So what is up with Law & Order mainstay Fred Thompson, who is going to announce his run for the presidency (in real life) this week? Granted, we’d much prefer Sam Waterston as a candidate, but you don’t always get to pick these things. (By the way, all-time best Law & Order babe? Angie Harmon, hands down!)

Anyway, Thompson laid out his schedule for his much-anticipated, long-overdue candidacy: He’s going to hit Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and then his native Tennessee, all starting with a Wednesday appearance on NBC’s The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.

Notice anything missing there? Oh, we don’t know. How about NEVADA! That’s right, second-in-the-nation NEVADA, where the Republican caucus will be held Jan. 19? Ever heard of Nevada, Mr. Thompson?

We only ask because we think it would be cool to meet Thompson. Fame factor and all.

» Now, we always assumed it took some smarts to run a really big company, like, say, MGM Mirage. But we’re starting to question that judgment, after Chairman and CEO Terry Lanni told our colleague Jon Ralston that Gov. Jim Gibbons is doing a "good job." (Ralston wrote about the exchange in his Friday column in the Las Vegas Sun.)

"I think he [Gibbons] is doing a good job as governor. I don’t agree with everything that he has proposed. But I am a supporter of Jim’s and continue to be," Lanni said.

OK, we understand that Lanni heavily backed Gibbons’ candidacy with (legal, reported) campaign contributions. We understand that politically, the state’s gambling industry needs to get along with the governor, and saying nice things about him publicly is a wise move.

But really: A good job? Which part of the job that Gibbons has done could be characterized as "good"? We don’t want to do the whole "Gibbons’ Problems List" here, but telling lies, being investigated by the FBI for allegedly receiving bribes, having your ridiculous napkin-headed picture on national TV, and campaigning hard for your own Jack Bauer Command Center (against the wishes of actual law enforcement officers working to prevent a terrorist attack), and bouncing the only representative of McCarran International Airport from a homeland security committee for nakedly political reasons can’t meet even the broadest definition of "good."

Do you think maybe Lanni got cut off mid-sentence? Yeah, that must be it. Lanni was probably trying to say, "I think Jim Gibbons is doing a good job [making a complete fool of himself] as governor. … But I am a supporter [of his immediate, involuntary commitment to a mental-health facility] and continue to be [alarmed that he's not in custody]."

Yeah, that’s probably what he was trying to say. Because you gotta be smart to run a big gambling company, right?

» OK, so maybe the headline writer at the Review-Journal screwed up when he or she accidentally attributed the "gas is going to be $9 a gallon if we pull out of Iraq now" statement to U.S. Rep. Jon Porter last week. (In truth, Porter says he was told that by U.S. generals and Iraqi officials, and was merely reporting what they’d told him.)

But c’mon. Shouldn’t the congressman take some responsibility? After all, he did think it worth repeating, right? And if somebody says something ridiculous, even if they’re quoting somebody else, they can’t escape all responsibility, especially if the statement is obviously false.

Like, if we said, "You know, this guy told us that the Republicans might just have a chance of not seeming like total jackoffs sometime before the end of the decade," you’d all think we were totally full of it, right? And we’d have to apologize, wouldn’t we?

» Speaking of Porter, we’ve got to disagree with the congressman about something. In Saturday’s Las Vegas Sun, he compared the occupation of Iraq to the last great war. "At the end of the day, the consequences are so great that I see this as big a war as World War II," he said.

Um, what?

In World War II, allies from around the globe came together to challenge a trio of power-mad dictators bent on world domination, and they did so only after the Continent and much of North Africa was under his control. In Iraq, the United States led a rag-tag coalition to invade a tin-pot dictator who couldn’t even conquer his unarmed neighbor. And in so doing, they created a situation that further destablized a region that — we admit — wasn’t that stable to begin with.

Iraq is nothing like World War II, in root cause, justification, planning or execution. It’s a civil war that American soldiers just happen to be in the middle of, and it’s very likely that civil war will continue whether we leave now or five years from now. Therefore, why not leave now?

We’re just saying.

» You know, we knew former Las Vegas Sun mainstay Ruthe Deskin. We read her column occasionally. And, we know current Review-Journal columnist Jane Ann Morrison. And we read her column occasionally. And as much as the latter tries like hell to be like the former, we think it’s a lost cause. For one, Ruthe always had something to say. And for another, Ruthe always knew that the story was never, ever about her.

But everybody needs a role model to aspire to, we suppose, and Morrison could probably do a lot worse.

» U.S. Sen. Harry Reid comes off looking pretty good in Molly Ball’s Sunday profile in the Review-Journal. Maybe too good. Reid says he doesn’t regret his vote, and based it on the advice of people he respected, like Colin Powell. Evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction "…was confirmed by someone who I have great admiration — who I had great admiration for, Colin Powell."

But as we’ve already mentioned on this blog, Powell’s stirring star turn before the United Nations in which he alleged the presence of WMD in Iraq came months after the Senate, and Reid, had already voted to go to war. So how could Reid rely on Powell’s evidence to justify his vote, when Powell himself didn’t finish his "research" until shortly before the speech? It might have been a good question to put to Reid.

Reid says it took him a long time to come to the realization that he’d been lied to about Iraq. "You don’t have many epiphanies," Reid said. "Things usually take awhile to build up in a person’s mind. I don’t go to conclusions very quickly. I don’t think most of us do."

Really? How long should it take to answer the question — is it a good idea to give George W. Bush and Dick Cheney the option to wage war on a sovereign nation that never attacked America? We only ask because 21 of Reid’s fellow senators came to a rather quick answer, and voted against invading Iraq. History, it seems, has proven those people right. Or maybe it was just their relative safe seats?

"I have no military background. As a result of that, I have overcompensated in making sure that I do everything I can to be supportive of the military," Reid said. OK, we understand that. But a vote to invade Iraq was not a vote to be supportive of the military; it was a vote to be supportive of Bush, and his misbegotten, trumped up sales job for the war. Nobody should ever confuse the two.

Oh, and if Reid really has "turned from conservative, pro-war Democrat to one of the staunchest senators on the anti-war left," what can we make of his newfound desire to compromise with Republicans? If the anti-war left loves Reid so much, why is dailykos.com slamming him?

Answer: Reid is pragmatic. He knows he can’t get a troop withdrawal plan out of the Senate because of Republican opposition, so he’s putting the onus back on the War Party in an attempt to get half a loaf. It’s politically viable, but it excludes Reid from membership in the "anti-war left" by definition, since those people tend to stand on principle. (A principle other than political survival, that is.)