So, President George W. Bush vetoed a bill today that would have allowed the federal government to spend money on research to use embryonic stem cells to cure disease. The veto is the first in his presidency, but let’s not forget that he’s issued more than 140 “signing statements” on other bills he’s approved which are, in some cases, mini-vetoes anyway. (Think, U.S. Sen. John McCain’s anti-torture bill.)

U.S. Sen. Harry Reid voted for the bill, while U.S. Sen. John Ensign voted against it, saying he considers fertilized embryos to be human life. We can’t agree, given that the embryos would never develop in the labs where they are stored, and would likely simply be discarded anyway. So it’s OK to discard “human life” but not use it to potentially cure disease? We don’t get that.

In any case, it’s very likely that this ends here, since the Senate doesn’t have enough votes to override Bush’s veto (they need 67). It’s just another unfortunate example in the long list of disappointments that is the Bush presidency, which has precisely 915 days left. That’s what Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld calls a “long, hard slog.”

In other Bush news, it was reported by The Associated Press that the president personally blocked an inquiry into the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping program, by refusing to grant security clearances to the ethics lawyers looking in to how the program won approval in the first place. No classified information meant no investigation, and thus the inquiry was shut down.

Why? The president said — through his attorney general — that it was a matter of national security. And White House spokesman Tony Snow said, “What he was saying is that in the case of a highly classified program, you need to keep the number of people exposed to it tight for reasons of national security, and that’s what he did.”

But get this: Apparently Bush did give security clearances to Justice Department lawyers and FBI special agents and their grandmothers when it came time to find out who leaked details of the NSA program to the New York Times.

So apparently, once it was out, it was OK to have more people in the government know about it. Fine, then. Let’s have the lawyers from the Office of Professional Responsibility get their clearances now, and investigate how this violation of the Fourth Amendment started in the first place. And while we’re at it, let’s add conspiracy and obstruction of justice charges to the president’s tab, shall we?

Nine hundred fifteen days. That’s sure a hell of a long time.

• You know, readers, sometimes the distant drums of time’s passing call us to new duties and obligations, and the time comes to move on. That was the (actual) bullshit line that Regent Doug Hill gave when he mysteriously abandoned his elected job.

And now we know why! Review-Journal reporter K.C. Howard reports today that Hill had been offered a job by Sunbelt Communications Co. before he left. Sunbelt, of course, is the company owned by Chancellor Jim Rogers.

While Hill’s behavior was most certainly unethical — entertaining a job offer from someone who is allegedly his subordinate without disclosing the same — he only narrowly avoided an even bigger problem. Howard writes that Hill was out of the room when the regents voted on renewing Rogers contract in June; had he voted on that matter with the job pending, he almost certainly would have committed an entirely separate ethical breech.

So, let’s do the list, shall we:

— Ex-Regent Doug Seastrand applies for and gets a job at UNLV, while he oversees UNLV on the board of regents. (In response, regents adopt a one-year “cooling off” period.)

— Regent Linda Howard openly solicits Rogers — ostensibly her subordinate — to donate to her campaign for public administrator, and he does.

— Rogers underwrites travel and a stay in a five-star hotel for regents on his annual Canadian fishing trip, a gift to his elected bosses that nonetheless goes unreported.

— Rogers agrees to pay for Regent Stavros Anthony to travel to Singapore with him to check out the university system’s new hotel college there.

There are so many conflicts, gifts, favors and consideration going back and forth, it’s hard to keep track! Clearly, Rogers is not intimidated by regents. In fact, he functions as their boss. But he shouldn’t be paying for a damn thing for them, and they shouldn’t be soliciting him for a damn thing. It’s wrong, it’s unseemly, and it contributes to the well-deserved reputation the regents have for being the worst public body in America.

Rogers’ riches make him a unique public servant: He doesn’t need the job, and he doesn’t care about pleasing his “bosses.” That’s generally a good thing. But when his bosses are indebted to him in one way or another, it makes Rogers into an unchecked dictator. And that’s always a bad thing.

• Is U.S. Rep. Jim Gibbons a Mormon? He says yes, even if his official biographies going back to the late 1980s list him as “Protestant.”

A word about labels: Protestant covers a wide swath of modern-day Christianity, so named because they “protested” the abuses and corruption of the Roman Catholic Church, another great branch of Christianity. Modern examples of Protestants include Lutherans, Baptists, Evangelical Free, Church of Christ and Pentacostals.

Mormons were founded by Joseph Smith around 1830, after he said he’d received a vision indicating that all the current incarnations of the church had strayed from the truth path. (Funny, that’s just what the Orthodox say about the Catholics to this day! Or Orthodox, can’t you get over that filioque clause business?) While Mormons accept the Bible as one of their four foundational books, they wouldn’t be considered Protestants in the traditional mold.

Therein, the dilemma. Gibbons says he may have checked off “Protestant” on a biography form long ago, but that he’s always been a Mormon, long before 2003, when he contemplated running against U.S. Sen. Harry Reid (who is a Mormon) and asked guidebooks like the Almanac of American Politics to change his affiliation.

“I’ve gone to a lot of different churches in my life, from Baptist to Episcopal to Presbyterian to LDS [i.e. the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, aka Mormons], but I have always considered myself LDS,” Gibbons told the Review-Journal today. “I am not the most active individual in the church, but I still hold my beliefs and I still believe in the doctrines and principles.”

But wait, Gibbons added: “I don’t lead with my religion. I don’t judge or gauge people on their religion. I am not out there using church rolls and church address books to lay my religion on my sleeve to ask for votes.”

Why, is he saying somebody out there is leading with his religion, using church rolls or address books to lay their religion on their sleeve and ask for votes? To whom could he possibly be referring?

• And finally today, we’re glad to note that Assistant County Manager Virginia Valentine will be promoted to the top job in Clark County come Aug. 11. She’ll be the first woman to hold the post, and responsible for 11,000 employees and a $5.9 billion budget.

Valentine previously worked at the city of Las Vegas, where she was hired by ex-Mayor Jan Jones and worked under current Mayor Oscar Goodman. She took the job at Clark County after a brief stint at the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce, where she was in charge of government affairs.

Valentine gets top marks from almost all quarters, and earned a unanimous vote from the Clark County Commission Tuesday. We know she’ll do a great job taking over for another highly qualified government administrator, current manager Thom Reilly.