Well, hell if Tom DeLay wasn’t telling the truth, for once.

On Sunday, Sept. 23, Gingrich says on Fox News Sunday that — if his supporters were to raise $30 million by Oct. 21, he’d consider a run for the White House. "I don’t see how as a citizen you could turn that down," said Gingrich.

Then, on Sept. 25, Gingrich appeared before the conservative think tank Nevada Policy Research Institute here in Las Vegas to identify eight major waves of change in American history. Of course, his 1994 "Contract with America" was the eighth wave.

So what the hell do we read on our BlackBerry on Sunday, Sept. 30, just one week after Gingrich sent his supporters racing for their telephones and checkbooks? Only the fact that Gingrich won’t be surfing the Ninth Wave of American History to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue!

What gives? Why the flip-flop?

Well, it seems he had the bank account ready to go, the news conference all set up and the papers ready to file when he learned … he’d have to step down from the non-profit foundation called American Solutions, the primary product of which seems to be Gingrich speaking about his ideas.

Um, nobody checked this out? This came as a surprise to the man who engineered the Republican takeover of Congress, and fought brave battles against former President Bill Clinton (when Gingrich wasn’t banging his own staffers, that is)?

"The McCain-Feingold [campaign finance] Act is a very anti-middle class act," said Gingrich, who would definitely know. "There are such severe penalties. I would have to have stepped down and resigned. … That basically ended the conversation."

What? He’d rather be head of a non-profit that nobody’s ever heard of than president of the United States? He’d rather put out news releases that get turned into coasters on reporter’s desks than try for a chance to speak to them from the White House press room? He’d rather stay on the circuit giving rubber-chicken dinners to inconsequential think tanks than convene state dinners in Washington, D.C.? Southwest over Air Force One?

If you buy any of that, you probably thought Newt had a chance to win in the first place.

According to our friend and colleague Anjeanette Damon, ace political reporter for the Reno Gazette-Journal, Gov. Jim Gibbons took off on vacation last week to Cabo San Lucas, and nobody really knew anything about it.

Oh, he told some people. Like Lt. Gov. Brian Krolicki, for example. Krolicki is technically the governor while Gibbons is out of state. Thus far, it doesn’t appear Krolicki signed any executive orders taking money set aside for Gibbons’ high-tech Jack Bauer Commander-in-Chief Operations Center Play Set and use it to print cocktail napkins with Krolicki’s photo on them. But we’re still checking that out.

But Gibbons didn’t tell many other people. And Damon’s question — did anybody notice the governor was gone? — is a good one.

How could you tell? Well, one way is to check if any really qualified people were kicked off boards or commissions by the guy whose other job is getting Gibbons’ Chief of Staff Mike Dayton coffee. That would be one way.

Another way is to see if anybody had signed off on a really, really stupid hiring/firing/appointment decision made by Business & Industry boss Mendy Elliott. Anybody got anything there?

We suppose you could tell if there were no meetings with foreign government officials, after which a totally fake policy announcement was made. Like, for example, if there were nobody to say the prime minister of Canada is willing to pay for all expatriate Canadians’ cable TV bills or something.

Or wait. Perhaps we’re going about this all wrong. What if instead of looking for things that didn’t happen up here, we were to check things that did happen down in Cabo San Lucas? For example, what if, on a rainy weekday night, a pretty Mexican cocktail waitress was allegedly assaulted by a gringo walking her to her car? Now that might be proof of gubernatorial vacation, right? Let’s give a call down to the Cabo PD and see what we can turn up.

Sure, Porter and co-sponsor U.S. Rep. Sam Farr, D-Calif., can cite big bucks dropped by foreign tourists in America, and how the downturn in tourism since Sept. 11, 2001, has cost American businesses jobs and revenue, to say nothing of lost tax dollars. It’s the same rationale given by every city, county and state for giving away tax dollars in order to lure businesses to set up shop in their jurisdictions.

But it still seems to us that Porter is suggesting we use $50 million to subsidize tourist-dependent economies like Las Vegas, which already spends $4 million a year to attract foreign tourists, via the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. Why should the United States taxpayers — some of whom no doubt oppose gambling — subsidize efforts to get foreigners to come here and drop their money in the casinos or malls?

Farr says the perception is that "Fortress America" doesn’t want tourists. That clearly isn’t the case, as the LVCVA campaign shows. On any given day, you can hear all manner of languages spoken in the hotels on the Strip. We don’t discriminate here in Sin City, unless you’re too poor to play.

It seems to us that a better way for America to attract tourists is to put an end to its arrogant foreign policy. Foreign visitors are much more likely to come to America if they get the idea that everybody in the nation isn’t a cowboy uninterested in cooperating with other nations instead of dictating terms to them. You know, like our president.

And the best way to do that is to get a new president, which we can do starting with the Nevada caucus on Jan. 19. Or Jan. 12. Or whenever the hell it’s going to be held. That may not be Porter’s preferred alternative, him being a Republican and all, but it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than $50 million. Don’t we have a deficit problem, or something?