippers or if they had wads of cash. Sorry, did we write that out loud?

There are other whoppers in his testimony, too. For example, he told jurors he disliked raising money but that it was a “necessary evil.” That’s a flat-out lie, readers: Herrera once personally told us that he liked raising money. The quote stands out in our mind because Herrera was the only politician — ever — to tell us that. Most of them hate raising money. Then again, most of them are honest, too.

After “tearfully” confessing to having sex with plenty of strippers while married, Herrera said it was a “very ugly time” in his life. (But the strippers weren’t ugly, were they? We’re told Cheetah’s has some good ones.) Herrera added that the matter was a private one between him and his wife. “I think, in all honesty, it had no place in this courtroom,” he said.

Well, gee, Herrera doesn’t really get to decide that, does he? We’re sure that, if it’s ever proven he did take money, that Herrera would consider that a private matter between himself and his accountant, right?

In contrast to his drinking, whoring, allegedly bribe-taking younger self, the new Dario Herrera is a churchgoing straight arrow. “I wanted to be a good husband. I wanted to be a good father. And that’s why I came home,” he said of the 2002 reconciliation with his wife.

Wait a second! Isn’t 2002 the very year he ran for Congress against now-U.S. Rep. Jon Porter, and lost? Well, imagine that: An alternative explanation for why he’d “come home”: The need to present a good image for the voters before Election Day.

And he blew that (pardon the pun, readers) with his election night “concession” speech that was nothing but a bitter, angry diatribe that closed the door (we hope) on another grifter’s career trying to fool most of the people most of the time.

Well, that’s it for that subject, readers. We’ve got to give Janeane a call to set up our Fiji thing…

ABSTRACT: Bush’s flack quits, the Ethics Commission appeals the Goodman ethics ruling, Lorraine Hunt gets medieval and we go to a party at the new Red Rock Casino.

A lot of you readers like to suggest what we at Various Things and Stuff should write about. And while we listen to all voices, ours is the final decision. We have strong confidence in our own news judgment, and we’d just like to say to all of you out there: We hear your voices, we read the front page, and we know the speculation. But we’re the decider, and we decide what is best to write. And what’s best for us to write is, well, this…

• Scott McClellan, who served as fibbing weasel in chief at the White House, is out, according to the Washington Post. President George W. Bush looks forward to the days when they’re in rocking chairs on a Texas porch, recalling “the good old days.” While we sure can’t wait for that day, either, we have to dwell in the present long enough to say that McClellan, even by press secretary standards, was awful. There’s a bright line between spin and lies, and McClellan lurched across it long ago. Let’s hope his successor knows better.

• Mayor Oscar Goodman is plenty hacked off at the state Ethics Commission’s decision to appeal a ruling that cleared hizzoner of ethics charges. You’ll recall that District Court Judge Mark Denton ruled Goodman didn’t break ethics laws when he invited fellow mayors to a cocktail party sponsored by a business co-owned by his son, Ross, because Goodman had no power to reward or punish his colleagues if they bought or didn’t buy his son’s product.

But the commission insisted that’s nonsense — Chairman Rick Hsu said it would be OK under that ruling for the governor of Nevada to use his position in government to get the governor of California to hire his son, since Nevada’s governor has no authority over California’s governor. And thus, the appeal to the Nevada Supreme Court.

“To me, it just smacks of vindictiveness and a waste of taxpayer money. Everybody has learned the lessons that they’re going to learn,” Goodman told the Review-Journal.

What? This from the mayor whose own ethics trial smacked of vindictiveness, who wasted thousands of dollars of taxpayer money building a videotape collection of his own TV appearances? Goodman himself has demonstrated time and again that he hasn’t learned anything from the case, as he continues to make it a stump speech joke.

No, the Ethics Commission got this one right: Denton’s ruling must be appealed, and overturned. Otherwise, ethics laws in Nevada — already weak — would be virtually meaningless.

“There’s no quit in me and I’ll be right there with them,” Goodman said. We wouldn’t want it any other way.

• Lt. Gov. Lorraine Hunt is showing there’s no quit in her, attacking the meaningless Education First initiative pushed by her gubernatorial opponent, U.S. Rep. Jim Gibbons, as “a feel-good” answer to a complex problem. Nice one, Lt. Gov. Hunt! Up until now, her campaign has been rather positive, which unfortunately these days means boring.

But then, Hunt told the R-J, she realized “I’m up against two big, powerful old-boy political machines, one on the Republican side, one on the Democratic side.”

And by the Democratic side, she means Henderson Mayor Jim Gibson, not state Sen. Dina Titus.

Gibbons denied he’s a political machine, which of course he is. “I chuckle at that, simply because I have all my life been the underdog, the outside candidate,” he says.

And that’s true, except for all the times he’s run for Assembly and Congress, which pretty much comprises his entire political career. (He once took on former Gov. Bob Miller, who took Gibbons to school and drove him home afterwards, in the only race where Gibbons really was an underdog.)

As for today, well every single poll shows Gibbons ahead, and we get the idea that that’s just the way he likes it. Uh huh. Uh huh.

• And finally today, we’re here to report we had a fabulous time at the opening of the valley’s newest resort, the Red Rock Casino. The Fertitta brothers, owners of Station Casinos, have definitely built a quality product out on West Charleston Boulevard.

We’re especially impressed with how the casino is integrated with the outdoor beauty of nearby Red Rock Canyon. The choice, and blending, of materials like wood, stone and marble, and the plentiful patios for restaurants, make the transition from inside to outside seamless. (The new Rande Gerber nightclub, Cherry, even has a retractable wall that opens to a private pool area overlooking the big pool beyond in what the Fertittas are calling “the backyard.”)

But once you’re inside, there’s no mistaking you’re in a casino, especially with the chandeliers scattered throughout. (We’re sure glad we’re not the ones who have to clean those bad boys.)

Although we took a quick swing through the buffet, the real dining treat for us was the Salt Lick BBQ. The food there was spectacular, from the brisket to the smoked sausage and turkey. (Do not, we repeat, do not miss a chance to take your vegetarian friends here!)

Now, we know that some neighbors (and some non-neighbors) complained about the hotel blocking views of Red Rock and causing traffic, but we couldn’t help but notice at least a few of those neighbors in line to get inside on opening night. And while the canyon is obscured from some vantage points, the design blends into the area extremely well. There were plenty of ways to screw this project up, but Stations appears to have missed virtually all of them.

Anyway, enough happy talk from us. We’ll see you tomorrow as we return to full-time cynic mode.

It may be cold in our office here in the nondescript industrial building near McCarran International Airport, but in the oven, it’s hot! Hot enough to produce a few Quick Hits, that is. Here you go:

• So a roving gang of about 15 youths beat up a guy outside a hotel and Metro Police honors the hotel’s outrageous request to keep its name out of the headlines?!

We’re glad the ploy didn’t work: The Review-Journal identified the hotel as the venerable MGM Grand.

We understand there comes a time for withholding information in police investigations, but not the simple location where the crime occurred! No business, no matter how big, has the right to redact from the public the fact that a violent crime occurred. And no police agency should go along with such an outrageous request.

It’s time everybody in town — and that means everybody — learned that we cannot really create a happy, prosperous city where nothing bad ever happens to anyone, where the streets are paved with gold, where your “gaming experience” always ends with a jackpot and where there’s never a line to get into the new club.

That world exists, but only in the fertile imaginations of marketing types and casino execs.

In our world, those golden streets are sometimes stained with blood, and when they are, the people who live here have every right to know.

• So sue her: State Sen. Sandra Tiffany was cited for “aggressive driving” on the Las Vegas Beltway, pled the ticket down to a parking violation and paid a fine.

“I was in the left lane, there was someone really slow in front of me and … [I] went around them without using my turn signal,” Tiffany said in the Review-Journal.

Oh, senator, we are so totally with you. If we’d been caught and fined for every aggressive move we’ve ever made on the beltway, they’d have enough money to finish the damn thing in about six days. Las Vegas has the worst drivers in the world, and the few of us who know what we’re doing have only our accelerator and steering wheel to carve out a path amidst the morons.

We cannot condemn somebody for something we’ve done ourselves. In fact, we commend Tiffany for not flipping the bird in the process. Now that’s restraint.

• Quotable: “President Bush and [Vice President] Dick Cheney are the most isolated individuals I know … If Bush appears in public, people in the crowd are all screened. If they have an anti-Bush T-shirt on, they don’t get in. I think the president is totally isolated.” — U.S. Sen. Harry Reid.

And you know that Bush is totally pissed he had to let Reid in, since the last time the senator came to the White House, he was wearing his “Bush Sucks Major Ass” T-shirt.

• Now there’s a big surprise: The state Ethics Commission has predictably concluded it can’t hold Assemblyman Scott Sibley responsible for conduct that took place before he was elected. That no-shitter was brought to you by would-be Sibley opponent (and lawyer) Greg Whicker.

It seems Sibley allegedly did some underhanded things related to his work as a process server in February 2004, for which a Clark County jury recently fined him $120,000. But he wasn’t elected to the Assembly until November 2004. Ergo, he wasn’t a public official to whom the ethics statutes apply. Ergo, the commission couldn’t do anything.

(And, between us and you, we don’t think the commission could have done anything even if the alleged incident took place after Sibley was elected, given that the conduct at issue was in no way related to his position in government.)

So, no hearing means no violation, although having a jury verdict of $120,000 to pay isn’t exactly winning the Good Government Medal. Whicker has every right to bring the matter up in the only venue that really counts: a political campaign. (Then again, Sibley can bring up Whicker’s attempt to vex him with a complaint that Whicker knew, or should have known, was frivolous. Isn’t politics grand?)

• Finally, a question: We know that former Clark County Commissioner Mary Kincaid-Chauncey took the stand Monday to say that she’d never accepted a bribe from Galardi, but did solicit and accept $9,000. (Of that, $4,000 went to a grandson’s ski school, and $5,000 went to the campaign of her son, Mark, who ran unsuccessfully for North Las Vegas City Council.)

But even if Kincaid-Chauncey didn’t put that money in her pocket, doesn’t it still count as a bribe, if Galardi intended it to influence her and she submitted to that influence?

We think so. And that was why defense lawyer Rick Wright was doing his best to convince the jury that Kincaid-Chauncey didn’t vote any differently than she normally would have, absent any bribe money. If he can prove that, she stands a good chance of being acquitted.

But if not, she’s doomed, since a bribe given to a loved one is still a bribe. Or so we think.

You mean you can’t say “blow job” on television?

What the hell is this world coming to, anyway?

Our friend and colleague Erin Neff reported in her column today (we’d link, but the Stephens Media Group’s IT department cannot make the Internet work today) that she was censored after her appearance on Nevada Week in Review on Friday.

Why? Because she said “blow job.” And apparently, you can’t say “blow job” on television.

After Neff uttered what she considered to be a relatively non-controversial term (how do you cover the G-sting trial without saying “blow job” after all?), KLVX Channel 10 General Manager Tom Axtell axed the reference.

To be fair, Axtell has to face the possibility of incurring a hefty fine from the Federal Communications Commission, which in recent years has shown an increased desire to fight “indecency” on the airwaves. (And yet, Fear Factor continues to air.) If the FCC really doesn’t like you, it can try to revoke your license to broadcast.

(FULL DISCLOSURE: Speaking of indecency, Nevada Week in Review often has us at Various Things & Stuff on the show.)

But wait, there’s more, Neff reports: KNPR 89.5-FM 88.9-FM wouldn’t let her use some marijuana-themed music on a recent show … that was about marijuana. And station program director Flo Rogers warned Neff to watch her language when talking about G-sting trial on Friday, “…because of the topic and the fact that kids, home on spring break, might be listening.”

Yeah, that’s probably what kids home on spring break were doing. Listening to KNPR. It’s the hip thing for young people to do these days, especially since it’s so hard to find explicit sexual material on cable TV or the Internet.

But our purpose is not to bash public media for saying silly things or being a little quick to hit the “mute” Our purpose is to bash public media for being timid.

It’s not about whether somebody says “blow job,” it’s about doing a bad job because you’re motivated by fear, of the audience, of the Federal Communications Commission, of fines and license suspension. Journalism produced under a spirit of censorship (even if it’s self-censorship) is bound to be only one thing: Crappy.

Now, we’re a little biased on the subject. By way of further full disclosure, we at Various Things & Stuff used to appear with some regularity on KNPR. We stopped not long after a meeting with Rogers and former State of Nevada host Gwen Castaldi, when we became convinced that the hard-hitting, hard-charging journalism we wanted to do wasn’t exactly welcome on the airwaves at KNPR.

Now, it is the right of every station owner to determine what can and cannot be broadcast, and we support that right 100 percent. But at the same time, we think it’s unfortunate that there exists a mindset that worries about whether somebody, somewhere might be offended at the word “blow job.” Instead, shouldn’t we worry that a county commissioner was giving them out like Halloween candy, along with her vote? Now that’s offensive and obscene!

What we’re saying is, we wish program directors — especially of public stations around the country — had adopted a more aggressive attitude. The Bush administration put a criminal (and we mean that literally) lackey in charge of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but instead of fighting back, most public media knuckled under. They tried to appease the new conservatives in charge of the radio and TV stations, even as those people made a mockery of contracting rules in a quest to prove public media was too “liberal.”

We’ve said it before: You can’t appease such folk. You can only oppose them. And the best way to do that isn’t to tell your people to tone it down. It’s to tell them to find and tell the best stories they can find in whatever way seems most appropriate.

That means, when you have public officials on the air, you don’t give them aural “blow jobs.” You hold them accountable for their votes, their fund-raising and their stances on the issues. (An interview with a well-researched journalist is one of the few times a politician ever talks to a person who isn’t going to simply kiss their ass.)

It means you ask good, hard follow-up questions, based on solid, accurate and comprehensive research. And it means that simply raising an issue and letting a public official bat it away with a canned, no-answer answer is not the same thing as doing journalism. Not by half.

Will you get in trouble doing that? You bet. We can tell you — after a year running CityLife, that many people (advertisers, readers, even executives within our own company) get upset at that kind of journalism. They cancel subscriptions, pull ads, threaten repercussions and write nasty e-mails.

But that’s the price of actual journalism. You’re going to upset people, and you’re going to cause trouble. In fact, that’s kind of how it works.

True, we have an advantage in that we are a newspaper, and we don’t need a license to publish every week. And we have a company president — our corporate Overlord-in-Chief, Sherman Frederick — who stands by our right and obligation to stir things up.

All we know is, when you’re afraid of what might happen if you say something, you generally aren’t going to say it. And the divide that creates between what you’re reporting and reality will grow, eventually to the point where you become irrelevant. And that, we think, is a sad thing.

UPDATE: Yes! We have Internet at last, which means we can bring you Erin Neff’s column via hyperlink. Enjoy.

Anyone for a few Quick Hits, on just another manic Monday? You know, we really do wish it were Sunday. Why? Well, that’s our fun day. Our “I-don’t-have-to-run-day,” if you will. Anyway, here you go…

• Quotable: “The president believes [Defense] Secretary [Donald] Rumsfeld is doing a very fine job during a challenging period in our nation’s history.” — White House spokesman Scott McClellan, speaking for President George W. Bush.

Let’s do the math: Seven generals (five Army, two Marine Corps) have called for Rumsfeld’s resignation. Those five all have combat experience, including command of units operating in Iraq.

On the other side, there’s Bush, who has no combat experience and the latter portion of whose Air National Guard service is shrouded in mystery.

We’re no experts, but we’re going to have to side with the guys who’ve actually been shot at on this one. Unless, of course, this is like the time Bush told ex-FEMA Director Michael Brown that he was doing “a heckuva job” and then fired him, like, a couple days later. Maybe that’s it.

• Quotable: “What this is showing us is there’s still a demand for the system. As we continue to promote the existence of the Las Vegas Monorail, ridership will continue to increase.” — Monorail spokeswoman Ingrid Reisman, on competition from the less expensive, better-view-affording “Deuce” bus system on the Strip that’s apparently sapping riders from the monorail. (Quoted in the Review-Journal.)

Oh, we’re pretty sure people know it exists…

• There’s no doubt that former Clark County Commissioner Erin Kenny — currently serving time in “public jail” — got a good plea bargain. But the Review-Journal pointed out on Sunday the deal lets her keep all but 18 percent of the $400,000 she took in bribes. (Her fine is just $70,000.)

“Does crime pay? It would appear it does in Erin Kenny’s case,” says ethicist Craig Walton.

At a minimum, Kenny should be required to pay the government, or perhaps donate to charity, every dime of the bribe money she took. (Any cash she earned by blowing strip club mogul Mike Galardi she can keep; she earned that.)

But how great would it be to have Kenny re-arrested, immediately after her G-sting sentencing, on charges of income tax evasion and conspiracy? In that proceeding, IRS criminal investigation agents could ensure that she pays taxes on all the ill-gotten gain, including penalties and interest, and then serves a couple more years in jail for defrauding the government.

Good thing dreams are free…

• Speaking of tawdry G-sting stories, the R-J also learned that, according to Emily Herrera’s sister, Jinny Hinckley, Emily Herrera has forgiven husband Dario Herrera for all his alleged sexual exploits in the G-sting case, including the time he went to a strip club on the very day she’d given birth to their first child.

Now that’s a moving testament to the power of love. Or something.

Our old friend Marvin Longabaugh — who is an attorney, a pollster and a big fan of sub sandwiches, kind of a Renaissance man if you ask us — did some research into the governor’s race recently.

Some of the findings comport with other polls, including the recent Mason-Dixon survey reported in the Review-Journal. Lt. Gov. Lorraine Hunt, for example, still leads state Sen. Bob Beers in the GOP gubernatorial primary, 20.4 percent to 14.7 percent. (U.S. Rep. Jim Gibbons leads everybody, with a whopping 41.2 percent; 23.7 percent are still up for grabs as undecideds.)

When regional differences are figured in, Gibbons’ lead over his fellow Republicans appears granite solid: He takes 60 percent of rural voters, 51 percent of Washoe County voters and 32.2 percent of Clark County voters, outpolling Beers (19.5 percent) and Hunt (23.5 percent) on their home turf, where they should be the strongest.

We can’t help asking the question here: Why was it that Gov. Kenny Guinn went searching all over Nevada for an alternative to Gibbons when the person running strongest against the congressman — Hunt — was standing right beside him for eight years? Just wondering. In any case, it looks like Guinn is meant to be frustrated on Election Day, as Gibbons’ lead is strong.

Over on the Democratic side, Longabaugh found state Sen. Dina Titus leading Henderson Mayor Jim Gibson, but by a very slim margin, 36.1 percent to 32.4 percent.

Gibson is beating Titus in the rurals, 29.6 percent to 18.5 percent, but there is a huge segment of rural Democratic voters out there who haven’t made up their minds: 51.9 percent. In Washoe County, Gibson leads 37.5 percent to 32.5 percent, but Titus comes back strong in Clark County, 39.7 percent to 31.6 percent. (While that’s a good showing, Titus needs to carry Clark by more — perhaps a whole lot more — if she wants a chance of raising money come general-election time, when she’ll be arguing that she can, in fact, beat Gibbons.)

And in that classic matchup, Gibbons is nearing the magic 50 percent: The poll shows Titus losing to Gibbons 48.3 percent to 29.1 percent, with 20.1 percent undecided. (That’s a gap of 19.2 percent — remember that number, as it will become important later on.)

As if to pour salt into the political wound, Gibbons leads among women 45.9 percent to 30.2 percent. What’s with the sisters, anyway?

Perhaps even more frightening, Gibbons is leading Titus among rural Democrats, 55.6 percent to 22.2 percent.

Rural Nevada voters. They really are a different breed.

What about Gibson? He loses to Gibbons, too, by a margin of 40.9 percent to 27 percent, with another 27.6 percent undecided. That means that, while Gibson is picking up fewer overall votes than Titus, and there are more people yet to make up their mind (27.6 percent in Gibbons-Gibson, vs. 20.1 percent in Gibbons-Titus). And the spread between between Gibbons and Gibson (13.9 percent) is smaller than the spread between Gibbons and Titus (19.2 percent).

And you know what that means: Gibson can use the numbers to reinforce his main selling point, which is that he can run a stronger general-election race than Titus against the Gibbons General-Election Juggernaut.

Allow us to interject a theory of ours here that might explain this: Gibbons and Gibson share more than just the same first name and most of the letters in their last names. They share a similar conservative philosophy, one that saw Gibbons’ chief advisor, Sig Rogich, try to recruit Gibson into the Republican Party. (We’d bet a nice bottle of Chateau Mouton Rothschild that if Gibson had switched, Rogich would be guiding him to the governor’s mansion instead of Gibbons.)

Titus, by contrast, presents a contrast. Sure, the polls show more people have opinions about her, but there’s no mistaking Titus for anybody but Titus, even with her could-be-better showing in these poll numbers. Oh, and there are more of those: Like Titus, Gibson loses to Gibbons among rural Democrats (40.7 percent for Gibbons, 22.2 for Gibson, a smaller margin than the Titus-Gibbons rural Democrat matchup).

Now, we don’t want to get all racial up in here, but one group that certainly does not like Gibbons is blacks: They said they’d vote for Titus over Gibbons 51.5 percent to 30.3 percent, and for Gibson over Gibbons 45.5 percent to 24.2 percent. Gibbons does get 33.3 percent of the black vote in the GOP primary, but Hunt took 66.7 percent and Beers — who is so white he gets mistaken for us and vice versa — got none.

What does it all mean? Titus needs to improve her showing in the head-to-head matchup, not against Gibson, but against Gibbons. There are undoubtedly donors out there who would give her money, but for the fear that she’s a lost cause, and that Gibson can run a better race against Gibbons in the general. (Certainly, the Gibbons campaign thinks so.) And the news — broken by my friend and fellow blogger Anjeanette Damon on Friday — that university Chancellor Jim Rogers and Gibbons have patched up their differences (see previous post) certainly doesn’t help Titus at all.

My colleague and fellow blogger Anjeanette Damon’s statewide scoop in the Reno Gazette-Journal that university Chancellor Jim Rogers has contributed $5,000 to the gubernatorial campaign of U.S. Rep. Jim Gibbons is very bad news for the campaign of another would-be governor, state Sen. Dina Titus.

Damon does a great job of bringing up Rogers’ previously dim views of the congressman, resurrecting an old quote from Face to Face with Jon Ralston: “I think, and maybe I’m being harsh, but I don’t think he’s [Gibbons] very bright. I don’t think he’s got very many great leadership qualities. I don’t think he can handle the job of governor.”

Oh, that’s not harsh at all, Mr. Chancellor! And you know what they say about first impressions. (Apparently, he did: When my pal Jon Ralston gave Rogers the opportunity to retract the statement on a later show, Rogers declined.)

But now, things are different. Why? Here’s what Rogers told Damon for her story, which ran on Friday:

“He [Gibbons] has come to our offices on numerous occasions and has suggested he was going to be support the things that we asked for and that we would be involved in talking about his [education] budget,” Rogers said.

Got that? It’s not that Gibbons has suddenly become bright. It’s not that Gibbons has suddenly developed great leadership qualities. It’s not that Gibbons can suddenly handle the job of being governor. It’s that Gibbons said he’d give Rogers what Rogers wants. Presto! Intelligent leadership for Nevada!

Plus, Damon’s story says, Rogers is a vocal opponent of state Sen. Bob Beers’ Tax and Spending Control initiative, which would limit the growth of government spending to the combined rate of inflation and population growth. And Rogers, who formed a political action committee last year in order to play a role in the 2006 elections, recently saw Gibbons come out against the measure, after months of refusing to take a stand.

Progress? Perhaps for Rogers, who has designs on global domination and apparently can make Gibbons dance for him like a Galardi stripper with both Dario Herrera and Michael Mack in the house!

On her blog, Damon adds Rogers may have thought opposing TASC is a better use of his money than supporting any particular candidate for governor. But here’s the real inside scoop. Damon says Rogers has also spent time talking to Sig Rogich, the Republican political strategist who is advising the Gibbons campaign. (Wethinks Rogich, who is very bright, had a lot more to do with changing Rogers’ mind than all that time spent with Gibbons.) Rogich is a big supporter of public education, Damon notes, and he’s told Rogers that Gibbons will be the same. Honestly, it’s probably a promise that Rogich can make, and keep.

So what does any of this have to do with Titus? And how can it really be bad news for her, since Rogers and his wife, Beverly, have already donated $40,000 to her campaign, eight times the check he gave Gibbons?

It’s all about the general, baby. You see, in every political forecast we’ve made, Rogers has figured heavily into the Titus march to victory. (What can we say? We love an underdog!) After Titus’ expected defeat of Henderson Mayor Jim Gibson, we reasoned, she could count on Rogers to beat up on Gibbons, for two main reasons: One, he legitimately thinks (or thought, we suppose) that Gibbons would be bad for education in Nevada. Two, Rogers had said such nasty things about Rogers, there was no way he could continue in his new favorite job as chancellor with Gibbons as a budget-wielding governor.

But now the two have made their peace. And now Rogers has given $5,000 to Gibbons (with the promise of more to come). And now it looks like Rogers will be spending his PAC money to make sure Beers’ measure doesn’t become law, not on ensuring Gibbons doesn’t get elected governor.

All of which means that the main theme of the Gibson campaign — that Titus cannot win a primary race against Gibbons — gets a little boost. Because without Rogers on her side, Titus’ uphill battle just got a little steeper. And Gibbons’ inevitability just got a little more sure.