CARSON CITY — Everybody’s still buzzing about Assemblyman Ty Cobb’s vote against Barbara Buckley’s elevation to be speaker of the Assembly on Monday, including word that he was “taken to the woodshed” by a bipartisan team of fellow lawmakers on Tuesday.

“We just talked about protocol. I think it was a great meeting, we’ll just move on and I hope things will be fine,” said Assembly Minority Leader Garn Mabey, the Republican leader in the lower house.

“I think the assemblyman made an error in judgment, he thought about his actions and now he understands that we work together in a bipartisan manner and that there’s a certain protocol and decorum to the way we do things,” added Majority Leader John Oceguera.

But perhaps the most stark comments came from Assemblywoman Heidi Gansert during a floor session Tuesday.

“Yesterday [Monday], I did not take the opportunity to congratulate you on becoming the first woman speaker in Nevada. I want to, today,” she began.

“I believe all of us were elected not to vote individual agendas, but to promote good public policy for our state. We are ‘One Nevada.’ Whether you are from the north, the south, a man, a woman, Democrat or Republican, our charge is to do what is right for the state. As a fellow female legislator, a wife and a mother, I recognize your commitment to public service and the personal sacrifices you have made. To be successful in this body, you must earn respect. Madam Speaker, you have my respect.”

Got that, Cobb?

• Now that we’ve had our dose of bipartisanship for the day, we can ask this: What’s up with Democrats William Horne and Harry Mortensen speaking in favor of that resolution honoring former President Ronald Reagan passed by the Legislature on Tuesday?

Look, guys, it’s OK to vote for a resolution that’s full of highly varnished statements about Reagan, in the spirit of unity, but you don’t have to like it!

• So Ande Engleman got canned as First Lady Dawn Gibbons‘ “chief of staff.” Now that’s a surprise to us, given the wonderful job she did on the Gibbons administration’s most detailed news release ever, on the first lady’s Armani gown. (That news release appears to have been excised from the governor’s website.)

Engleman laughed and hung up on a reporter when called for comment, but other sources said Engleman and Dawn Gibbons had problems because the first lady felt she was being kept out of key decisions. You know, kind of like her husband and the Legislature.

Anyway, Engleman has had a lot of jobs, from TV reporter to TV talk show co-host, to head of the Nevada Press Association, to government official, to radio reporter, to working part-time for then-Congressman Jim Gibbons in a horrible violation of journalism ethics. We’re sure she’ll find something.

• And finally today, a wee bit of irony going on down in Las Vegas. It seems that the Review-Journal did a survey of business owners (you know, the people who count) about the problems facing Nevada.

On Tuesday, reporter Jennifer Robison reported business owners were generally satisfied with Nevada’s tax climate (30 percent say it’s “excellent,” while 49 percent say it’s “good”).

Now, this is the part of the blog where we churlishly remind you readers of that long-ago story in which Robison wrote that the “hundreds” of new taxes passed by the 2003 Legislature would keep businesses from moving to Nevada, a story for which we’ve still yet to read a correction, despite several subsequent stories in which Robison has quoted people saying the tax climate in Nevada actually attracted them to the state.

And that’s still a valid point to make. But today, there’s more. It seems that while the capitalists quoted in Tuesday’s story are OK with the tax climate, they still bitch that taxes raised in 2003 (there weren’t really hundreds, just a handful) could be eliminated. That’s capitalists for you: Always looking to cut costs.

But consider that in light of today’s Robison piece, in which she reports that businessmen are mighty concerned about transportation, with some even saying that bad traffic is holding their businesses back.

You see it now, right? Businesses hate to pay taxes, and want them cut. But they also want roads so their employees, customers and suppliers can move around and keep the capitalist machine humming. Yet they seem to be ignorant of the perfectly obvious fact that taxes pay for things like roads, and without them, you’re going to have problems like gridlock!

Taxes are the price we pay for civilization, capitalists. So pay up, or shut up.

• And finally today, and speaking of transportation, Regional Transportation Commission General Manager Jacob Snow thinks the members of the Assembly and Senate transportation committees are morons.

At least, that’s the impression we got after watching Snow (literally) pull out a canvass “money bag” to illustrate a too-long presentation on Las Vegas transportation issues to a joint committee meeting Tuesday.

From the bag, Snow produced little Matchbox buses and trains and stuff, some of which he tossed to the committee members like the Sea World people toss fish to the dolphins. (Only unlike at Sea World, Snow demanded the committee members give the toys back at the end.)

Speaking slowly as if to a child, Snow led Chairman Dennis Nolan in reading from a form that listed the amounts of money sent to Washington, D.C., in transportation taxes, and what they got back. (Nevada? $30 million in, $10 million back. We totally got screwed!)

After showing a nifty video, it was naptime for commission members and … oh, wait, that’s right. This isn’t Romper Room! It’s the Legislature! And while we often suspect that some lawmakers aren’t the brightest people, actually treating them like they were morons was insulting.

You know what we didn’t hear Snow say? He didn’t mention anything about the Las Vegas Monorail, a system he once claimed would be the “backbone of transportation in Southern Nevada.” Instead, Snow pitched his own idea: A bus system that goes up and down the middle of the Strip, and out to far-flung areas in the valley. Since this isn’t a fixed route, it can be changed when traffic patterns change. That makes sense to us.

So why was Snow a big advocate of the fixed-route monorail at one time then? Hmmmm…