Unless you’ve been living in a cave and missed the early advance publicity that’s been all over Las Vegas, you know U.S. Sen. Harry Reid has written a book.  The Good Fight is the story of Reid’s political life interspersed with his youth in Searchlight, Henderson and beyond.

We won’t recount the content at length (follow the links if you’re interested) but we will say this: It’s a good book, one that we really enjoyed. Not only did we learn a few things about the Senate’s majority leader that we didn’t know previously, but Reid says his children did, too.

“I wanted this to be a story about who I am,” Reid said, explaining why he didn’t write about his legislative record or a specific issue, like Social Security. “I read some of those [polemical books] and they’re so boring,” Reid said.

Reid was actually laboring on The Good Fight for about a year before he realized he’d need help from a co-author, in this case Mark Warren of Esquire. But Warren keeps his fingerprints almost invisible; on almost every page, you can hear Reid’s quiet voice telling the story.

Of all the politicians who come in for criticism in Reid’s book, none take a bigger beating than President George W. Bush, who comes across as a dolt, a liar or an incompetent. Reid may have been a defense lawyer in private practice before politics, but he sure as hell has built a powerful case for censure (at least) or impeachment (even better) of Bush and his henchman, Vice President Dick Cheney. But the senator from Searchlight has done neither with his lofty position.

“I am as frustrated as the American people,” Reid says. “You can flex your muscles, but if you don’t have anything to back it up with, you’re in trouble.”

A lesson learned from Reid’s youth: He picked a fight and lost, something he’s completely unwilling to do in the Senate where he rules by a razor-thin majority, at least until the next election. No votes equals no justice, at least until the fallout from Bush’s agenda swamps the Republican yacht in November.

One thing readers will notice about the book is how personal it is: Reid talks about sensitive topics like his father’s propensity for domestic violence and ultimate suicide, his own fisticuffs with his future father-in-law and his hard-fought journey through law school against the indifference of a cruel dean. And the senator’s martini-dry sense of humor comes through as well.

“It was, frankly, hard for me to write some of the things that I did,” Reid said.

Perhaps most vivid is Reid’s portrait of former Gov. Mike O’Callaghan, who was the senator’s mentor and longtime friend. It was O’Callaghan who encouraged Reid to seek office, guided his career and offered (unsolicited) commentary thereon. “What the fuck are you doing?” O’Callaghan would call and say. Anybody who’s been on the receiving end of one of those phone calls (and we have) knows Reid is calling it true. And what any of us would give to be able to hear that booming voice on the phone again.

The book will be on shelves soon, and Reid will be everywhere, from Reno and Las Vegas to San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York, with some signings combined with fundraising trips. (Profits from the book will go to charity, Reid says.) Oh, and he’ll be on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart next Monday. And that’s not to be missed.

Back in the days when the Las Vegas Sun was a struggling afternoon newspaper, the larger morning Review-Journal could afford to be arrogant. The Sun’s circulation was tiny compared to the R-J, and the smaller paper could break a story that only about 40,000 people in town would see. Later, the much larger R-J could write the same piece, and still have it considered to be “breaking news.”

(Trust us, we know: We were employed at the Sun as a reporter from 1993-1997, and at the R-J as a columnist from 2000 to 2005. Oh, and for full disclosure purposes, Stephens Media LLC publishes the R-J, CityLife and this blog.)

Anyway, those days are gone. Since September 2005, the Sun has been delivered inside the morning Review-Journal, thanks to a modification of the longstanding, federally approved joint-operating agreement between the two newspapers.

That means the R-J has the exact same circulation as the Sun.

The same readers who get the R-J get the Sun.

So it becomes fairly easy to see when the Sun kicks the R-J’s ass on a story, and the R-J gamely tries to run the exact same story a few days later as if nothing’s happened.

And that should be embarrassing to the editors of the R-J, given that it bills itself as the paper of record.

Now, we at Various Things & Stuff read both newspapers religiously every day, and we happen to know the story linked above is hardly the only example of the “it’s not news until we print it” mentality. Perhaps the reality of the need for daily competition hasn’t yet sunk in? It’s only been about 2-1/2 years, after all, and newspapers are well known to change at a glacial pace.

Also, we’d be remiss if we didn’t point out something the Sun omitted: It’s owners — the Greenspun family — are partners with Station Casinos, a likely possible explanation for the Sun’s exclusive. (This time.) It’s the kind of thing that should be disclosed in the story, to alert the reader to conflicts.

But that can’t explain all the Sun’s scoops. Or the lack of red faces down on Bonanza Road.

There may be some out there who are wondering, in the interests of fairness, whether we’re going to lambaste the Nevada Republican Party the way we did the Clark County Democratic Party when the latter screwed up its convention so badly, it needed to have an entirely new “do-over” to make up for it.

In a word, no.

It’s not that we’re biased in favor of the Republicans, even if they did select a way better-looking chairman for their convention in state Sen. Bob Beers than did the Democrats. It’s that the two situations are not at all the same.

In the Democrats’s case, the Feb. 23 county convention was ruined by incompetence. The party simply booked a room that was far too small to accommodate the expected turnout, much less the actual turnout. It took the state party essentially taking over the convention to get it right, with a second convention at the Thomas & Mack.

In the Republican’s case, the convention was thwarted because of the extreme competence of the supporters of U.S. Rep. Ron Paul. Our friend Chuck Muth — who knows about these things — describes at length how the Paul supporters out-organized the backers of U.S. Sen. John McCain on his blog. (For some blow-by-blow coverage, see our colleague Anjeanette Damon’s blog, and there’s some good info in the Las Vegas Sun’s story, too.)

Got it? Democrats screwed themselves by incompetence; Republicans screwed themselves by underestimating the passion and organizing skill of the Ron Paul Revolution.

And, as a side note, we couldn’t be more delighted. First, we love to see Republicans in disarray. Second, we think Paul is obviously the superior choice to McCain. (Paul is right on ending the drug war, ending the Iraq War and preventing future wars, as well as civil liberties, although we don’t endorse his entire agenda). Third, we love it when the people stand up and tell the powers-that-be what’s what.

So, go Ron Paul! Go revolution!

You’ve probably heard by now the Guggenheim Hermitage is closing, the victim of, well, the fact that tourists don’t exactly come to Vegas in order to ponder how post-Impressionists’ bold experiments with multiple perspectives paved the way for the Cubists; rather, tourists come to drink slime-a-rita out of glass footballs and play Sopranos-themed slot machines.

Is anyone really surprised at the closure? That’s what happens when you toss a nonprofit museum in the ol’ free market croc pit and tell it to dance. I still contend to this day, though, that if Venetian owner Sheldon Adelson really wanted to do Western Civ a favor, instead of pouring money into his wargasmatron hater machine Freedom’s Watch, he should have given the Gugg free rent, and in turn admission to the Gugg should have been free all the time. But no. Now we’ve got the messy death of an interesting cultural experiment — a contemplative space amid the sight-and-sound riot of the Strip — on our hands.

But the painful part is this: Oh, now they listen. Until it closes May 11, admission to the Gugg is free. Amazingly, a spot-check on Saturday revealed What Could Have Been — brisk biz as tourists and locals ranging from crisp to crusty filtered through the tidy “Modern Masters” exhibit, which is quite excellently put together. It’s basically about how the modernists took those serious, all-important genres codified by the stuffy French — historical paintings, portraits, still lifes, landscapes and domestic scenes — and just ran wild with them.

Curious Sub-Event That, If I Were a Bigger Person, I Would Decline to Take as a Metaphor of the Creeping Myopic Cupidity that Rules the Strip: So, we’re standing there whisper-talking in the museum … and all of a sudden this big fat stink beetle just casually trundles across the floor.

I’ll warehouse that in my soul as a piece of found performance art.