About a month ago, I started working on a long story about the state of abortion politics. It is published in the Outlook section of today’s Washington Post and, given the past week’s events, I hope it makes for a timely read:

Having failed to get a budget passed in the two preceding years, Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) announced on Friday that he wouldn’t push a budget this year, either, and claimed that last year’s debt -ceiling deal was sufficient. “We do not need to bring a budget to the floor this year,” he said. “It’s done, we don’t need to do it.”

Before they spike the ball, the Obama administration should consider: “In January 2011, the unemployment rate was 9.1 percent with a participation rate of 64.2 percent. If that were the participation rate today, the unemployment rate would be 8.9 percent, instead of 8.3 percent. As an analysis from Hamilton Place Strategies concludes, ‘Most of the shift of the past year is due not to the improvement in the labor market, but the continued drop in participation in the labor force.’ . . . The unemployment rate is dropping because economic growth continues to be so anemic that nearly 4 million Americans have quit looking for work and have been disappeared by the Labor Department.”

LAS VEGAS — After high-octane campaigns in the first four states with primaries and caucuses this year, the Republican contest this week in Nevada has been a snoozer. That’s not likely to be the case come November.

For the past three decades, Egypt has received an average of $2 billion a year from the United States, making it the biggest recipient of American foreign aid besides Israel.

But with the country now at a critical stage in its transition toward democracy, that aid is in peril — as U.S. lawmakers threaten to block assistance in response to Egypt’s crackdown on pro-democracy groups, several of them well-connected nongovernmental organizations based in Washington.

SPARKS, Nev. — With Friday’s jobs report punctuating the nation’s steadily improving conditions, Mitt Romney and his advisers are confronting an unexpected economic turnaround that threatens to undercut the central rationale for his candidacy.

The Virginia Senate put off a vote Friday to lift the state’s one-per-month limit on handgun purchases.

The Senate postponed action to give two senators who were absent Friday the chance to vote on the bill. It is expected to come back for a final vote Monday.

The Republican presidential race has a way of sucking all the oxygen out of the room and obscuring much of the domestic news of the day. But a series of developments this week should remind us that in the broader political landscape Capitol Hill Republicans are in better shape than the you might think by looking at their dreadful poll numbers.

Changes are coming to the top ranks of the Office of Management and Budget just as the agency prepares to release President Obama’s proposed fiscal 2013 federal budget on Feb. 13.

With OMB Director Jacob J. Lew moving across the street to serve as White House chief of staff and Jeffrey D. Zients sliding into the acting director role, other staffers will be asked to pick up elements of Zients’s previously broad portfolio as deputy director for management.

The big news at yesterday’s circus-like Donald Trump endorsement of Mitt Romney had nothing to do with anything Trump said or did. Lost in all the noise was something far more important: Mitt Romney again flip-flopped on a topic that has become absolutely central to his whole candidacy — the question of whether the President made the economy worse.

President Obama plans to announce details Friday for a $1 billion Veterans Job Corps that the White House says will put up to 20,000 veterans to work over the next five years on projects to preserve and restore national parks and other federal, state and local lands.

LAS VEGAS — In 2010, as the tea party rose to prominence, the movement splintered in Nevada and helped nominate Republican Sharron Angle in one of the most closely watched Senate races in the country.

During Wednesday’s balmy afternoon, a familiar scene in Washington unfolded: There was Jack Abramoff, sitting in his usual window seat at Eli’s, the kosher Dupont Circle deli, greeting the regulars.

It was as though the ex-lobbyist had never left. By “left,” we mean “was incarcerated in the federal pen,” and by “ex-lobbyist,” we include “convicted felon.”

A virus has infected the computer network of a job-development agency in the Commerce Department, forcing it to block employees from the Internet for 10 days.

The attack, discovered two weeks ago, targeted computers at the Economic Development Administration, which is responsible for making business-development grants to distressed communities to help them create jobs.

House lawmakers voted Wednesday night to freeze the pay and salaries of congressional staffers and civilian federal employees. If passed in the Senate, the proposal would extend the current two-year cost-of-living raises for an additional year starting next January.

Virginia is poised to lift its one-per-month limit on handgun purchases, with the Republican-controlled state Senate expected to do away with the decades-old cap Friday.

The Senate passed the measure in a preliminary vote Thursday, one day after the House passed its own version. Gov. Robert F. McDonnell (R) has indicated he will sign legislation lifting the purchase limit.

LAS VEGAS — Real estate mogul Donald Trump endorsed Mitt Romney for president on Thursday in a joint appearance — both theatrical and awkward — at a hotel Trump named after himself.

Trump had once mounted an informal campaign for president, and he had raised questions about Romney’s tenure as head of the private-equity firm Bain Capital. The two men have little in common: The showy, boastful Trump and the stiff, earnest Romney are two entirely opposite faces of American wealth.

The Fix doesn’t like to just toss around the term “guru” — except when referring to our spiritual advisers, that is.

But when it comes to Nevada politics, there’s really no other word for Jon Ralston.

So with his home state’s caucuses two days away, The Fix is using Ralston as a guinea pig for a new Fix feature (with apologies to Craig Kilborn) called “Five questions.”

The House of Delegates tentatively passed a bill Thursday that would ban state subsidies for poor women to abort fetuses with serious birth defects.

The state spent about $2,800 on 10 abortions in 2010. The year before, it spent about $15,000 for 23 abortions.