This is an abridged version of a story airing this weekend on This American Life. The story is part of our series on money in politics.

We imagine lobbyists stalking the halls of Congress, trying to influence lawmakers with cash. But often, it's the other way around: Members of Congress stalk lobbyists, looking for contributions.

"Most Americans would be shocked — not surprised, shocked — if they knew how much time a U.S. Senator spends raising money," Sen. Dick Durbin told us.

There are special call centers across the street from the Capitol where Senators and Congressmen sit, often for hours a day, calling potential donors to ask for money.

And lawmakers and their staffs are constantly trying to find lobbyists to organize fundraisers. For the most part, these are much more mundane than the fancy black-tie galas you sometimes hear about on the news.

Take a look at this invitation for Rep. Tim Bishop, a democrat from New York. It's at a restaurant called Johnny's Half Shell. Cost: $500 to $2500. Time: 8:30 a.m.

Eight thirty a.m. is not glamorous. And lots of these fundraisers happen at breakfast.

Here's another invitation, this one for a a Republican candidate, Steve Daines of Montana. It's at the offices of the Associated General Contractors of America, a big trade group in town. Imagine 15 people eating appetizers in a conference room. Not glamorous.

A congressional watchdog group called the Sunlight Foundation collects these invitations to fundraisers and puts them online. We crunched some of their numbers. (Notes on the data are at the bottom of this story.) Here's a breakdown of fundraisers, by category:

Sifting through the invitations, the same venues come up again and again. Lunch at The Capitol Grille, dinner at Bullfeathers, cocktails at the Monocle. Here are the top 10 locations for fundraisers between 2008 and early 2012. They form a ring around the capitol.

Not all of the events are boring. There are pheasant hunts, golf tournaments, sailing trips. This past week, for a thousand bucks, you could join South Dakota Senator John Thune at a Van Halen concert. Here's a count of fancy events from 2008 through early 2012:

And here's a graph of all fundraisers in that time:

So how do lobbyists actually pay to attend these events?

Read More: "We have a policy that all checks have to be hand delivered"

Guilt! Betrayal! Monetary policy!

This week on This American Life, Planet Money tells the story of the European debt crisis. Here's a list of all the ways to listen to the show.

If an hour about the euro leaves you wanting more, subscribe to the Planet Money podcast. Read the Europe Q&A we wrote for the New York Times Magazine. And check out our previous podcasts on the crisis (listed here in reverse chronological order):

Read More: 14 awesome Planet Money podcasts about the European crisis

Standard & Poor's announced yesterday that its president Deven Sharma is stepping down. The ratings agency has come under fire in recent weeks for its downgrade of the United States, and it has seen its stock tumble amid reports that the Justice Department is investigating it and other agencies' ratings of mortgage securities.

We spoke with Deven Sharma about these securities back in 2009 for our This American Life show, "The Watchmen."

Deven Sharma

Some of our mortgage-related securities experienced more severe downgrades than we have historically experienced, and that's been a disappointment.

Alex Blumberg

I think, honestly, as a listener out there, this is the thing that is frustrating is that I've heard this a lot, that nobody could have seen this coming, nobody could have seen this coming. More than anybody else, that is your job. Right? It's the investment bank's jobs to say, this is going to be great. It's your job to say, you know what? Here's how things could go bad.

Deven Sharma

Our analysts are really smart people, and they too observed that there was too much of a bubble and we needed to do something about it. And they made changes to our methodology and criteria starting in 2006. Now, hindsight, it's like they didn't make enough of a severe change as we have now experienced. But it's not that they missed it. They missed the severity of it.

Sharma has been president of the ratings agency since 2007.

Update, July 26: This story from Planet Money's Alex Blumberg and NPR's Laura Sydell aired this weekend on This American Life. (Check out TAL's "Ways to Listen" page to find how you can hear the story.) A shorter version of the piece is also airing today on All Things Considered. Here's the story.

Nathan Myhrvold is a genius and a polymath. He made hundreds of millions of dollars as Microsoft's chief technology officer, he's discovered dinosaur fossils, and he recently co-authored a six-volume cookbook that "reveals science-inspired tech­niques for prepar­ing food."

Myhrvold has more than 100 patents to his name, and he's cast himself as a man determined to give his fellow inventors their due. In 2000, he founded a company called Intellectual Ventures, which he calls "a company that invests in invention."

But Myhrvold's company has a different image among many Silicon Valley insiders.

The influential blog Techdirt regularly refers to Intellectual Ventures as a patent troll. IPWatchdog, an intellectual property site, called IV "patent troll public enemy #1." These blogs write about how Intellectual Ventures has amassed one of the largest patent portfolios in existence and is going around to technology companies demanding money to license these patents.

Patents are a big deal in the software industry right now. Lawsuits are proliferating. Big technology companies are spending billions of dollars to buy up huge patent portfolios in order to defend themselves. Computer programmers say patents are hindering innovation.

But people at companies that have been approached by Intellectual Ventures don't want to talk publicly.

"There is a lot of fear about Intellectual Ventures," says Chris Sacca, a venture capitalist who was an early investor in Twitter, among other companies. "You don't want to make yourself a target."

Sacca wouldn't say if Intellectual Ventures had been in contact with any of the companies he's invested in.

"I tried to put you in touch with other people in this community to talk to you about this and they almost uniformly said they couldn't talk to you," Sacca told us. "They were afraid to." IV has the power to "literally obliterate startups," Sacca says.

Read More: Nathan Myhrvold responds

Planet Money's on This American Life this weekend. From TAL:

It seems like every politician has a different plan for putting people back to work. Some want to cut taxes, others want to offer huge incentives to companies. And with so many competing ideas, we—joined by the Planet Money team—couldn't help but wonder...how do you create a job? Is there a magic formula? A secret cure-all?

Check out This American Life's "Ways to Listen" page to find out when the show airs on your local station, and how you can download the podcast.

Our partners at ProPublica just won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of stories about Wall Street. Planet Money collaborated with ProPublica on parts of the series that aired on Morning Edition and This American Life.

In a post this afternoon, Paul Steiger, the editor-in-chief of ProPublica, writes:

ProPublica reporters Jesse Eisinger and Jake Bernstein have been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for their stories on how some Wall Street bankers, seeking to enrich themselves at the expense of their clients and sometimes even their own firms, at first delayed but then worsened the financial crisis. ...

Jesse and Jake's work was greatly augmented by partnerships with public radio's "Planet Money" and "This American Life." While radio reporting is not eligible for the Pulitzer, we want to acknowledge a great debt to, and celebrate our partnership with, Adam Davidson and Ira Glass and their teams. ...

For more:

• Read the citation from the Pulitzer committee.
• Listen to the stories that aired on This American Life and Morning Edition.
• Watch "Bet Against The American Dream," a show tune that accompanied the story.
• Read the full series at ProPublica.org.

Planet Money on This American Life:

Chana Joffe-Walt explains why prescription drug coupons could actually be increasing how much we pay, and prevent us from even telling how much drugs cost.

Listen to the show.

This piece originally aired on Someone Else's Money, a Planet Money/This American Life show on health insurance. Also, check out More Is Less, the TAL episode that looked at why health-care costs keep rising.

Planet Money's on This American Life this week, posing a surprisingly slippery question: What is money?

To find the answer, we go inside the bowels of the Federal Reserve, learn why Brazil created a fake currency, and consider what giant stone coins on the bottom of the ocean tell us about the nature of money.

Check out This American Life's "Ways to Listen" page to find out when the show airs on your local station, and how you can download the podcast.

This weekend on This American Life: The wild life and tragic death of Toxie, Planet Money's pet toxic asset.

For more, check out the Toxie megagraphic. And listen to the podcasts:

• We bought a Toxic asset!
• When An Asset Turns Toxic, Who You Gonna Sue?
• We Take Toxie On The Road
• Toxie's Dark Past
• The Origin Of Toxie
• Toxie, R.I.P.

A couple other bullet-worthy items:

• A blog post explaining, in slightly technical terms, what we mean when we say Toxie's dead.
• The podcast where we dive into our next investment: Gold.

Finally, here's the Toxie Song, written by a Planet Money listener who grew attached to our toxic asset, and posted the song on our Facebook page.

Planet Money, ProPublica and This American Life collaborated on a project that's airing this weekend on This American Life. It's a story about a hedge fund called Magnetar that made millions of dollars when the housing market collapsed.

The show includes a lot of in-depth investigative reporting. It also includes this song, which was written by Robert Lopez, one of the guys behind Avenue Q.

Ira Glass writes:

Watching musicians record the original Broadway song for this week's radio show was like watching a seasoned SWAT team at work. It was all so fast!

All this happened in the late afternoon, in a recording studio right by all the big Broadway theaters, so the performers could go straight from the session to their shows that night: The Addams Family, Chicago, La Cage Aux Folles. One of the singers, Christian Borle, was off to dance on the ceiling as Bert in Mary Poppins.

It's hard to write about all this without gushing in a very uncritical way. It was just really fun to watch these people who are so good at their jobs. The song was written by Robert Lopez, who co-wrote Avenue Q and is writing a new musical with Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Our musical director was Stephen Oremus, the musical director of Avenue Q and Wicked. Orchestrations were by Bruce Coughlin, who created the orchestrations for 9 to 5, Grey Gardens, Urinetown, revivals of Annie Get Your Gun and Guys and Dolls. Singer John Treacy Eagan was one of the people who took over as Max Bialystock, the lead in The Producers, after Nathan Lane left the show, and for this recording he definitely amped up the Nathan Laniness.

I was surprised that any of them perform together, the vocalists singing along with the rhythm section, woodwinds with woodwinds, trumpets with trombone, but everyone told me this is part of the Broadway sound. They only did two or three takes. Even the first take was pretty close. John Kilgore had the thing mixed and finished five hours after we walked in the door, though Robert and Stephen had little fixes the next day. (For instance: they replaced the small "bell tree" with a bigger one in the final mix. To give it that full Disney magic, they said.)

Here are the full credits for the song. Thanks to everyone who made possible Broadway's first ever investigative reporting musical comedy number!

Music and Lyrics: Robert Lopez

Vocalists: John Treacy Eagan and Christian Borle

Music Supervisor/Producer: Stephen Oremus
Orchestrator: Bruce Coughlin

Piano: Mark Hummel
Keyboard: Randy Cohen
Bass: Dave Phillips
Drums: Sean McDaniel
Sax/Flute: Dave Mann
Sax/Clarinet: Charles Pillow
Sax/Clarinet: Dave Riekenberg
Trumpet: Tony Kadleck
Trumpet: Bud Burridge
Trombone: Randy Andos

Studio Engineer: John Kilgore
Music Contractor: Michael Keller
Copyist: Karl Mansfield

On today's Planet Money:

Justice is served! A wrong is righted! And we get to the heart of why the law sees corporations as people.

Last week on This American Life our own Alex Blumberg had a story about corporate personhood. The idea was actually pitched by Alex's dad, who was pretty upset about the recent Supreme Court ruling that essentially said: Hey, giant companies are like people. So they get to spend money on political campaigns just like you and me. It was Alex's father's dream that Alex get to the bottom of this issue. He wanted Alex to call up Exxon Mobil and say: "Who do you think you are?" Alex's story went on the radio— but halfway through the crew over at TAL cut it off. They thought it was too boring. We here at PM felt otherwise. Apparently you did too. We got lots of emails and tweets from listeners asking for the rest of the story. So today, we bring you Alex's full story on corporations as people. We also check back in with his dad.

After the jump, see a picture of the father and son team behind today's show.

Download the podcast; or subscribe. Music: The Ramones "This Business Is Killing Me." Find us: Twitter/ Facebook/ Flickr.

Read More >>

The Hunts Point Market in the Bronx comes alive in the 'middle of the night.' Adam and Chana stopped by to find out who's haggling for oranges at 3 in the morning. Download the story here.

We just heard the This American Life story Alex and I did with Ira, about the financial crisis.

As soon as it was over, my dad and my uncle called to say they liked it a lot but still had a crucial question: you say it's scary, but how is it scary to me? How does the crisis affect regular people?

I do think I could have done a better job of laying this out.

We will be focusing on this question intensely over the coming weeks. The truth is, the crisis is still somewhat contained to big banks and large corporations. It is harder for people to get a loan, but it's far from impossible.

It's hard to do good narrative journalism about a thing that might happen. It's always easier to tell good, juicy stories about things that have happened, already, to real people.

Here's what I'm afraid of, why I said I'm scared:

Read More >>

It sounds a tad obscene, and maybe it is. This weekend, contributing editor Alex Blumberg hits the airwaves and podcast pools of the world with a This American Life segment on "naked short selling" — an arcane financial maneuver that would seem to make no sense.

I heard the rough mix of Alex's piece in an edit some weeks back. It's called "Now You S.E.C. Me, Now You Don't." I'm here to tell you that the segment makes loads of sense. The practice, well ...

So give it a listen, if you'd be so kind. It plays live this weekend and goes to iTunes on Monday. We're also planning to have it here next week. Let us know what you think, will ya?