WEEK IN REVIEW: JAN 26-30

The first full week of the Obama administration was a bit bipolar - the president had some important victories, as well as a few surprising stumbling blocks. Here's a rundown of the biggest stories in the past five days:

PROGRESS:

• As expected, President Obama's stimulus plan, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed the House of Representatives on Wednesday. However, it received not a single Republican vote, despite the fact that the president watered it down to bring at least some of the Republican caucus on board. Their opposition shouldn’t surprise anyone - any stimulus that does pass is not going to end the recession; the best it can hope to do is keep unemployment lower than it otherwise might be. But of course, if it passes no one will ever know what would have happened without the stimulus - they'll just know unemployment was still high. So the Republicans can make plenty of noise about opposing a "useless" stimulus. A great political move, if an unprincipled one.

• Another legislative victory for liberals came with the president’s signing of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. The law overturned the Supreme Court's 2007 decision in Ledbetter v. Goodyear, which held that a pay discrimination claim based on sex must be brought within 180 days of the first discriminatory payment. Ledbetter, who only became aware of the discrimination years later, argued that each paycheck constituted a new discriminatory act re-triggering the 180-day period for filing of a suit. The Act made her claim law.

• On the financial front, President Obama also suggested decisive government action was on its way. On the one hand, he chastised Wall Street upon reports that $18.4 billion in bonuses were distributed to executives in 2008. On the other, the White House gave indications of several courses of action it might pursue to break the credit crisis, among them the creation of a so-called "bad bank" to buy up risky bank assets, prop up balance sheets and get banks lending again.

• The president's Middle East Envoy, George Mitchell, is wrapping up a several-stop trip through the Middle East this weekend. Mitchell, who played an instrumental role in negotiating peace in Northern Ireland years ago, is feeling out the parties in the region to gauge the feasibility of restarting the peace process. There has been little said about Gaza lately, however (other than the spat at Davos between Israeli President Shimon Peres and Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan), and it's unlikely Obama will get anywhere by simply delegating the peace process to Mitchell and staying on the sidelines.

• In a fascinating move, President Obama appears interested in appointing Republican Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire as his Commerce Secretary. Because New Hampshire has a Democratic governor, this raises the question of whether the Democrats might get their filibuster-proof 60 vote majority in the Senate after all. It's unlikely that Gregg would take the job without assurances that his successor will be a Republican, though.

• Finally, President Obama has brought change to the White House already: he held a bipartisan cocktail party there earlier this week. Former President Bush was not a drinker (excluding the first four decades of his life), and we saw how that worked out for inter-party relations in D.C. Perhaps a little social lubricant might get the gears of government working again.

SETBACKS

• President Bush has managed to strike back from the political grave! Most people breathed a sigh of relief when Inauguration Day arrived and Bush did not issue a blanket pardon to members of his administration for any alleged violations of law. However, it seems that he extended letters to many members of his staff, including Karl Rove, which purport to grant "absolute immunity," forever in perpetuity, against congressional subpoenas. The legality/constitutionality of this move is anyone's guess, and John Conyers is far from finished with his hunting of Bush administration officials, so you can bet you will see a lawsuit sometime soon about whether the president's executive privilege can justify a move like this.

• Obama has butted heads with the judiciary for the first time in his tenure (okay, technically the judge is not a member of the judicial branch since the Guantanamo court is a creature of statute, but still). The chief judge of the war crimes court at Guantanamo rejected the president's call for prosecutions there to be halted. The degree of independence these military commissions have is still up in the air, so look for more news on who will get their way in this fight.

• Finally, one more bit of irritating news for the president: his half-brother, George Obama, was arrested in Kenya on marijuana possession charges. Sadly, it looks like Obama's ancestral home has the same silly drug laws as nation he now leads.