The Senate farm bill is likely to pass today. And while I disagree with the cuts to the food stamp program dressed up as fraud prevention, the bill does end the practice of paying farmers not to produce, which in practice was a subsidy to southern farmers who relied on the subsidies (insert your snarky quote about how Southern Republicans “hate government handouts to the undeserving” here). The subsidy payments that remain, particularly on crop insurance payments, will be limited in significant ways.

The White House is on a veto spree today. They threatened to veto the House’s new 90-day surface transportation extension because it includes a quick approval of the Keystone XL pipeline. Without an explicit veto threat, they “oppose” any version of a cybersecurity bill that violates user privacy. And they threatened to veto a not-so-small business tax cut bill expected out of the House this week.

So I hear that Richard Trumka is personally outraged by the JOBS Act, and the larger idea that “this administration thinks that it’s going to be good for the country to re-inflate a stock market bubble.” This didn’t deter Trumka’s AFL-CIO from endorsing the President who signed that bill for re-election, of course. “Labor weighs a number of factors in their election endorsements,” is the imagined reply I can see myself getting from a labor operative minutes after this post is published. And that’s fine.

Dayen’s news roundup from April 9, 2012, featuring stories about Scott Walker, Wisconsin recall, war on women, Eric Canto, Paul Krugman, Bobo, Marcy Wheeler, Trayvon Martin, Iraq, Egypt, Mitt Romney, and more

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.

The Senate leadership has given up on trying to pass their version of the STOCK Act, instead planning a vote on the House bill. The two big Senate amendments that lose out here are the Leahy-Cornyn amendment responding to a Supreme Court ruling that weakened prosecutorial use of the “honest services fraud” statute against public officials and businessmen, and one from Chuck Grassley, on “political intelligence.”

A very big meeting will take place today between House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and conservative members of the House Budget Committee, over the budget for the next fiscal year.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor claims to be soldiering on with a new set of jobs bills, necessary because the GOP has become defined by their attention to culture war issues rather than what brought them to the House majority. But these plans are either small beer or just another manifestation of the “tax cuts forever” ideology that’s so fashionable in Washington.

The House passed a watered-down version of the STOCK Act, the bill that would ban insider trading among members of Congress as the Office of Congressional Ethics investigates Rep. Spence Bachus for insider trading.

When the Senate passed the STOCK Act, the bill that bans insider trading on non-public information picked up in Congress (yes, that’s not against the law right now) along with some other ethics reforms, I thought that could be a vehicle that would move expeditiously through the House. However, even though Majority Leader Eric Cantor made promises that the STOCK Act would get a vote this week, instead what has happened is a free-for-all, with lobbyists gutting the bill at Cantor’s behest.