Congress has passed a groundbreaking child nutrition bill that "expands the school lunch program and sets new standards to improve the quality of school meals, with more fruits and vegetables," according to the New York Times.

Latino voters frustrated with Democrats’ inaction on issues important to their community are thinking about striking out on their own and starting the Tequila Party, the Las Vegas Sun reported this weekend. Get it? Tea Party for the ultra-right white folks…Tequila Party for the Latinos! It’s got a cute—if potentially offensive—name, but little more at this point.

Via Gizmodo comes the story  of Tammy Banovac, former surgeon and onetime Playboy model, who is wheelchair bound and therefore refused to pass through metal detectors at the airport. So she came prepared and stripped down to her underwear to avoid a pat-down.

Nonetheless, she was subjected to a hand search and pat-down so long she missed her flight--and the same thing happened the next day.

 Yesterday during the Senate Armed Services Committee hearings on the Pentagon study and Don't Ask, Don't Tell repeal, John McCain repeatedly gripedabout not having enough time to consider repeal--but then wasted much of his time grandstanding about WikiLeaks and asking the military personnel present if they agreed with him that WikiLeaks, essentially, was a bad thing--and to assure lawmakers that a criminal investigation was in process.

On last night's Rachel Maddow Show, the host discussed the GOP's current love affair for the horrible "poison perv pill" as a way to kill meaningful legislation in Washington:

If you want to kill a proposed policy in Washington, one of the most devious ways to do it is with a "poison pill." As a metaphor, the poison pill is relatively straightforward: you simply force something into a bill that is so politically toxic, it kills the whole thing.

This afternoon, NASA’s Astrobiology Institute revealed a fairly breathtaking finding: the discovery of what is essentially another form of life. Geobiologist Felisa Wolfe-Simon found bacteria in Mono Lake, California that can live without phosphorus, instead sometimes using arsenic.

A man in Hayden, Idaho, is spreading hate this holiday season by building a series of racist snowmen -- carrying nooses and donning KKK hoods -- in his front yard.

EveryDNS.net, the domain name provider for the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, has withdrawn its service after hackers unleashed a crushing series of distributed denial of service attacks on the site.

Within hours, WikiLeaks was back up at a new domain name registered in Switzerland, WikiLeaks.ch, which as of this morning was providing sporadic access to the site.

The deadline came and went on extended unemployment benefits, leaving millions of jobless Americans to go without much-needed aid, even in a struggling economy with high unemployment. A last-gasp effort in the Senate was killed Tuesday night by Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.).

The Democratic House leadership's gambit on middle class tax cuts worked, Republican lies about tax cuts for middle class families being a job-killer and un-American and a travesty notwithstanding. The bill just passed, 234-188, with three Republicans voting for us, and 20 "Dems" voting for the millionaires.