A project of the Sunlight Foundation, Open States provides data about legislatures in all 50 U.S. states via an easy-to-navigate website, the Open States API (JSON, RSS, iCalendar) and state-by-state bulk data downloads (CSV, JSON).
Income-Based Repayment (IBR) is a new way to make your federal student loan payments more manageable starting July 1, 2009. And if you're a teacher or work in government or at a nonprofit (501(c)(3)) organization, you might qualify for a new type of public service loan forgiveness after 10 years of eligible payments and employment.