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- The Senate voted 61-37 today to approve the $838 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, nearly identical to last night's cloture vote. Today's extra vote was from NRSC Chair John Cornyn, who decided his time was better spent last night at the Monday Meeting with media conservatives and Wall Street Republican donors. A review committee is now working to reconcile the Senate and House versions of the bill.
- Timothy Geithner outlined his plan for round two of the financial market bailout and as Ezra notes, it's quite challenging to find anyone who understands the details of the plan. Not exactly a confidence builder, and the markets have reacted accordingly.
- Barack Obama held his first prime-time press conference as president last night and gave an evasive answer to The Huffington Post's Sam Stein on whether his administration would support Patrick Leahy's truth and reconciliation commission, which might be worked out within the framework of the Justice Department rather than a through a Senate bill.
- Also on the legal front, Daphne Eviatar reports that a five-year-old ACLU FOIA request to open documents pertaining to the Bush administration's interrogation techniques will test the Obama administration's pledge for openness, and Russ Feingold is not pleased with Obama's position on extraordinary rendition.
- Despite the whining of former Bush administration flacks over "dot coms and other oddballs" getting to ask questions of the president, the aforementioned oddball Sam Stein has the only report I know of that gets inside where the vetting process went wrong on Tom Daschle. Meanwhile, John Sides argues that cabinet snafus don't matter and Marc Ambinder crunches the numbers all to find that the Obama administration is not only sending nominees to the Senate for confirmation at a good pace but is actually doing far better than any president in the last thirty years.
- I wouldn't have guessed that Michael Steele's rise to the top of the GOP was part of a quid pro quo to island territories outside of the United States. Maybe there was something to that report a month ago that painted Puerto Rico's Luis Fortuno as a model for the GOP's future?
- Apparently Mike Huckabee thinks that the stimulus package is "anti-religious" because of a provision in the legislation that doesn't actually exist. Quite the novel critique. At least Joe Scarborough can admit he doesn't know what he's talking about (even if the admission itself is confused). And speaking of people who don't know what they're talking about, get a load of Zachary Roth's challenge to Fred Barnes' baseless assertion in his Weekly Standard column that the "case for man-made warming is falling apart."
--Mori Dinauer