For the most part, Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto does a good job.

She’s secured a grand jury indictment against Nevada Lt. Gov. Brian Krolicki for allegedly misappropriating funds during his stint as state treasurer, she’s filed at least 229 objections to the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump and she recently helped secure Nevada’s share of a $1.1 million multistate settlement (about $12,000) against pharmaceutical giant Bristol-Myers Squibb related to two antitrust matters.

However, when it comes to wasting your tax dollars to keep God in government, Nevada’s legal eagle, and her official mouthpiece, are stuck in the Dark Ages.

Today, Cortez Masto joined with the attorneys general of the other 49 states to kill a lawsuit that would remove religious ceremonies from President-elect Barack Obama’s inauguration. According to this document, filed in U.S. District Court, Cortez Masto lent her name to the friend of the court brief.

We called her spokeswoman, Edie Cartwright – probably the rudest state employee paid with your tax dollars – to ask for comment.

“You guys are great, aren’t ya?” sneered Cartwright in a husky voice. “Do you stay up nights on this?”

“Yeah, we are great, actually,” CityLife replied. “So, your defense for filing the amicus brief is that ‘Everybody else is doing it’?”

Once Cartwright worked through what sounded a helluva lot like righteous indignation, she shot back with, “We joined the amicus brief because we agree with the tenets … Our feeling is that this is appropriate, does not violate the First Amendment and is part of the American tradition.”

Oh, like the American tradition of the separation of church and state?

Apparently, Cortez Masto needs to go back to law school.

For her spokeswoman, might we gently recommend charm school?

Remember when Bush promised to get Osama bin Laden? I think he said “dead or alive,” didn’t he? Oh yeah, here it is.

Unlike most other lies he’s told, that whopper seems to trouble Bush, for some reason:

Funny, but you can smell the whiskey and regret from here, can’t you?

How many of the 4,200 families who’ve lost a son or daughter in our needless, greed-driven oil war do you think want Dubya’s head on a plate?

Most professional football players don’t get by on their intellects, but it looks as if Kurt Warner, former Super Bowl MVP winner and born-again Christian (whatever that means) should have taken at least one comparative religion class in college before busting out his best third-grade depiction of Jesus of Nazareth. Frankly, I still don’t believe he “drew” that.

Also, I didn’t realize the Lamb of God was a white dude. Did they have those 2,000 years ago in the Holy Land?

I won’t even touch on his polka-dot pimp shirt. Damn.

And here I thought former Florida gridiron wunderkind Danny Wuerffel (Go, Gators!) would have been the first former pro baller to humiliate himself like this.

What happens when a struggling neighborhood loses a lifeline? If the neighborhood is Las Vegas’s Historic Westside, it hits the streets, like the F Street Coalition did earlier this morning. Westside residents and supporters hoisted signs, recited chants and walked the long mile between the intersection of F and Bonanza Streets and City Hall. Here’s some video:

Mitchell Sayles, who was born and raised on the Westside, says the city closed F Street to hide the impoverished neighborhood from developers and tourists. In image-obsessed Las Vegas, excising urban blight is an operation that requires no more thought than removing an unsightly mole.

“They think whoever comes to town would see it as an eyesore,” he says. “Our little poor community.”

CityLife broke this story in early October, a couple weeks after the community realized the road closure was permanent. The Cliff’s Notes version of the controversy includes allegations by community leaders that they weren’t notified of construction plans, that the new street configuration will slow emergency response and that it will effectively block the flow of redevelopment dollars from Union Park and downtown. And did I mention the decades of neglect and outright abuse the Westside has suffered at the hands of city leaders?

The City Council approved the plan to close the F Street underpass in 2006, when the neighborhood was represented by Lawrence Weekly, who is now a Clark County Commissioner. The Nevada Department of Transportation added the city’s D-to-F connector to its I-15 widening project and assumed responsibility for construction that closed the street.

The F Street Coalition has filed an emergency injunction to stop construction and reverse the closure, which the state says will cost upwards of $30 million. A hearing on the matter is scheduled for Jan. 21 at 1 p.m.

Just 13 days remain until George W. Bush, the good ole boy from … Yale? … is out of power and back on the road to oblivion.

At CityBlog, we’re still counting down the days until Handsome George is history and President-elect Barack Obama, a better educated, less offensive mouthpiece for this American corporatocracy, takes over.

In a way, we’ll all miss ole Georgie (like a case of the clap), so here’s something to remember him by, apart from the uncontrollable fits of weeping that only seem to come in the night, when it’s dark: his lie that he supports the troops.

Ever since Bush swaddled himself in the American flag and perverted true patriotism to use 9/11 to advance a corporately encouraged police-state agenda (promoted locally by at least one loyal Republican apologist and Yale alumna), he’s never missed a photo op with American troops.

Images like the one above lull a largely inattentive populace into thinking a president has the people’s best interest at heart.

If more of us read James Madison directly and what other Founding Fathers really thought about the U.S. Constitution (some of which, interestingly, is available online from actual Yale scholars — see Madison’s comments from June 26, 1787), there would be a Second American Revolution tomorrow.

In early 2005, Salon.com certainly uncovered how the Bush and his top generals actually cared for troops wounded in battle, discarding their broken bodies in moldy, rat-infested quarters at Walter Reed Army Medical Center (archive here). Salon’s gutsy reporting came a full two years before the mainstream media was “shocked” by similar revelations in establishment journals like The Washington Post (their archive here.)

Caught in this lie, Bush actually apologized. He had to, once the rank and file learned what their commander in chief actually thought of them:

However, if you’ve ever spent one day wearing our nation’s uniform, you know that any major military fuck-up stems directly from a lack of leadership. Having worked for my share of generals, including a former aide to Bush 41, I can tell you: Generals in high-profile jobs like the ones at Walter Reed don’t make a move without checking with the White House first.

Although our money says Obama could very well be a bust, at least he’ll see to it that those brave young men and women in uniform who fight and bleed for the United States of America are treated like the heroes they are.

Despite a net gain of (perhaps as many as) eight seats in the U.S. Senate, despite winning the presidency of the United States, despite an election in which 66.8 million Americans voted to reject Republican maladministration of the last eight years (that’s 53.4 percent of all voters), U.S. Sen. Harry Reid is cautioning Democrats  to be bipartisan and not “overreach.”

Pardon us, but what the fuck?

In an interview with The Hill newspaper, Reid said Democrats will have to be “very, very careful” to avoid overreaching and that they will not rubber-stamp the agenda of President-elect Barack Obama, the way the Republican-controlled Congress rubber-stamped the George W. Bush agenda.

“If Obama steps over the bounds, I will tell him. … I do not work for Barack Obama, I work with him,” Reid said.

That’s all well and good — except for one thing: Obama’s agenda is the most progressive we’ve seen in Washington D.C. in decades, and the Democrats in Congress could do a hell of a lot worse than rubber-stamping it! (Hell, for that matter, Obama could stand to do some overreaching of his own!) And that’s to say nothing of the fact that when fights over important matters came before Congress these last eight years  — including the war in Iraq, the Patriot Act, warantless wiretapping, torture and offshore oil drilling — a hell of a lot of Democrats were rubber-stamping right alongside their Republican colleagues! So now is a hell of a time to find one’s balls!

Except saying that would be — what’s the word? — overreaching. Reid also said it is essential for Obama and congressional Democrats to work closely with Republicans in the new Congress. “Even though we’re one short of 60 [votes needed to end filibusters], I don’t want to ever have to depend on cloture,” Reid said. “We may have to do that, but it will be with the support of a few Republicans.”

Why do we suddenly think that if Reid had 80 votes in the Senate, the House of Representatives, the White House, the Supreme Court and the downtown Washington, D.C. YMCA, he’d still be urging caution, bipartisanship, baby steps? Yes, we know he has his re-election in Nevada to think about, but there are 113,000 more Democrats here than Republicans! It’s a new, blue world, senator! Here’s a news tip: Republicans don’t agree with you, or with Obama, and are going to do everything they can to stop your agenda, so you’d best keep that cloture option real handy. Something tells us you’ll be using it, a lot. And here’s another news tip: If the roles were reversed, Republicans would be screwing Democrats like they were the D.C. madam’s working girls! And talking about a “mandate” in the process!

If anything, the Democrats should take this opportunity to overreach the shit out of this motherfucker, because there’s a hell of a lot of work ahead undoing the tremendous damage Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have wrought these last eight years. We have wars to end, environmentally damaging policies to reverse, an economy to fix, tax cuts for the rich to repeal, corporate welfare to stop and that’s just in the first week! Don’t forget, some of us are still hoping we get a Justice Department that actually brings Bush and his friends to justice! (We can’t bear to ask Reid about the odds of that.)

Reid is called a “shrewd legislator” in The Hill piece, and that he is. We just wish he was also a bold legislator, one who recognizes this moment in history as the opportunity that it is. Now is not the time for timidity, or compromise, or middle-of-the-road politics. That’s what got us to the place we’re in now. Why not try something new? You know, that thing you saw on all those blue signs during the campaign, a little thing called “change.”

Do it, and you may be surprised at what happens, nationally and back here in Nevada.

(Hat tip to the Las Vegas Gleaner, which featured commentary on this subject first.)

(We should note, ironically, that Beers himself was up for this job, but critics including university Chancellor Jim Rogers told Gibbons it was a bad idea. “It tells the voting public they can go to hell,” he said. Indeed, it does, Mr. Chancellor. Which prompts us to ask this question: Since Rawson, too, was rejected by voters, how does his appointment not also tell the voting public they can go to hell? We only ask because today Rogers praised Rawson’s appointment, saying he was delighted with him and fellow appointee Kevin Page. Our guess? Beers has opposed more funding for education over the years, while Rawson has supported it.)

Rawson’s votes for education (and the infamous, but totally necessary, tax increase of 2003)  nothwithstanding, there are so many other things to say about Rawson’s career, it’s difficult to know where to start.

There’s the fact that he was both a community college professor of dentistry and an elected official, thus violating our state constitution’s separation-of-powers clause. There’s the fact that, while in office, he saddled Nevada with its very own dental school, one that was later determined to be both costly and totally unnecessary.

Then there was the sister dental school Rawson helped start in Hawaii, which ran into legal and financial troubles. Rawson’s partners in that venture were sued by the state over false statements and allegedly deceptive business practices. Moreover, his role in that school put into question his post-state Senate sinecture on the state Gaming Commission. He wanted to be reappointed to that post, but his request was denied by … Gov. Jim Gibbons?

But by far, our favorite bullet point on Rawson’s resume involves his repeated  testimony in an Arizona murder case that put a man on that state’s death row. That man, Ray Krone, was later acquitted by DNA evidence despite the insistence by Rawson and another “expert” that Krone was guilty. (You can read more about that case here and here.)

So, yeah, why the hell not? Seriously, it’s only the board of regents. How much real harm can he do there?

2009 has already brought its first music venue casualty. The cozy, high-potential Ice House Lounge shut its doors abruptly on Jan. 2, mere days after a sales closure for the property unexpectedly fell through. Former manager Mark Hornsby tells CityBlog the unnamed buyer had promised to keep things “pretty much the same” at Ice House after some renovations, but then disappeared, leaving the current owners — based in New Jersey and itching to get out of the business — with no choice but to close the Downtown lounge and hope for a new buyer down the road.
“It’s just going to sit there until someone comes along and wants the thing,” says Hornsby. “For now, unfortunately, another one bites the dust.”

Utah AG Mark Shutleff's Hail Mary? An emergency injunction to bring this baby to Salt Lake City.

Look. I hate the BCS as much as any self-respecting college football fan. After all, its wicked super-computing cost my team a shot at conference and a national championships. But …

This. Is. Ridiculous.

Really, Utah? You unload your polygamist compounds on Texas, and stymie its attorney general, then swoop in all hero-like with your threats to investigate the Bowl Championship Series? Isn’t there some kind of crime in Utah that needs your attention? A magic underwear syndicate, or maybe an unpersecuted gay person?

Why don’t you just do what all the other football fans across the country do when they start feeling the need to burn off a little aggression? Ignite an abandoned couch. Overturn a compact car. Hell, start a riot.

But please, for the love of god, do not file a criminal complaint. That’s just so Mitt Romney.

Family of war criminals: The apple doesn't fall far from the douche

Yeah, I know. I promised to revisit another of George W. Bush’s lies each weekday until the shit-kicker who was born with the silver foot in his mouth is out of our White House and on his way to a new racist ‘hood in Texas.

What can I say? I lied.

No, seriously, CityLife solves the state budget crisis in this week’s edition (out Thursday), so I’ve kinda been monkeying around with that when I wasn’t busy doing Dubya research by chugging a fifth of Jack Daniel’s finest while snorting dirty coke off the asses of underage Thai hookers in a Boulder Highway motel room. Hey, if our “leaders” in Carson City are too inept or too stupid to do it, someone had to. Work on the budget, that is.

Anyway, back to this lying motherfucker.

He’s a “war president” with war on his mind, don’t ya know.

If war is such a precious part of Dubya’s “process,” why didn’t this former booze hound and pot smoker (and alleged coke monkey) roger up fully for his Texas Air National Guard service? Was he so different back then, that he felt lucky to have landed an officer billet in a unit that virtually guaranteed he’d never have to carpet bomb innocent Vietnamese civilians while ostensibly targeting military men and materiel?

According to the Boston Globe, Dubya neither met his military commitment nor the punishments for failing to do so. (Here, too.)

But he’s seen to it that at least 4,212 of our bravest young men and women have bled out on the sands of Mesopotamia for a greed-driven oil war — a fact so obvious to anyone with even a cursory knowledge of geopolitics that even former central banking crime boss Alan Greenspan felt free to admit as much to the unwashed masses last fall.

Fourteen days and counting. Fourteen days.

Cassie: oh my.

RIP
ew. on the couch for several days.

me: : (

Cassie: he’s in a better place, aaron.

Cassie: with iggy pop. oh wait.

Story here. R.I.P. you beautiful, fat and awesome guitarist.

It never fails: Whenever I start believing I’m so smart and clever ’cause I caught some state official in another lie — something any trained monkey could do — I invariably come across something like this.

Something like Chinese artist Liu Jianhua’s above Shanghai cityscape of poker chips and dice. Amazingly, this miniature city is the least creative in a series of works of art depicting civilizations made from mundane consumer goods.

Hit the link to glimpse San Francisco rendered in Jell-O, Atlantis fashioned from food packaging and circuit-board topography — perhaps the best use for them I can imagine.