Stymied by Republicans, Democrats are at a loss as they struggle to help pump up the economy in the run-up to congressional elections this fall.

The demise of their jobs-agenda legislation Thursday means that unemployment benefits will phase out for more than 200,000 people a week. Governors who had counted on fresh federal aid will now have to consider a more budget cuts, tax increases and layoffs of state workers.

Senate Democrats cut billions from the bill in an attempt to attract enough Republican votes to overcome a filibuster. But the 57-41 vote fell three votes short of the 60 required to crack a GOP filibuster...

Corporate CEOs would have to appear in campaign ads they fund, under a political disclosure bill the House just passed by a narrow margin.

Democrats, hoping to rein in special-interest spending before November's midterm elections, pushed the measure, which would impose broad new disclosure rules on political spending.

The bill, approved by a 219-206 vote, was opposed by Republicans who cast it as violating free-speech protections and filled with exemptions for powerful groups, such as the National Rifle Association and labor unions.

There’s a brilliant man named Thomas Sowell. And, um, I didn't vote for Barack Obama in 2008, but I sure would have voted for Thomas Sowell. This man, well, his article says quite a lot. His editorial, um, says here — and it’s just been posted this week — but it says, "When Adolph Hitler was building up the Nazi movement in the 1920’s" — and I'm quoting from Thomas Sowell in his editorial: 'leading up to his taking power in the 1930s, he deliberately sought to activate people who did not normally pay much attention to politics. Such people were a valuable addition to his political base, since they were particularly susceptible to Hitler's rhetoric and had far less basis for questioning his assumptions or his conclusions. 'Useful idiots' was the term supposedly coined by V.I. Lenin to describe similarly unthinking supporters of his dictatorship in the Soviet Union.'

And this isn't in the article — this is my comment — but we do have useful idiots today, who are heard to say, 'Wow, what we really need is for the president to be a dictator for a little while.' They know not what they say.

Nearly a year after she quit her governorship of Alaska, Sarah Palin was found guilty today of another breach of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act involving her so-called Alaska Fund Trust (AFT), which she established as a private "legal defense fund" while governor.
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In what is an extremely detailed finding, Petumenos ruled that even though Palin assigned the research of forming the fund to her former spokesperson Meghan Stapleton and even though Palin relied on extensive outside legal counsel, that "the Trust itself, as ultimately conceived, violates the Ethics Act."

The finding is a stinging rebuke to Palin, who must now return more than $386,000 in contributions to the AFT.