to a narrow majority in the Senate, they are wiped out in the House, and an exultant Nancy Pelosi reclaims the title of Speaker.

In passing the Ryan budget, Congress also upped the debt ceiling by a trillion or so, but perpetual deficits mean that the ceiling is coming awfully close, and federal spending is due to break it in early August 2015. So now, in May, the president must go on bended knee to Speaker Pelosi, who demands tax increases as the price for her caucus supporting an increase in the debt ceiling.

As the Speaker tells the press after the tenth of her many meeting with the president:

Since 2000, we have cut taxes for the wealthiest ten percent of Americans to record lows and have nothing to showCharacterization of the structural and functional diversity of indigenous soil microbial communities in smelter-impacted and nonimpacted soils.
A century of mining and smelting activity at the Anaconda Smelter site in Anaconda, Montana, USA, has contaminated the surrounding soils and groundwater with metals. Soil microbial communities from six smelter-impacted sites and a nonimpacted site were compared to determine the long-term effects of a gradient of metal concentrations on microbial activity, biomass, functional diversity (Biolog microtiter plates), and structural diversity (denaturant gradient gel electrophoresis of 16S ribosomal DNA). Microbial activity and biomass were decreased in the smelter-impacted soils. Likewise, the functional and structural diversity of the microbial communities native to the smelter-impacted soils were shifted, relative to the microbial community, from the nonimpacted site. These shifts were significantly correlated with soil