In a television ad this week, Dole questioned the Christian credentials of Democratic challenger Kay Hagan. The state senator responded angrily, filing a lawsuit on Thursday and airing an ad of her own that says Dole is breaking the Bible's Ninth Commandment by bearing false witness.

The two candidates are locked in one of the nation's closest Senate races. An Associated Press-GfK poll released this week found Hagan has a slight edge. The pair has spent months swapping negative ads, but even some Republicans think Dole's assertions about Hagan and her faith have gone too far.

"It's pretty risky," said Republican political consultant Carter Wrenn, who worked for the late Jesse Helms, the senator Dole replaced in Washington six years ago. "Anytime you start questioning somebody's religion, you're getting on thin ice."

Dole was once considered such a sure thing that Democrats struggled to recruit a challenger for a Senate seat that has been in Republican hands for 35 years. But a surge in Democratic registrations and excitement surrounding the party's presidential nominee Barack Obama have boosted Hagan's campaign.

Dole's 30-second advertisement shows clips of some members of an atheist advocacy group — the Godless Americans Political Action Committee — talking about some of their goals, such as taking "under God" out of the Pledge of Allegiance and removing "In God We Trust" from U.S. currency. It goes on to question why Hagan went to a fundraiser at the home of a man who serves as an adviser to the group.

"Godless Americans and Kay Hagan. She hid from cameras. Took Godless money. What did Hagan promise in return?" the narrator says.

The ad ends with a picture of Hagan while another woman declares in the background, "There is no God!"

Hagan is a Presbyterian church elder who teaches Sunday school. On Wednesday, her attorneys demanded the ad come down within 24 hours. On Thursday, Hagan's attorneys filed a lawsuit in Wake County Superior Court accusing Dole of defamation and libel.

"Each airing of the advertisement further injures (Hagan's) good name and reputation in the community," Hagan's attorneys wrote in court documents. Thursday's court filing does not detail Hagan's full case against Dole, but allows Hagan 20 days to file the full complaint.

Dole's campaign says the ad does not question Hagan's faith, only her agenda and associations, and attorneys for Dole said in a letter to Hagan's legal team that the ad was factual. Dan McLagan, a Dole spokesman, said the campaign had no plans to pull the ad from the air and dismissed the lawsuit as a "silly political gimmick."

"This lawsuit is frivolous and we will file a motion to dismiss," he said. "Kay Hagan knows that the Dole campaign ad is accurate and she is trying to confuse voters until Election Day."

Hagan responded Thursday with an 30-second spot of her own. Referring to the Ninth Commandment in the Old Testament, Hagan says the campaign is about creating jobs and fixing the economy, "not bearing false witness against fellow Christians."

"Elizabeth Dole's attacks on my Christian faith are offensive," Hagan says in the ad. "She even faked my voice in her TV ad to make you think I don't believe in God. Well, I believe in God. I taught Sunday School. My faith guides my life, and Sen. Dole knows it."

The editorial board of The Charlotte Observer, the state's largest newspaper, compared Dole's ad to an infamous spot run in 1990 by Helms against challenger Harvey Gantt, who is black. That ad showed a pair of white hands crumpling a rejection letter, while a narrator slammed "racial quotas."

Wrenn, who helped write the so-called "hands" ad, said both ads were probably put together under similar circumstances.

"When you get down into the 11th hour of a campaign, the pressure gets up pretty high, and your sleep deprivation factor gets up pretty high," Wrenn said. "Sometimes you just lose your judgment a little bit."

Five GOP state lawmakers, in a brief filed Monday, say the inquiry has exceeded its authority and is too political.

Palin is the focus of a legislative investigation into allegations she abused her power by firing her public safety commissioner. The commissioner says he was pressured to dismiss a state trooper who was involved in a messy divorce with Palin's sister.

Investigators are scheduled to submit a report on the investigation Friday. Oral arguments are scheduled for Wednesday.

Five GOP state lawmakers, in a brief filed Monday, say the inquiry has exceeded its authority and is too political.

Palin is the focus of a legislative investigation into allegations she abused her power by firing her public safety commissioner. The commissioner says he was pressured to dismiss a state trooper who was involved in a messy divorce with Palin's sister.

Investigators are scheduled to submit a report on the investigation Friday. Oral arguments are scheduled for Wednesday.

In a vote that shook the government, Wall Street and markets around the world, the House on Monday defeated a $700 billion emergency rescue for the nation's financial system, leaving both parties and the Bush administration struggling to pick up the pieces. The Dow Jones industrials plunged nearly 800 points, the most ever for a single day.

"We need to put something back together that works," a grim-faced Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said after he and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke joined in an emergency strategy session at the White House. On Capitol Hill, Democratic leaders said the House would reconvene Thursday in hopes of a quick vote on a reworked version.

All sides agreed the bill could not be abandoned.

On Monday, not enough lawmakers were willing to take the political risk -- just five weeks before the elections -- of backing a deeply unpopular measure that many voters see as an undeserved bailout for Wall Street.

The bill went down, 228-205, even though Paulson and congressional leaders proclaimed a day earlier that they had worked out an acceptable compromise in marathon weekend talks.

Lawmakers were caught in the middle. On one side were the dire predictions from Bush, his economic team, and their own party leaders of an all-out financial meltdown if they failed to approve the rescue. On the other side: a flood of protest calls and e-mails from voters threatening to punish them at the ballot box.

The House Web site was overwhelmed as millions of people sought information about the measure.

The legislation the administration promoted would have allowed the government to buy bad mortgages and other sour assets held by troubled banks and other financial institutions. Getting those debts off their books should bolster those companies' balance sheets, making them more inclined to lend and easing one of the biggest choke points in a national credit crisis. If the plan worked, the thinking went, it would help lift a major weight off the national economy, which is already sputtering.

Stocks started plummeting on Wall Street even before Monday's vote was over, as traders watched the rescue measure going down on television. Meanwhile, lawmakers were watching them back.

As a digital screen in the House chamber recorded a cascade of "no" votes against the bailout, Democratic Rep. Joe Crowley of New York shouted news of the falling Dow Jones industrials. "Six hundred points!" he yelled, jabbing his thumb downward.

The final stock carnage was 777 points, far surpassing the 684-point drop on the first trading day after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

It's a "terrible Catch-22," House Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller, D-Calif., said Wednesday as the House passed, and sent to the White House, legislation aimed at assuring that the ADA lives up to its promise of protecting the disabled from discrimination.

The 1990 law is widely regarded as one of the major features of civil rights legislation in the 20th century because it ensured that the disabled have access to public buildings and accommodations, thus giving them better access to the workforce. But the Supreme Court has generally exempted from the law's anti-discrimination protections those with partial physical disabilities or impairments that can be treated with medication or devices such as hearing aids.

The Supreme Court has slowly chipped away at the broad protections of the ADA and has created a new set of barriers for disabled Americans," said Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., a chief sponsor of the bill along with House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md.

The bill directs the courts toward a more generous application of the ADA's definition of disability, making it clear that Congress intended the ADA's coverage to be broad and to cover anyone facing discrimination because of a disability.

"It will afford millions of individuals with access to the courts under the ADA and clarifies that anyone with a disability is protected from unfair discrimination," AARP senior vice president David P. Sloane said after the Senate passed the measure by voice vote last week.

The House passed the measure by voice vote as well. But Hoyer noted that it took months of difficult negotiations involving the business community and advocates for the disabled to find the right balance between the rights of the disabled and the obligations of employers.

Plame accused Vice President Dick Cheney and several former high-ranking administration officials of revealing her identity to reporters in 2003. She and her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, say that violated their constitutional rights.

A federal judge dismissed the case last year on largely procedural grounds. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld that ruling Tuesday.

The lawsuit named former presidential adviser Karl Rove, as well as Cheney's former top aide, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

A lawsuit against state Controller John Chiang was filed Monday in Sacramento County Superior Court. The suit says the state Constitution and several sections of law prohibit the state from paying full wages without approval of a budget.

The controller, a Democrat whose office is responsible for paying state employees, has balked at carrying out the Republican governor's July 31 executive order cutting employees' pay until a budget for the fiscal year that began July 1 is approved. Lawmakers are divided over how to close a $15.2 billion deficit.

Schwarzenegger directed that the pay of nearly 140,000 rank-and-file employees be cut to the federal minimum wage of $6.55 an hour. About 30,000 management employees would be paid $455 a week, and another 8,000 workers, mostly doctors and attorneys, would get nothing. All those workers would get the remainder of their normal paychecks after the budget is approved.