Before I begin, allow me to apologize for my dereliction of duty not only today (that's a gentle way of saying "no column today, folks!"), but over the past weeks and months. I have, as many of you know, been distracted by trying to put together sample chapters of a book. This has led to a certain amount of neglect here at the site, which I do feel bad about and do apologize for.

But today, I have a minor announcement: the final push is on. By the end of this weekend, I will have put together a "final draft" of my sample chapters. In other words, the end is in sight, people.

While we're on the subject, I'd like to personally and publicly thank everyone who has taken the time and effort to aid me in this project by reviewing earlier drafts. Your help has had profound impacts on my writing and editing, and hopefully editing future chapters won't be nearly as hard because I'll be using new-found good grammatical habits in the first place. This will save an enormous amount of time.

In creating anything, however, at some point you just have to say "Enough!" and call it over and done with. That's the point I'm approaching, and should reach within days. It won't be perfect -- but then no piece of writing ever is. It will, however, be more perfect than those aforementioned earlier drafts, because of your help. I say this as bait for a certain type of perfectionist who is itching to comment that "more perfect" is improper, since "perfect" is really a superlative. This is the same urge of those who tried to talk a notable bunch of authors out of using "unalienable" since it's not really a proper word ("inalienable," they would insist, should be used instead).

Assuming everyone recognizes those examples, they prove my point. No writing is perfect. What I will (hopefully) achieve, though, in my final draft is "good enough." Good enough to catch the eye of some literary agent, editor, or publisher who is interested enough to keep reading -- even through the inevitable minor grammatical errors.

To put this another way entirely, once done with this draft, these chapters won't be touched again until someone is paying me to re-edit them. I will cheerfully argue arcane punctuation and grammar with an editor who is working with me to get the manuscript ready for publication. But I'm done with reworking it for now.

Having said all of that, the real reason I'm writing this today (other than to apologize for the lack of a Thursday column during such a momentous week) is to invite everyone interested to read what I've come up with. Those who have previously edited a draft, there is no need for you to do anything -- I will be sending out an email to everyone on the list when the new draft is available. But for anyone who slipped through my dragnet of getting as many reviewers as possible -- for those of you who have never seen a previous draft -- if you'd like to see what I've been working on, let me know either through email or just by leaving an "I'd like to see it!" comment here. I will be in touch with you via email if you do so, and will give you instructions as to how to download a copy (fair warning: it's about 160 pages long).

Looking forward, I will spend the next couple of weeks finishing up the "sales job" part of my book proposal, and then I will start trolling the waters for agents and publishers. But the milestone I will hit this weekend should allow me more time to focus on the blog, one way or another.

So thanks for everyone's extended patience and thanks for sticking with the site through the admittedly thin period that should now hopefully be drawing to a close. It's been a much longer journey than I ever thought it would be, but the end is indeed now in sight.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant

I'd like to start off today's article with an excerpt from a New York Times story, to make a point. Here is what ran in the Times, with a few sentences left out.

Speaking of early reports, the cameras had been at the scene for scarcely an hour before former Representative Dave McCurdy was on CBS talking about "very clear evidence" of the involvement of "fundamentalist Islamic terrorist groups." ... But then came a CNN scoop of suspects of Middle Eastern appearance being pursued. Then came a CNN denial. But then came a report that two or three such men were being sought. The Treasury and Justice Departments were troubled enough by CNN's apparent choice of speed over checking that they warned Washington reporters against relying on the network for news about suspects or about other explosive devices, another changeable subject.

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It has been more than a day since the horrific act of terror at the Boston Marathon happened. Nobody knows much of anything, at this point, but it certainly hasn't stopped some from taking their free-floating anger and directing it at their own particular "usual suspects." This is pointless, but it is also hard to ignore, as we all wait for actual proof, real data, and the identification of any possible perpetrator of such a tragedy.

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Today, I have nothing to say.

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In this week's news, former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher died. As a result, Cher fans got a scare. The dangers of hashtag parsing -- because "nowthatchersdead" can be broken up two ways. The other pop culture result of the "Iron Lady's" demise was (you can't make this stuff up) the song "Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead" rocketing to the top of the British charts, even though it is three-quarters of a century old. Make of it what you will.

Back home, the New York City bribery scandal where a Democrat tried to buy his way onto the Republican ballot for mayor has taken a bizarre twist. Not just a "sex with a young staffer" sort of twist, but also a "bizarre religious practices" twist as well. Only in New York, we suppose, could a Republican "Theodist" get elected.

Speaking of Ding Dongs and the New York City mayor's office (how's that for an awesome segue?), Anthony Weiner is now exploring his own... um.... chances of winning the mayor's race, apparently. Late night comics everywhere are rejoicing, one assumes. I mean, look how easy it was for a non-professional comedian to put together a joke about it, using only Margaret Thatcher and Republican weirdness as a launching point!

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OK, I'll admit right up front that that title is a bit of hyperbole. I really haven't documented 4,396 other instances of Republican hypocrisy. It just feels like it, that's all. Today's installment even crosses over from garden-variety hypocrisy to full-blown Orwellian doublethink, in fact.

Congressman Greg Walden, who is the leader of the Republican group whose mandate it is to get more Republicans elected to the House of Representatives, just attacked President Barack Obama's budget proposal -- from the left. Stunning, isn't it? Walden decried Obama's offer to use "chained CPI" to gradually reduce Social Security payments to seniors -- which, coincidentally enough, is exactly what progressives are slamming Obama for right now. The progressive response was to be expected, since protecting Social Security is (or used to be, at any rate) a core value of the Democratic Party. But it sure is mighty strange to see Walden over there on the left with the progressives.

To understand exactly how strange this phenomenon is, a little history is required. Here is the Republican storyline on Social Security and Medicare, starting roughly 75 years ago.

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Democrats seem to be showing slightly more enthusiasm these days for attacking the endless filibustering in the Senate by Republicans. If this truly is the beginning of a trend, it would be notable, but it's too early so far to say that it's going to gain political traction or not. We're still waiting for the votes to be counted, to put this another way. But while the glimmerings seen recently from Democrats may not be sustained, it's still worth pointing them out, if only to encourage such behavior among the party at large.

Republicans, except for a brief two-month period when Democrats held a 60-seat advantage (right before the death of Ted Kennedy), have been filibustering with abandon, ever since they lost control of the Senate. They've been able to do so for one reason and one reason alone -- they have not had to pay a political price for doing so. The media has been lulled into a screaming inaccuracy (countless stories run with some form of the untruth: "the Senate requires 60 votes to pass a bill"), which has taken almost all the pressure off Republicans to justify their actions. Democrats have mostly gone along with this as well, except for the occasional "Tsk! Tsk!' from Harry Reid, and except for more-liberal Senate Democrats who never get quoted in the mainstream media.

Perhaps this is changing. At the forefront of this change is President Obama. On gun control legislation, Obama chose his rhetoric carefully, starting with his State Of The Union speech. Obama called loudly for just "a vote," and then tried to shame the Senate into allowing that to happen with the repeated refrain: "They deserve a vote!" By doing this, he was actually setting the legislative bar pretty low (he wasn't demanding passage of a law, after all, just "a vote"), but he has stuck to this idea with tenacity -- even in the face of the "Washington chattering class" pronouncing itself tired of the whole gun control debate, a few weeks back. The groupthink inside the Beltway had all but come to the conclusion: "The public doesn't care about gun control any more, so Obama's legislation is dead and buried, let's just move on to more fun subjects, shall we?" Obama refused to let it drop, though, and kept hammering away at the issue in public. Central to his argument was the "they deserve a vote" idea.

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In the midst of all North Korea's saber-rattling, the United States made a major military announcement yesterday which is going to change the future of warfare in significant ways. Not to put too fine a point on it, but America just unveiled the first working phaser weapon. The Pentagon doesn't call it that, they call it a "laser weapon system," but this is merely semantics from a bunch of guys who probably didn't spend a lot of time watching science-fiction as kids. Their loss. But no matter what the big brass wants to call it, the fact is that Captain Kirk's phasers are now a reality.

The video, which I am too lazy to search for at the moment, shows a ship-mounted laser cannon (again, they probably call it something else, but that's essentially what it is) shooting down an unmanned drone aircraft out of the sky.

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The 2012 election happened over five months ago, at the beginning of November. One notable result of this election was that two states -- Washington and Colorado -- voted to legalize marijuana for adult recreational use. This was a direct challenge to federal drug policy. We are all still waiting for the Obama administration's response. I don't know about you, but I, for one, am getting a little sick and tired of the wait.

I cannot name another contentious issue that President Obama has stonewalled in such a fashion during the same time period. We've had policy announcements, speeches, or other White House activity on such hot-button issues as: gay marriage, gun control, contraception, Social Security, Medicare, taxes, the federal budget, drones, Afghanistan, Iran, Israel, immigration reform, women's rights, climate change, and probably a number of others that don't immediately spring to mind. The public knows where Obama stands on these issues, or at the very least knows the general direction of his policy. But not on marijuana. On that particular issue, we are left to guess.

There is simply no excuse for this. Allow me to point out, once again: it has been over five months since the election. During this entire time, we have heard not a peep from Barack Obama, nary a word from Eric Holder. Nothing. The stonewalling is complete.

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We've got a lot to cover this week, so we're going to try to get through everything in a rather foreshortened format. At least, that's the goal (I have lost count of the times I've started one of these columns with "It's going to be shorter this time, dammit!" and then wound up with the usual tome's-worth of text when I get to the end).

First, some "old business" to start. For anyone who missed it, and is still in a foolish mood, some House Democrats put together an amusing "House of Fools" website to poke fun at Republicans.

With that out of the way, we're going to take a quick overview of what the media considers the big stories of the week, and we're going to end up in the Talking Points section with all the stories you may have missed due to the media being distracted by this stuff, just for fun.

President Obama just waded into some brackish waters in the sexism swamp by how he referred to California's attorney general at a fundraiser. Note to politicians: since the late 1970s, it has no longer been acceptable to comment upon professional women's appearance in any way, shape, or form. Obama immediately apologized, but be on the lookout for some late-night comedians making a few funny jokes tonight.

Obama also made a gesture this week, to give up five percent of his income in solidarity with the pain the sequester cuts are causing to hundreds of thousands of workers. Which prompted me to suggest yesterday how the federal budget could easily be cut to save fifty times the money Obama will be saving, by abolishing the offices of the congressional chaplains.

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