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…