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WASHINGTON - The White House regularly takes heat from the GOP for supposedly ballooning the federal bureaucracy and its powers, but Republicans apparently have missed the cuts the Obama administration is proposing for the Popcorn Board.

In fact, the U.S. Department of Agriculture wants to shrink the number of members of the board by almost half -- from nine to five.

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama called Thursday on Congress to set aside partisan politics and pass comprehensive immigration reform, saying failure to act has left in place a system that is "broken and dangerous."

WASHINGTON - The Republicans struck out seven times, the Democrats four. Republicans committed eight errors, the Democrats four. Eventually, the Democrats came out on top 13 to 5.

It wasn't a vote on a bill, but the score in the annual Congressional Baseball Game Tuesday, where the lawmakers play for bragging rights.

WASHINGTON - Sen. Al Franken offered an early glimpse of the Senate hearings on Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan in a recent speech before the American Constitutional Society.

Kagan's name didn't come up once.

WASHINGTON - While Congress mulls making the program mandatory nationwide, Utah will soon join three other states voluntarily implementing E-Verify, which is designed to cut back on jobs for undocumented workers and, by extension, reduce illegal immigration.

WASHINGTON - Calculating how much oil is being leaked into the Gulf of Mexico has proved plenty daunting, but oil and gas operators routinely have to wrestle with another problem when shutting down wells -- what to do with the thousands of tons of steel on decommissioned platforms and wellheads.

WASHINGTON - In May alone, census workers across the country were shot, attacked with bats, killed in car accidents, robbed, threatened with axes, and bitten by dogs and, in one case, a duck.

WASHINGTON - Authorities are banding together ever more closely with the financial sector and Internet providers in hopes of disrupting the multibillion-dollar global child-pornography trade.

WASHINGTON - Way back in the day, companies would offer prizes or cash to folks who wrote in with the best suggestion for improving their products or operations, or who penned testimonial songs or poems praising a new model of vacuum cleaner or laundry detergent.

Gone are the days when video-game players were content to destroy asteroids on their Ataris.

Nintendo's affable Mario and Luigi have been replaced by characters who slay demon babies, slit their own wrists, slaughter innocent bystanders and use fallen comrades as "meat shields" on their way through gruesome virtual worlds.