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Now that the supercommittee has closed it's doors, Congress can get on with the all-important work of extending two of the most powerful stimulus measures in effect today -- the reduced payroll tax and extended unemployment benefits.

Attentive students of Washington's now perpetual budget saga will recall that the deal to raise the debt ceiling back in August mandated an end to both the payroll tax cut and extended unemployment benefits. As we noted back then:

Energy Secretary Steven Chu testifying last week

Talk about a waste of taxpayer dollars.

A coalition of civil rights groups are preparing an amicus brief to defend the “No Representation Without Population Act” challenged in Fletcher v. Lamone. Maryland’s first-in-the-nation law requiring the state to count prisoners at their home addresses is protective of minority voting rights.

Ok, it’s true. The Obama Administration did make an environmental decision based on politics and undue outside influence. But it’s not the one that you think.

If libertarians had been calling the shots in Washington in the fall of 2008, the United States might now be in a second Great Depression.

Another day, another misleading and false attack on clean energy funded by Koch Industries, which makes billions of dollars from a variety of polluting industries.

A basic reason that people break rules is that they believe they can get away with it. And you're more likely to think that you can cheat without consequence if you know that watchdogs won't bark, much less bite.

This observation doesn't just jive intuitively with our understanding of human nature, it also squares with lived reality. Fewer police means more crime. No drug testing in baseball means an epidemic of steroid use. Rare audits mean more tax cheating. And so on.

Public approval of Congress is now at its lowest level ever recorded by modern polling, so it's no surprise that Governor Rick Perry might find this branch of government a juicy target; Perry said yesterday that he favored cutting pay for members of Cong