Retiring senator Jim Bunning, Republican from Kentucky, has single-handedly blocked an extension of unemployment and COBRA benefits originally doled out in the stimulus bill. Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog! Go! has a run down of federal highway funding, which includes money for thousands of federal employees who will now be furloughed, that is also not flowing [...]

Not that kind of reconcile. Time magazine has a good summary of a possible path to passage of the health care bill, which stalled after the Massachussetts special election last month resulted in the loss of the 60th vote for Senate Democrats to block a Republican filibuster. Now that it is clear that yesterday’s big [...]

The blog Girl on the Brink chronicles the day-to-day existence of “a professional, divorced urban mom,” laid off and “panicked, desperate and going-for-broke.” From last October 11, or Day 189 of her unemployment. Manifesto of the Idle Workers of the World We are more than 15 million individuals in the prime of our lives who [...]

When Republican Scott Brown won the special election for Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat last month, it through a giant monkeywrench into the Democrats’ plan to pass a comprehensive health care reform bill. We covered the responses of both the online Massachussetts Republican community Red Mass Group (elation) and the online Massachussetts Democratic community Blue Mass Group (despair).

Yesterday, Brown — and a handful of other Republicans — voted with Democrats to block a Republican filibuster on the Democratic jobs bill. From the Los Angeles Times:

So, with Brown contributing to half a political victory for the Democrats (the bill still has to pass the House), what do Massachussetts Republicans think of Brown now? Some comments on Red Mass Group

From the World Bank blog, a post about the Zero Rupee bank note, printed in India and distributed by an anti-corruption organization called 5th Pillar. Imagine that you are an old lady from a poor household in a town in the outskirts of Chennai city, India. All you have wanted desperately for the last year [...]

Speaking of the U.S. debt, as we did in our last post — Keith Hennessy, who was a senior White House economic advisor to President George W. Bush, wrote a lengthy post on his blog a couple of weeks ago criticizing President Obama’s description of the Bush years as a “decade of profligacy.” One argument, [...]

“Recent trends in credit default swap markets show a clearly discernable uptick in the perceived likelihood of default on 5-year U.S. senior Treasury debt, a notion that was virtually unthinkable in the past.” Cited in today’s front page New York Times article on the inability of government to address the mounting national debt is research [...]

From The Big Picture financial blog: Last month, a record-high 38.2 million people were enrolled in the food stamp program, which in 2008 was renamed the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program. Below is a chart that shows participation in the program from 1969 to last year.

Remember that public debate last week between Obama and congressional Republicans? From the New York Times: The encounter at a Baltimore hotel was unlike any of Mr. Obama’s presidency or very many other presidencies, for that matter. While he met with the Republican caucus once before and occasionally invites Republican leaders to the White House, [...]

“…it is not at all clear…that a Special Inspector General should be weighing in on government policy decisions, much less predicting the housing market or economy’s future.” Yesterday we ran a post about the Special Inspector General for TARP’s Quarterly Report to Congress. The report was highly critical of the bailout’s inability to increase bank [...]