...lobbing it back over to the House The Senate has approved an amendment to the war supplemental spending bill (HR 2642) that would fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through the end of Bush's presidency. The $165 billion spending measure was adopted 70-26.

The state of state budgets continues to deteriorate around the country. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities released another update yesterday to their increasingly disturbing analysis, which now shows that 31 states are anticipating budget problems in 2009, with 27 projecting a budget shortfall. We continue to reiterate that this is pretty bad news as state budgets are far less flexible than the federal budget and usually are legally prohibited from running a deficit. From the CBPP update: 31 states anticipate budget problems. Of those:

Doing the Veto-Voodoo Dance It's vetoes ("veti" in Latin?) gone wild this week at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, with President Bush vetoing the Farm bill this afternoon, and issuing formal veto threats against the war funding bill cleared last week by the Senate Appropriations Committee and, now, against the House extenders package, H.R. 6049 -- the Energy and Job Creation Act of 2008.

Shawn Fremstad posted yesterday on a new paper released this month by John Schmitt over at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. The paper studies the impact unions have on income and has some interesting findings: