Has the sweltering DC heat gotten to Senate Budget Committee Chair Kent Conrad (D-ND)? I'm searching for an explanation for his recent statement that the Bush Tax Cuts for the wealthiest 2 percent of U.S. households be extended at a cost of about $150 billion (and be offset in subsequent years*).

Tomorrow, if all goes according to plan, the Senate should finally pass an extension of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits to more than 2.5 million unemployed workers who have gone without a check for over six weeks. Central to this delay were Republican and a moderate Democrat's demands that Congress pay for the emergency extension. Many of those same members of Congress, however, change their tune when it comes to extending the Bush Tax Cuts.

On this blog, we talk a lot about how great the Recovery Act recipient reports are (these are the reports recipients turn in every quarter explaining what they've done with their Recovery Act funds). Over the past year, we've thrown around words like "groundbreaking" and "historic" to describe how we feel about them. But they aren't perfect. Among other problems, reading the reports can oftentimes leave readers confused about what the project in question actual does, as the main descriptive fields can be anywhere from a few words to lines and lines of text filled with industry jargon.

Yesterday, Rep. Mike Quigley (D-IL) introduced in the House companion legislation to Sen. Russ Feingold's (D-WI) recent contracting reform bill. As companion legislation, the House version of the "Federal Contracting Oversight and Reform Act of 2010" is a mirror image of the Feingold bill. The measure has several strong provisions, and, "if enacted, will lay the foundation for future [contracting] reforms." More members of Congress need to support this legislation.