Ed Kilgore says most of what needs to be said about Byron York's attempt to claim that GOP arguments against the judicial filibuster were acts of High Constitutional Principle. York recycles the argument that, because the Senate is charged with giving "advice and consent" with respect to presidential nominees, the filibuster of judicial appointees somehow raises constitutional problems.

• I would definitely categorize behind-the-scenes efforts by congressional Democrats to have a jobs package ready to go as soon as health-care reform is signed into law by President Obama as too little, too late, but at least by agreeing to the details in advance we won't have to spend months upon months watching the process unfold committee by committee, vote by agonizing vote. Perhaps there's a lesson here for majority rule in the U.S. Senate ...

Spencer Ackerman uncovers a dynamic that would seem to be at the heart of the bureaucratic difficulties in putting together all the discrete pieces of information that various agencies had gathered on alleged underwear bomber Umar Abdulmutallab. Namely that the National Counterterrorism Center, which is tasked with putting all the disparate pieces of intelligence collected by other government agencies, only has about "eight or nine" analysts working in their Middle East Branch at any given time:

Well, not really. But one thing the administration must realize by now is that no matter what they do, they’ll get no credit for their efforts to appeal to Republicans, so long as the revanchist right that sits in Congress is uninterested in their entreaties. So why bother anymore?

Just about everything you'll hear coming out of Washington starting now is really about November's midterm election. The gravitational pull of the midterms was already apparent last year, as Republicans marched in perfect lockstep to vote against whatever the president and Dems proposed -- Republicans always have authoritarian discipline on their side, which is why they're Republicans -- but you haven't seen anything yet.

Everyone knows that policies are nothing without a strong public champion. Here are the figures we've watched shape the political landscape of the aughts:

Nancy Pelosi: The San Francisco liberal who took control of the House.

Al Gore: His post-Clinton reinvention.