We were meaning to get around to writing about the potential candidacy of our friend Chuck Muth against Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley, the way our colleagues have done. (Read Anjeanette Damon’s take here and again here.) We weren’t totally sure, however, that this wasn’t one of Ashton Kutcher’s non-hilarious douche pranks, so we held off.

Well, Chuck swears it’s real on his website, where he’s done the serious math about his chances of moving from his home in Carson City to Buckley’s District 8 here in Las Vegas. And he’s definitely not all talk: He once ran against Senate Minority Leader Dina Titus. If anybody would challenge the state’s first female speaker, it’s Muth.

As far as we’re concerned, we don’t think he should do it. First, as Chuck explains in the link above, the math is not with him. He’d need more than 1,100 Democrats to abandon the speaker in a year when Republicans are as popular as Dr. Dipak Desai sipping from the punchbowl with a hepatitis-infected syringe.

Second, we like Buckley. She’s done a good job as an Assembly member, and her tenure as speaker was a good one. Unlike somebody else who we won’t name (hint: it rhymes with Phil Maggio), she actually had the Assembly finished on time during the 2007 session, with a few minutes to spare! So, she deserves another term.

Third, we also like Chuck, and we don’t want him to die. We’re not saying Buckley would intentionally kill Muth just for running against her. Not at all. But let’s be honest: Sometimes, madam speaker doesn’t know the power of the Buckley Stare of Death. You know how the emperor in Star Wars shot lightening out of his hands? That would be like an Asian massage with happy ending compared to being on the other end of the Buckley Stare of Death. (Trust us. We’ve seen in once or twice ourselves.)

But why do we have to choose? Why shouldn’t we be allowed to have both Buckley as speaker and Chuck in the Assembly? (Can you picture that? People would pay money to attend those floor sessions! MUTH: Madam Speaker! May we consider Assembly Bill 432, the Barbara Buckley Loves Taxes Like Eliot Spitzer Loves Whores Act of 2009? BUCKLEY: The chair will entertain a motion for the gentleman from Southern Nevada to blow it out his ass!)

Instead of running in a tough, numbers-adverse district, why not do a cakewalk in a GOP-held seat where the incumbent is, shall we say, lametastic? Let’s see, where’s that Assembly roster? Oh, here is is. Yes, let’s see here. Here you go! District 13, where incumbent Chad Christensen has racked up way more campaign-finance violations than he’ll ever see in bills passed. Why not run for that seat? Or stay up north and run in District 26, home of uber-dick Ty Cobb.

Hell, there’s even an open seat down here, since Assemblywoman Valerie Weber has decided to commit political seppuku and run for the Clark County Commission against heavily anointed Las Vegas Councilman Larry Brown. District 5 is in a nice area, or so we hear.

Our point? Don’t waste the kids’s college fund, Chuck! Save yourself: Move to Southern Nevada, for sure, since it’s way better than Carson City. But don’t run against Buckley!

Is this even the same band? Local superstar act Panic at the Disco emerged in 2005 and was barely distinguishable from its emo-pop peers. For its second album, the quartet has arguably overcompensated with songs that not only sound nothing like their predecessors, but rarely sound anything like each other, either.

Pretty. Odd (oy, more extraneous punctuation) is an ambitious 13-song collection of throwback pop-rock, with seemingly every genre and musical instrument thrown in — and not always in service of the songs on which they appear. Some songs have strings. Some have horns. And some, like “The Piano Knows Something I Don’t Know” (oy, more overlong titles), have horns and strings and bells, Panic stuffing itself with sounds like it had the Rio Carnival Buffet of instruments at its disposal.

Which is to say a lot of Pretty is the work of its producer, Rob Mathes, who conducts orchestras on top of producing pop albums. He took the boys over to Abbey Road studios in England — after some recording at the Palms hotel-casino studio — and the inspiration of that locale comes through several songs. But it’s not just The Beatles who are the obvious sonic touchstones here; The Kinks and The Beach Boys have also sprinkled their kaleidoscopic pop dust over these tracks. Sometimes it’s nearly overwhelming, and other times you marvel at the simultaneous complexity and breeziness of the compositions. The only recognizable Panic element in “Do You Know What I’m Seeing” is Brendon Urie’s (albeit improved) voice.

Amid all that clatter is songwriting that improves upon 2005’s A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out. Single “Nine in the Afternoon” is a knockout tune that blends Britpop with Ben Folds. “That Green Gentleman” also bears that irresistible Blighty bounce, a sonic truce between Oasis (by which we mean The Beatles) and Blur (The Kinks). And lyrically, the band is considerably less arch or breathless (though there’s some cheek to “I Have Friends in Holy Spaces”). It’s just one of several improvements that makes Pretty. Odd pretty interesting.

Clearly, a love of literature will draw bibliophiles to the new Bauman Rare Books in the Palazzo. What compels these book addicts to old tomes? The inviting mustiness of the pages? The sense of palpable connection to the past? The plain, comforting physicality of a well-bound book that seems to calm a mind addled by the Information Age?

Well, you know, like, totally all of the above! From today’s Review-Journal piece:

“I love, love, love old books,” said Jennifer Whitehair, online editor for the Las Vegas tourism Web site Vegas.com and book collector. “It is a great store, I’m happy to see it has come to Vegas.”

Why not? They’re fluffy, delicious and calorie-free! Here we go!

• Clark County’s Fire Chief Steve Smith wants companies to learn the importance of getting a “hot work permit” to avoid future fires like the one that was ignited at the Monte Carlo on Jan. 25. You know what an excellent learning tool might be, Chief Smith? A citation for people who did work without one anc caused a fire!
• Of course, no one in the Monte Carlo fire will be cited.
• Gov. Jim Gibbons is set to announce another set of budget cuts on Monday, as the projected deficit could be as high as $800 million. Does he know that once the state of Nevada cuts its budget to nothing, there’s nothing for him to be governor of anymore?
• On the upside, our governor problem would be solved.
• Speaking of Gibbons, my colleague Jon Ralston wrote a piece saying the word “insensate” perfectly describes the governor. We looked it up. It means, “lacking sensation; not feeling, or not capable of feeling, sensation; inanimate; without sense or reason; foolish; stupid; lacking sensibility; without regard or feeling for others; cold; insensitive.”
• To us, that seems like a lot of effort to describe the governor. What’s wrong with the classic “asshole”?
• We know U.S. Sen. Harry Reid is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And we know the LDS church discourages its members from imbibing any substance that alters a person’s state of mind. But when Reid describes the 2008 presidential campaign as “one of the most sensationally positive campaigns in the history of our country,” we simply must ask: Is he high?
• Hey, Review-Journal editorial page: It’s ruby slippers. We’d have thought you would know that…

Well, that was quick: A pair of ballot initiatives that would ostensibly have cleaned up government are being pulled. Did the conservative forces behind them decide that dirty government was OK after all?

Not really, says organizer Kris Munn. They’ll just try to find somebody in the state Legislature who will put the ideas into a bill in the 2009 session. He said Monday that “Both of these [initiatives] are near to my taxpayer heart,” but apparently, he didn’t have the heart to fight for them in court.

It turns out Nevadans for Clean and Open Government were scared off by a lawsuit filed by Nevadans for Nevada, an AFL-CIO group that pointed out the two initiatives were anti-union attack pieces in disguise. One, banning sole-source contractors from making political contributions, would have silenced unions in the political process, and the other, a ban on using taxpayer money on lobbyists, would have put local governments at a disadvantage.

Oh, and lurking in the fine print: Paycheck protection, which would have kept unions from being able to automatically deduct dues from members’s paychecks. That’s a longtime Republican wet dream, since they hate that any group of working people might get parity with big business.

You know, we think AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Danny Thompson is a great guy. First, he sues to protect us from that misanthropic failed congressional candidate Sharron Angle’s war on cops, nurses and firefighters (via property tax restrictions) and now he’s fighting anti-America right-wingers and their efforts to attack the First Amendment right of working people to petition their government for a redress of grievances. And he’s managed to keep local labor together despite a big split on the national stage.

Nice work, Mr. Thompson. Keep it up.

U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton just can’t seem to get past that big, giant, steaming, huge pile of horseshit she dumped on the public in recent days, which is to say, her wholly invented tale of braving sniper fire on a landing in Bosnia.

In reality, her visit to Bosnia was no big deal. But to hear Clinton say it, well, she was Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan. At least until the video surfaced of her walking, head held high, with daughter Chelsea Clinton, greeting people right on the tarmac in a ceremony she said was canceled due to sniper fire.

After first saying she “misspoke,” Clinton on Tuesday finally admitted she made “a mistake,” but only after saying “I had a different memory.”

“So I made a mistake. That happens. It proves I’m human, which, you know, for some people is a revelation,” Clinton said.

Awww, a self-deprecating remark, urging us all to move on. We will. But just one real quick thing first.

See, she didn’t make “a mistake.” She invented events that never took place. That’s not making a mistake. That’s telling a big fat fucking lie. And it doesn’t prove she’s human. It only proves she’s a big fat fucking liar. And sadly, that is not a revelation.

We missed it until Keith Olbermann noted it on TV Tuesday, but one of her remarks on the Excuseapalooza 2008 tour was made during an interview with the  Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. (”I was sleep-deprived and I misspoke,” she told the paper.) That triggered a distant memory for us, and so we checked.

Indeed, the Tribune-Review was one of the former workplaces of Christopher Ruddy, who is most famous for his work asserting that former White House deputy counsel Vincent Foster was murdered. (Official accounts concluded that he committed suicide in a park outside of Washington, D.C.) Ruddy expounded on his newspaper reporting in a book, The Strange Death of Vincent Foster: An Investigation, in 1997. He went on to found the right-wing website Newsmax.

Ruddy’s work asserted that not only was Foster murdered, but that it had something to do with his work in the Clinton White House. It found purchase in the Tribune Review, Olbermann noted, a paper owned by notorious right-winger Richard Mellon Scaife.

And Hillary Clinton sat for an interview with the paper. Perhaps she “had a different memory” of its coverage of the demise of her close friend and associate Foster?

Despite the lies, one thing has become clearer: We now know a little more about how far Clinton will go to become the Democratic nominee.