Hmmm. New Senate minority leader Harry Reid isn’t as boring as I thought:

And here’s another story from Reid’s tenure as chairman of the gaming commission: A man named Jack Gordon, who later married LaToya Jackson, tried to give Reid a $12,000 bribe. Reid let the FBI videotape Gordon offering him the bribe, and then, according to a Las Vegas Review-Journal account, he “put his hands around Gordon’s neck and said, ‘You son of a bitch, you tried to bribe me.’” That’s right, Senate Democrats are being led by a man who once tried to strangle LaToya Jackson’s future husband-manager. You call that boring?

Even if he had never served on the gaming commission, Reid’s biography would still be a better read than the average senator’s. He is the son of an alcoholic gold miner who killed himself. His mother did laundry for, in Reid’s words, “houses of ill repute.” He once disguised himself as a homeless man and spent the night at a mission in Las Vegas. Quirkily, he never says good-bye, even to his children, when he hangs up the phone. He once filibustered the Republicans for nine hours, by himself, by reading from the history book he wrote about his hometown of Searchlight, Nev. (Even better, the reason for the filibuster was to prevent the GOP from protesting the delaying tactics being used by Democrats.) And just this past week in Time, Reid told Joe Klein that he got into a fistfight with his future father-in-law before he eloped with his wife.

I’ll concede. Harry Reid is no Tom Daschle. Whether that will be good for the Democrats remains to be seen. But it won’t be boring.

Lots more.