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class, and the fee for failing to get insurance would do just that.
• ___

• WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Congress is in, but it's far from lawmaking.
• For the next 3½ sweltering weeks on Capitol Hill, lawmakers will look busy, say many words and lob blame at each other. They will even cast votes on such weighty matters as health care reform, taxes and more. But they're not expected to pass much legislation, opting instead for what amounts to campaigning from the televised House and Senate floors, or anywhere on the stately campus where a microphone

might be live.
• Just back from a weeklong July Fourth break, they're not even pretending to govern. The schedule and all of the body language says they're marking time: The Republican-led House this week got to work debating and voting on yet another doomed measure to repeal President Barack Obama's health care law. The Democratic-led Senate, meanwhile, is debating whether to give businesses a tax cut if they expand their payrolls, and whether to extend some or all of former President George W. Bush's tax cuts -- more measures not expected to go anywhere.
• "This will be an extraordinary four-week period because we are going to work every week these four weeks," House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer said with a heavy dollop of sarcasm. "Hopefully members are up to the challenge of this rigorous schedule."
• Tieless and sporting a white baseball cap emblazoned with the South Carolina state logo, Sen. Lindsey Graham acknowledged, "We're talking about the election in political terms rather than trying to find ways to solve the nation's problems."
• ___

• VIENTIANE, Laos (AP) -- Hillary Rodham Clinton became the first U.S. secretary of state to visit Laos in more than five decades, gauging whether a place the United States pummeled with bombs during the Vietnam War could evolve into a new foothold of American influence in Asia.
• Clinton met with the communist government's prime minister and foreign minister

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