When John Ensign went crying to his parents to hush the Hamptons with $96,000 that wouldn't show up on any FEC or Senate disclosure reports, they "decided to make the gifts out of concern for the well-being of long-time family friends during a difficult time," according to Ensign's lawyer. "The gifts are consistent with a pattern of generosity by the Ensign family to the Hamptons and others."

"Pattern of generosity?" One wonders how many "gifts" and bonuses Lord and Lady Ensign were forced to pay the household domestic help when Nevada's future junior senator was growing up.

Even more startling than the hollow explanation of the "gifts" is the assumption, intrinsic in the attorney's statement, that forking over $96,000 as an act of "generosity" to a family with a household income that is already three or four times the Clark County median (Doug Hampton alone was paid a total of $245,000 by Ensign over 17 months) might look like anything other than the wretched excess of self-absorbed fancy people with more money than sense.

Cavalierly getting mummy dear and father sir to shovel out tens of thousands of dollars so junior can have some sexytime with the help? That's just how the better sorts roll.

Besides, there is no law that says filthy rich parents can't ladle money to the family of their flagrantly hypocritical son's mistress. Legally, it's all on the up and up, or so says Ensign's lawyer.

Assuming for the sake of argument that's true, it rather misses the point.

How securely rooted on the advantageous side of wealth polarization must one be to not see how vulgar such cute little off-the-books cash and prizes are in the eyes of those who typically do not give or receive $96,000 "gifts," i.e., pretty much everyone else? 

Or perhaps put another way, What degree of detachment, nurtured through privilege, must John Ensign be operating under that he thinks it is appropriate for him to represent the people of Nevada in the United State Senate?

Ensign suffers from precisely that condition that he and other conservatives, with an assist from a pliant media, have so successfully if inaccurately assigned to Democrats and progressives over the years: He's out of the mainstream. Way, way out.

Ensign is also -- to use another term of derision commonly employed in right wing talking points -- an elitist. (Actually, given that Ensign was sleeping with an employee who is his wife's best friend and his good friend's wife and all the rest, this is one of those occasions when it is in fact accurate and not hyperbole at all to call someone an elitist pig).

Perhaps Ensign's parents should quit bailing him out of his troubles. Break the cycle of dependency, as it were. John Ensign doesn't need a hand out, he needs a hand up. After all, if his parents keep paying for his sex, he'll never learn to pay for it himself. Etc.

Meantime, he is, sigh, a senator.

Ensign loves to get up on his hind legs and spew conservative pablum such as, for instance, how patriotic it is to maintain the nation's failed "market based" health care delivery system. At no time as an adult has he himself ever struggled to come up with money to pay a health care bill, or any other bill for that matter.

Over the years, Ensign has been incapable of muttering two sentences without one of them leveling a complaint about high taxes on hard-working Americans -- a demographic group that he has actually seen with his own eyes out of the darkly tinted window of his chauffeur-driven Escalade.

Ensign's hard right positions are based entirely on facile conservative rhetoric. "Struggling to make ends meet" are just words to him. He has no grasp of daily reality as experienced by 99.999 percent of his constituents. That in itself may not be all that rare among U.S. senators, but in Ensign's case his profound ignorance is made more pernicious by his relentless resort to twisted right wing rationalizations for putting average people at heightened risk, ripping them off or screwing them over, preferably while benefiting a transnational conglomerate if possible.

That too, is not all that rare among U.S. senators. But Ensign adds a particularly unique insult to the injury by virtue of being not only a callous, arrogant and ideologically obsessed right wing ass, but a spoiled little trust fund brat who, thanks to over-indulgent, checkbook-at-the-ready parents, has routinely been sheltered from consequences and was never forced to grow up. Little wonder his judgment is atrocious.

Ensign needs help -- and not the spurious pseudo-support of fellow fundamentalist Christian men who have perverted their faith to the point that they pretend any and all behavior is excusable if committed by someone of whom their god sufficiently approves. Ensign needs real help, clinical help (it's tempting to suggest that he and Jim Gibbons might get a package deal, but Ensign obviously doesn't need the discount).

Ensign's constituents inhabit a place that is utterly alien to the cloistered, privileged and coddled senator -- reality. And if he's incapable of even recognizing the world his constituents live in, he can't possibly represent them.

Behold as the embattled 'Do tries to push back against the horrible news all of which indicates that he's a scoundrel, a liar and a prick and a doomed one to boot!

First, here's a statement (via Ralston) from Ensign's lawyer on how $96,000 fell out of the sky on the Hamptons because Ensign's parents are So Darned Nice!

Ha! Ensign dragged his parents into the scandal. EPIC FAIL! And still counting on daddy's money to get him out of trouble like, oh, a spoiled, date-raping frat boy? "Please, mommy and daddy, don't let the mean woman make my political career all poopy." Grow up, Hairdo McToast, you're 51 years old. And for about seventeen minutes there you were a minor somebody in the Party of Personal Responsibility. Disgusting.

But see how the rich throw their money around? Out of the goodness of their hearts AND totally legally always!

Meantime, Ensign is still pretending that he can be a senator and says he won't resign. Does he mean it? Is he really so obtuse that he thinks he can survive? Well, to quote John Ensign, "if I didn't, I'd lie."

So John Ensign celebrated the birth of his lord and savior skinny little Jesus by exercising senatorial privilege with his best friend's wife while his best friend was in the same house. Then Ensign wrote his best friend's wife a note to remind her, in case she didn't know, that "I used you for my own pleasure" and she was merely a sexual object for Ensign to swing with at his convenience. New and improved hush money allegations abound, too. Etc., etc.

And now comes fellow holy roller, family values champion and full-on wingnut senator Tom Coburn to exercise some senatorial privilege of his own:

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) on Thursday said he would not testify in court or before the Ethics Committee about any advice he gave Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) on how to handle his affair with a former staffer, citing constitutional protections for communications during religious counseling, as well as the patient confidentiality privilege.

“I was counseling him as a physician and as an ordained deacon. ... That is privileged communication that I will never reveal to anybody. Not to the Ethics Committee, not to a court of law, not to anybody,” Coburn said.

However entertaining/icky the fresh and specific details and charges provided by cuckold Doug Hampton's charm offensive on Jon Ralston's TV show, and the fallout thereof such as Coburn's scurrilous and cowardly attempt to wrap himself up in a blanket of churchy nobility, it's increasingly clear that Ensign's preferred scandal management strategy -- shut up and hope it goes away -- is not going to fly.

The ethics complaints already lodged against him meant that Ensign's steadfast refusal to say another word would not be, well, the last word -- though there is always a risk that ethics complaints or even legal charges against senators will produce little more than wimpy admonitions rendered long after the fact, i.e., nothing that a narcissistic and well-funded member of one of the world's most exclusive clubs can't muddle through with an insincere apology and the heartfelt forgiveness of his cynical colleagues.

But a cuckold who is also Ensign's former co-chief of staff (even if the job was merely a sinecure, which seems to be the case) and who is willing to talk to the press, well ... the story is heating up, not cooling down.

And Cindy Hampton hasn't even come out of the woodwork yet.

Ensign has become an absurdity, a grotesque figure silently cowering in the dark shadows of the public stage. And it's going to get worse! Ah. Good times.

* * * *

So... given the chance -- a chance that seems increasingly likely by the day if not the hour -- will Ensign's kindred spirit, psychological doppelganger and fellow knee-jerk wingnut Jim Gibbons appoint himself to the Senate?

One can only hope. The national press would erupt in a magnificent orgy of playful mockery and scorn, so that would be fun. And if Gibbons managed to survive a Republican primary to win his party's nomination for the seat in a 2010 special election, the Democrats would be a lock to pick it up.

But Gibbons still has some unfinished business as governor -- after all if he's in the job long enough he's bound to do something gubernatorial someday, just by the law of averages. So instead of parachuting himself into an empty Senate seat, maybe Gibbons would appoint one of the numbnut Republican whackadoodles from the Legislature who so proudly stood by his efforts to kill old people, get children back to work in the mines where they belong and generally shut down the state of Nevada once and for all. U.S. Sen. Ty Cobb, anyone? How about John Hambrick -- he, clearly, is senatorial material.

Of course Gibbons fancies himself a maverick who likes to think out of the box. Maybe Howard Weiss, the raging paranoiac and RV dealer who doubles as a key adviser in the Gibbons brain trust, could be Nevada's next junior senator.

Then again, Gibbons also has a fond spot for the hallowed role that cronyism plays in Republican politics, a venal consideration (does Gibbons entertain any other kind?) that might launch Warren Trepp on a career in public service.

But whether it's one of the aforementioned suspects or somebody else (Bob Beers, Sue Lowden,one of disgraced former judge Jerry Carr Whitehead's cows), one thing's for sure. If Gibbons gets a chance to appoint a senator, the choice won't be the product of rational thought.

The sharp young people lucky enough to be selected for this rare and exciting opportunity will not only have a chance to help stop all the evil liberal socialism in our nation's capital BUT ALSO make their parents proud:

Careful readers will notice that something seems to have been botched in the process of getting the ad into the Senate Employment Bulletin. For instance, some words were clearly omitted between the first and second lines of the ad. Also, the ad failed to note that husband and wife teams are encouraged to apply.

In February 2008 while in full-on mid-affair mode, Sen. John Ensign wrote a letter, well, more of a note, really, to his mistress apologizing for schtupping her even though she was his wife's best friend and her husband was Ensign's best friend and they were both Ensign's employees and really does the creepy never stop with these people?

Of course, gabbity-gabbing about Goddy McGod ensues.

Alas, it turns out that the next day Ensign flip-flopped and decided that however great a friend Doug had been (and despite giving Goddy McGod a sad), it was all worth throwing away again and again and again, for another six months in fact, if it meant Ensign could continue to have more feel good sexytime and "use" Doug's wife "for my own pleasure."

Family values!

Ralston got the get on his TV show. The Sun has a rundown of Ralston's interview with Doug Hampton and a copy of the sad little love note from a troubled, guilt-wracked (but apparently not that guilt-wracked) 'Do, whose mostly pernicious career in public life increasingly appears to be coming to an ignominious, tawdry and unscheduled but richly deserved and hilarious end.

UPDATE: The Doug Hampton interview can be viewed on the internets. Creepy? Eh, in a mildly supercalifragilistic sort of way.

Why it seems like it was only yesterday that your lowly Gleaner was on TV unloading on Harry Reid for being wholly uninspiring as a Senate leader generally and AWOL on the health care debate in particular. 

But lo and behold, Roll Call reports that Reid, in an uncharacteristic yet most welcome act of senatorial leadership, has told foot-dragging Democratic Senator and Republican accommodationist Max Baucus to quit wasting time on his knees before Republican senators in the stupid hope that he can suck them into supporting a health care bill:

Boy is my face red. Okay, not really. In fact, if I was an honest-to-goodness really and truly self-respecting Las Vegan I would boast freely about being a lone voice in the Nevada wilderness who for weeks has been hammering away at Reid for being a no-show on health care, and take credit for his newfound interest in -- and advocacy of! -- progressive components of health care reform.

But while shamelessly taking unwarranted credit would be the Las Vegas way, it would be wrong. Reid was probably just trying to do something to keep skeptical liberals quiet for a day or two. And more importantly, the Gleaner may not be the only one who has been hoping Reid would act -- it sounds like 10 to 15 Democratic senators might have shared some opinions on the matter, too.

Officials with Nevada's gambling/hotel, mining and development industries, along with their joint partnership subsidiary, the Nevada Legislature, are very proud that lawmakers need not comply with any pesky, high-falutin' campaign finance reporting requirements of the sort required in the fancy states.

After all, it's just little old Nevada. Why should our volunteer citizen legislators have to quickly, efficiently and transparently disclose the manner in which they collect more campaign money in a single year than they themselves would earn in, oh, a decade or more? Are campaign finance reform advocates contending that a position might be unduly swayed, and a sense of perspective skewed, just because hundreds of thousands of dollars are deposited into accounts ultimately controlled by and typically bearing the names of assorted bumpkins, sycophants and self-interested opportunists? Hey! The people of Nevada elected those bumpkins, sycophants and self-interested opportunists, thank you very much.

Anyway, legislation to bring Nevada's campaign finance reporting requirements into the modern era was allowed to languish during the recently failed 2009 session of the Nevada Legislature. Oddly, legislators themselves are at a loss to explain exactly why the reforms made it through both the Senate and the Assembly yet were not reconciled and passed by session's end (Sun).

Too bad, though, whatever the reason. Because now it will continue to be difficult at best to find out how much money these people have and where they got it, and nigh impossible to discern such information by a date that would be useful to anyone. And you just know that with very little in the way of accurate, timely  information, cynical Nevadans are going to continue to think of their lawmakers, inasmuch as they think of them at all, as just a bunch of filthy whores. And that sort of vulgar characterization is simply unfair to sex workers.

The latest obscure and hopeless Republican toying with the idea of running against Harry Reid is one Chuck Kozak, a Reno attorney who proudly touts his "commitment to injustice" (RJ).

Sigh. All of this would be a lot more fun if a) Reid were to give at least some signal, no matter how half-hearted, that he realizes his job title is "senate majority leader" and b) anyone other than Republicans -- be it the Anybody But Reid "anti" camp or the "pro" forces epitomized by juicemonger Sig Rogich -- actually cared whether Harry Reid gets reelected.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal, which is a newspaper, has written an editorial basically calling for the abolition of Medicare, the program that provides health insurance coverage to elderly Americans.

This is yet another example of how the newspaper industry continues to commit economic suicide. Without Medicare, an estimated 94.2 percent* of the Review-Journal's readership would be forced to find a private insurance company that is not only willing to sell a comprehensive health coverage policy to a senior citizen, but to sell it at a price that any but the most fabulously wealthy senior citizen could afford. In other words, seniors citizens would have no health insurance at all, they'd die quicker, and who would read the R-J then?

*Estimated age group of R-J readers is based on industry trends and the high concentration of teabagging old farts on the newspaper website's comment threads.

  Alas, not our nutjob governor.

This Independence Day holiday finds your Gleaner's thoughts turning to the opinion held by many founders that a republic's success depended on a virtuous citizenry and that a virtuous citizenry, in turn, could only flourish and survive under a particular stage of economic and social development.

Nutshell: Once a society advances, as it inevitably will, beyond an agriculture-based economy to an economy dominated by commerce, your republic is screwed.

More than two centuries later, America and most of the rest of the world is pretty much dedicated to the proposition that a republic, and the democratic components thereof, can and must survive and thrive in a post-agrarian economy.

That doesn't necessarily mean that the likes of Franklin and Jefferson were wrong. It just underscores a point that is stupidly obvious but that also is too often conveniently ignored or glossed over: they were products of the eighteenth century.

Newt Gingrich, William Bennett, Rush Limbaugh and other conservative "thinkers" often natter on about how shocked the founders would be by modern America, usually in the context of big government. Maybe so. The list of things that would shock eighteenth century people, even eighteenth century people of uncommon brilliance and imagination, is a long one that includes but certainly is not limited to: the cut and paste feature on the new iPhone, frozen veggie burgers, grass lawns, the flat screen TV, learning that the black man speaking on the flat screen TV is the president of the Untied States, etc...

But if the size and scope of government would surprise the declaration's signers, they would be equally surprised -- and arguably even more dismayed -- by the power and influence wielded over society by big business.

*   *   *

Meantime in other revolution news, please enjoy this video of Franklin and Adams coming to the realization that this Jefferson slacker really and truly can throw the high cheese.

Finally, remember everyone, no flag code violations.

So in this week's CityLife column, your Gleaner considers one of the state's many politicians whose aspirations for higher office hinge on that all-important bloc of the Nevada electorate, "morons who like to vote for charlatans, demagogues and flakes because they're 'different.'"

This very disturbing video was voluntarily and deliberately put up on on the internets by Las Vegas Review-Journal Editor Thomas Mitchell in conjunction with a blog post he wrote about clean energy (long story short: he's against it).

"They looked at me with blank stares, like the addled uncle who was supposed to be kept in the attic..."  Mitchell writes.

I've nothing to add.

For decades, the American media has operated under the delusion that asking random passers-by how they feel is a wise use of newsroom resources. Now the media's historical abuse of "the man on the street" has been taken to new heights by a Las Vegas TV station. (via Sebelius)

This tourist seems to present exactly the sort of thing that the TV station might have been looking for -- a unique and colorful yet representative reaction to the stunning news that Michael Jackson is still dead.

But instead of thanking the tourist for his frank and free opinion on this important topic, our strapping young broadcast journalist on the scene, thinking out of the box, as it were, opted for a more novel approach and assaulted the tourist physically.

To be fair, the reporter may have been frustrated because he was relegated to getting reactions to the Michael Jackson story from Las Vegas drunks when he would rather be reporting in, say, Iran or Iraq. After all, Iranians and Iraqis loved Michael too.

Still, 'tis a sad day for America when a man can't get totally shitfaced and act like an idiot in front of a camera in public without getting pushed around and slapped by a Las Vegas TV reporter.

But not one of our free weeklies with sex ads in the back.

LAWeekly announced that it has hired a new editor, Las Vegas Sun Deputy Managing Editor Drex Heikes.

Its Pulitzer punctuated the distance that the Sun has put between itself and its wrapper, quality wise, over the last few years. Heikes was the editor on the Pulitzer stories and by all accounts has had a whole lot to do with the Sun's overall progress.

Heikes once e-mailed to complain because your lowly Gleaner had suggested that the Sun's improvements were despite the influence of upper-level poohbahs Brian Greenspun and Mike Kelley, not because of them. Unfair, Heikes objected.

Now maybe we'll find out.

He's a family man, a businessman, an animal lover and a free spirit -- a "consistently popular" "golden boy" who is not only "handsome" but "savvy" and, no doubt because he is so "exceptionally hard-working," he was able to overcome adversity to become a "self-made" "rising star."

The lengthy profile of holy roller John Ensign in Sunday's R-J must have only heightened Nevadans' outrage over the revelation that the senator slept with his friend's wife and tried to hush it up with cash and and crony-supplied prizes: What a shame that such a talented, wonderful, able, unique and simply magnificent man has been laid low by the taint of tawdry scandal. Boo hoo, no?

It is of course impossible to do a politician's biography justice in the confines of a single newspaper article. There are bound to be omissions. Still, Ensign's achievements as a lawmaker were given curiously short shrift in the R-J piece. After all, John Ensign, and only John Ensign, can fairly claim as the crowning accomplishment of his legislative record a law that makes it a crime to carry a rooster across state lines for a cockfight.

Having no impact whatsoever on the Yucca Mountain issue, putting petty partisan gamesmanship ahead of the interest of his own constituents, demonstrating profound ignorance of and/or cavalier disregard for his own state's financial crisis, flat-out making stuff up to discredit the hotel-gambling labor force that has done so much to enrich him and his family, openly crowing about Katrina's forced displacement of tens of thousands of Democratic voters as a political silver lining for the GOP -- those are merely some of the entries that might be used as starters on a list of items highlighting Ensign's political career.

But while the R-J didn't mention any of those things, patient readers who lasted deep, deep into the gentle profile of their junior senator were rewarded with this item about Ensign's sleeping around:

That of course dovetails with the AP report that Ensign's 2002 disappearance "followed an earlier affair," and is yet another reason why the press must continue to well, press Ensign to address the charges that Cindy Hampton was not, as he put it in his public confession, the worst thing he's ever done, but merely the worst thing he's ever done lately. Get him on the record -- hopefully denying any earlier affairs of course. Then when the evidence to the contrary comes out, he can be truly toasted and duly ousted, and Nevada can rid itself of the boy senator once and for all.

In a week featuring more 'Do fallout, the Sultry Saga of Sparky Sanford and continued, incessant whiny-butt pussy-footing around on health care from spineless, er, centrist Democratic senators who still seem to think it's 2003, the smartest, sanest thing that anybody said might have come from the podium during the president's meeting with a pissy press:

"I know everybody here is on a 24-hour news cycle. I'm not."

A fresh batch of "Republicans for Reid" has come out of the oven and this round of luminaries includes one Greg Maddux, who apparently played baseball or some damned thing and might have been the one person out of everyone on this whole doomed planet who Reid absolutely positively did not want to see coming out of the woodwork to challenge him.

Oh, and the CEO for the local electricity monopoly is in there too. Maybe he'll keep his vendors/brethren in the coal/CO2 industry from launching independent attack ads on Reid for spilling the beans that one time about how coal is going to kill everyone everywhere.

John Ensign's lips are sealed in the hope that his whole hush money/crony/sex scandal thingy will just blow over, because that strategy worked for David Vitter, or so says one beltway analysis. Eh, Vitter, Schmitter. Keeping your mouth shut and hoping a problem goes away on its own has long been Plan A in the Greater Las Vegas Area Handbook of Public Relations, Crisis Management and Negligent Governance.

Meantime in other Ensignania, the Sun reports that Fox News had Doug Hampton's allegations of Ensign schtupping the man's wife in their fair and balanced possession even earlier than thought. But a Fox guy still swears that the network was not sitting on the story to protect a wingnut in distress and as always the word of a Fox News journalist is good enough for me.

The Sun also gently informs its readers that "Hushed talks continue about Ensign’s sudden absence in 2002, which the Associated Press has reported involved his marriage."

Close, admittedly. But just to recap, here's what the AP actually reported:

Why the Sun's oh-so delicately phrased circumspection, wherein "followed an earlier affair" becomes "involved his marriage"? If it is because the Ensignites are disputing the AP's report, fair enough, s'pose, but shouldn't there be a headline that says "Ensign denies earlier affair"?

It just goes to show that the Vitter/Vegas strategy is probably the way to go ... Ensign can sit quietly and do what he does best -- look pretty -- and eventually the media will get bored and start paying attention to the next shiny object.

Oh whatever. The real purpose of this post was to thank the enterprising and helpful Gleaner reader who provided the latest fun photo of Ensign looking all dorky (apologies to dorks) as if he's thinking "I'm not talking and the media can't make me so neener neener neener" (thanks, enterprising and helpful reader).

UPDATE: I see Sebelius at CityLife has been trying to get Ensign's staff to say whether the senator is disputing the AP report, but so far Ensign and Co. are -- surprise, surprise -- clamming up.

All South Carolina's wingnut governor does is go a-whoring in Buenos Aires and in one fell swoop a) Jim Gibbons has competition in the race to see whose governor is the most batshit crazy and b) holy roller John Ensign's hush money/crony/sex scandal is wiped from the consciousness of Washington's ADD-addled liberal media. Mark Sanford is by far the Nevada Republican Party's most valuable asset.

UPDATE: Good TV.