This week House Republicans will try to pass a part of their budget that would substitute cuts for the poor for planned cuts to the military. That certainly sounds like the first order of government – first, do no harm to defense contractors, and be sure to comfort the afflicted with the knowledge that we have more guns and bombs than the rest of the world, rather than actual, you know, comfort.

The job approval rating of Congress, while still atrocious, has managed to improve slightly in the last few months according to Gallup. Currently 17% approve of the job Congress is doing and 79% disapprove.

A cybersecurity bill that many believe poses clear dangers to digital freedom is drawing the ire of digital freedom and civil liberties groups. The legislation, the Cybersecurity Intelligence Sharing Protection Act (CISPA), should be a major story all week.

In anticipation of headlines that might be made as members of Congress propose amendments to the bill and it continues to take shape before being voted on by the House on April 23, I recorded an interview on CISPA with Trevor Timm, who is a digital freedom activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Republicans think they have a winning issue with the Keystone XL pipeline, even though President Obama has already approved the lower half of it. They think it plays into their depiction of Obama as unwilling to promote domestic energy to lower gas prices, even though domestic oil and gas production has exploded under Obama, and the pipeline would do nothing to aid that with the tar sands oil coming from Canada and just moving to Texas refineries on its way out to sea and the global market.

Last year, the watchdog group Citizens for Tax Justice put out a paper showing that 30 Fortune 500 companies had a negative tax rate for the cumulative years 2008-2010. Extending that through 2011, there are still 26 such companies that paid “negative” income taxes.

With a Jewish holiday coming up tonight thoughts turn to what I should be neurotic about. Matt Yglesias says I should freak out about Europe, and he’s right. But that’s been the case for two years. And the powers that be over there are religiously opposed to the proper steps to take to end the crisis. In short, seen it! So what’s next?

I don’t care what you think about the health care law, a structure of government with a judicial review that feels free to parse legislation line by line and make what amount to ideological pronouncements on what can go forward and what cannot sounds a death rattle for progressive governance over time.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tim Weiner has a talent for getting clandestine government agencies to spill their secrets. After dissecting the Central Intelligence Agency in Legacy of Ashes, for which he won a National Book Award, Weiner now turns his sights on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s intelligence activities in Enemies: A History of the FBI. Those who watched the 9-11 Commission hearings during which the FBI was criticized for being no more than gumshoe detectives might be shocked to find that the FBI engaged in clandestine anti-terrorism and counter-espionage right from its very beginning in 1908.

At the start of the first hearing on a lawsuit challenging the Homeland Battlefield Act, a federal judge appeared to be “extremely skeptical” that those pursuing the challenge had grounds to sue the US government. However, by the end of the hearing, the judge acknowledged plaintiffs had made some strong arguments on why there was reason to be concerned about the Act, which passed as part of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) on New Year’s Eve last year.

Environmental activist Tim DeChristopher, who was given a two-year sentence in prison for making fake bids in a Utah public land auction that was later found to be corrupt, has been moved out of solitary confinement. He has been put back in the minimum security camp where he was being held before a member of Congress had him moved.