Although we hate it, we would never think of calling upon the R-J to remove it. We’re secure enough in our ideas that Tinsley’s daily depth charge doesn’t shake us, and right-wingers should have cartoonists on their side, too. (Besides Family Circle, we mean.) And, to be honest, we’ve already called unsuccessfully on the R-J to get rid of much worse things in the paper. To our dismay, the Living section keeps getting published.

But today’s Mallard Fillmore was especially lame: It shows a “Journalist’s T-shirt” emblazoned with the words: “My contact at the CIA betrayed her country, and all I got was this Pulitzer Prize.”

What a heaping, steaming, unmitigated load of shit.

Right-wingers seemed to be slaves to the notion that patriotism means 100 percent unquestioned loyalty to one’s country during periods when it’s governed by a Republican. (Does anybody doubt that if this was still the Bill Clinton administration, Republicans would have jumped all over the president for a secret surveillance program? Hell, look at what happened when Clinton collected a bunch of FBI files. An independent counsel still may be investigating that one.)

Here’s a memo, right-wingers: Patriotism is much broader than you think. And it sometimes requires patriots to stand up against their government, for the good of their country. When the people currently in office — be they Democrat or Republican — betray the Constitution, the only true patriotic response is to oppose them.

Thus, whomever leaked word of National Security Agency’s warantless wiretapping of American citizens — and the woman fired by the CIA for allegedly doing it says she wasn’t the source — is the true patriot, putting his or her job in jeopardy in order to tell the truth to the people. That is not a betrayal of the nation; it’s a high service to the nation.

The fact that some right-wingers cannot recognize that should be disturbing.

And you can tell that we’re patriots, because, if this still was the Clinton years, we’d be saying the exact same thing about the NSA program. Principles shouldn’t change with presidents.

• Where does U.S. Rep. Jon Porter stand on illegal immigration? He voted for the harsh House Republican plan that would make immigrants felons, would not provide for a guest worker program and would criminalize helping immigrants, even if the help was offered by a church.

We suppose he didn’t progress in his theological studies enough to read the parts of the Bible that condemn mistreating strangers in your country. Why don’t religious Republicans ever want to legislate that kind of Bible stuff into law?

Anyway, Porter told the Las Vegas Sun that even though he voted for that plan, “the arrangement was for both houses to do border security, and then the Senate to do a guest-worker program, and then bring them together.”

Oh, so Porter does believe in a guest worker program? And this isn’t a flip-flop on the issue, in light of the fact that even President George W. Bush isn’t so big an asshole as to support the House plan?

(A Culinary Union rep told the Sun that Porter and his colleague U.S. Rep. Jim Gibbons changed their minds after getting thousands of signatures from Las Vegas residents urging a fair immigration plan.)

We only ask because we are bracing ourselves for a last-minute Porter switcheroo, of the kind that killed a $1,500 bonus for soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. In that case, Porter switched his vote at the request of House Majority Whip Roy Blunt, and was the rare swing vote that killed the bonus in the House.

And guess who still opposes a guest worker plan of the kind that Porter says he was always looking forward to the Senate authoring? You got it: Blunt.

We’ll be waiting until the vote finally closes on this one to find out where Porter (or is that the House leadership?) stands.

• Happy 60th birthday, North Las Vegas!

The city famously slammed by writer Hunter S. Thompson as the place to go when you’ve fucked up once too often on the Strip turned 60 on Monday, and had itself a little party to celebrate. It’s grown considerably since it was incorporated on May 16, 1946, and is now home to 190,000 people and 82 square miles.

Notice a little something about this birthday: It was celebrated on the 60th anniversary of the city’s actual incorporation, and thus it’s an actual birthday.

Contrast that with another city you may have heard of, Las Vegas, which celebrated its 100th anniversary six years early in order to satisfy the insatiable publicity needs of its mayor. Instead of waiting until 2011, 100 years after its official incorporation, the city of Las Vegas chose an arbitrary 1905 land auction as its “founding” and did all manner of celebratory things last year, some of which turned out to not be wholly lame.

But we’re still looking forward to 2011, when we at Various Things and Stuff will be able to utter the words we just couldn’t bring ourselves to say in all of 2005: Happy 100th birthday Las Vegas!

• Is it just us, or does everybody hear the frantic copying of that Associated Press story on secondhand smoke in casinos that ran on the front page of the Review-Journal’s Business section today? Copiers over at the Clean Indoor Air Act headquarters have got to be working overtime as those zealous healthmongers plan how to use this information in the campaign to stamp out almost all public smoking in the state.

It seems UNR professor Chris Pritsos conducted five years of research funded by the National Institutes of Health and discovered that secondhand smoke does, in fact, damage the DNA of casino workers who don’t smoke themselves. (It may also cause heart and lung disease.)

The study, which has yet to be peer reviewed, could have broad implications for the Clean Indoor Air Act, which would ban smoking in most bars, restaurants, grocery stores, convenience stores, school and day-care centers. (And that goes for restaurants in casinos, too.)

Gambling industry leaders like Alan Feldman were too polite and well-bred to say something crass like, “nobody’s holding a gun to anybody’s head to make them work here.” Instead, Feldman touted the advanced “air-handling systems” in hotels these days.

Let’s face it: Smoking goes with gambling like bagels go with lox. And we don’t want to ban lox, do we?

Only kidding. But here’s a serious point: The Clean Indoor Air Act, which is premised on protecting workers from the dangers of secondhand smoke, won’t do jack for casino workers. Gambling floors of casinos are totally exempt from the act’s ban, although dealers, pit bosses, cocktail waitresses, security officers and other hotel workers are constantly exposed to secondhand smoke there.

The practical reason for that oversight is that casinos would have squashed the initiative like a bug if it had banned smoking outright. But by excluding the very people Pritsos studied, its backers cannot credibly claim to be doing this for workers.

It’s going to be a fun campaign. We can’t wait to find the smoke-filled back room where this one’s being decided.

UPDATE: We at Various Things & Stuff have learned (after an observant colleague e-mailed us) that the secondhand smoking study story was not the work of The Associated Press, but rather the work of Reno Gazette-Journal scribe Lenita Powers. Her story ran Monday in the Reno paper, and was re-written and subsequently published in the Review-Journal today. Our apologies to Powers for the oversight.