Got time for some been-in-meetings-all-day Totally Quick Hits, Media Style? They’re a refreshing afternoon pick-me-up, and full of fiber. Here we go!

• “Senate Democrats rally to block hike in minimum wage.” Oh, how they must have cackled over at the Review-Journal when they wrote that headline. Democrats? Blocking the minimum wage? Why, those a-holes!

The lead of the McClatchy Newspapers story gives the full tale: “With a showdown approaching today or Friday, Senate Democrats are publicly predicting that they’ll block a minimum wage hike this year so long as Republicans insist that it be tied to slashing taxes on inheritances for a select group of wealthy Americans.” (emphasis added)

Yes, that’s it: Democrats want a minimum wage increase, but they don’t want it if they have to swallow estate tax “reform,” which is what the House Republicans knew when they voted to send this bill to the Senate. And, they got their headline.

If it was us, we’d have gone with “Democrats refuse to swallow GOP poison pill,” or perhaps “Republicans ride for estate tax reform, using poor people as sled dogs.”

• You’ve got to read this story in the Las Vegas Sun if only for the great line at the end of the first paragraph.

• We’re hard on the R-J Living section, but only because it’s lame. But there is lameness at the Sun, too.

• Sure, just 8.5 percent of the 70 people featured in Las Vegas Life’s August “It List” issue are members of, or business partners with, the magazine-owning Greenspun Media Group. Actually keeping the vigorous self-love under 10 percent is an improvement.

But who the hell picked some of these people? And how honest is Life to not including a single member of its rival Stephens Media Group on the “It List”? You may not like him, but is Stephens President Sherm Frederick really not an up-and-comer, innovator, old guard or new guard guy? And no Stephens writer or editor is at least worth a mention? Please.

And, seriously, can Las Vegas Sun managing editor Mike Kelley really be called an “innovator” just because he happened to be standing around when the Greenspuns agreed to fold the flagging Sun into the daily R-J?

Let’s be honest: This list isn’t. Honest, that is. What were Publisher Pat Kelly and her editors thinking?

Having said that, the profile of U.S. Senate candidate Jack Carter (by longtime Life scribe Joe Schoenmann is worth a read.

But that’s only if you can get past “It List” interviews like the one in which KNPR-FM 88.9 host Dave Berns says “I like to say I got a triple dose of righteousness: growing up in New York, being a Jewish kid and living in Eugene [Ore.] — that’s like a super-equation for knowing that you are right, that you have questions and that you are going to ask them.”

We at Various Things & Stuff like to say we got a triple dose of cynicism: We grew up in California, we’re Catholic and we now live in Las Vegas. Still, we’re guessing this quote was uttered tongue-in-cheek. At least we’re hoping it was.

Las Vegas Deputy City Attorney Daniel Still’s memo on whether the stocks constitute “cruel and unusual punishment,” is so good, we think somebody should send it to the Bush administration, which could benefit greatly from reading at least the first section.

The attorney, whose memo betrays a certain amazement that the question even needed to be asked, let alone answered, does yeoman’s work pointing out how the stocks are wrong. And he restrains himself from calling Mayor Oscar Goodman a dumbass for proposing the idea in the first place. (Goodman wanted to use the old-time punishment on graffiti vandals, allowing people to paint their faces while their head and hands are immobilized in the stocks.)

“The main functions of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment is to limit the power of a legislative body to establish penalties for crimes, restrict courts when sentencing convicted defendants and protect prisoners from the excesses of prison authorities in the executive branch,” writes Still. (A copy of the memo was sent to us here at Various Things & Stuff after an Open Records Law request. Goodman waived the usual attorney-client privilege so the document could be released. Thanks, mayor!)

“The United States Supreme Court has declared that ‘the unnecessary and wanton infliction of pain … constitutes cruel and unusual punishment forbidden by the Eighth Amendment,’” Still adds.

But wait, you may be saying at home. They used the stocks long after the Eighth Amendment was written. So how could they be considered cruel and unusual when measured against the founder’s intent? If the framers of the Bill of Rights thought the stocks were cruel, would they not have been banned after the Bill of Rights was adopted?

Good question. And Still’s answer, culled from court rulings: We’re not talking about the framer’s intent. We’re talking about modern standards.

The Eighth Amendment, the Supreme Court has ruled, “embodies broad and idealistic concepts of dignity, civilized standards, humanity and decency against which penal measures must be evaluated,” Still’s memo reads. “The Estelle court [referring to the 1976 Estelle v. Gamble decision] further indicated that punishments which are incompatible with evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society or which involve unnecessary and wanton infliction of pain are repugnant to the cruel and unusual punishment clause.”

Moreover, Still adds, punishments that are inhumane, barbarious [sic], unknown to common law or which have become obsolete with the progression of humanitarianism violate the Eighth Amendment.

Let’s get practical: In Hope v. Pelze (2002), the Supreme Court ruled that handcuffing an inmate to a chain post for two to seven hours was cruel and unusual punishment. If that’s true, the stocks are definitely out.

The question we should now be asking is, given Still’s memo and its fairly sound legal reasoning, why are things like torture and secret prisons allowed under U.S. law? The obvious answer: They’re not, but, much like warantless wiretapping, the Bush administration is doing them anyway. If only they had the moral conscience of a deputy city attorney in Las Vegas. (And, while we don’t agree with Goodman on using the stocks to punish, we do think he did the right thing to ask his legal counsel to issue a ruling before plowing forward with a bad idea. Would that the president would take as much care as the mayor.)

Oh, and about that idea that a person could voluntarily choose the stocks, to avoid or reduce a stint in jail? Yeah, that’s out, too, Still writes in his memo. “The Supreme Court indicated that a promise associated with a waiver is unenforceable if the interest in its enforcement is outweighed in the circumstances by a public policy harmed by enforcement of the agreement,” the memo reads.

“Based upon the above common law analysis of waiver, it is likely a court would consider a defendant’s waiver of Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment as an unenforceable promise,” the memo adds.

Don’t forget, counselor, that this is Las Vegas, the wild west. You never know what our courts will do. Unless you’re a friend of the judge, that is.