Since those bastards at NBC have elected to show non-stop tennis or Olympic trials and totally preempt Meet the Press, even on MSNBC, we had some extra time. So we decided to bake up some delicious Quick Hits. Here we go!

• Here’s a clue you may not be suited to be a judge: When people suggest you see a shrink before you present a defense that your crazy ass did bad things while serving as a judge.
• Speaking of Judge (for now) Elizabeth Halverson: She forgot to mention to the state Supreme Court that she’d filed an EEOC complaint against them, even while she was arguing that she shouldn’t have to face voters in what’s sure to be a blowout for whoever ends up running against her. Whoops. Halverson is the worst kind of lawyer: Whiny, and ineffective. (She lost the Supreme Court case, by the way, so now it’s a race to see who will bounce her from office first, the voters or the Judicial Discipline Commission.)
• Lawmakers put off (at least until August) the manifestly terrible idea of gradually turning over public space to private, for-profit interests, the culmination of which will no doubt be modern-day serfdom and a permanent underclass. Remember, it all started with toll roads.
• C’mon, R-J! State Sen. Bob Beers only proposed annual sessions in order to be able to budget better. With an annual session of two months, there would still only be 120 days every two years, which is what the voters said they want. (Stupid voters!) And lawmakers would only get paid for the first month, so there wouldn’t be any extra money involved. And, you’d be able to approve a budget without having to peer two years into the future. That’s no reason to start eating your own!
• Independent candidate Ralph Nader will be on the Nevada ballot! Well, at least one progressive should.
• Nevada State College: 1.6 graduates per year. Seriously. Ten people have graduated from the school since in opened in 2002. Of the original 63 full-time freshman who started in 2002, only 10 graduated from Nevada State College. But the school has conferred 586 degrees.
• So Nevadans use more prescription painkillers than anywhere else in the country. Really? Finally, we’re at the top of a good list! And if you had our governor, you’d want to get high all the time, too, even if he did finally get somebody competent to be his chief of staff.

Former state Sen. Ann O’Connell is an honorable person, a staunch anti-tax Republican who was the only person we know in state government who actually read all the audits of state agencies for clues about where things had gone off the rails. Although we don’t agree with her on many issues, we most definitely respect her, which is not something we say about some of her colleagues.

But we had to disagree ever so slightly with the portrait of O’Connell painted in Thursday’s Jane Ann Morrison column in the Review-Journal.

Morrison says O’Connell was targeted in 2004 in her Republican primary by the gambling industry, which was upset with her for failing to support the industry-backed gross receipts tax in 2003. And that is absolutely  true. But Morrison goes on to add this: “Voters in her GOP primary believed the deceitful fliers, and she lost her race.”

Not entirely true.

See, O’Connell — as anti-tax a Republican as there was — did something surprising and politically unwise in 2003. She signed on to a $1.2 billion tax package presented by her colleagues state Sens. Terry Care and Mark Amodei, which was an alternative to the gambling industry-backed plan. And while we said at the time it was hard to swallow the image of O’Connell as a tax-and-spender, it’s impossible to deny she did voice support a hefty tax package that year. In fact, the issue got a lot of publicity in the runup to the election. (In the final analysis, O’Connell voted against a compromise tax plan because of a conflict of interest. But we’re sure she would have pushed the red button otherwise.)

So, while the fliers in question may not have provided the full measure of O’Connell’s career, they cannot be considered “deceitful,” inasmuch as they stated a simple fact: O’Connell backed a tax. And recall, too, that most everybody — including the Review-Journal’s editorial page — saw through the transparent tactic. Hell, if we were smart enough to figure it out, the voters should have been, too, right?

The man who won that primary race in 2004, state Sen. Joe Heck, went unmentioned in Morrison’s column. He seems to have had a love-hate relationship with the newspaper since his election. On the one hand, the R-J dislikes him for dethroning one of its fiscal heroes, although Heck cannot be described as “pro-tax.” (In fact, his idea to “trigger” cuts based on how bad the economy was at a given time was one of the smartest approaches we heard during the recent special session.) On the other hand, the R-J invited him to pen a series of letters from Iraq (where he was deployed as commander of a medical unit) without noting that he’s up for re-election. But most recently, the editorial page has slammed him with the worse epithet it can muster — Democrat. What gives?

With Carson City District Court Judge James Todd striking down the trio of petitions backed by Las Vegas Sands Inc. Chairman Sheldon Adelson, it appears the November ballot isn’t going to be quite so crowded as we thought.

Although we disagreed with the premise of the petitions (redirecting room tax money to education, roads and public safety, and requiring a two-thirds majority to raise taxes by initiative) we do confess a bit of sympathy for Adelson’s side. His minions, including former Treasurer Bob Seale and former Controller Steve Martin, relied on signature affidavits found on Secretary of State Ross Miller’s website. Alas, those were old affidavits, not updated to reflect new requiremens passed by the Legislature in 2007.

And yes, Seale and Martin are former state officeholders who should have known to check the law. And yes, Miller’s website contained a note that said some information may have changed. But if you can’t rely on the government to provide timely, accurate information, who can you rely on? (Perhaps the state Supreme Court; Adelson’s people are considering an appeal.)Anyway, assuming there is no appeal, or that any appeal is rejected, that leaves us with just a couple initiatives left for November. They are:

• The PISTOL initiative, which would restrict government from abusing eminent domain to steal the private property of one person and hand it to another private owner. This was approved in 2006, and if approved a second time this year will become part of the state constitution. We thought it was already part of the U.S. Constitution, but it turns out the Supreme Court’s copy doesn’t contain the final clause of the Fifth Amendment.
• A non-binding referendum asking voters if the room tax in Clark County should be increased by 3 percentage points, with the additional funds used to replace money cut from education and, later, for teacher salaries and student achievement.

Given that we started with a whole bunch of initiatives, this list is pretty small. (Ex-Assemblywoman Sharron Angle’s appeal of the rejection of her property tax initiative has yet to be decided, so that may, or may not, be on ballots. We’re betting on “not.”)

But if you click the link above, you’ll see we started out with a whole mess of initiatives, some of which were withdrawn, some of which were bargained away (the Nevada State Education Association’s plan to raise the top tier of the gross gambling tax to 9.75 percent) and some of which were nixed by court action (Adelson’s bunch).

You might be tempted to lament the loss of initiatives, but don’t. In theory, they’re supposed to be democracy’s safety valve, a check on government power when the government is too cowardly or swamped by special interests to act. But in reality, they have mostly become political tools to legislate political preferences or special interests into law. It’s a terrible way to make policy, as we saw with the myriad (and ongoing) battles over the Nevada Clean Indoor Air Act. So the fewer the better, we say.