Classic stuff. Potato Hole

A law that provided stopgap road funding and longer and more generous unemployment benefits and health insurance subsidies for the jobless expired Monday. Without the extension, about 200,000 jobless people would have lost federal benefits this week alone, according to the liberal-leaning National Employment Law Project.

The measure to be voted on tonight would extend through the end of the month several programs that expired on Monday, including the jobless aid, federal highway funding and help for doctors facing cuts in Medicare payments.

It would provide a monthlong extension of the programs to give Congress time to pass a yearlong fix that's also pending.

Earlier on Tuesday, Bunning objected to a request by Maine Sen. Susan Collins, a fellow Republican, to pass a 30-day extension of jobless benefits and other expired measures.

When asked Tuesday if Bunning was hurting the Republican Party, Collins said, "He's hurting the American people."

Hotheaded Emanuel may be White House voice of reason By Jason Horowitz, WaPo, March 2, 2010

Rahm Emanuel is officially a Washington caricature. He's the town's resident leviathan, a bullying, bruising White House chief of staff who is a prime target for the failings of the Obama administration.

But a contrarian narrative is emerging: Emanuel is a force of political reason within the White House and could have helped the administration avoid its current bind if the president had heeded his advice on some of the most sensitive subjects of the year: health-care reform, jobs and trying alleged terrorists in civilian courts. [...]

Emanuel's allies say there is no such thing as Rahm at rest. According to almost everyone who has ever worked with him, he has an insatiable need to be in the mix, and he is deeply concerned with the news of the day. His office is the White House nerve center. "In order to get a final decision, everything needs to go through Rahm's office," said a former administration official who thinks Emanuel should delegate more.

Every morning, Emanuel leads a 7:30 meeting with about 10 senior administration aides, pushing through the president's priorities, all listed on index cards embossed with the title "Chief of Staff." Throughout the day, one senior administration official said, Emanuel might call six times to determine whether he can cross off an item. If not, it is on the list the next day.

The official said Emanuel surveys colleagues' opinions "more than people think." Emanuel's initial reaction to criticism is likely to be slamming down the phone. But usually, he calls back after a few minutes, the official said, and says, " 'Okay, let's talk.' "

His weighing in on a mind-boggling swath of governmental and political activity adds to his outsize image as chief of staff of everything. As a result, he can be blamed for almost everything, especially as health-care legislation became stuck, the president's approval ratings dipped and widespread angst about the economy fueled a GOP resurgence.  [... bleccch ...]

Now, my mother always told me this, but I never believed her.  And of course, this isn't the first study I've seen that had the same conclusion, but it's interesting in 2010 that the results are pretty similar.

Couples who live together before they get married are less likely to stay married, a new study has found. But their chances improve if they were already engaged when they began living together.

The likelihood that a marriage would last for a decade or more decreased by six percentage points if the couple had cohabited first, the study found.

The study of men and women ages 15 to 44 was done by the National Center for Health Statistics using data from the National Survey of Family Growth conducted in 2002. The authors define cohabitation as people who live with a sexual partner of the opposite sex.

"From the perspective of many young adults, marrying without living together first seems quite foolish," said Prof. Pamela J. Smock, a research professor at the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. "Just because some academic studies have shown that living together may increase the chance of divorce somewhat, young adults themselves don't believe that."

The authors found that the proportion of women in their late 30s who had ever cohabited had doubled in 15 years, to 61 percent.

Half of couples who cohabit marry within three years, the study found. If both partners are college graduates, the chances improve that they will marry and that their marriage will last at least 10 years.

"The figures suggest to me that cohabitation is still a pathway to marriage for many college graduates, while it may be an end in itself for many less educated women," said Kelly A. Musick, a professor of policy analysis and management at Cornell.