We’re not taking sides in the war between Gov. Jim Gibbons and the Nevada state Board of Medical Examiners. In fact, we think it’s probably a good thing that people associated with alleged unsafe clinic owner Dr. Dipak Desai are being asked to step down from the board.

And, we’d like to add, we know nothing about the Nevada medical board, beyond what we’ve read in the papers (i.e. that Ralph Nader’s old group says they don’t discipline doctors enough, and that the board has said it can’t be too harsh, or we’d have no doctors at all).

But we did once run into a medical board, way back in our cub reporter days in California.

There, we worked for the now-defunct Sacramento Union newspaper, and got onto the case of a doctor who provided abortions in clinics in and around Sacramento. We’d heard that he’d botched some procedures, and even had action taken against his license, but that he was still being allowed to practice, even while complaints against him were pending.

We investigated and interviewed the director of one clinic, who told us it was political bias against this physician that was the basis of the complaints, not anything to do with medical practice. Imagine our surprise to discover a deposition — which the clinic director attended — that revealed it was a botched surgery that resulted in action against him.

And the more we looked, the more problems we found. The worst? The doctor used an instrument not normally used in abortion procedures, lost it during a surgery, and sewed the patient up without ever telling her about the incident. Of course, complications later ensued.

We wrote about that incident and others in several stories, finally growing so shocked that we asked the medical board if a patient had to die in order for a doctor to lose his license.

Perhaps that question was unfair. The board in California did investigate and attempt to discipline the doctor, placing his license on probation, against all political pressure. (Pro-choice groups, like the clinic director, cast the charges as an anti-abortion crusade, which always struck us as odd. This doctor was little better than a butcher, as far as we were concerned, and who more to stand up for women’s health and safe abortion procedures than those who were pro-choice?) But nothing came of it.

How do we know? Flash forward about five years, to our stint working for the San Bernardino (Calif.) Sun. We opened the newspaper one day to read a story about a woman who died after having undergone an abortion.

And you know the punchline, right? It was the same doctor we’d investigated in Sacramento years before.

He’d finally killed a patient, through yet another botched procedure.

After supplying all of our old clips to a fellow reporter on the Sun, we followed the story with interest. The doctor finally agreed to voluntarily surrender his license and stop practicing medicine. We could not help but wonder, if the medical board had pushed harder, or insisted on a revocation of this physician’s license earlier, would the woman who died been spared?

There’s really no way to tell. And yes, we did our part, writing about the case and focusing as much attention on the board and this doctor as possible. But all of that was for naught. In the end, a woman really did have to die for something to happen, and even then, his license was surrendered, not revoked. (As an epilogue, he was criminally charged and saw some jail time, last we heard.)

It seemed to us that the medical board in California wasn’t protecting patients as much as doctors. And again, we don’t know enough about Nevada’s medical board to say whether it is doing it’s job or not. What we do know is that when vitally necessary regulatory bodies fail to do their jobs, people can die.

Dip 'em in milk for a total disintegration treat!

Just found these at 7-11. How is it that soft, cakey Oreos are only emerging just now, when so many other cookie breeds evolved their own delicious, gummable sub-species decades ago?

And why aren’t they better? The famous flavor is there, but inexplicably muted. You’ll find way more of that warm, violently chocolatey Oreo taste assault in wimpy, corn-based Oreo breakfast cereal than you will in Cakesters. Maybe it’s just Nabisco’s planned lead-up to a late-spring “Cakesters X-Treme” launch. They’re really going to need something more dangerous to compete with Mrs. Fields’ new Toffee Chunk Life-Wrecksters and Keebler’s Elves-Gone-Nutz! Face-and-Neck-Attacksters.

Oh, how we must face those stony verities when we are faced with travail — faced with (sigh!) losing it all. Truly, what is the measure of a man? The car he drives? The size of his bank account?

No, my friends. No. It is the quality of the ass he owns. And lo, though the son of former County Commissioner Yvonne Atkinson Gates, Brian Atkinson-Turner, was nabbed Friday on charges of filing false tax returns and failing to file corporate tax returns, he will always have for succor in his times of trial the ass of his wife, Kathryn O’Gara. Which is his property. Says so on his MySpace page. Scroll down and wait for the spinning bikini-booty shot! O’Gara’s prominently displayed backside, as well as the rest of her, was arrested on the same charges, by the way.

You can have my ass when you pry it from my cold dead MySpace page.

In a related story — related insofar as it has to do with MySpace pages connected with people in the news — attorney Glen Lerner was sanctioned Friday for explosively flaking on a client’s murder trial. If you feel like the Heavy Hitter is getting too heavily hit upon by the powers that be, never fear — cartoonishly whirl over to his MySpace support group!

In a conference call with Nevada reporters just moments ago, Gov. Jim Gibbons said a “health care professional” told him that single-use vials were not re-used at the Endoscopy Center of Southern Nevada. He declined to identify that person, however.

“That may have been a little bit premature,” addmitted Gibbons, who just yesterday was boldly declaring that no re-use took place. Of course, it did: That’s precisely how infection may have been passed from patient to patient, exposing at least 40,000 people to hepatitis and HIV.

(Hey, kids, here’s a fun new game: Tell the governor something false about a major issue of public importance, and see if he blurts it out to reporters! The winner is the one who gets him to say the most outrageously false thing.)

So, let’s check the score here: The governor said people wouldn’t seek health care because of the “buffoonery” of the news media (and not, say, the greed of doctors re-using syringes and medicine to save money). He then backed off and apologized.

And the governor said that no single-use vials of medicine were re-used, when Southern Nevada Health District investigators clearly established they were. He then backed off and said ” that may have been a little bit premature.” (Actually, it was flat-ass wrong.)

But don’t worry, people! The governor is serious now!

“I am focused today like a laser on our health-care system,” Gibbons declared on the conference call. He didn’t specify whether it was the “laser” on the “Death Star,” come to blow up Planet Sanity.

What he did say was that he has demanded the resignations of three doctors who sit on the state Board of Medical Examiners — Javaid Anwar, Sohail Anjum and Daniel McBride — all of whom have recused themselves from the Endoscopy Center case because of ties to Dr. Dipak Desai, the politically connected owner of the facility at the center of the scandal.

Gibbons took swift action today, he said, after getting “more information.” We can’t be certain, but perhaps that “new information” was this excellent Review-Journal story penned by former medical reporter Paul Harasim. It details just some of the political connections enjoyed by Desai.

Gibbons also demanded the resignation of the board’s executive director, Tony Clark, and insisted that it was only because of Clark’s failure to act more quickly in the case, and not anything else. (This leads us to think there was most definitely something else, but we are totally cynical that way.)
In addition, Gibbons has asked for the termination of Lisa Jones, head of the Nevada Bureau of Licensing and Certification. He says that board had the money to hire inspectors who might have caught the problems at the Endoscopy Center sooner, but failed to do so.

One last thing: We can’t leave this issue without speculating as to the identity of Gibbons’s secret tipster. We’re putting our money on Dr. Ikran Khan, a health care adviser to Gibbons who performed consulting work for Desai last year. It seems like he’d be a perfect pipe from the now-radioactive Desai to the gullible governor.

Then again, we may never know. Khan resigned his post today, Gibbons said.

UPDATE: Yeah, you know how we said we suspected that there was something else behind Gibbons’s push to get rid of Tony Clark from the Board of Medical Examiners? Yeah, here it is.

DOUBLE UPDATE: No, it’s not Khan who gave Gibbons the bad info. According to this Las Vegas Sun story, he hasn’t given the governor any advice about the scandal.Damn! Dr. Desai has so many friends, it’s almost impossible to track down who might be the governor’s secret tipster. Let’s just assume for now it was Dr. Phil, since that guy’s pretty full of it most of the time.

The Fremont East District promises a wealth of nightlife opportunities … if only they can get these new places open.

Taking over the corner of Fremont Street and Las Vegas Blvd., a space once occupied by a neon-encrusted 7-11, The Hive isn’t going to meet its originally anticipated opening date of mid-April. According to the Review-Journal, the new guesstimate is summer 2008.

The Venue of Las Vegas project is also behind schedule. Construction was expected to begin in January and end in October 2008, but crews have yet to demolish the old carpet store at Fremont and Eighth streets.

The R-J’s Alan Choate further reports “a lease is already being negotiated for a proposed tavern at 517 Fremont.” Wishful thinking, considering that’s the address of the almost 3-year-old Beauty Bar.

I knew something was afoot when the members of The Bitters were standing around the Art Bar just after 10 p.m., prepping for their set with hearty swigs of … ice water from plastic Coors Light cups? Zuh?!?! It was so endearingly nerdy I just had to stick around. It wasn’t long before I figured out what was up with all the carefully wrought sobriety: The Bitters needed it in order to better exfoliate my brain with a set of mind-screwing hairtrigger instrumental prog-core that alternately spazzed, charged, swayed and … rocked, yes, rocked, so it wasn’t like I was just standing there like a chooch getting high off wispy guitar abstractions. But don’t take my word for it. Take my shitty camera’s word for it!

Photographic evidence of The Bitters' rockin' mathitude.

The only thing you can’t really see is how guitarist Jeff Murphy has a strange penchant for dressing like an Estonian peasant woman — jeans over sweats topped off with kung-fu shoes or something — or eight-armed drummer Frank Klepacki, who treated the audience to an intense, nearly 10-minute drum solo that was astoundingly non-ghey. I hereby proclaim The Bitters rank easily among our valley’s best bands!

''The gold on our wings was mined from the souls of puppies.''

Money can make people crazy, but gold can really get you retarded – literally. See, gold mining has come a long way from the days of rag-bearded prospectors mucking around in mountain streams. These days, mining gold often requires brutal chemical methods to wrest the stuff from the earth and get the precious metal ready for rappers and squealing housewives.

One of the nasty byproducts of that process: mercury — which just happens to be a potentially deadly neurotoxin. And wouldn’t you know that Queenstake Resources’ Jerritt Canyon Mine, about 50 miles north of Elko, was spewing the stuff left and right because the plant was using old-ass emission-control equipment?

Thankfully, the state has new rules in place to limit mercury emissions, and the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection promptly used them to shut down Queenstake until it got its shit — or in this case, its possibly lethal neurotoxic spew — under control. A 777 to the state for protecting our lungs and our brains!

''Goo goo AIDS ga ga hepatitis goo goo HIV.''

The state should have stripped Dr. Dipak Desai of his medical license the moment it became reasonably clear his practice of re-using syringes and single-dose medicine vials was both intentional and systematic.

So why is Dr. Desai getting by with a flimsy promise not to practice medicine in Nevada until the hepatitis scare is sorted out? According to a March 16 Review-Journal story, it’s likely because he’s got friends in high places — most notably the Nevada Board of Medical Examiners, the entity that holds the key to Desai’s fate in Nevada. The piece reveals that his tight relationships with key board members has completely neutered the board when it comes to honestly investigating what appears to be a willful disregard for patient safety for the sake of profit. No wonder Gov. Gibbons called on three board members today to resign.

Speaking to the R-J, UMC trauma surgeon James Tate said it best. “[Desai is] tied in everywhere. The more you look at this mess, the more you realize that an independent investigation, probably by an agency from out of state, has to be done in order to restore public confidence in our health care system.”

For choosing to shield a well-connected colleague rather than protect public health, we inject the Nevada Board of Medical Examiners with a flaming vial of 666!

Gov. Jim Gibbons has apologized for saying “media buffoonery” was at fault in the health care crisis currently gripping Southern Nevada. But the governor has yet to address a far more serious matter: His lying about what took place to cause the health care crisis in the first place.

(Thanks, by the way, to our colleague Anjeanette Damon of the Reno Gazette-Journal, who posted the governor’s apology news release on her blog. We did not receive a copy of it, nor is one parked at the governor’s news release archive at this hour.)

Here’s what the release says, in part:

The governor also said he regretted using the word “buffoonery” while describing media coverage of the health care crisis. “My intention was to be sure that people were not fearful of seeking medical care because of the intense media coverage, it was a poor choice of words and I regret it,” Gibbons said.

“What we have is a public health care crisis and what we need is public health care confidence,” Gibbons said [emphasis in original]. “That is why I am taking decisive action to restore public trust.”

While we appreciate the govenor’s apology, it’s really unnecessary. We couldn’t possibly care less what Gibbons thinks of us, or says about us. We’ve been called worse than a “buffoon” by better than the governor. So, whatever.

But it’s interesting that Gibbons talks about restoring health care confidence — he himself acted to lower confidence when he falsely claimed Sunday that no single-use vials of medicine were re-used at the Endoscopy Clinic of Southern Nevada. In fact, the vials were re-used. That’s how the hepatitis and HIV viruses were potentially transferred from one patient to another in the first place: re-using syringes (not needles) and single-dose vials of meds on more than one patient.

By the way, that’s not us media buffoons claiming that. It’s the Southern Nevada Health District, whose investigators witnessed the unsafe practices at more than one valley clinic.

Yet Gibbons, in a Gazette-Journal story published Sunday, claimed the opposite. Take a look:

“There was no single-vial of medication reused. There were no reused needles. Gross negligence when you have far below the number of average (hepatitis C) cases listed? That’s trial lawyer speak to me. I think if you’d had gross negligence, you’d have a higher number.”

Thus far, the governor has not retracted, corrected or apologized for that statement, which he must clearly know is untrue. Either that, or he’s so criminally underinformed as to be unable to talk about the issue with any insight whatsoever.

We’re still waiting for the apology for that. We’ll let you know what we hear.