Gibbons divorce- we hope to honor the boundaries.

Hey wait a minute — isn’t this the state that made divorce into a commodity? Why the preoccupation with our governor’s failed marriage?

Here’s why: because there’s a lingering bit of neurosis in our American souls that says politicians should have solid marriages, while surgeons, college professors, accountants, hair dressers, and bus drivers can get divorced with no inquiry as to its affect on their job performance. This says a lot more about our attitude toward government than it does about our attitude toward marriage or professional competence.

Governor Gibbons has asked for privacy, and few details are available. That hasn’t stopped us from placing it at the top of the news, and won’t stop further probing into the most personal details from Jim and Dawn Gibbons’ marriage. Someone will get them, and someone will publish them.

What won’t be described, because it can’t be, is their personal anguish. Those who haven’t experienced divorce can’t do it justice, and those who have, if they’ve got a beating heart, would rather not try.

The Reasonable Reporter recalls an earlier chapter, when a chilly darkness descended over her own household while the daily business of life went on for more than a year. Weekends were planned, dry cleaning was picked up, friends were entertained, material obligations were met. But there was an odd emptiness to it all.

More strange, in retrospect, was the utter lack of eye contact. How do two people live under the same roof day after day, week after week, and never look each other in the eye?

Ah, the tidal wave of relief on the day the word was finally spoken. “Divorce.” It wasn’t until three months later, during the final sweep of the vacuum cleaner over the vacant floors of a vacant house, that the sadness finally set in.

As for job performance, it sharpened during and after the divorce. The job was a place to focus. Besides, when your worthiness as a life partner is called into question, professional competence takes on new importance. Hell, your boss always loves you as along as you deliver the goods. That’s one relationship where the rules are clear cut.

Probably, no two divorces are alike. But one suspects the broad outlines are similar. And one hopes we can honor the boundaries. It’s not up to us, of course, it’s up to our bosses, who love us as long as we deliver the goods.

Nevada GOP: Ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille

The hijacking of the Nevada Republican convention by Ron Paul supporters was not exactly a stealth attack. Let’s begin with the premise that people who unselfconsciously declare a revolution are very likely committed to make something happen.

Beyond that, all the indications were there. Although the GOP numbers were dwarfed by the Democratic Turn-Nevada-Blue campaign, and remained in its shadow for the purpose of news coverage, Republican pre-caucus registration surged. The overwhelmingly unifying characteristic about the new registrants was their support for Ron Paul.

How about the Washoe County convention? Fully a third of those present were Paul supporters, and they were not shiny, happy Republican attendees, but rather the in-your-face variety, pushing a string of unsuccessful and time-consuming fundamentalist libertarian amendments to the party platform. At last, the proposals became so frivolous that a Paul campaign official and one of his local stalwarts took the most vocal of their activists aside, and told him to give it a rest.

The most significant (and under-analyzed) sign that Nevada’s “Ron Paul Revolution” wouldn’t peter out — Paul’s second-place caucus finish behind Mitt Romney, and ahead of now-presumptive nominee John McCain, who still has only lukewarm support from the party’s base.

And what can be said about the established institution that knows a revolution is brewing, and fails to fend off the attack? In this case, the phrase that comes to mind is, “I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille.”

Now comes the once-luminous Republican Norma Desmond, batting her giant false eyelashes and twirling her beach umbrella, assuming, ridiculously, that she’s still as commanding as she was in her prime, as the silent screen legend. The Ron Paul revolutionaries are her Joe Gillis, dressed as her boyfriend in the elegant clothing she provides, taking refuge in her mansion. For his own selfish purposes, Joe indulges the delusions of the no-longer alluring diva, who’s oblivious to a new world turning outside the walls of her compound.

How did the Nevada Republican party become Norma Desmond? First, by living in a state of apparent denial. Second, by cutting off communication with the outside world. Or perhaps they never were inclined to communicate, and now that the GOP’s best days seem to be in the rear view mirror, nobody in the party knows how to do it.

Many Republican politicians, as the Reasonable Reporter has previously noted, are loath to interact with the media, and conduct such interactions grudgingly when they deign to engage in them. The party has been slow to adopt advanced communication technology. It also seems blissfully unaware that in the street, there is the kind of disdain for its core philosophies that can be addressed only with vigorous communication.

Even in a year when they acknowledge they’re fighting for their lives, the Silver State’s Republicans can’t muster a communication strategy. Their missives are occasional, and mostly inconsequential to the day’s events. They tend not to try to drive the news, which is, by the way, an endeavor never abandoned for long by the Silver State’s Democrats, who are quite skilled at it.

Who can expect grassroots enthusiasm, when there’s such tepid public outreach from the organization? Recall that when Norma Desmond finally appeared in person at MGM to confront studio executives, the guards at the front gate of the empire her stardom helped to build didn’t know who she was.

The Ron Paul revolutionaries know they’re on a suicide mission, but they don’t care. They are there, no matter what they say, to disrupt the nomination process. In the end, they, like Joe Gillis, will float face down in the pool at Norma Desmond’s mansion, riddled with bullets from her gun. Norma, having snuffed the discordant element in her life, will descend the grand staircase, preening for the news cameras, convinced that they’re capturing her close-up for the movies, rather than her final exit from Sunset Blvd.

Dems have a rousing debate. Zzzzzzzzz.

Remember the summer of 2007, when the candidates had 90 seconds or less to answer a question and everyone wanted to hear more? Those were the days. The Reasonable Reporter tuned in late to the Philadelphia debate, and didn’t hear the ground rules. Apparently Clinton and Obama were instructed to drone on until snores from the audience reached their ears, or until the opponent had a birthday, whichever happened first.

Clinton provided the most memorable moment, suggesting that the GOP should simply apologize for the last seven years and withdraw from the general election. None of the punditry has dissected that remark, but then again, the pundits had dozed off by the time she said it.

Just when you thought there were no new ways to show contempt for a reporter… Along comes the BlackBerry.

The Reasonable Reporter has been kicked out of offices, stood up for appointments, and chastised for stories that didn’t comport with the world view of the subject. Once, a bureaucrat who spotted the press badge blurted out, “I hate reporters,” before any conservation had begun. One copes, and one tries to remain gracious.

Technology, though, provides ever-expanding opportunities for rude behavior. Last week a young spokesperson – with a hot microphone in her face and the reporter’s question half-spoken — grabbed her BlackBerry and tapped out a rather lengthy response to an incoming message. Her eyes glazed and she uttered a disengaged “uh-huh” to (sort of) acknowledge that the reporter was still speaking to her, (haltingly at this point, stunned by her rudeness, and wondering whether it was a signal of dismissal).

The BlackBerry’s purpose is to facilitate instant communication. So far as we know, such communication is not disrupted by a polite word to any persons who might be conducting actual face-to-face communication with the user. Something on the order of “Excuse me, I have to answer this right away. One moment, please.”

By the old-fashioned standards of the last century, a mere nine years ago, communication deferred by two minutes or so is still fairly instantaneous. The young spokesperson might have waited until the reporter, who was part of a group summoned by the young spokesperson for a briefing, had departed. But there was something apparently more pressing than the questions of the reporter who had responded to the young spokesperson’s invitation.

Technology has evolved so fast since the young spokesperson’s generation left home, that the Mommies and Daddies – even if it had occurred to them — didn’t have a chance to incorporate BlackBerry etiquette into their training about such things as table manners and thank you notes. So maybe it’s now the job of the bosses. This must-respond-now behavior is not confined to conversations with reporters. It’s widespread, it’s most prevalent among younger users, who seem oblivious to its alienating effect, and it’s rude. Someone needs to point out that the connection with the human beings in the room is not, and should not be secondary to the wireless connection.

Lost and found and lost again: The art of the basics in corporate communication

“Of course you kick your opponent when he’s down,” said a wise friend over cocktails one evening, discussing an issue-oriented political campaign he’d led to success.

“And then you kick him again. And again. And again.”

The Reasonable Reporter recalled his words this morning when the Reno Gazette Journal arrived. Someone, who may now be in line for a raise and promotion at Saint Mary’s Hospital, had issued a swift kick to Renown Regional Medical Center.

Top-of-fold in the RGJ –- coverage of the campaign orchestrated by the SEIU against Renown, central to which has been repeated assertions by Renown nurses that the quality of patient care at the medical center is suffering due to short staffing.

Obscuring the headline and part of the photo –- an advertising sticker, affixed like a post-it to the front page, declaring Saint Mary’s to be “Ranked #1 in Quality in Northern Nevada.” Ouch.

Not complicated. Not high tech. Not expensive, relatively speaking. Not fair.
But this little guerilla tactic revives a lost art in corporate communication. Twenty-first century communicators have become so preoccupied with trying to out-tech the other guy that they’ve forgotten the basics. They’ve forgotten how to bob and weave, and how to dance with real feet on the real ground.

On the ground. That brings us to the sure winner of this year’s Duh Award for Corporate Event Planning. Apparently none of the planners for the Olympic Committee bothered ahead of time to research the political proclivities of San Francisco, the site of the first Tibetan Freedom concert, where “Free Tibet” bumper stickers graced the back of every third vehicle for the latter half of the 1990s. It is, moreover, a city where anyone will protest anything.

So yeah, it’s kind of predictable that running the torch for the Beijing Olympics through San Francisco would cause, at minimum, some consternation. At worst, all hell could have broken loose. Can you say “Duh?”

In fifty states, they couldn’t find a more suitable city to host the torch? It’s not hyperbole to suggest that this event could have erupted into something resembling the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle, causing a marketing calamity. (Although the Canadian business mag Financial Post reports the Olympic sponsors tend to hang in there through political turbulence, and even expect same.)

Someone in the Olympic planning cohort woke up just in time to avert outright chaos, which was the good news. The bad news is, a lot of McDonald’s and Coca Cola customers truly excited to see the flame were disappointed when the route was changed, and the concluding ceremony amounted to hustling the torch onto a waiting airplane.

There’s more good news, though. Call it an unintended consequence. Americans who might not have been able to find Tibet on a map have gotten a lesson in global politics. Zimbabwe’s mysterious election results may have eluded them. Hugo Chavez might preside permanently in Venezuela. Um, is he a contender in the World Wrestling Federation championships? Hey wait a minute, where’s the torch, and what’s Tibet?

The beloved Olympic torch, like a good teacher, brought the subject home, even for the students who usually don’t care.

Sounds like 1998, on the OTHER radio station.

Dispatch from the Planet San Francisco, where one needn’t rely on cable news networks to feel the pulse of politics. Everything from walking the dog to shopping for groceries is a political act. A dose of political vibe is available just strolling into a café to buy a bagel in the morning.

It would be better, says the man stirring cream into his coffee as he awaits his bagel, to make the bagels here in the community, rather than trucking them in. Imported bagels send the community’s jobs and money elsewhere, and the trucks ruin the pavement. Do we need to guess where he stands on NAFTA?

This is the town where, for a short time in the 1990s, egg-throwing anti-SUV terrorists became underground heroes by stalking parked vehicles in the night, damaging countless paint jobs in an overt expression of hatred for conspicuous consumption. The public controversy arising over this destruction of property? Whether the egg-throwers were, indeed, justified.

Here, politics is served raw. So the Reasonable Reporter scans the San Francisco talk radio menu, on which, long before the advent of Air America, there existed robust outlets for all political points of view.

On this night, listeners to KGO’s Ray Taliaferro — arguably the hard left – are at full tilt bashing the Clintons. Not just Hillary, but Bill, and Chelsea, too, for her “none-of-your-business” response to a question from a college student about her father’s dalliance with Monica Lewinsky.

The talk show context is the Obama-Reverend Wright controversy, one clearly relished by the Clinton camp. The Clintons are pounded by caller after angry caller. These radio listeners, obvious Obama supporters, don’t like Hillary’s attitude toward Obama. But their outrage has a larger moral basis. This discussion is dominated by anger left over from the Clinton White House years.

“They embarrassed this country, and it’s time for them to get off the stage.”

“Hillary says ‘you can’t choose your relatives, but you can choose your minister.’ How dare she? She chose her husband, and then she turned a blind eye while he abused women.”

“Chelsea says it’s none of our business. What the President of the United States does in the oval office is our business.”

These are the approximate words of the callers, scrawled into a notebook as soon as the opportunity presented itself, so as to preserve them as faithfully as possible. Yikes. The Reasonable Reporter is having a flashback, in a Twilight Zone sort of way. Or maybe it’s true that if you live long enough, you hear everything.

The words of these callers, minus any references to Obama, could be lifted straight from tonight’s tape and dropped into a movie depicting talk radio, circa 1998. But it would be a movie about the other kind of talk radio. You know, the kind that carries Rush Limbaugh. These were almost precisely the words a decade ago of the callers to conservative talk radio.

In 1998, it was the right-wingers who decried the moral implications of Bill Clinton’s sexual behavior, with all its outward ripples affecting American dignity and equal protection in the workplace. Angry radio listeners from the left were outraged at the right’s outrage. In those days, they agreed with Chelsea. It was nobody’s business.

While tonight’s KGO radio listeners didn’t lament the use of presidential privilege as a tool to deny Paula Jones her day in court, the fat lady has not yet sung. Stranger things could occur, and well they might.

Of Guns and Frightened Women

Eight unsavory characters are blasted into eternity by a gun-wielding Jodie Foster. She’s making her way through a dark period, after a horrifying assault in Central Park by thugs who killed her boyfriend and put her into a three-week coma. She kills some people along the way. That’s the plot, and the body count, without ruining it for anyone who still intends to rent The Brave One.

The film calls to mind other stories of women and danger. North Reno women, whose rational anxieties have been fanned into a raging inferno by news coverage of a prowling serial rapist turned murderer. Some of those women are carrying pepper spray and taking self defense classes. Surely, determined rapists everywhere are shivering in their boots.

Back to Reno in a moment. The Brave One also causes the Reasonable Reporter to reflect, from her calm perspective in Nevada, on the surreal facts of life back on the Planet San Francisco. Was it really so common to hear gunfire out on the street? Was it really routine to speculate, based on the sound of the sirens, about the distance between our living room and the spot where the body lay? The speculation became ritual after a shooting that left a bystander lying about 25 yards from the front door. Did that really happen? Seems like a bad dream now.

And this was a desirable neighborhood, where newly-arrived young professionals lined up to pay exorbitant rents. Less affluent college students and would-be artists with day jobs packed in four to a flat. Unflinchingly, they wrote the big rent checks, in exchange for the gritty panache that came with a Mission District address. Many were surprised when their fantasy of a loft-and-cafe existence in the hip inner-city was punctured with bullets and bodies, and yes, the occasional bystander was caught in the crossfire.

Official word from the San Francisco Police in 2001 was that no permit to carry a weapon had been issued in the city for a more than a decade. This was the official word, but without much effort, the Reasonable Reporter tracked down a firearms trainer who had recently prepared a key figure in a high-profile criminal case to pass muster for a permit. The recently-permitted person provided off-the-record confirmation.

So much for the official word, which was so much official crap if you were well connected, or if the city had a compelling interest in your survival. It was true for ordinary citizens, though. Like the divorced mother of two in the Richmond District, whose menacing ex-husband ignored the restraining order and showed up at her apartment to kill her in front of their children. She would have been ineligible for a permit, had it occurred to her to apply for it. Yet guns were everywhere.

In The Brave One, Jodie Foster’s New York City heroine is freaked out and alone, and feels the need for protection. She’s unable to legally purchase a firearm, but when she walks out of the gun shop empty-handed, a stranger who overheard the unsuccessful transaction taps her on the shoulder. The need is met, and Foster becomes a vigilante.

Here’s another inner-city fantasy. An ordinary citizen gets her hands on a gun, and what follows naturally is that she embarks on a killing spree.

A variation of that fantasy is now extended to college students, as a spate of campus violence fuels debates about how to protect them. In the fantasy, armed students get drunk, and engage in a dormitory shoot-out. A competing fantasy has a lone woman in a dark campus parking lot — perhaps a UNR parking lot — defending herself by drawing a gun on a would-be rapist. Each scenario remains a fantasy until the day it occurs. And each could occur, irrespective of the law.

The difference as things currently stand – and this is where poor Jodie Foster got off to a bad start in The Brave One – is that the parking garage attack will go unreported. Any reasonable college freshman can figure out that it’s not worth risking a weapons charge in order to report that everything turned out OK.

Back to Reno, where the female population is jumpy, and police are imploring women to help in the capture of Brianna Denison’s killer by coming forward if they’ve been attacked. Who’s going to report her on-campus tangle with the man who might be most-wanted, if she also has to report her own criminal activity? Hiring a lawyer isn’t in the budget for most college women, never mind the hassle and the stigma and the famously invasive questions.

(If you’re interested, here’s Jodie Foster’s own commentary on The Brave One, from an interview in Entertainment Weekly:

“I don’t believe that any gun should be in the hand of a thinking, feeling, breathing human being. Americans are by nature filled with rage-slash-fear. And guns are a huge part of our culture. I know I’m crazy because I’m only supposed to say that in Europe. But violence corrupts absolutely. By the end of this, her transformation is complete. ”F— all of you, now I’m just going to kill people with my bare hands.”)

The most interesting Clinton success story has not been shared.

The Reasonable Reporter can only wonder what it’s like to be so influential that highly-placed campaign officials make a personal appearance to flog you for the tone of your coverage. The vicarious experience is available thanks to Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, who shares an account of a meeting where an angry Clinton spokesman cited a skit from Saturday Night Live to a group of major-league political journalists, as proof that they’ve shown a bias in favor of Barack Obama.

(In the SNL skit, located on YouTube, three worshipful journalists grovel before Obama on the set of a debate. He forgives them their favoritism, as Hillary Clinton looks on, never given the opportunity to speak.)

Milbank relates the incident to make a point about the degree to which the Clinton campaign is grasping for a way to explain failure. One way is to blame the media, where Obama shines brighter as a projection of collective hope than Clinton as a workhorse for better bureaucracy.

But who’s fault is that? When they made Hillary less toxic, her handlers also made her less interesting, in the mass-market sense. Having now filed down all the sharp edges that made Hillary fascinating, perhaps her pre-campaign bout of self-improvement could be one of her greatest success stories. Even a blind-drunk consultant on the verge of slipping into a coma should be able to identify it as most interesting tale about her quest for the presidency. But it hasn’t been shared.

Eighteen months ago, Hillary Clinton was one of the most cruelly caricatured people in the country. Talk shows used to drop the sound of cawing crows behind her voice. Whole subsections of joke websites were devoted to her. She’s been analogized to the Wicked Witch of the West; she’s been portrayed as a dominatrix dragging a dog-collared Bill around on a leash; she’s been productized as a doll with a nutcracker between her thighs.

Few of the caricatures are surviving at the mass level, because her campaign persona doesn’t support them. And this is the interesting story. You want change? Female viewers could be glued to the tube watching how Hillary Clinton made the transition from perceived she-monster to smiling, accessible PTA mom with a hairdo that never droops and a flattering executive wardrobe.

This is not about fashion, although fashion isn’t an unimportant element. It’s about a Pygmalion-like transition that must have begun with appearance, but clearly extended to voice coaching, cadence training, and body language adjustments. Who knows what else was involved, or how many people played Henry Higgins to her Eliza Doolittle? The point is that it worked.

This is no small accomplishment, and in fact, it capsulizes the strong-woman struggle the campaign has labored in vain to convey. Many’s the tough, competent woman who’s been told to “pull back” if she wants to succeed. To curb her assertiveness, to smile more, to be more feminine. It’s advice that goes down hard for smart women who grew up with the drumbeat of feminism always in the background. It’s also hard as hell to do. Try changing your natural demeanor for even an hour-long meeting.

American women support a magazine industry that thrives month after month, even in the age of the internet, shouting self-improvement instructions to us while we’re in line at the supermarket. Some of the instructions are about our physical appearance, but many are about changing our relationship to the world. We have also supported the creation of a new television genre – the makeover show. Judging from the way those shows are proliferating, we must love them.

Hillary’s problem is her insistence that voters want meat and potatoes when they are showing a clear preference for something more creamy and less filling. Telling the story of her reinvention might seem risky, but it’s no more so than any other imaging gamble. If Obama can run from event-to-event with Oprah on his arm, and still be taken seriously as a potential commander-in-chief of the American armed forces, then why not?

Do you all need your mouths washed out with soap?

Jane Fonda. Wasn’t she married to a man who owned a television network? Seems like she’d know there are words you don’t say on TV.

But on a visit to the Today Show, Fonda dropped one of the most vile words in the English language. Fonda said the C-word on a fluffy morning news show watched by millions of women who think dodge ball is too violent a playground pastime for their kids. Effortlessly, she said it, and without an apparent second thought. The word rolled right out of her mouth, like it was the primary ingredient in a cookie recipe, or the name of the shop where her hair stylist works.

Feminists of Fonda’s generation have a love-hate relationship with the C-word, and some have declared that it’s liberating to say it. Letting it slip on the Today Show was a verbal malfunction of major proportion, brought on by Fonda’s involvement in a much-acclaimed stage play with the unfortunate name “The Vagina Monologues.” The Reasonable Reporter has never seen the Vagina Monologues, and is unable to say whether the show is as revolting as its name.

In other news of 1960s feminists versus the English language, Hillary Clinton got huffy with MSNBC when one of its reporters suggested the Clintons “pimped out” their daughter, Chelsea, by putting the young woman on the campaign trail. Hillary scolded MSNBC for allowing the P-word to be used in conjunction with her daughter. “I became Chelsea’s mother long before I ran for any office,” she said in a letter.

Hillary’s outrage was, of course, momma-bear posturing, but it says two interesting things. First, that she is quite out of touch with pop culture. “Pimp,” a word once doubly loaded for its sexual and criminal connotations, has been defanged and defined downward through repeated use in other contexts. (That doesn’t mean reporters acting in their professional capacity should use it.)

The second thing it says is how damn smart Condi Rice was to resist Republicans who wanted her to seek the presidency. Some in the party thought she’d make a great candidate. We’ll see your first viable woman, and we’ll raise you a viable black woman with actual foreign policy experience.

But Condi squelched the idea immediately, and the Reasonable Reporter wonders whether she foresaw the endless situations in which momma-bear could have favorably compared herself, because she is a mother, to Condi, who isn’t. Childless women know one thing well. We know that our key deficiency, in the eyes of many parents, is childlessness.

Dr. Rice is a brilliant scholar, Hillary might say. But does she know what it is to sit up at night with a sick child and wonder whether her health insurance will cover the problem? Dr. Rice has built an admirable career, but has she ever had to worry about whether her child is reading at grade level? Ad infinitum.

This disqualifying technique would rock the Richter scale with Hillary’s target demographic. It would be pulled out at every opportunity, and would come without the kind of blowback that resulted from the Martin Luther King- couldn’t-do-it-without-LBJ potshot.

Finally, Time Magazine’s Mark Halperin said on a radio show that John Edwards thinks Obama is “kind of a pussy.” For crying all night, people, do you all need your mouths washed out with soap? The Reasonable Reporter is a First Amendment absolutist, and, by the way, has more than a passing acquaintance with profanity. But not on the air. People who appear on news programs – reporters, hosts and guests – have a responsibility to exercise some judgment when they choose their words.

Personal tragedy can be a useful tool.

At the 2007 legislative session there was an ACLU lobbyist named Joey Turco. Joseph Turco, to be more correct. After law school, Turco began to identify himself as Joseph, because, he said, you can’t be taken seriously in court if your name is Joey.

If the Nevada Legislature were a movie, Turco would be an offbeat character, engagingly portrayed, in a fleeting scene that would draw notice from critics for its delightful quirkiness.

His suits were slightly rumpled. Sitting down to testify, he would lay his notes out, then straighten his tie, and take a breath, as if to start speaking — only to stop short just as his first sentence was anticipated.

Next, he might look down at the table, and then up at the ceiling. A hand would move to his brow. An impatient room would wait while he adjusted himself in his chair. After what seemed like eternity, Turco, an earnest civil libertarian, would speak.

Elaborate preludes notwithstanding, Turco was no Clarence Darrow. But once, he tossed out a phrase so perfectly crafted that it echoed for hours.

“Lawmaking by personal tragedy,” he said to the Reasonable Reporter, after both houses passed a bill permitting DNA collection from a broader assortment of criminals. The bill’s initial hearing had featured the mother of a murdered New Mexico college student whose killer was found through a DNA match when he committed a subsequent crime. The mother has successfully advocated in a number of states for expanding the range of situations in which biological samples are taken by the police.

Lawmaking by personal tragedy finds parents of tragic victims using the law to make a broad category of people pay for a narrow set of horrors. Candy Lightner comes to mind, the original Mother Against Drunk Driving. So energetically did she pursue statutory vengeance for her daughter’s death at the hands of an unrepentant drunk, that there are places now where casual wine sippers are in the sights of law enforcement before they’ve left the restaurant parking lot.

Turco’s phrase floats in the background, as Reno suffers through a fruitless search for the missing Brianna Denison. At the moment, the personal tragedy takes the shape of frustration for so many, who want so much to rescue the girl, but feel increasingly helpless as the weeks pass and hope dims.

The Reasonable Reporter would like to say this carefully, but it’s an observation laced with crudeness, and there’s little that would make it more gentle. Whole segments of the community are now ordered around this tragedy. On many days it drives the news, and even if Brianna does “come home,” to use the parlance of her searchers, her tragedy will be a driver at the next the legislative session.

The 2007 legislature authorized expanded DNA collection, but not the money to process the samples. Washoe County’s crime lab has gathered close to three thousand biological specimens, which have mostly sat on the shelf for lack of funds.

County law enforcement established $150,000 as the cost of clearing the DNA backlog, and decided last week to appeal to the public for help. The effort was barely underway when several prominent community members stepped forward with nearly two-thirds of the total, and turned it over to Washoe County for expenses related to processing all 3,000 specimens.

This massive infusion of private cash, announced in the context of the Brianna investigation, will support more than just a search for Brianna’s abductor. It’s reasonable to ask whether all 3,000 of the shelved DNA samples are of interest in this case. Are they all kidnappers and sex offenders? A there no embezzlers in the bunch? Nobody who sold Toyotas to a chop shop?

Of course there are, given Nevada’s expanded DNA policy. There are no doubt many biological samples from crimes with a non-biological basis. This probability greatly rankled Joseph Turco. (Although it should be noted that there is no testimony from Turco regarding this matter on the legislative record. The ACLU submitted its proposed amendments in writing, and they are not reflected in the public record.)

In a climate where government’s goals outpace tax collection, personal tragedy can be a useful tool. Brianna’s case may be solved by this effort, but the net it casts will be much wider. Brianna’s personal tragedy, in effect, paved the way to overcome a larger law enforcement hurdle.

Washoe County’s sheriff has suggested that when the 2009 session rolls around, the largess of a few community leaders who contributed their own money will be presented as the will of the public-at-large to fund regular DNA processing. It’s a benign distortion, because right now, the will of the public is to discover Brianna’s fate, and to bring the culprit to justice.

Carson City will no doubt find the DNA-processing money in 2009. Because who in his right mind would argue that it makes sense to collect biological samples from criminals and then allow them to languish on a shelf while crimes remain unsolved? And who in his right mind would risk seeming insensitive to personal tragedy?

Snapshots: from Hillary’s cleavage to Michelle Obama’s derriere

Some months back, when Hillary seemed inevitable, she donned a top with a neckline that revealed a bit of cleavage. While it’s pretty certain Mrs. Clinton’s cleavage didn’t cause Playboy to come calling, it got lots of attention.

If Hillary’s cleavage was not presidential, then Michelle Obama’s pink fanny-hugging skirt at the South Carolina victory speech was decidedly un-firstladylike. The suit was fashionable, and feminine, and revealed an enviable derriere. But a prospective first lady – even one as stunning as Mrs. Obama — might want to rethink future displays of that particular asset.

Nobody’s asking her to be Barbara Bush, but her shapely backside did distract from the purpose at hand.

Other snapshots from post-Nevada campains: The Republican debate at the Reagan Library, during which the candidates sat in front of what appeared to be the hulking body of Reagan’s retired Air Force One. (Also a distraction from the purpose at hand.)

Mitt Romney might have been able to taxi a Boeing 747 through the hole available to him when the conversation turned to an early statement of his regarding a “timetable” for withdrawal from Iraq. But he missed his shot. Since Romney staunchly maintains that McCain is deliberately distorting the quote, it would have been a fairly simple matter – and an effective move – to accuse McCain of engaging in Clinton tactics.

They were, after all at the Reagan library, before a crowd that might have (debate protocol be damned) roared appreciatively had Romney said something to this effect:

“Senator McCain, you’re using Clinton tactics to try and misrepresent my record, and I won’t indulge you in it. The video in question is posted on my website for anyone who wants to see it for themselves. I will clarify my position one final time here, and then I’d like to move on.” Then he should have done it, in two or three sentences, and met any further questions about it with his URL.

Instead, he sank into a demeaning yes-you-did-no-I-didn’t exchange that diminished both candidates, and made the Reasonable Reporter wish for a flight attendant to appear with a drink and some headphones.

Back to South Carolina and the spectacular pink-suited Michelle Obama. No, wait a minute – Back to South Carolina and the victory speech given by the inspiring husband of the spectacular pink-suited Michelle Obama.

Barack Obama started slow, but came to life about a third of the way into his speech, and yes, he inspired hope and all the other goodness that lives in the mysterious part of the psyche from which human beings draw their political preferences. He was spine-tingling. And the next day brought endorsements from the Kennedy family.