First off, let's get our holiday schedule out of the way. Today, as you've already noticed, we're not having a full column. We were working on one, but the research got a bit daunting and nobody's going to read it tomorrow anyway, so we're setting it aside for now (the subject will come up again, the column was inspired by the news that the Supreme Court is going to take up a "religious freedom/corporate personhood" question with regard to birth control insurance -- so look for the full column when the oral arguments are made, in a few months).

Tomorrow, we will be eating turkey with all the trimmings, so there will be no column at all. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Friday, we may drag ourselves to the keyboard for a Friday column, but right now the forecast leans more toward lying on the couch, so we'll just have to see. Maybe you'll get a full Friday Talking Points, and maybe you'll get a re-run of a column from Thanksgivings past, who knows?

One other unrelated note is that our thoughts will be going out to one of the CW.com commenting family this year. Last year, Chris1962 was hit hard by Hurricane Sandy, so we certainly hope that a year's time has allowed her to rebuild and have some things to be thankful for which were swept away last year. We haven't heard from her in a while, so we hope she's been busy rebuilding and recovering from the storm.

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It is ridiculously early to start talking about the 2014 midterm elections. I realize that, really I do. But we've got to start sometime, and it's always amusing, months later, to look back on my unfulfilled prophecies, so this column will be that sort of blue-sky speculation (just to warn everyone, up front).

The 2014 midterms are, right now, pretty much of an open book. Nobody (including me) can accurately predict what is going to happen in the election, and there is always the possibility of some catastrophe happening between then and now which will suck the political oxygen out of the race to the point where other issues pale in importance. A year is, after all, a long time in politics.

But having said all of that, and barring any unforeseen gigantic issues on the horizon, we can at least look at what both parties have to play around with in the campaign. One side in particular is already telegraphing what will occupy the center stage of their campaign platform. It's not even really "guesswork" to state now that Republicans will be placing Obamacare at the center of their efforts. Figuring out the Democratic strategy is a bit harder, though.

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Millions of Americans will travel home for Thanksgiving this year, and millions of the same Americans will get into heated political discussions at some point during the festivities. Most of these political discussions will wind up convincing nobody, because the whole point of them is (at heart) to casually ridicule other members of your family -- you could just as easily tease each other about who you went to the prom with or some other event from your past. The net result is the same. Liberals will travel to heartland towns and be called tree-hugging bleeding hearts (or worse) and conservatives will travel to cosmopolitan settings and be called heartless hicks and hayseeds (or worse), and everyone will then happily decamp to the living room to watch football.

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This was a big week in the political world, so we've got a lot to get through before we get to the big, explosive "nuclear option" story. In fact, it was even a big week just for political anniversaries. Fifty years ago this week, an event of no little importance happened. I speak, of course, tomorrow's 50th anniversary of the first broadcast of Doctor Who by the BBC.

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Today was a momentous day in the United States Senate, as filibuster rules were changed in the first major way since the 1970s. I'm not going to write about the direct fallout of this extraordinary action, since I did so yesterday and plan on doing so tomorrow as well. Instead, I'd like to take today to point out a (so far) little-noticed secondary consequence of Harry Reid's historic vote. Because if the early reports are correct in stating that confirmations will be filibuster-free not just for "non-Supreme Court" judicial nominees but also for high-ranking executive branch nominees, then it clears the path for Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to tender her resignation.

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There's an old adage in politics that the way to win political struggles is to "bring a gun to a knife fight." If this imagery isn't violent enough for you, the subject on the table now is whether Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is considering what is called the "nuclear option." If bringing a gun wins a knife fight, then I guess dropping a "nuke" would pretty much obliterate the opposition. Which is why the term "nuclear option" was coined in the first place -- to show what a radical move it would be.

Specifically, "going nuclear" means a vote in the Senate to change the rules by which the chamber operates under. This doesn't seem all that controversial at first, but the reason it is seen as such a drastic measure is that the vote would be a straight majority vote -- 51 votes would win (or even 50, with Joe Biden casting a tie-breaker). Traditionally, the Senate has only changed its rules by supermajority votes, or on the first day of their session (which won't happen again until January of 2015).

So far, it hasn't happened. Instead, what might be called "nuclear deterrence" has worked. Merely threatening to "go nuclear" has been sufficient to make the opposition party back down, usually after some "Gang Of (insert number)" group hashes out a détente of sorts. This time, however, this doesn't appear to be a viable route.

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It seems to be time for another round of threatening "the nuclear option" in the Senate, but before we get into the details, it's worth providing a bit of context. I wrote this article back in May, and not much has changed since then. There was one brief week where Democrats walked right up to the nuclear trigger and Republicans backed down and allowed Richard Cordray to be approved by the Senate, but immediately afterwards the Republicans started blocking everyone again, and the three seats on the D.C. Circuit Court remain unfilled. President Obama has named three candidates, and all three have been blocked in the last few weeks by Republicans in the Senate once again. While this round of brinksmanship is just beginning, the fight over the judges has been going on for a while. Which is why this article deserves reading now -- to set the stage for the upcoming battle.

Originally published May 28, 2013

In one of their stunning (but regular) "up is down" leaps of illogic, the Republican Party is charging President Obama with "court-packing." In reality, they're just miffed that a Democrat is going to exercise his constitutional authority to appoint judges in the regular order of things. To call such actions "court-packing" is nothing short of laughable, to be blunt. In fact, the only hinkey business afoot is coming from Republicans themselves on the issue.

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I have to begin by saying that I don't really enjoy playing this game, but so many in the inside-the-Beltway chattering class are getting so obsessed with it of late that (against my better intentions) I'm going to reluctantly jump into the fray. Mostly because one metaphor seems to have been ignored by everyone so far, and I think it deserves at least a bit of consideration.

The parlor game of which I speak could be called "match the scandal." The rules are simple: pick a scandal from days gone by and make a comparison to the current scandal unfolding in the news. This time around, the question appears to be: "What can be easily likened to the Obamacare website rollout disaster?" The favored answer so far seems to be: "It's Obama's Katrina!" But I don't think you need to look back even that far -- I think Obama's own previous experience gives a much more useful metaphor for pundits to casually bat around while waiting for the announcement from the White House that the website is (mostly) fixed. Because, to me at least, the last two months are reminiscent of nothing more than watching the seemingly-endless gusher of oil erupt from the floor of the Gulf of Mexico, after the Deepwater Horizons drilling rig exploded and caused the BP oil spill.

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Let's see, what happened last week?

Well, of course, there was lots of Obamacare news, but since most Democrats are pretty sick of hearing about it at this point, we're going to once again largely ignore it today. After pointing out one story which was strangely ignored in the pile-on in the media this week. It seems the profits for the company contracted to build the Obamacare site are way up. How nice for them, eh? Sigh.

Seriously, though, if you want to read my thoughts on Obama's presser yesterday, or my warning of a possible upcoming disaster on the website, please feel free to do so. But two columns (in what was essentially a four-day week) is enough on the subject for now, I think. Also, we've devoted a whole lot of talking points to the issue for the past two months, so we're going to instead offer up a rant this week on a different subject.

While it's hard to see, if all your news sources are of the mainstream variety, there were indeed other political stories happening this week.

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President Obama held a rather extraordinary press conference today, to defend his embattled Obamacare website rollout and announce an administrative fix to the larger Obamacare program of people who have had their insurance cancelled. The big unanswered question after the presser was done: will it be enough?

Obama was as chastened as he's ever been in one of these meet-the-press events. Because it is football season, he deployed on multiple occasions a seasonal sports metaphor, saying "I fumbled the ball." This will, no doubt, be the lead soundbite from the press conference as well as the lead headline in tomorrow's papers. "Fumbled" will be added to "evolved" in the Barack Obama historical political lexicon from this point on, one assumes.

But, as I said, the key questions will all begin with the same phrase. Let's examine a few of these "Will Obama's press conference be enough..." questions.

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