We at Various Things & Stuff have not always agreed with our corporate overlords in the Stephens Media Group. But they leave us alone to do our thing on this blog and in CityLife, which is the highest praise we can offer for news executives.

But a column penned by our corporate Overlord-in-Chief, Sherm Frederick caught our eye this weekend, and we thought it worthy of a response. We didn’t mind so much when Sherm discounted global warming, or asserted U.S. Sen. Harry Reid was an actual, real-life liberal, since nobody else could possibly believe such fanciful tales.

But on Sunday, Sherm dissed a person we consider a fine public servant, Assistant County Manager Virginia Valentine, who is on the short list to become Clark County manager. Sherm boldly said Valentine, a former Las Vegas city manager hired by then-Mayor Jan Jones, left her job “amid issues about her professional judgment and personal stability.” To wit:

“Second, those who go back a ways will remember that Valentine left her job as the Las Vegas city manager a few years ago amid issues about her professional judgment and personal stability. So, in the wake of corruption convictions against former county officials, we want the county’s top appointed boss to have questionable judgment and character?

“I don’t think I’m being an old-fashioned stick in the mud by raising these questions. This is the elephant in the room everyone wants to pretend isn’t there. I hope someone in the Clark County decision-making process has the guts to ask a few hard questions.”

Now, hold on a second.

We were around at the time — working as a columnist for the Review-Journal, which Sherm oversees in his role as publisher and president of the Stephens Media Group — and we don’t remember any questions about her “professional judgment or personal stability.”

In fact, Valentine earned praise in the R-J when she left her job at City Hall. “If Valentine leaves a legacy, it’s not the [improved] bond rating but the fact she departs City Hall with virtually no enemies,” wrote then-City Hall reporter Jan Moller on May 20, 2002. “It hasn’t always been easy, given that her job comes with seven bosses on the City Council whose priorities and personalities don’t always mesh.”

“Several of her predecessors found the task impossible and were forced out when they lost support on the council. But Valentine … is leaving of her own volition.”

Mayor Oscar Goodman praised Valentine in the piece. “Goodman said he developed a respect for Valentine early in his tenure when he watched her negotiate a development deal. He doesn’t remember the deal, but he recalls Valentine’s posture. ‘She was a real hardball player,’ Goodman said. ‘She handled the situation in the same way I handled similar situations in my private [law] practice.’”

(Ouch. You mean Valentine threatened to whack the developers if they didn’t do what she wanted? Only kidding)

Valentine said she left her job at City Hall because she wanted to spend more time with her adopted daughter. And before somebody can adopt a child, they do a fairly good job weeding out those with “issues about … professional judgment and personal stability.”

Valentine took a job at the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce that allowed for more family time, but swiftly left, after she was plucked from a field of 120 candidates to become an assistant county manager.

County Manager Thom Reilly said at the time (in yet another R-J story, published Oct. 10, 2002): “We had great candidates. The edge went to Virginia because of her proven reputation and leadership in the community. Also her demonstrated ability to manage diverse and multiple areas was important because the county is so large and there is so much going on.”

Now, even if you want to argue Las Vegas officials wouldn’t say anything negative about her because she was leaving, Reilly had absolutely no reason to lie about her — let alone hire her to be one of his deputies. And now that Valentine has risen to what the Las Vegas Sun has identified as one of the front-runners among candidates to replace Reilly, her reputation seems to have remained sterling.

In fact, it seems Valentine gets high marks from almost everybody in town, outside Sherm and the people he says are whispering about the elephant in the room, whomever they are.

Forgive us, but on this one, we part ways with our Overlord. We think Valentine is an outstanding professional who’d make a fine county manager, and we hope the commission sees fit to give her the job. Of course, our endorsement will probably hurt her more than it will help.

What? Las Vegas is under terrorist attack! Bullets are flying, martial law is being imposed and police are shooting even more than usual! Holy shit!

Oh, wait, it’s only a video game.

That’s right, the latest edition of author Tom Clancy’s video game series Rainbow Six takes place right here in Las Vegas, both on the Strip and downtown. (Silly video game people! Don’t you know that nobody goes downtown anymore?)

The prospect has Mayor Oscar Goodman, and others, full of anger.

“It could be harmful economically, and it may be something that’s not entitled to free speech [protection],” Goodman told the Review-Journal. “It’s based on a false premise …. I will ask … whether or not we can stop it.”

MGM Mirage said it would check to see if the game violated copyrights, and Boyd Gaming lamented that we spend so much money promoting Las Vegas as safe, it’s “concerning” that the game portrays the city as unsafe.

In other news, San Andreas city officials are suing to prevent the depiction of their city as a crime ridden place with the highest auto-theft rates in the world, the nation of Cambodia is charging Lara Croft with the theft of antiquities and a morbidly obese Pac-Man is suing, claiming eating all those little dots contributed to his Type-II diabetes.

C’mon, people. Isn’t there even a single person whose head is currently not jammed up his ass?

Oh, here’s one: Vince Alberta of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitor’s Authority. “I’m confident that the general public can distinguish between what’s reality and what’s fiction,” he said. At last! Someone who treats Las Vegas visitors like the adults we’re always saying are eligible to enjoy the fruits of Sin City. Thanks, Vince!

• Speaking of heads up asses and Mayor Goodman, he had another doozy of a quote in the R-J with respect to Project Splendor, another future tax-subsidized office-and-retail high-rise planned for downtown.

How can the public decide if this is a good thing or not until they’re privy to the terms of the deal, Goodman was asked. His reply:

“Who cares? I hope it takes place. If you asked the public about the furniture mart, they probably would have laughed,” he said. (Actually, they probably still would laugh, but it would be the bitter laugh of a public losing out on property tax dollars for a project that’s closed to — you guessed it — them.)

“I say this respectfully to the public, but until they see the economic impact of these projects, and the impact they will have architecturally and to diversity our economy — once they see it, they’ll know it’s a great project,” Goodman added.

Wait: In order to judge, the public has to wait until the city gives away the store and the damn thing is built? What if they decide it’s not worth it then? It’s too late to do anything! And this is Goodman saying something “respectfully” to the public? We’d hate to hear how he says “fuck you.”

Oh, wait. We think we just did.

• Just a quick word about the Sunday letter to the editor of the R-J from Foothill High School teacher Karen Vaughan, who opined that officials were right in cutting off valedictorian Brittany McComb’s microphone during her graduation speech because she mentioned Jesus Christ.

McComb’s mike was cut, Vaughan says, because the young lady deviated from the district-approved version of her speech, which had been edited by lawyers. (Apparently, all graduation speeches go through this Orwellian treatment before the words can be spoken in public.)

Before we get to the letter, a disclaimer so our friends at the ACLU don’t go all crazy on our ass: The district was within the law to cut McComb’s mike, based on court rulings. Because graduation is a school-sponsored event, and because speeches are vetted, the school assumes liability to not violate the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, which it avoided by cutting the mike when McComb deviated from her approved text. We simply think it’s unfortunate that a student was censored. Everybody on the same page now? OK, back to the letter.

“As an educator, I teach my students to obey the law. I teach them when and how to question the law. I personally teach First Amendment rights and responsibilities. I also teach them to honor their commitments. I teach them how freedom of speech works,” Vaughan wrote.

“She [McComb] made a commitment to reach her speech as approved by the legal department of the school district, and she did not live up to that commitment.

“We’re telling students they don’t have to obey the rules, and if they break the rules and involve God, they might make the national news,” she adds.

There’s a legitimate point in there: McComb could have, and perhaps should have, told the district that she was unable to agree to the suggested edits to her speech. She probably would have been denied the right to speak in that event, which is still a form of censorship.

But there’s a legitimate counter point: The district should not be editing what kids are going to say at graduation in the first place. They’ve just been through years of education; if the district isn’t confident it has instilled the proper maturity, values and intelligence in its highest-performing charges to allow them make unedited remarks before their peers, we’ve got a bigger problem than students hearing the name of Christ.

Yes, McComb broke the rules, but it wasn’t a legitimate rule in the first place. Which brings us to Vaughan’s last point: “If you want to be mad at something, go after the law, but don’t attack the people who enforce the law for everyone.”

Not quite, Ms. Vaughan. We say, go after both the (illegitimate) law and the people enforcing it. If those people are really teaching students when and how to question the law, they ought to know better.

• And finally today, Las Vegas Sun Editor Brian Greenspun reached way back into the archives for a pat on the back in his Sunday column.

Greenspun recalled the heady days of 1998, just before U.S. Sen. Harry Reid was about to pull off a 428-vote victory over then U.S. Rep. John Ensign, in a nasty political fight. Just before voters were to go to the polls, Greenspun brought some mighty big guns to bear on the race, in which his newspaper backed Reid.

“Way back in 1998, when Harry Reid was running for re-election to the U.S. Senate, I happened upon an exclusive interview with the president [ex-President Bill Clinton, that is] in which he said that if Harry Reid were not re-elected, Nevada was certain to get the Yucca Mountain dump,” Greenspun wrote Sunday.

“I ran that story on the front page of the Las Vegas Sun — believing that if the president of the United States said the dump was coming our way without Harry Reid in the Senate to stop it, that was big news in Nevada — much to the chagrin of Harry’s opponents [i.e. Ensign] and a few ‘experts’ on journalistic ethics.”

Those experts? Why, CityLife of course! Back in those days, we published a weekly feature dubbed MediaWatch that kept a close eye on local newspapers and TV stations. (MediaWatch still appears in the paper, on an occasional basis.)

Greenspun then goes on to declare victory, saying a deal Reid is forging with U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., to build temporary nuclear waste sites around the country instead of shipping it to the over-budget, overdue Yucca Mountain is Nevada’s final salvation. (It’s actually not; Domenici sees the temporary sites as a necessary precursor to Yucca, while Reid views them as capitulation to the argument that Yucca will never happen.)

But let’s give credit where credit is due: Reid has fought Yucca at every turn. And Reid’s opposition has made Yucca a damn near political impossibility. And Ensign, the man who would have replaced Reid but ended up getting elected two years later anyway, hasn’t managed to bring even a single additional anti-Yucca vote to the table, despite promising to do so during the 2000 election. (Ensign’s up for re-election this year, by the way, running against Jack Carter, son of the former president.)

On those matters, Greenspun is, and was, absolutely right. And so was his source, Clinton. Props, gentlemen, props. In fact, a bare majority of Nevada voters agreed, and sent Reid back to Washington. To the extent the Sun persuaded any voters in Reid’s direction, we offer our thanks.

But that wasn’t the journalistic point we “experts” at CityLife were trying to make. See, we objected to a front-page news story that was really a thinly disguised editorial endorsement of Reid. That kind of thing may be commonplace here at CityLife, but the Sun purports to be a real-life, grown-up newspaper, where that kind of thing is best left on the editorial page.

Anyway, we figured since Greenspun could go back and exhume praise from the archives, we might as well go back and exhume whatever it was we said back in the day. Here are the relevant portions of the MediaWatch item from CityLife’s Nov. 5, 1998 issue, penned by then-Managing Editor Geoff Schumacher.

“It defies explanation.

“On Friday, the Las Vegas Sun’s top front-page story was headlined: ‘Clinton: Reid needed to fight dump.’

“Hmmm. Sounds interesting. The president endorsing a Democratic senator in a tough re-election battle. That’s news. So why didn’t the Review-Journal or the TV stations carry the story?

“A closer look reveals that it was written by Sun Editor Brian Greenspun, who never writes news stories. But Greenspun is a close friend of Clinton. They went to law school together, and have remained chums ever since.

“Apparently, Greenspun hooked up privately with the president and came away with the laudatory quotes about Reid, whom the Sun endorsed at least three times before Tuesday’s election (not counting Greenspun’s ’story.’ [Greenspun’s relationship with Clinton was, by the way, not disclosed in the Sun piece in question.]

“The ’story’ if you haven’t guessed, wasn’t really a story at all but yet another avenue to endorse Reid in his race against Ensign.

“Greenspun breaks about a hundred basic rules of newswriting in his effort to make Reid look indispensable to Nevada’s future.

“According to the ’story,’ Clinton’s comments came in response to a ‘Where I Stand’ column Greenspun wrote a week before endorsing Reid.

“‘Your column was right on target,’ Clinton reportedly told Reid, as if the Sun is regular reading at the White House.

…

“Because this is not really a news story, Ensign was not asked to respond to Clinton’s comments.

“While Sun newsroom employees are genuinely striving to make the paper credible, the Greenspun family can be counted on to drag it back to the level of a journalistic plaything.”

(Full disclosure(s): Like us at Various Things & Stuff, Schumacher worked at the Sun before he came to CityLife. He’s now director of community publications at the Stephens Media Group, which publishes this blog, CityLife as well as the Sun’s rival paper, the Review-Journal.)