The payroll tax cut and extended unemployment benefits expire on February 29. And though the House-Senate conference committee charged with figuring out a year-long extension met yesterday, there really isn’t a lot of movement toward a solution. Pay-fors seem to be the biggest stumbling block.

The House GOP caucus definitely wants to try to force the issue on the Keystone XL pipeline with another vote. What’s not yet clear is where they want to place the rider. If they choose to attach it to payroll tax cut/UI legislation, that’s an indicator that they really want it to pass. If not, it’s an indicator that they just want to talk about it some more.

The Super Committee, what we’ve been calling Catfood Commission II, held its first meeting today. There wasn’t much on the agenda, just the internal governing rules of how the committee will proceed, under the direction of co-chairs Patty Murray (D-WA) and Jeb Hensarling (R-TX). Both sides are talking about compromise and the need for action, but a lot of that talk can be dismissed as empty. The fault line that’s starting to emerge is over whether job creation strategies should be part of the Super Committee’s work.

There’s no good outcome here. Either we get a pathetically bad grand bargain that probably has no revenues to speak of, or we get sequestration. The hilarious outcome would be a deal at the end of 2012 to extend the Bush tax cuts in exchange for canceling the trigger cuts, which would absolutely explode the deficit but make a lot of people in Washington happy. But either way, we’re not getting a jobs committee to recommend job creation measures that will go to the Congress for an up or down vote.

If you think that the committee is designed to fail, these are good members to that end. If you think that the entire exercise is a ploy to cut entitlements and lessen small-d democratic accountability, you can see that at work here as well. In that sense, ultimately the specific members of the committee don’t really matter.

Via everywhere, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has chosen Sens. Patty Murray (D-WA), John Kerry (D-MA) and Max Baucus (D-MT) for the Super Congress, the bipartisan committee charged with finding at least $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction over the next 10 years. They will make up 1/4 of the 12-member committee: the other Majority and Minority Leaders in each chamber of Congress will chose the other nine.

Usually, when Max Baucus tries to craft a grand bargain, oversized legislation starts by getting progressively worse, at which point the legislation finally dies.

But he has finally succeeded in getting a grand bargain, with a deal to extend Trade Adjustment Assistance in exchange for votes on the Korea, Colombia, and Panama trade deals.

Max Baucus, a participant in the now-stalled debt limit talks led by Joe Biden, told the Senate Finance Committee that the new “grand bargain” in the deal, what Eric Cantor balked at and left to John Boehner to authorize, is a swap of Medicare cuts for tax increases.

This was the first vote on the Afghan war since the killing of Osama bin Laden. Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi gave it a huge boost by announcing she would vote for it this morning, in defiance of the Obama Administration’s strategy.

Democrats unveiled their legislation to repeal Big Oil tax subsidies today, giving the high-profile legislation to three Senators with elections next year in tough states (Claire McCaskill, Sherrod Brown and Jon Tester) along with Bob Menendez, who appears to be the point person on oil-related issues in the caucus. Given that he was so successful in getting the oil spill liability cap lifted- oh wait, he didn’t, and I suspect that this legislation will end up somewhere on the same shelf with that one.