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The Senate narrowly approved legislation on Wednesday to extend Bush-era tax cuts for the middle class but to let them lapse for more affluent households, in a surprise vote intended more to give both parties election-year cover than to produce a new tax law.

Tax cuts that President George W. Bush signed in 2001 and 2003 are playing a major role in the election of 2012. They surface again today as the Democratic-run Senate holds a symbolic debate over President Obama's proposal to extend the Bush tax cuts only for middle-class Americans, not for the wealthy.

A "pervasively polluted" culture at HSBC Holdings Plc allowed the bank to act as financier to clients seeking to route shadowy funds from the world's most dangerous and secretive corners, including Mexico, Iran,the Cayman Islands, Saudi Arabia and Syria, according to a scathing U.S. Senate report issued on Monday.

Senate Republicans blocked Democratic-backed legislation requiring organizations pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into campaign ads to disclose their top donors and the amounts they spend.

Senators rejected dueling Democratic and Republican small-business tax cut plans on Thursday, the latest futile effort to break the election-year gridlock that’s consumed Capitol Hill on issues dealing with jobs and the economy... “There is no reason for [Republicans] to have killed this bill other than they are trying to hurt President Obama, small businesses and the middle class,” Reid, who introduced the bill, said at a news conference.

Gibbs said that proposals by Republican Mitt Romney and other Republicans amount to nothing more than tax breaks for the wealthy and fewer regulations for business, the recipe tried during the George W. Bush years and found wanting. "We tried it in eight years and it ended in this huge economic calamity," Gibbs said.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell says the odds of Republicans taking over the Senate after November's elections and him becoming the new majority leader are "50-50."

Republican renewed an offer today to President Obama over the George W. Bush-era tax cuts, due to expire at the end of the year. "What we ought to be doing is extend the current tax rates for another year with a hard requirement to get through comprehensive tax reform one more time," said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., speaking on CNN's State of the Union.

"For us to have the numbers in the Senate and House and White House isn't going to be as easy as everybody thinks," Rooney said after the high court decision Friday. "It's great to be optimistic, but in an election a lot of things have to go your way. 2012 would have to be like 2010 and then some."

There's a lot of anxiety these days as we wait for the U.S. Supreme Court to issue its decision on President Obama's health care law. Apparently, Senate candidate Richard Mourdock wanted to be ready. The Indiana Republican's campaign yesterday uploaded videos to YouTube of his different reactions to the decision, including cheering the law's demise. The videos were taken down.