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WASHINGTON (AP) — Three months after Superstorm Sandy ravaged coastal areas in much of the Northeast, Congress on Monday sent a $50.5 billion emergency relief measure for storm victims to President Barack Obama for his signature. "I commend Congress for giving families and businesses the help they deserve, and I will sign this bill into law as soon as it hits my desk," Obama said in a statement late Monday. Despite opposition from conservatives concerned about adding billions of dollars more to the nation's debt, the Senate cleared the long-delayed bill, 62-36, after House Republicans had stripped it earlier this...

Breaking: Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski wins re-election to Senate as write-in candidate

The Congressional Budget Office has released their analysis of the House version of the stimulus bill (H.R. 1). You can read the full analysis in PDF form here, but we thought it would be useful to take some of the budget numbers in the analysis and present them in chart format. Shown below are several different views of the how the dollars for H.R. 1 would be spent over time. Most striking is that in total, the CBO estimates that less than 21% of the funds would be spent in 2009. Apparently, it is a huge crisis which requires swift...

Amie Parnes reports from Lebanon, VA: Obama poked fun of McCain and Palin's new "change" mantra. "You can put lipstick on a pig," he said as the crowd cheered. "It's still a pig." "You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change. It's still gonna stink." "We've had enough of the same old thing." The crowd apparently took the "lipstick" line as a reference to Palin, who described the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull in a single word: "lipstick."