Overpriced downtown midrise, meet a creature commonly known as a ''renter.''

Hm. Interesting story in the Sun today asking, gee, why is coughtooexpensive Streamline Tower only half-sold coughtooexpensive? Could it be that desire to live downtown hasn’t reached coughtooexpensive critical mass yet? Naw, the collective fauxhawkian desire is coughtooexpensive definitely throbbing at max levels.

Could it be that bobos are a-scared of being in the “ghetto”? Naw, anyone who’s set a babydolled foot on East Fremont in the last year knows it’s coughtooexpensive tidied up considerably.

Could it be that, oh, maybe coughtooexpensive intractable high- and mid-rise developers who were hoping to ride the coattails of the housing boom coughtooexpensive overplayed their hand coughtooexpensive and now are feverishly praying that interest in downtown miraculously overtakes coughtooexpensive a slumpy economy and that coughtooexpensive young urbanites suddenly — also miraculously — start pulling down high five-figure salaries that will convince a skittish lender to qualify them for a coughtooexpensive overpriced condo overlooking a downtown-in-progress so the developers can get their creditors off their backs?

Achootooexpensive. Excuse me!

 Gov. Jim Gibbons today apologized for his use of a state cell phone to send hundreds of text messages to an alleged paramour, according to the Reno Gazette-Journal. Of course, this being Gibbons, he managed to screw himself even harder and deeper than before his apology. This from the newspaper’s story:

In his first comments since public documents were released detailing nearly 860 personal text messages exchanged between Gibbons and [the woman] on his state cell phone, Gibbons said his conversations with her centered on daily life.

He said he talked to her about his office, personnel decisions he was making and his tax policy. The pair also talked about her dog, her kids and other life issues, he said.

Gibbons said it was a mistake to use his state phone for the personal conversations.

“It wasn’t something I should’ve done,” he said. “When I realized the state was getting charged for it, I immediately ceased and paid the bills.”

OK, that’s it. You know what, governor? Fuck you, too! No disrespect, but that’s what we say to people who think we’re so stupid as to buy the kind of bullshit that’s being slung at us in the above paragraphs. But on the off chance that Gibbons is being honest (which, to be frank, we must discount as a possibility), a couple things:

1. They talked about personnel decisions? Really? Well then his “friend,” must be really, really bad at management, since Gibbons ended up with the worst gubernatorial staff in living memory.

2. They talked about his tax policy? What tax policy? “No new taxes,” takes up three words in a text message. What did they talk about for the other 859 messages?

3. “Life issues”? “Life issues”? C’mon, governor. That’s almost worse than Detroit mayor-style salacious messages. We’d have more respect for you if you admitted you were trying to make time with the lady via state cell phone than if you were swapping comments about that day’s episode of Oprah.

To sum: Gibbons denials of an affair are plainly unbelievable, as the huge number of text messages alone suggests a relationship far beyond that of “just friends” discussing “life issues.” (Hey, we at Various Things & Stuff have friends, too, and we don’t think we’ve sent 860 text messages in our entire life!) His apology and explanation of the texts only add to the notion that he’s lying his ass off, not only to his constituents but, if he actually believes what he’s saying publicly, to himself. This suggests — in bright, neon letters — one final, inescapable conclusion: The man is simply unfit for office.

Gov. Jim Gibbons has called an emergency meeting with legislative leaders to discuss the budget, and we’re pretty sure it’s not just to bump up the state cell phone plan’s text-messaging capability. Gibbons has asked Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate and Assembly, Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto, Treasurer Kate Marshall and even Lt. Gov. Brian Krolicki, who we hear has been asked to bring bagels.

“I believe we are in the midst of the worst fiscal crisis in the state’s history,” said Gibbons, who is also in the midst of the worst political crisis in his career’s history. “It’s important that all state leaders are on the same page about where we stand and [that] together we consider our options moving forward.”

Option 1: Taking away the governor’s cell phone. Oh, and maybe his Wii, too. And no more Grand Theft Auto 4, dude. There’s a fiscal crisis on! (Yes, we know it’s serious, but please: The governor is virtually begging to be mocked, and we will not disappoint.)

Anyway, according to a news release, the general fund is expected to fall short about 6 percent this year, and 11 percent in 2009, far worse than the last crisis of 1992-1993, when the governor says revenues were 5 percent less than expected. In real dollars for the current two-year budget, we’re short  $980.5 million, which is a lot of cabbage.

How bad is it? Gibbons is actually going to talk about Krolicki’s idea to “securitize” the state’s tobacco settlement money, which has some other officials in state government worried. (Under that plan, the state would essentially sell its annual payments from tobacco companies in exchange for a one-time lump sum, estimated at about $775 million.)

Bottom line: Things are not looking good, and 2009 is surely going to rank as one of the worst legislative sessions ever, leavened only slightly by literally tons of text-messaging jokes at the governor’s expense.

Don’t worry about looking for four horsemen: This is not the apocalypse. At least not yet.

But the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce did endorse taxes today, in the form of endorsing the Clark County School District’s upcoming push to authorize $9.5 billion in bonds to build 73 new schools to keep up with the more than 130,000 additional students expected to come to town in the next decade. The bonds will be paid off with property taxes charged to both residential and commercial property in Clark County.

So, finally, the chamber backs taxes on business! Alas, it’s not the kind of business income tax that university Chancellor Jim Rogers has called for, or a gross receipts tax of the kind proposed by the Task Force on Tax Policy in 2002. But it’s a start.

“Our community — including the business community — has a vital interest in ensuring that our school system has the ability to keep up with our growth,” said Hugh Anderson, chairman of the chamber’s generally anti-tax government affairs committee. “This bond issue is revenue neutral and will not increase taxes on individuals, families or businesses, but it will benefit the entire community by allowing the Clark County School District to keep pace with our growing student population.”

Well, now, just when we were trying to say something nice about the chamber — for once — Anderson has to go and ruin it. Yes, he’s correct: Existing bonds are being paid off, which means that passing new bonds won’t increase taxes. However, if the bond issue is rejected, taxes would go down, so in a way, the chamber is still calling for taxes.

Anyway, we’re glad to see that pretty much everybody can get behind this bond program, since it would be damn near impossible to accommodate another 130,000 students in existing schools, without going to multiple shifts and night classes. So, the chamber should get some credit for that, and for the $10,000 it donated to the bond effort from its BizPAC political action committee fund.

But now, a question: Where are we going to get the cash to put teachers computers, books and other resources into those new buildings? Who’s going to clean them up, keep them safe, administer them and fix them up when they break down? Where’s that cash going to come from? The nicest school building in the world is just four walls without gifted teachers and support workers, you know.

Anybody up for talking about the chancellor’s business tax? After all, our community — including the business community — has a vital interest in ensuring that our school system has the ability to keep up with our growth.

Anyone?

By all accounts, our own U.S. Sen. John Ensign is pretty much a failure at anything not involving a ball of some kind. Yes, he’s managed to get himself elected — twice — to the exclusive club that is the U.S. Senate. But what’s he done there, other than carry water for an increasingly irrelevant War Party? Answer: Nada.

Consider recent news: Ensign, in his role as head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, has not only failed to persuade his chosen candidates from actually running for office (or, in one really embarrassing incident, from being able to get on the ballot), but he’s had to repeatedly lower expectations about how badly Republicans are going to lose in November.

And this is after he failed to persuade fellow Republican senators to donate money to what even they must see as a losing proposition. “It’s no secret that Ensign has struggled all cycle to persuade his fellow senators to contribute directly from their campaign accounts, or to even make calls to donors on the NRSC’s behalf,” says a Roll Call story incredibly posted on the NRSC’s own website.

“You sometimes have disappointments,” Ensign told the Las Vegas Sun in a story that detailed how he couldn’t get his chosen candidate in New Mexico, Montana, Iowa, South Dakota and Massachusetts. “We had fantastic potential recruits, we just couldn’t sign (them up). It was a year that would be totally different if we could get our A-plus candidates involved.”

Got that? The head of the NRSC, the man in charge of recruiting candidates to run for office to boost the Republican minority in theU.S. Senate, has just announced that his spate of candidates is less than A-plus. “Republican Senate candidates second-tier, Ensign declares,” might be a good headline for that one.

So what has Ensign been doing instead of failing to help his party? How about voting against repealing tax breaks for big oil companies as gasoline surges past $4 per gallon, where the price will likely stay well into next year. Oh, yes, it’s true.

Why would Ensign be such a monumental dick as to give taxpayer money away to oil companies making record profits while those same taxpayers are being gouged at the pump? Well, apparently Democrats included a windfall profits tax in their tax-break-ending bill, and Ensign doesn’t like taxes.

“When you tax something, you get less of it. That’s a basic fact of supply and demand,” says Ensign spokesman Tory Mazzola, in the Review-Journal’s version of the AP story on the vote. (Sadly, it is not linked online.)

There you have it, folks: Sound-bite philosophy to comfort you while you take it in the shorts at the pump. And don’t get us started on how Ensign voted against another measure to give tax breaks to encourage development of green energy, because the Democrats were responsible enough to pay for that dip in federal revenue. Apparently, deficit spending is OK with Ensign, who claims to support those green tax breaks without offsetting the charge to the treasury.

There are some in the Nevada population who voted for Ensign because he looks pretty. We’re not being sexist when we say that; we’ve actually had female friends confess this is what motivated their vote for a senator who is generally hostile to women’s rights.

So we ask those friends: $4-per-gallon gasoline, oil companies making record profits AND getting taxpayer handouts to search for more oil that the companies can then overcharge us to buy. How pretty is that picture?