The legislation, approved 213-197, would update the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to expand the powers of intelligence agencies and keep pace with ever-changing communications technologies.

But it challenges the Bush administration on a number of fronts, by restoring the power of the federal courts to approve wiretapping warrants, authorizing federal inspectors general to investigate the administration's warrantless surveillance efforts, and establishing a bipartisan commission to examine the activities of intelligence agencies in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Most provocatively, the House legislation offers no legal protections to the telecom companies that participated in warrantless wiretapping and now face about 40 lawsuits alleging they had breached customers' privacy rights.

On Friday, a deeply divided House rebuffed President Bush's demand for retroactive immunity, then defiantly left Washington for a two-week spring break.

Republicans said the secret session proved to be deflating, not because of the quality of the evidence, but because of Democrats' unwillingness to listen.

A few from the archive:

Lisa: "Can't you see the difference between earning something honestly and getting it by fraud?"

Bart: Hmm, I suppose, maybe, if, uh ... no. No, sorry, I thought I had it there for a second."

To be sure, time marches on.

Yet for many Californians, the looming demise of the "time lady," as she's come to be known, marks the end of a more genteel era, when we all had time to share.

Perhaps the most powerful way in which we conspire against ourselves is the simple fact that we have jobs. We are willingly part of a world designed for the convenience of what Shakespeare called “the visible God”: money. When I say we have jobs, I mean that we find in them our home, our sense of being grounded in the world, grounded in a vast social and economic order. It is a spectacularly complex, even breathtaking, order, and it has two enormous and related problems. First, it seems to be largely responsible for the destruction of the natural world. Second, it has the strong tendency to reduce the human beings inhabiting it to two functions, working and consuming. It tends to hollow us out.

Where have we seen this before? Oh, yeah:

On Friday, a deeply divided House rebuffed President Bush's demand for retroactive immunity, then defiantly left Washington for a two-week spring break.

Republicans said the secret session proved to be deflating, not because of the quality of the evidence, but because of Democrats' unwillingness to listen.

From the archive, Sorry, I thought I had it:

Lisa: "Can't you see the difference between earning something honestly and getting it by fraud?"

Bart: Hmm, I suppose, maybe, if, uh ... no. No, sorry, I thought I had it there for a second."