First, let me be clear about this: I am a great supporter of the First Amendment. I'm a journalist, after all, and it protects me and my ilk. It's also important to the country, and our values. So let's stipulate all of that before we get to what the Supreme Court did yesterday.

After living with the Bush administration for all these years, one notion has become unalterably clear: Vice President Dick Cheney likes to keep secrets. Even more than that, Cheney himself is a believer in the ultimate privacy of the executive branch. We have seen that over and over again with the refusal to reveal the names of those he met with on energy policy. The importance of confidentiality in the executive branch, he believes, trumps everything else.

I bet that now it's all but a done deal: a pardon for Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Today, in sentencing the vice president's former chief of staff to 2½ years in prison for his role in the CIA leak, Judge Reggie Walton really threw the book at him. "People who occupy these types of positions, where they have the welfare and the security of the nation in their hands, have a special obligation not to do anything that might create a problem," the judge said. And that was that.

So a holiday weekend approaches (translation: no news), and suddenly the contents of two books about Hillary Clinton are poured into a piece on the front page of the Washington Post. One book is by two former New York Times investigative reporters; the other is by Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame. And, in unison, the HRC folks claim that the books are too boring for words--and what isn't boring is just wrong. Have a nice weekend.

It's become a problem for John McCain in this presidential race: He's now too inside Washington, people say. He's gone Establishment. His support for the war is killing him with those independent voters he wants to attract. And now, his support of an immigration reform measure is hurting him with his party's conservative base.

So the White House—which has had a hard time lately with its image—has finally done something to applaud. The president wants to increase the fuel efficiency of the cars we drive and yesterday ordered up new rules governing that. That means something very simple: Automakers need to start producing cars that give us more miles for the buck, and oil producers need to get with the ethanol program. And fast.

Honestly, the queen could not have come to Washington at a better time. We are all completely worn out with the congressional tug of war over Iraq, and now it seems like the fight will go on at least through the summer. We haven't seen a lot else accomplished, even though the one instruction the voters gave during the last election was this: Get something done. We've been watching 18 presidential contenders debate and wondering why we still feel like there's got to be something more out there (you feel that way more acutely, according to the polls, if you're a Republican). To top it off, the spring weather started out cold–and only now has it begun to warm up.