We at Various Things & Stuff have been pretty hard on U.S. Sen. Harry Reid on the blog recently, given his attempt to engineer the Democratic primary election in Nevada for Henderson Mayor Jim Gibson. That’s just wrong, we think.

But our despair at Reid’s anti-Democratic action was erased today, when he took to the Senate floor to forcefully demand the Senate Intelligence Committee pick up its long-stalled investigation of how prewar intelligence was used to take the nation to war in Iraq. Reid’s parlimentary skill was on full display as he took the Senate into a rare closed session to debate the matter, outraging Republicans but winning assurances that the so-called “phase 2″ of the committee’s investigation will resume. (Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said he could no longer trust Reid, news which Nevada’s senior senator surely greeted with bitter tears. Or not.)

The American people, Reid said, have an absolute right to know the reasons why the nation is at war and why more than 2,000 service members have died, Reid said. (That’s to say nothing of members of Congress, who were shown maps purporting to show the locations of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. No weapons were ever found.)

Reid’s action captured headlines immediately and threw liberals into a frenzy of joy. “I don’t care if you’re a Republican or a Democrat, you owe Harry Reid a big smack on the lips,” Majority Report co-host Sam Seder said on his daily show on Air America Radio.

We don’t think we’ll go that far, but we will go this far: Reid’s action was long overdue, and we couldn’t be happier he did it. For that, we say, thank you, Sen. Reid.

Boy, we have sure have had it with the right-wing biases of the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce! Those capitalist enablers have gone too far this time! While purporting to sponsor a “candidate forum” for the 2006 governor’s race, the chamber really is having a one-sided beauty pageant reserved for Republican candidates! Don’t believe us? Check the list:

• U.S. Rep. Jim Gibbons. (His remarks were pre-recorded, no doubt to be screened for plagiarism and to avoid sexually harassing his audience.)

• Lt. Gov. Lorraine Hunt. (She’s our favorite among the Republican candidates. How many of them can cook and sing?)

• State Sen. Bob Beers. (Best looking Republican candidate by far, even if he does favor government as it was back in Precambrian days.)

• Henderson Mayor Jim Gibson. (The most canny Republican candidate, he’s actually snuck into the Democratic primary to avoid the competition in the Republican ranks.)

Seriously, chamber, you should have invited a Democrat to your event! For those who care, it’s from 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. in the chairman’s auditorium at the Sierra Health Services building, 2716 N. Tenaya Way.

Wait, wait, this just in! Chamber Spinmeistress Cara Roberts called us back to tell us state Sen. Dina Titus, who actually is a Democrat, first agreed to attend the forum, but then called to cancel, saying she had to teach a class. (Titus’ day job is as a UNLV professor of political science.)

A lot of people think we at Various Things & Stuff are cynical bastards. And, most of the time, they’re right. But we’re not generally conspiratorial bastards.

Still, can you blame us in a world where we seem to see a terror alert every time the Bush administration gets into trouble? New York Times columnist Frank Rich recently wrote about a study performed by MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, who found no fewer than 13 “coincidences” involving bad Bush administration PR days and terror alerts, news conferences, warnings, etc.

The worst of the bunch came in 2002, when then-Attorney General John Ashcroft beamed a news conference from Russia, where he was on a state trip, to announce the thwarting of a dirty bomb plot. The truth? He was talking about the arrest of Jose Padilla, which had happened one month earlier. But right before the news conference, FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley had gone public with allegations the administration had ignored terror intelligence prior to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

So, are we kooks for wondering if perhaps the timing of the Samuel Alito Supreme Court nomination and today’s bird flu pandemic news conference by President George W. Bush are designed, at least in part, to distract us from the fact that Vice President Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, was indicted Friday on charges of lying to FBI agents and the grand jury?

Think about it: If you’re worried that abortion rights may be set back by the Supreme Court following your own horrible death by bird flu, it’s hard to focus on the very real fact that a national-security administration sacrificed national security in order to smear a political opponent, isn’t it?

We’re not denying there is such a thing as bird flu. (By contrast, some of those politically connected terror warnings have turned out to be entirely bogus.) We’re not denying the bird flu could be very bad. We’re just saying that the administration has a track record of trying to distract the public from its own shortcomings by turning to security, which they — for reasons now passing understanding — still have some credibility on.

We could be wrong. But we doubt it.

So we see from today’s Review-Journal that Barrick Gold Corp. has made a $9.2 billion offer to buy rival Placer Dome. The purchase would continue a string of acquisitions that have seen Barrick absorb operations in Chile, Argentina, Peru, Tanzania, Canada and Australia since the company first formed in 1983.

We’re not drawing any conclusions, of course, but it’s somewhat odd to us that the company that’s been assimilating other mining concerns for years would have as it’s spokesman a guy named Vincent Borg.

Coincidence? We don’t think so.