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For this week’s cover package on why there aren’t any good Vegas novels, we invited CL contribs and other writers to come up with premises for would-be Great Las Vegas Novels. Jarret Keene didn’t fucking listen. But it’s clear he has a future in alternative-lifestyle pulp writing. One of his many ideas, flung not unlike feces at a zoo:

Casino Queen: This is a GLBT-friendly time-travel adventure story about a drag revue headliner and Commercial Center bar owner named Cage, who seeks
to steal fashion tips from great women in history: Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, Greta Garbo. Fifteenth-century King Charles II has designs on our hero, however, and Cage soon finds himself dressed up as (the missing-in-action) Joan and leading a full-scale invasion of the Strip as standard bearer for the French army. The only thing in their way? A Liberace Museum employee who knows the truth about the new Maid of Orleans.

Of course, U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton will say anything to get elected! But that only makes it so much more fun when she gets caught telling whoppers. With cheese. Check out our colleague Hugh Jackson’s blog for the most hilarious campaign video in a long time.

This week in CityLife, Andrew Kiraly trades his editing desk for a gun turret long enough to pump some tracer rounds into Charles Bock’s ballyhooed novel, Beautiful Children, as part of a cover story on the pitfalls of writing Vegas fiction. Look for that fireball in the sky on Thursday morning when CityLife hits the stands. Meantime, if you need a long snort of Mr. Bock, that’s him wearing a True Value work shirt on the first episode of a new web-based book-chat show, Titlepage. Moderated by editor Daniel Menaker, this episode also features novelists Richard Price, Susan Choi and Colin Harrison.

Bock is by turns modest (”Hopefully there’s also some very hopeful, very human, best parts of ourselves in the book, and some jokes that don’t suck”), as determinedly unpretentious as his shirt (”I don’t even know if Vermeer is a painter … I think he is”), mildly cynical about his onetime home (”There’s a Guggenheim in Las Vegas, but it’s a status marker”) and somewhat less mildly cynical about his onetime hometown (Vegas is “where everyone knows everything about everything except a book”). It’s a pretty good performance overall.

As for the show itself, the production values are decent, the writers have ample time to talk and, hey, it’s about books.

We love this story from the Friday Las Vegas Sun, about how libertarians are worried that the government will get bigger in the wake of the hepatitis scare at the Endoscopy Clinic of Southern Nevada, or the mortgage foreclosure crisis.

Wayne Allen Root, whose full-time job seems to be the marketing and promotion of Wayne Allen Root, has this to say: “Yes, this scares the heck out of me because it’s not the solution.” And our friend Chuck Muth notes, “Every time a situation comes up, people say we need more government.”

Well, we’ve got a surprise for you, Chuck: This time, we’re not saying we need more government. Hell, just having the regular-sized government would be enough.

It was Republican Gov. Jim Gibbons, recall, who cut funds that would have paid for the Bureau of Licensure and Certification, funds that would have paid for inspectors to go out and make sure people such as Dr. Dipak Desai weren’t building 8,000-square-foot homes by (allegedly) reusing 50-cent syringes. And even if that money had been delivered in full, the bureau apparently couldn’t fill the positions it already had open.

If it had the money and the wherewithal to fill the jobs, might the problems at Desai’s Endoscopy Center of Southern Nevada been prevented? Perhaps. It was an inspection by the Southern Nevada Health District that finally uncovered the wrongdoing. And aren’t we glad that Big Brother was snooping into private-sector health care that day?

We don’t need more government. We just need the government we already pay for!

And please don’t give us the line that these problems are caused by government in the first place. Government did not make the doctors at the Endoscopy Center allegedly order nurses to re-use syringes and single-dose vials of medicine. Greed did. Government did not make the clinic staff allegedly fail to properly sanitize the equipment in the clinic. Greed did.  Government uncovered these alleged crimes. And we should all be glad that our big-government loving society paid for the medical cops who did the gumshoe work!

Some might argue that the poor doctors at the clinic were forced to cut corners, since the government-regulated insurance companies and Medicare pay so little for procedures. But don’t forget, this is our private-sector health care system we’re talking about.  It’s not “socialized medicine,” of the type that the Democrats want, which isn’t socialized medicine any more than the mandate to buy auto insurance in Nevada is “socialized auto insurance.”

The reason people clamor for more government when things go awry is that is inconceivable human beings would behave in such a depraved way. Who would grind up sick and dying cows and allow fellow humans to eat the meat therefrom? What kind of a doctor would knowingly expose patients to a deadly virus for want of using a cheap syringe? Who would engage in mendacious financial transactions that lead giant companies to bankruptcy, destroying the pensions of loyal workers to make a few more bucks? What kind of “public servant” would turn his back on his constituents to enrich himself? What giant, moneymaking corporation would take taxpayer money, knowing that poor students may not be able to attend college or working poor families may not be able to afford daycare as a result? What kind of a sick, twisted, sociopath would lie to an entire nation so this country could attack a sovereign nation under entirely false pretenses?

“There ought to be a law” is a natural reaction to that kind of inhumanity. But it’s also a short-signed one, since it seems no matter how many laws we pass, the evildoers keep finding ways to do their evil.

But that doesn’t mean we stop trying, especially if “down with Big Government” is the best our foes have to offer.

So much news, so little time. Let’s digest together with some Quick Hits. Here we go!

• An ABC reporter tells Vice President Dick Cheney that two-thirds (that’s 66.6 percent!) of the American people oppose the war. “So?” Cheney replies. So Cheney’s a total prick, that’s what! And 100 percent of the people knew that.
• Chancellor Jim Rogers and the Review-Journal editorial page are upset that the Clark County Democratic Party will get the Thomas & Mack center nearly for free April 12 to conduct the sequel to the Feb. 23 Clusterfuck Convention. We tend to agree: The county Democrats and their never-to-be-named leader screwed up the first go-round. They should have to pay for the second.
• Congressman Ron Paul will be a speaker at the Republican state convention April 26 in Reno! (Why, that’s almost enough to make us want to go to Reno! Almost.)
• “Ron Paul’s brought at lot of people into the party, and we’re excited about that. We’re coming together behind John McCain — he is our nominee — but we’re happy to have Ron Paul come speak and be part of the convention.” — Party Executive Director Zac Moyle. Yes, Ron Paul will be a speaker. But that doesn’t mean the War Party is going to actually listen to him!
• No, no, no! The Las Vegas Convention Authority, Clark County and the cities of Las Vegas, North Las Vegas, Henderson, Mesquite and Boulder City can’t be plaintiffs in a lawsuit against Sheldon Adelson’s petitions to divert money from the LVCVA! That’s going to give Adelson’s people the precise opening they need…!
• See what we mean: “Of course government is going to sue to resist the people’s right to petition and reform government. Government by it’s nature doesn’t reform itself; it takes the people to accomplish reform. We believe taxpayers in Nevada want an alternative to having their taxes raised.” — Robert Uithoven, consultant to Las Vegas Sands Inc.
• So, Clark County doesn’t have enough money to run University Medical Center, supply staff to county courtrooms, provide a legally sufficient number of public defenders or properly staff its child welfare offices. But it does have enough money to spend nearly $8 million buying some dirty businesses in the Commerical Center. What the fuck? (No pun intended.)
• So, Las Vegas does have enough money to build an entirely new City Hall which its own officials admit is not needed to accommodate the city’s staff, but it doesn’t have enough money to keep the gyms open on Sundays? Again, what the fuck?
• Two-time Assembly candidate Kris Munn (he once lost to incumbent Mark Manendo) won’t reveal who’s behind a pair of initiatives aimed at “cleaning up government.” But the net effect of these initiatives would be detrimental to the political involvement of union members, says AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Danny Thompson. Hmmm. Who do we know around here who a.) has a lot of money, b.) hates unions, c.) likes to use the initiative process under the cloak of secrecy?

If Gov. Jim Gibbons called on three members of the Board of Medical Examiners to quit in order to induce them to resign, he’s failed miserably. Almost everybody in the world seems to be taking the side of three doctors who, because of ties to recycling advocate Dr. Dipak Desai, have recused themselves from an investigation into his clinic/hepatitis factory.

If, however, Gibbons did it to divert the state’s attention from the fact that he apparently doesn’t know dick about anything, well, mission accomplished!

Yet today, as we write this, all three members of the board that Gibbons wants out — Drs. Daniel McBride, Javaid Anwar and Sohail Anjum, along with Executive Director Tony Clark — are still around. And they are getting support from some high-profile people.

Already, we knew that U.S. Sen. Harry Reid said they should stay. This weekend, we read in the Review-Journal that U.S. Sen. John Ensign said they should stay. And former Gov. Kenny Guinn — who appointed the three doctors to their posts on the medical board — told the Las Vegas Sun that they should stay. Review-Journal columnist Jane Ann Morrison weighed in for McBride in her column this morning.

Sure, Assemblywoman Sheila Leslie said McBride, at least, should go. But that was only because he was both on the board’s committee investigating medical malpractice while at the same time serving as chairman of an insurance company that fights medical malpractice claims. And McBride quit the insurance job last week, after the Review-Journal revealed the obvious conflict.

(Daniel Burns, Gibbons’s temporary spokesman, claimed on Thursday, “That’s why the governor has asked for his resignation.” But up until that point, Gibbons and Burns insisted it was the doctors’s ties to Desai that prompted the governor to demand their resignations. We note this not to suggest that the governor and his press shop are disorganized, or that it’s difficult to find discrepancies in the governor’s account, but rather to show the administration is desperately grasping at straws in an attempt to make the governor look like he’s in charge.)

Gibbons’s new spokesman, former reporter Ben Kieckhefer, maintains Gibbons still wants the board members to quit, despite their recusuals and the fact that state law allows the governor to appoint temporary members to hear individual cases in which board members have declared a conflict. And if there’s anything we know about Gibbons, it’s that he’s stubborn!

So, let’s do the score: On the pro-resign side, we have Gibbons, and Leslie, and some trial lawyers (strange bedfellows, indeed!). On the don’t-resign side we have Reid, Ensign, Guinn, Morrison and, apparently, everybody who ever met McBride, since they all say he’s the most decent, ethical guy ever.

No matter what else is true, however, something Leslie said is: “Right now, I think this whole stalemate between the governor’s office and the board is a huge diversion to the real issues.” Indeed. We mustn’t lose sight of the fact that it’s been alleged that Desai put people’s lives in danger so he could save money, and that, if true, he should probably lose his medical license and go to jail for, oh, say, ever.

GET INVOLVED: A hearing of the Legislative Committee on Health Care to discuss the crisis will be held at 5:30 p.m. tonight at the Grant Sawyer State Office Building downtown.

Rest assured that Las Vegas is doing its part to fuck up the planet.

Las Vegas is filled with cutthroat visionaries and steely-eyed pioneers, but perhaps none are so bold as the minds behind the Las Vegas-based company Arctic Oil & Gas, which is throwing its big ol’ balls on the table with a preliminary claim to purportedly vast oil reserves beneath the central Arctic Ocean — now available thanks to new, possibly global warming-induced seasonal melts that positively tantalize with the possibility of tasty oil extraction! From the Edmonton Journal:

The company, which counts retired B.C. senator Edward Lawson among its directors, has filed a claim with the United Nations to act as the sole “development agent” of Arctic seabed oil and gas.

The firm acknowledges that the Arctic’s petroleum deposits are the “common heritage of mankind,” but has argued that the polar region requires a private “lead manager” to organize a multinational consortium of oil companies to extract undersea resources responsibly and equitably.

Translation: Mine! Mine! Mine! Never mind the grievous irony in taking advantage of global climate change to drill for a source of fuel whose use is a culprit in causing global climate change. What’s up with the Arctic Oil & Gas just waltzing in and filing a legal claim on an Arctic seabed? You can, uh, do that? Here’s hoping the UN finds some counterballs to put the scheming AOG in its place.