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.