Health Benefits For Unemployed Stripped From Stimulus, HuffPost Readers Find

Reading even a single page of a Senate bill is often no simple task, with legislative-ese obscuring the purpose behind the language. Reading 736 pages of the stuff is like mountain climbing in a wheelchair.
So we outsourced the work to Huffington Post readers: 367 people responded to the call and signed up to read portions of the Senate stimulus bill, compare it to the House bill passed earlier, and look for anything else interesting or newsworthy in it. Hundreds more posted their finds in the comments section below the full text of the bill. Responses that came in earlier are featured here.
The readers who signed up brought varying degrees of expertise to the project. One reader, who wanted to stay anonymous, is a consultant who works with the Department of Defense doing facilities and infrastructure assessments to determine the need for just the kinds of projects included in the section of the bill he read. Another, Tim Dickinson, is a politics reporter for Rolling Stone. Dickinson quickly found that the Senate had increased funding for STD prevention to $400 million. (Senate Republicans found that appalling and have succeeded in stripping it from the bill.)
Citizen journalism is still in its infancy and there will be many more opportunities around budget time to dig through congressional and presidential products. If you were one of the hundreds of people who contributed -- or signed up to, but didn't end up having time -- let us know where the kinks are. How could it have been smoother?
To join the team for the next round of research, sign up here.
LinkHere