That U.S. Rep. Mike Slanker, R-Nev., is sure smart. His front man, former insurance salesman Jon Porter, has taken advantage of Slanker’s congressional franking privilege to send a two-sided flier that purports to be about Medicare, but is really an election vehicle. How can we tell? By a simple application of the Photo-Matic Taxpayer Abuse Scale, Version 2.0, of course!

By running the flier — which you can see on my colleague Jon Ralston’s blog here — through the Photo-Matic’s scanner, we discover that there are three photos of Porter in the flier, or 1.5 photos per page. Using a complex, proprietary algorithm, we deduce that … it’s a taxpayer-financed campaign piece!

And isn’t that something? Slanker, who’s $1 million ahead of Democratic challenger Tessa Hafen, feels the need to use taxpayer money to gain an additional advantage. Oh, sure, we know that plenty of people running for Congress do this (and by plenty, we mean everybody, Democrat and Republican). But that doesn’t make it right, as they say. If the rest of the Republican leadership jumped off a cliff, would Slanker’s front man do the same thing?

Oh, that’s right. He would.

ABSTRACT: Today, we talk about the sometimes-bizarre world of the Las Vegas Sun, presidential salaries and bad news for Oscar Goodman. We just got a bread maker: Time for some Quick Hit sandwiches!

• Media watching: Is it just us, or do employees of the Las Vegas Sun live in a magical dream world, where unicorns gallop beneath rainbows, leprechauns hide their pots o’ gold from greedy strangers and magical fairies sprinkle their pixie dust in forests of talking trees?

We offer these examples of cross-dimensional transit to Fantasyland. (Or could they simply be garden-variety cases of gross self-delusion? You decide.)

Example No. 1: The final column of Tom Gorman

Example No. 2: The final column of Jeff German

• And speaking of the Sun, Editor Brian Greenspun just doesn’t get it. His Sunday column took North Las Vegas Mayor Mike Montandon to task for allegedly misleading residents about a new master-planned development that may, or may not, include a neighborhood casino.

So? Well, as Greenspun admits, he’s got a bit of an agenda. ” I am told by the editors around here that now is a good time to disclose my conflicts,” he wrote. “I am a partner in Aliante, which is North Las Vegas’ first real master-planned community. It has been a success for both us and the city and, especially, the thousands of people who call it home every day.

“I am also a partner with Station Casinos in the recently announced Aliante Station, a hotel-casino that is proposed to be opened sometime in 2008. That means I not only have a community interest in how the quality of life in North Las Vegas continues to grow but also a financial one. Disclosure over.”

What the editors around the Sun apparently did not tell Greenspun, however, is that it is wrong to use your newspaper as a tool to advance your private business interests, even if you disclose the conflict. Greenspun may be 100 percent right that Montandon tried to pull a fast one on neighbors who oppose a non-Greenspun-affiliated neighborhood casino, but the fact that he’s got a financial incentive to keep competitors away makes him the most flawed of messengers.

So, does that mean he can’t say anything, can’t exercise the rights of any of the citizens at that meeting? No. He’s got every right to address the City Council, like everybody else. But using his newspaper as a cudgel to beat them about the head and shoulders, when there’s money to be made? That’s off the table, or at least it should have been.

And lest you think we can’t say anything nice about the editor of the Sun, think again. We’re glad to see he at least disclosed his conflict, however grudgingly he did it. That’s progress! Maybe now he can be sure his reporters do it, too, every time they write about Greenspun-affiliated businesses.

Full disclosure: We at Various Things & Stuff worked at the Sun from 1993-1997. We now edit CityLife, which is owned by the Stephens Media Group. That company also owns the Sun’s main competitor, the Review-Journal, where we were a columnist from 2000-2005.

• Man, the president makes a lot of money. No, not George W. Bush. The new president of UNR, Milton Glick, who, like Bush, will pull down $400,000 per year! And Bush doesn’t even get Glick’s $8,000 annual vehicle allowance, $18,000 housing allowance or $5,000 host account.

Then again, Bush has an armored Cadillac limo, motorcades that never stop for lights, the White House to live in and a converted 747 jumbo jet that gets priority wherever he goes, so there are compensations.

But still, $400,000?

Part of that salary — $80,000 per year to be exact — will be paid by Chancellor Jim Rogers, just so Glick knows who his real boss is.

• A sports stadium? One not in downtown? One not even in city limits? One that doesn’t allow Mayor Oscar Goodman to get his face on TV? Why you gotta harsh on hizzoner’s mellow, clothing magnate Fred Nassiri?

• Speaking of bad news for Goodman, it seems the “Centennial” committee “lost” $20,000 that it wanted to use to broadcast a show about the city’s 100th “birthday.” How? The Sun reported today that some dude named Michael Hyams vanished with the $20,000, and that he can’t be found at his last address, working at a hotel in Missouri. The Utah company that actually got the check has also vanished.

Surprisingly, “Centennial” officials didn’t get the hint when Hyams had a “miscommunication” with Sara Lee, bakers of the world’s largest “birthday” cake. He thought it would be free; they charged the “Centennial” Committee $95,000.

It’s a good thing none of this was taxpayer money, although the government officials in charge of “Centennial” cash don’t seem to be any more competent when dealing with money raised by the sale of “Centennial” license plates and “Centennial” sponsorships than they are with tax dollars. We can’t wait to see what they do when the city’s real 100th birthday comes up in 2011.

Despite the fact that they got convicted, and will most probably spend some time in prison, the G-sting verdicts couldn’t have come at a better time for ex-Clark County Commissioners Dario Herrera and Mary Kincaid-Chauncey. After all, news that breaks on Friday gets put into the little-read Saturday newspaper. In Washington, D.C. and elsewhere, savvy officials release bad news on Friday night in a process they call “taking out the trash.”

But we at Various Things & Stuff read all the coverage, and found a few interesting things therein. Let’s take a look:

• “They [the federal government] let the real criminals off, so we’ll probably go to jail. Maybe you’re better off in the system if you’re a criminal.” — Kincaid-Chauncey, after the verdicts were read, as quoted in the Review-Journal.

First, she is a criminal, having been convicted by a jury of her peers of conspiracy, wire fraud and extortion. Second, the “real criminals” she’s referring to, strip club owner Mike Galardi and ex-Commissioner Erin Kenny, jumped at the chance to make a deal. Kincaid-Chauncey had the chance to do that; she chose to fight the charges. It was a gamble, and she lost.

But that’s not to say there’s not some truth in what she’s saying: Galardi and Kenny will probably do fewer days behind bars than either Herrera or Kincaid-Chauncey, and Kenny got to keep the lion’s share of the bribes she took during her corrupt career, which is patently outrageous. It was a very sweet deal for both of the government’s star witnesses.

• “If you’re a politician, you’re dead in the water. If you’re a slutty topless club owner, you get nothing.” — Robert Chauncey, Mary Kincaid-Chauncey’s husband.

Actually, as a former cop, Chauncey should know that political corruption cases are notoriously difficult to make. Juries want ironclad proof on full-color video, like they were watching an episode of The Sopranos, and often, that’s just not how it works. (It certainly wasn’t the case here, where prosecutors had to encourage the jury to make inferences from taped evidence.)

And the only reason the slutty topless club owner got such a deal was that he recognized his guilt and turned rat almost immediately. Mary Kincaid-Chaucney still doesn’t acknowledge she did anything wrong, despite the verdicts.

• One of the charges against the defendants was wire fraud, i.e. using the phone for criminal purposes. But how, you might wonder, is that a federal matter? After all, Galardi and his alleged bagman, ex-Commissioner Lance Malone, were both in Las Vegas when talking on their cell phones for most of the Nevada portion of the G-sting case.

Whoops. It turns out they were using Nextel, which has a transmission tower in California, which means the calls made use of interstate wires, which means it is a federal crime.

A stretch? Perhaps. One wag this weekend guessed that future cell phone customers who have nefarious intent might want to ask their cell provider if all their equipment is located within the state of Nevada, or if any crosses state lines.

What if it had happened entirely within Nevada? Our guess is we’d still be waiting for local authorities to take up the case.

• And that brings us to this: Three cheers for the FBI and the U.S. attorney for the district of Nevada, Dan Bogden. As we’ve said, these are hard cases to make; the bureau’s special agents and Bogden’s prosecutors, especially Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Schiess, did a remarkable job. (Even we at Various Things & Stuff doubted the defendants would get convicted after hearing the defense case.)

“Their purpose is promoting the public good. A violation of that strikes at the very foundation of our government,” Bogden said of public officials. We couldn’t agree more. And we think other local law-enforcement officials are starting to catch on as well.

• We thought we’d catalogued all of Herrera’s many and varied ethics violations, until we read R-J lead G-sting trial reporter Adrienne Packer’s comprehensive sidebar.

Man, that guy was a crook!

Props, by the way, to Packer, who wrote compelling and interesting stories on the trial for the duration. Trials are 95 percent tedium and 5 percent high drama, which makes covering them something of a challenge. Packer deserves credit for a job well done.