Democrats are re-tooling President Obama’s budget this week, while the president is pressing Congress hard to preserve his priorities of health care, energy and education. Meanwhile, Republicans are in an uproar over and even some Democrats are pushing back on some of Obama's $3.6 trillion budget. For more, we talk to our friend Todd Zwillich from Capitol News Connection.

Volunteers in Fargo spent Wednesday sandbagging as quickly as they could as estimates of how high the Red River would crest were raised. Donald Schwert, Professor of Geology at North Dakota State University in Fargo, joins John to explain why the area is so vulnerable to floods, and Todd McDonald, a reporter for Prairie Public Radio, will describe how the city is coping.

For more information, check out Donald Schwert's Fargo Flood Homepage

The Texas Board of Education is in the midst of a major fight this week over a new science curriculum that's designed to challenge the principle of evolution. The Board will vote tomorrow on standards that will govern science teaching on evolution in Texas for the next ten years. Right now the Board is evenly split.

This is not a small fight and it is not just about beliefs: Texas is the 2nd largest textbook market and many publishers write to the state standards. Joining us is the Chair of the Texas State Board of Education, Don McLeroy, a "young earth creationist”, who is leading the charge to question evolution in the state's science curriculum.

On Oct. 5 at an observatory on Mount Lemmon in Arizona an astronomer noticed a comet headed this way. He sent the coordinates to the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and, Timothy B. Spahr, director of the Minor Planet Center, swung into action. The asteroid was being affected by Earth's gravity and looked as if it was being pulled directly into Earth. A few calculations later and, sure enough, the asteroid was going to hit Earth. Luckily It was small enough to disintegrated in the atmosphere and sure enough it ended up raining down rocks on Sudan.

This morning, we talk with Dr. Spahr about the asteroid tracking system and a new article in Nature that reports on the composition of the asteroid, which landed in Sudan.

Want more? Of course you do! Here's a clip from the BBC's Averting Armageddon and some tips on avoiding asteroids:

An uptick in new and existing home sales across the country has real estate watchers and economists hoping that the housing market might have finally hit bottom, especially in the South and West regions of the nation. In the South, new home sales rose almost 10% in February, compared to January, and in the West the rise was 6.6%. Joining The Takeaway are two real estate brokers, Ed Snively of El Centro, California, and Ryan Ward of Atlanta, Georgia who have been riding the tumultuous waves of the housing market in both of those regions.

Fargo, North Dakota is being protected from rising floodwaters by an energetic band of volunteers who are filling and stacking sandbags to construct temporary dikes. Among those volunteers is Sarah Mayo, a junior at North Dakota State University, who joins John to tell us how things are looking in her hometown.

Here's a CNN iReport of the flood:

Since 2001, half of all FBI agents have been assigned to uncovering terrorist attacks in the U.S. It was unclear how the Obama administration might change that, but attorney general Eric Holder is now saying that the FBI will keep counterterrorism as its top priority, even in the face of mortgage fraud and the deadly drug war on the Mexican border. This comes in a report in today's New York Times that was co-written by David Johnston, who joins us now.

For more read David Johnstone's article, White House to Keep Agencies’ Focus on Terrorism, in today's New York Times.

Congressional Republicans agree that President Obama's budget "spends too much, taxes too much and borrows too much." So, what's the Republican argument for fiscal discipline in these times with this President and Congress? How is the GOP planning to participate in budget negotiations? We had a lot of questions and decided to go straight to the source: The Takeaway talks with Eric Cantor, the Republican representative of Virginia's 7th congressional district, who serves as the House Minority Whip about the Republican view of the President's economic recovery plan.

Read a transcript of the segment...

Related:
• Education secretary Arne Duncan on how stimulus dollars could help schools
• Senator Charles Grassley takes on the stimulus bill
• Gov. Jon Corzine on buying into Geithner's toxic asset plan
• The Takeaway is investigating the Recovery Act with you at ShovelWatch.org

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Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is heading to Capitol Hill this morning to outline a sweeping overhaul of federal financial regulations. Early leaks of his testimony say the plan would extend regulation for the first time to all trading in financial derivatives and to companies including large hedge funds and major insurers such as AIG. Joining us this morning to look at whether this will stop the next meltdown and whether lawmakers will pass the new regulation laws, are Dan Gross, senior editor at Newsweek and columnist for Slate and Philip Coggan, capital markets editor at The Economist in London.

Over the course of two days last week, 50 to 60 small earthquakes shook the Earth at the foot of the San Andreas Fault. Some fear the chances of a Big One hitting the Los Angeles area are greater now than ever before. Leonardo Seeber is a Senior Research Scientist at Columbia University and he joins us on the show to talk about this.

If you don't remember what to do in the event of an earthquake, watch this clip:

Thirty years ago today Egypt and Israel brokered a historic peace treaty, ending three decades of war. When Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin shook hands with Egypt’s president Anwar el-Sadat on the White House lawn, it marked a new era for the Middle East. But has the peace deal fallen short of its initial expectations? Joining us to mark this moment, and to assess Middle-East peace in the 21st century is Martin Indyk. He’s the former U.S. ambassador to Israel and Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs during the Clinton administration. He’s currently the director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. He has a new book out; it’s called Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East.

Here's clip that looks back on the historic peace accords. This movie is part of an exhibition that is taking place in the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem.