The economic stimulus bill faces its key test vote in the Senate today. If the vote goes according to the Democrats' plan, the bill will be finalized tomorrow. But, the vote in and of itself is not a stimulus plan and the road to passage has been bitterly partisan. Here with a road map for the negotiations ahead are David Herszenhorn of the New York Times and Jay Newton-Small, Washington Correspondent for Time Magazine.

To understand the economic crisis you need to understand numbers. But it can be difficult to think critically about the statistics used by politicians and journalists, especially when you're panicked about your job and your 401K. To take a step back from the hysteria surrounding financial facts and figures, Katherine and Todd talk to Andrew Dilnot, co-author of the book The Numbers Game: The Commonsense Guide to Understanding Numbers in the News, in Politics, and in Life.

They’re calling it the modern day equivalent of the electrical grid, or the interstate highway system. Seven billion dollars of the stimulus plan making its way through Congress right now is devoted to bringing broadband internet to under-served parts of the country. But technology experts worry that the multi-billion dollar tech plan will suffer if we don’t have more time to look at exactly what technology we’re getting. One of these experts is The Takeaway's technology contributor Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor at the University of Virginia, who joins us now to talk about these concerns.

President Obama is pushing Congress to finalize his stimulus bill —a plan that would provide federal dollars for projects across the country. At the same time, hundreds of buildings commissioned by another U.S. President in the middle of an economic crisis are being torn down. Buildings commissioned by Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration are being demolished. Tracie Rozhon, freelance reporter for The New York Times joins us for a look at a group that has started a new national movement to save the buildings that lay at the center of the New Deal.

For more information on the fate of WPA buildings, read Tracie Rozhon's article, New Deal Architecture Faces Bulldozer in today's New York Times.

Our partners, the BBC, just released the results of an opinion poll of residents of Afghanistan. The poll finds that that the majority of Afghans still strongly oppose the return of the Taliban, but are increasingly disillusioned and uncertain about the future of their country. For more on these results, we turn to Ian Parnell of the BBC, who joins us from Kabul, Afghanistan.

For more on the future of Afghanistan, read the BBC's coverage.

It's Monday morning and we're gazing ahead to the week in Washington. Might we see new evidence that bipartisanship is possible? Where is President Obama headed? And what's going on with the TARP? Helping us gaze into the future is Stephanie Mehta, the assistant managing editor at Fortune Magazine.

The AP has an interesting report on the multi-billion dollar Troubled Assets Relief Program also known as TARP.

The United States is far from the only nation to develop a plan to get its economy back on track. In fact, at least 33 other countries have done the same. Justin Fox, business and economics columnist for Time Magazine, joins Katherine and Todd to look at how some other nations are approaching this thorny problem and what we might be able to learn from them.

For more from Justin Fox, check out his blog The Curious Capitalist for Time Magazine.

Bill Richardson, Tom Daschle, Nancy Kilefer, Tim Geithner, and now Hilda Solis. What do all these names have in common? They were all named to top jobs in President Obama's administration. And all of them stumbled (or fell) due to questions that arose during the confirmation process. Does President Obama have a vetting problem? To answer that question we are joined by Kenneth Gross, a vetting expert who worked with President Bill Clinton.

To see more about President Obama's cabinet picks, see our guide to his inner circle.

When it came to light that Alex Rodriguez tested positive for steroids in 2003, baseball fans were shocked. His teammates and fellow players were shocked too, but for different reasons. The Baseball Player's Association, the union for ballplayers, held on to the results of voluntary drug tests submitted by the players. If they hadn't, for better or worse, the world would not have known about A-Rod's steroid use. For more we turn to Anthony Reiber of Newsday who joins us from the New York Yankees training camp in Tampa, Florida.

All eyes were on a California woman who gave birth to octuplets earlier this year. The birth of eight children was a modern medical miracle orchestrated by an enormous team of doctors and nurses, and it is a procedure that would not have been possible in many other countries. To explain why our health care system makes successful multiple births more likely we are joined by Dr. Samantha Butts, an OB/Gyn at the University of Pennsylvania Health System and assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Senator Ben Nelson (D-Neb) has a long history of reaching across party lines to reach consensus on pressing issues in the Senate. His ability to bring together Republicans and Democrats to compromise on key policy has been instrumental to passing important legislation in the past. In the face of the partisan bickering over the stimulus, and the President's statement that he wants a bipartisan solution to the economic crisis, Senator Nelson finds himself in the center of the debate.