ABSTRACT: Today, we wonder why Harry Reid won’t oppose nuclear power, and then whip up a delightful batch of Quick Hits about attorney Glen Lerner, Gov. Kenny Guinn, Republican activist Chuck Muth, and Review-Journal columnist Jane Ann Morrison.

U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, are you listening?

We know that Reid is in Nevada this week, having taken a break from doing battle with the likes of inside-traders and constitution-shredders back in Washington, D.C. And while we like Reid, we can’t ignore his flaws.

One of those flaws: His support for nuclear power.

You’d think Reid would be against atom-splitting to keep the lights on, given that Nevada has been targeted for the toxic by-products of the process. Reid’s done a masterful job fighting the dump, which the current administration is pushing like there’s no tomorrow. (And if there’s any justice, there won’t be a tomorrow for the Republicans come 2008.)

Part of the push was the arrival of Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman at the Review-Journal’s editorial board on Wednesday. Bodman admitted there were flaws with Yucca Mountain in the past, but that the administration was pushing forward with it in the future.

Why? Well, there are three or four new nuclear power plants getting ready to open come 2010, to say nothing of all the current plants, most of which have waste piling up.

“The problem is, we don’t need three or four nuclear reactors in my judgment. We need 14 or 24. We need a large number. And that’s the driver behind Yucca Mountain,” Bodman said. And he’s absolutely correct.

Are you listening, Sen. Reid?

Nuclear power plants = Need for a place to dump nuclear waste.

Therefore,

nuclear power = Yucca

Therefore,

support for nuclear power = support for the need of a nuclear waste dump like Yucca

And it’s getting harder and harder to stave off that logic as fuel rods pile up around the country, and new fuel rods are generated. (The administration is pushing a bill that would not only fast-track the dump, but would transform its capacity from 77,000 tons to 120,000 tons.)

Yikes.

The sooner leaders like Sen. Reid adopt a more commonsense approach — opposing Yucca and nuclear power, the stance of U.S. Rep. Shelley Berkley — the sooner we can move on from the now-quaint idea of nuclear power and onto getting serious about new energy technology. If we can subsidize nuclear power — and, boy, do we, subsidies that Reid has wisely opposed — we ought to be able to subsidize research into those new technologies, too.

Otherwise, it’s oil, coal, natural gas and nukes.

Time for some Quick Hits, cooked up in our solar-powered Dutch oven in the parking lot of our nondescript industrial building near McCarran International Airport…

• Attorney Glen Lerner is taking the Nevada State Bar to court over the bar’s attempts to regulate his advertisements. Lerner’s campy ads feature some testimonials, which is a no-no under Nevada Supreme Court rules. But we’re compelled to ask: What does the Nevada Supreme Court know about law?

Anyway, another contention seems to be that Lerner calls himself “the heavy hitter,” while the bar would prefer he say he’s “a heavy hitter,” so as not to rule out the possibility that there are other heavy hitters out there.

Gee, we hope the bar has a heavy hitter to argue its case. So far, the arguments against Lerner seem kind of lame to us.

• Poor Gov. Kenny Guinn. He’s in the twilight of his term as governor, he’s just learning to walk with a new surgically implanted hip, and he’s taking shots from political foes left and right.

Well, actually, make that just “right.”

As in Republicans, members of his own party.

According to the Review-Journal’s Molly Ball, U.S. Rep. Jim Gibbons says Guinn’s administration is in “for-profit mode,” because Guinn advocated the largest tax increase in state history. “When we have surpluses … that tells me the people in this room are paying too much,” Gibbons told an audience of Northern Nevada capitalist running dogs.

C’mon, congressman: We all know that while Guinn introduced a gross receipts tax package in 2003, he didn’t do jack afterwards to see that it passed. As a result, we got a hodgepodge of lame tax increases instead.

Even Lt. Gov. Lorraine Hunt got into the act, saying she disagreed with the 2003 tax increase because it resulted in large surpluses. That must be why she stayed silent at the time, presiding over the Senate as it passed the tax package without a word of protest: She had to wait to see if there were surpluses, which means the tax package was bad.

Hmmm. That could make deciding on future taxes a little tricky, no?

Anyway, we feel sorry for the governor. Keep your chin up, Gov. Guinn. Only 20 months to go until retirement!

• Our friend Chuck Muth is up to his old, wicked tricks, we see.

Muth, a man who appreciates irony as much as we do, sent a letter to Clark County Manager Thom Reilly, asking for him to step down while strip club mogul Mike Galardi’s claim that Reilly took a $5,000 bribe.

See, it was Reilly who pressured Clark County Recorder Frances Deane to step down recently when it was reported that her office had been raided by Metro Police, searching for evidence she sold a first look at moneymaking documents to a local businessman.

So Muth, who is counseling Deane as well as impeached state Controller Kathy Augustine (hey, the guy loves a challenge), is trying to do a little hoisting on Reilly’s petard.

Of course, we beg to differ: The government doesn’t believe the Reilly allegations, since its known about them for a long time and has never bothered to assign FBI agents to investigate. Metro has at least enough evidence to get a search warrant, and run an active investigation, of Deane. So we’re talking apples (Reilly) and badly rotting summer plums (Deane).

But, as always, Muth isn’t shy about pressing his case, and pointing out what he sees as hypocrisy. Nice one.

• Finally today, the R-J’s Jane Ann Morrison has an interesting column.

It seems one of her 2003 stories — the revelation that former Clark County Commissioner Erin Kenny had a phone conversation about hiding a $200,000 developer bribe — was a set up. The person on the phone with Kenny was really an FBI agent, not her father. And the call was played for the guy who offered the bribe, in order to get him to roll over.

Morrison says she got the tip, double-checked the tip and printed the tip, only to realize during the G-sting trial that she’d been misled. And she admits she was used to get the information out. “It bothers me that I was a participant,” she says, albeit an unwitting one.

We think this is just the kind of transparency the media needs, now more than ever. We all make mistakes, and when we do, we need to report as aggressively on ourselves as we do on others. Far from showing up our faults, this adds to our credibility. Let’s hope every journalist does the same thing as Morrison, if they find themselves in a similar situation.