By a 58-41 vote last night, the Senate fell one vote short of invoking cloture on the stimulus package passed last week by the Finance Committee. Majority leader Harry Reid (D-NV) lost his bid to pass a broader package than was passed by the House on Jan. 29. Reid had told his GOP colleagues that the vote would be their one-and-only chance to vote on a stimulus package, but he is virtually certain to hold a vote in the coming days on a pared down version of the Finance Committee bill.

Since the president's FY 2009 budget request was mostly a rehash of old policies and proposals we've already spent time debunking in previous years, we've been looking for some new angles with which to view the president's budget. As I was sitting at my desk looking at the budget books in my office, the actual length of the main budget volume released this year jumped out at me. Or I should say, it didn't jump out at me. Turns out the main budget book for the FY 2009 budget is the shortest one ever released by the president. At 170 pages, it is more than 45 percent shorter than the average length of the budget book released each year by President Bush (which came in at 311 pages. Not sure what one can make of this change, particularly since the FY 2008 budget is also much shorter than the Bush average. This particular part of the president's budget proposal has evolved during the Bush administration to be a fancy, glossy, picture-filed advertisement for the administration's achievements and priorities, with little hard budgetary information. It is developed, I suppose, to help the administration put the best spin on their budget proposal and successes. I wonder if the Bush administration is tired of actively selling their misguided priorities, particularly in this final year and that is the reason for the shorter volume? Or perhaps they have realized they really don't have many budget achievements that they should be bragging about?

The steady stream of bad economic news continued into February with the release today of the Bureau of Labor Statistics' employment report showing that the U.S. economy lost 17,000 jobs in January, for the first monthly net job loss in 53 months. The weekly jobless claims figures for the week ending Jan. 26 jumped by 69,000 to 375,000, the largest increase in over 120 weeks. But there's good news, too! A column in U.S. News & World Report today reveals that we still have only a 6 percent risk of recession. Here are the obscure but cheery facts: