Now the $10,000 degrees are available in Florida and Texas — but not for many students, not for many majors and not on the flagship campuses. The original goal was that the degrees would use new teaching techniques and technologies to bring down costs; so far, many of the programs are unchanged…

“Less that 24 hours after voting against the bill that averted a default and ended the government shutdown, the Lehigh Valley senator was in town to meet with donors contributing to his 2016 re-election campaign.”

“One of my favorite old Kentucky sayings is there’s no education in the second kick of a mule,” McConnell told The Hill. “The first kick of a mule was when we shut the government down in the mid-1990s — and the second kick was over the last 16 days.”

Section 123 of the Senate bill secures $2.918 billion in funding for the Olmsted Lock and Dam Authority for a dam project on the Ohio River being developed by URS Corp., a construction management company. That’s a huge boost from the $775 million originally allotted. URS told The Wall Street Journal that the project — one of the largest taken on by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — would halt without more funding…

LANCASTER INTELLIGENCER JOURNAL NEW ERA: Lancaster Newspapers Inc. announced Thursday it is hiring the president and publisher of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Patriot-News of Harrisburg, John A. Kirkpatrick III, to be its next president.

Two recent major national news stories coming out of Pennsylvania — the Sandusky / PSU / Tom Corbett scandal and the Harrisburg debt / Corbett bailout stories — demonstrate the woeful inadequacy of our state’s campaign finance reporting laws.

Both current Lancaster City mayor Rick Gray and his predecessor Charlie Smithgall have spent two terms in office and are competing for the opportunity for a third term.

HUFFINGTON POST: House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said Wednesday that he would not block a bipartisan Senate compromise to reopen the government, paving the way for an end to the two-week government shutdown.

The only concession to the movement to gut President Obama’s health care law is a mild tightening of income verification rules for people obtaining subsidized health insurance on the new insurance exchanges.

Months of debate within the Republican Party about how to fund the government and avoid a debt default came to a boil at a morning meeting in a Capitol Hill basement, where more conservative members made their displeasure known about Boehner’s proposal — as well as their weakened negotiating position, the Journal reported…

Philadelphia Trial Lawyers Association donates total of $195,000 to two state Supreme Court justices, prominent lawmakers and judicial candidate