It’s still only February, but things are looking pretty bleak for Democrats in the Pennsylvania Senate race, regardless of whether Sen. Arlen Specter or Rep. Joe Sestak is the nominee.

You probably heard that the Senate just passed the jobs bill, which is big news. But the news you may not hear in the rest of the press is the vote margin and the backstory behind it. The bill passed 70 – 28. The ‘vote’ to allow a vote on the bill only passed on a 62 to 30 vote margin. In other words, a bunch of people who voted against allowing a vote at all then turned around and voted for the legislation. It shows you a lot of the cowardice, buck-passing and general nonsense behind the current use of the filibuster. By any logic, the numbers should go the other way: the number of people who are willing to allow a vote should if anything be greater than the number who are willing to vote for the legislation on its merits.

Now, there are a few caveats. Sen. Lautenberg (D-NJ) is in New Jersey undergoing chemotherapy. So he wasn’t available for either vote. But that leaves seven other senators senators who missed the cloture vote altogether: Bennett (R-UT), Brownback (R-KS), Burr (R-NC), Enzi (R-WY), Hatch (R-UT), Isakson (R-GA) and Sessions (R-AL). And on a cloture vote, absent an excuse like getting chemo, an absent vote on a cloture motion is always taken as a ‘no’, since the ‘no’s don’t have to show up to block the legislation. They just have to not vote ‘yes’.

We’re trying to confirm now who the switchers are.

Now we’ve got more details. It turns out there were six Republican senators who voted against allowing a vote on the jobs bill on Monday and for the bill itself this morning. (Two others didn’t vote on Monday and voted yes today — which is pretty much the same difference.) We’ve got the names here.

Yesterday, John McCain claimed that he only voted for TARP because no one told him the money was for Wall Street. Now he’s defending his decision to suspend his campaign in 2008 by claiming that Obama suspended his campaign too.

Weren’t we all there? He doesn’t think we remember?

The New York Senate race is like honey to flies. The latest prospective candidate: Iraq Coalition Provisional Authority flack Dan Senor.

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL): Even if Blackwater did rescue me from the Niger coup last week (and I’m not saying they did), I’m still against profiteering private contractors.

It was always hard for me to buy into the idea that we’d learned our lessons from the dotcom bust or the 2008 financial collapse so long as we were still producing and purchasing the Hummer. There are other emblems of our excess but none quite so blatant. Now it looks like the Hummer will be no more. GM has been unable to find a buyer for the Hummer line and will discontinue production later this year.

A fun moment on the House floor today as Republicans got their knickers in a bunch over Rep. Anthony Weiner’s (D-NY) declaration during a health reform debate that “the Republican Party is a wholly owned subsidiary of insurance companies.” Watch.

You would figure that after a top Justice Department official writes a scathing memo about how the department’s own Office of Professional Responsibility handled a case there would be some changes made in that office, right? Stands to reason.

So after reading associate deputy attorney general David Margolis’ rebuke of OPR’s handling and analysis of whether torture memo authors John Yoo and Jay Bybee violated their professional responsibilities, we decided to ask Attorney General Eric Holder whether he plans any review of OPR or to make any changes there. His response may surprise you.