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$10.99
By Catherine Lutz
$17.28
$22
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Flickr/wyteone
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When the Los Angeles Lakers won the NBA championship in June, the team and private donors paid the $2 million tab for the victory celebration. The same can’t be said for Michael Jackson’s July 7 public memorial at Staples Center, unfortunately.
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AP photo / Dan Joling
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Having startled allies and detractors alike with her resignation announcement last Friday, Alaska Gov. (for now) Sarah Palin got back to work Tuesday, signing a bill, doing a little Eskimo dancing and deflecting questions about her political plans.
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ekgpulse.com
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Let’s see if this one takes. After critics blasted an earlier, more expensive version, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee took another crack at a plan to provide coverage for tens of millions of Americans without health insurance. The latest plan, released Thursday, comes at the lower cost of $611.4 billion, as opposed to the $1 trillion proposal that didn’t go over so well last month.
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Wikimedia Commons / Daniel Nicoletta
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Friends and admirers of the late San Francisco supervisor and gay rights activist have been rallying to establish an annual commemorative day in his honor, and on Thursday, the California Senate approved a bill that would officially make Milk’s birthday, May 22, Harvey Milk Day in the Golden State.
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AP photo / Sang Tan
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Sacre bleu! Some conservative members of France’s parliament are probably regretting their decision to begin their Easter break a little early, as their absence allowed rival socialists to ambush an Internet piracy bill on Thursday.
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AP photo / Toby Talbot
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Vermont has followed Iowa’s lead, becoming the fourth state to make same-sex marriage legal. On Tuesday, the Vermont Legislature overturned Gov. Jim Douglas’ veto with one more vote than was needed to make it official.
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AP photo / Evan Vucci
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After the top brass at AIG couldn’t be stopped from dishing out $165 million in bonuses to executives who didn’t exactly deserve gold-star treatment, Congress is attempting to recoup most of the money by slapping a 90 percent tax on such executive windfalls.
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Flickr / debaird
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Nearly a quarter of the members of the House of Representatives find themselves embroiled in a lobbying scandal, with Rep. John Murtha at the center. One hundred four representatives earmarked more than $300 million in just one bill, allegedly in exchange for campaign contributions from a lobbying firm founded by a former Murtha protégé.
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flickr/jeffrey beall
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It’s finally happening: President Barack Obama is about to sign the stimulus bill. Get ready, people of Denver—he’s going to do the honors at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, of course—where else?
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The New York Times / Susan Etheridge
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Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced Wednesday afternoon that congressional leaders have finally agreed on a $789 billion economic stimulus package, pushing the plan to a final House and Senate vote by Friday at the earliest.
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Wikimedia Commons
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The Senate passed its own version of the stimulus package Tuesday, slashing funding in areas that would most effectively stimulate the economy, such as aid to low-income Americans and states, while expanding tax cuts. The House and Senate bills must now be reconciled with one another.
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AP photo / Ron Edmonds
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He has his opponents in Congress, but President Barack Obama is stressing the need to settle the stimulus issue—and fast. On Monday, in his first major news conference since assuming office, Obama warned of economic troubles ahead and presented the stimulus package as a possible way out.
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bloomberg.com
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Note to all the senators who trotted out their best horse-trading tactics to create the latest, pared-down version of the stimulus bill: Paul Krugman does not approve of your centrist ways.
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By Eugene Robinson — Unbeknown to the House Republicans who voted unanimously against President Obama’s stimulus package, we are in the midst of a rare fundamental shift in American politics.
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AP photo / Ron Edmonds
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On Thursday, President Barack Obama signed his first bill into law—the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act—with the lofty aim of ensuring equal pay for equal work and eradicating workplace discrimination. The bill’s namesake, a former Goodyear employee, was on hand, as was first lady Michelle Obama, who at a reception after the signing ceremony called Ledbetter “one of my favorite people.”
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — One of the clearest signals President-elect Barack Obama has sent is his determination to learn from the Clinton years, and particularly from the former president’s failures on health care.
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By Marie Cocco — At the earliest, it is likely to be at least February or March before the first dollar of an Obama recovery plan is felt. This is a national disgrace.
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The New York Times / Doug Mills
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On Friday the House approved, after initially rejecting, the $700-billion bailout package for the financial industry in what is likely to be the most expensive government intervention in the nation’s history. This, of course, only slightly surpasses another notable “government intervention”—the nearly $600 billion spent in the war in Iraq.
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White House / Susan Sterner
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The House couldn’t swallow the $700-billion bailout proposal, so the Senate added about $100 billion of incentives—mostly in the form of tax cuts. The Senate will vote on the proposal tonight and the House could decide as early as Friday whether $700 billion is too much, but $800 billion is just about right.
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youtube.com
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Despite House Minority Leader John Boehner’s claim, backed up by other Republicans in Congress, that the bailout bill might have passed were it not for meddling House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s bombastic speech on Monday, others from within GOP ranks beg to differ.
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Did Nancy Pelosi’s speech just before the House vote on the proposed bailout on Monday lead to the bill’s demise? Let’s hope our legislators aren’t so susceptible that an 11th-hour speech would reverse their positions vis-à-vis a $700-billion measure. Here’s a clip of the House speaker’s comments on the floor.
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White House / Eric Draper
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When it came to a showdown in the House, the $700-billion bailout scheme was considered to be as toxic as the securities it was supposed to save us from. Democrats and Republicans broke ranks Monday to vote down the measure, 228-205, against the wishes of both parties’ leaders.
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Collage: commons.wikimedia.org / senate.gov
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“This meeting is an attempt to move the process forward,” President Bush declared Thursday, but it seems the White House gathering of congressional leaders and presidential candidates might have achieved the opposite effect. Lawmakers had agreed to a bailout outline earlier in the day, but the afternoon’s “political theater,” as Christopher Dodd put it, has raised doubts about the deal.
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Flickr / soggydan
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Citing the financial crisis, John McCain announced Wednesday that he’d like to skip Friday’s debate so he can put on his senator hat and get back to work in Washington. Unimpressed, Rep. Barney Frank called the idea “the longest Hail Mary pass in the history of either football or Marys.” Update
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AP photo / Lauren Victoria Burke
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Just when it seemed they wouldn’t have enough votes to pass a key Medicare bill, Democratic senators staged a dramatic coup by secretly whisking Sen. Edward Kennedy into the Capitol on Wednesday to cast his vote and make his first congressional appearance since he was diagnosed with brain cancer in May.
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itpsites.com
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If there was one word that summed up the political tenor of the Bush II presidency, it definitely wouldn’t be accountability. On Friday, this was once again made clear as the House of Representatives passed a bill granting retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that allowed their networks to be used by the government to eavesdrop on Americans following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
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Actor John Cusack is ramping up his political presence during this election cycle with his film “War, Inc.” and now this advertisement from MoveOn.org, in which he points out how George W. Bush and John McCain are remarkably similar in some pretty fundamental ways, regardless of McCain’s recent bids to distance himself from the outgoing president.
Posted on Jun 17, 2008
READ MORE 
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publicradio.org
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With a mind-set reminiscent of the Bush administration’s recent bailout of mortgage lenders, the Senate last week approved the Foreclosure Prevention Act, a bill that provides billions of dollars in tax breaks to big businesses like Ford and General Motors but takes only modest steps in addressing the plight of homeowners.
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international.wi.gov
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What has the power to unite progressive Democrats and conservative Republicans? According to a compelling article in the San Francisco Chronicle, agribusiness is having its way in Congress, even getting Democrats to cut food stamps to make room for subsidies.
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epp-ed.eu
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A California senator is working to push a bill through the state’s legislative channels that would make global warming a required study topic in California public schools, but detractors maintain that the science behind Sen. Joe Simitian’s proposed academic addition is unclear.
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By Eugene Robinson — Are the news media being beastly to Hillary Clinton? Are political reporters and commentators—as Bill Clinton suggested but didn’t quite come out and say in a radio interview Tuesday—basically in the tank for Barack Obama?
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AP photo / Charles Rex Arbogast
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The idea of any news organization associated with conservative Australian media baron Rupert Murdoch backing a liberal Democrat (egad!) such as Barack Obama may seem strange, but upon closer inspection the New York Post’s endorsement for the Democratic nomination reads less like a bid for Obama than an effort to avoid four more years of “Team Clinton” in the White House.
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brokerforyou.com
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What to do about the slumping U.S. economy? President Bush may disagree with congressional Democrats on dozens of issues, but he seems to agree with their call for some kind of temporary stimulus measure to be implemented as soon as possible. Bush’s potential bailout plan will likely focus on income tax rebates to inspire Americans to go out and spend for their country.
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nymag.com
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During the early days of his romance with his girlfriend (now wife) Judith, then New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani made trips to the Hamptons, where she lived, and billed “obscure city agencies” for costs his NYPD security detail incurred while accompanying him, according to The Politico.
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In this latest campaign video for Hillary Clinton, her once-tubbier hubby is shown sweating it out on a treadmill as a cheeseburger appears on the TV he’s watching, rotating in lascivious beefy splendor on the screen. This isn’t, however, the cheesiest moment from this ad, which ultimately aims to point out how “Caucusing [i.e., for Hillary] is easy!”
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jfklibrary.org
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While Hillary’s out on the campaign trail, Bill Clinton may be offering his diplomatic expertise to help bring a resolution to the Writers Guild of America strike, which has halted several productions in Hollywood and New York.
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After the House failed to override Bush’s veto of the SCHIP children’s health care renewal bill on Thursday, Rep. Pete Stark berated the administration and the bill’s opponents. In light of their attitude, he questioned whether the nation’s kids would “grow old enough for you to send [them] to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the president’s amusement.”
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Though he referred specifically to the gay non-discrimination bill, Rep. Barney Frank made an impassioned plea for realism among activists that could be applied to the war, the environment or any other major issue of the day. He warned that imperfect legislation can help millions of people, unless “ideologically committed single-issue groups” are given a veto.
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btinternet.com
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First we had “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” Then came the Patriot Act. And now, President Bush has co-opted another vague term that’s hard to argue with, emptied it of its intended significance, and altered it to mean “let big telecom companies that aided the administration in its dubious wiretapping activities off the hook.” Yes, folks, this latest round of rhetorical gymnastics has brought us “the Protect America Act.”
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foxnews.com
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President Bush may not have done his party any favor in coming elections by exercising his veto privilege—the fourth time he’s done so—to deep-six a bipartisan bill passed by Congress that would have renewed the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.
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The House has passed an expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program but failed to win enough votes to override President Bush’s promised veto. Still, SCHIP has overwhelming public support, and Democrats welcomed the opportunity to force Bush and his congressional allies to take a stand against poor children.
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Amal Graafstra / amal.net
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The California state Senate, anticipating a worst-case employment scenario that would make George Orwell and Karl Marx spin in their graves, passed a bill Thursday that prohibits employers from requiring that their workers be tagged with an implanted identification device similar to the kind that has become popular among pet owners to ID their lost animals.
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loringdesign.com
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Now that U.S. pennies are more of a nuisance than a useful form of currency, given their ever-so-rapidly evaporating value (no offense, Honest Abe), and now that it costs the government nearly two cents to make each penny, why don’t we just toss them altogether? (Hint: It has to do with lobbyists.)
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Well, we might have seen this one coming, but yet another plan to set a timetable to begin the gradual withdrawal of American troops from Iraq has been deep-sixed in the Senate.
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AP Photo / Ron Edmonds
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Although the legislation is sure to be shot down by President Bush if it survives in the Senate, the House of Representatives passed a bill Thursday calling for the majority of U.S. troops in Iraq to be withdrawn by April 2008.
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After attempting to collaborate on a workable immigration bill, President Bush and the Senate couldn’t see eye to eye on the issue. The vote count fell 14 short of the 60 required to pass the bill Thursday.
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AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis
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When you combine a goat with an electric fence you get the solution ... to illegal immigration? That’s Sen. Trent Lott’s answer to the immigration question.
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By Bill Boyarsky — As the immigration issue takes the front-and-center position in Congress, opportunities for real reform—as well as legitimization for millions of undocumented workers—are being squandered in each round of deliberation over the pending legislation.
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To announce her new campaign song (a Celine Dion tear-jerker), Hillary Clinton spoofed the now infamous “Sopranos” series finale, complete with a disappointed Bill, who has to make do with carrots instead of onion rings, Chelsea struggling to parallel park, and a surprise cameo.
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