Perri Nelson's Website 

Dems vow change as Congress ends session

Jim Abrams writing for the Associated Press (via the Seattle Post Intelligencer), gives a summary of the last minute efforts of Congress.

Before the predawn finish Saturday, departing House Speaker Dennis Hastert acknowledged that after eight years, the longest stretch for a Republican in the job, he will welcome a return to the rank and file. "On Jan. 4, I will be privileged to rejoin you on these benches where my heart is," he said,

Some privilege. The way he said it, you'd think he planned on it from the start. If he didn't want to continue as speaker, he could have simply stepped down instead of engineering a defeat for the Republican party in the House.

Lawmakers ready to return home also were reminded of the corruption and scandal problems that helped sweep Democrats to power in the November elections.

Of course, this is an AP report, so there's no mention of the Democrat corruption from individuals like Rep. McDermott or Rep. Jefferson.

The House ethics committee, in a report Friday, admonished Republicans for turning a blind eye for years to the inappropriate conduct of former Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla. He resigned in September after it was revealed he had sent salacious electronic messages to former teenage pages.

Again, this is an AP report, so no mention of the fact that the ethics panel also found that Democrats were not blameless in this incident either.

As one of its final acts, Congress approved a stopgap measure keeping federal programs running at or slightly below current levels through Feb. 15. President Bush quickly signed it on Saturday.

The action was necessary because lawmakers failed to pass the annual spending bills covering the budget year that began Oct. 1, except those dealing with defense and homeland security.

Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., who will become House Appropriations Committee chairman when the Democrats take over, said the bill was "a blatant admission of abject failure by the most useless Congress in modern times."

Of course, there's also no mention of the persistent obstructionism of the Democrat party during this "useless" Congress's tenure, which is also something that I'm sure Rep. Obey neglected to mention.

In the Senate, incoming Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said he and new Republican leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., have agreed that all 100 senators will hold a private session on Jan. 4 to kick off what they hope will be a new era of civility and less partisanship.

I seem to remember someone talking about a "new tone" in Washington a few years ago. Civility and less partisanship were the goal then, but of course since the Democrats weren't in power, they would have nothing of it.

I'm sure that there must be a dictionary that covers the variants in language used by Equus asinus. Somewhere in that dictionary there's sure to be a definition of partisanship and bipartisanship.

Partisanship is probably defined as when Republicans insist upon holding to conservative principles when they are in power, and the Democrats are in the minority.

Bipartisanship is probably defined as the condition that exists when Republicans cave to Democrat demands, or whenever Democrats are in power.

The Democrats are vowing a change. They're calling the 109th Congress the most useless Congress in modern times, because so little got done. God help us if the Democrats manage to get their agenda through. Expect taxes to rise, government spending to rise even faster, and expect our national defense and intelligence services to be gutted.

They've done it before. They'll do it again.

New Feature...

As most bloggers know, sitemeter collects more information than just how many hits a web site receives. It also records the IP address, the number of page views, the referring page and the exit page. It also geocodes the IP address where possible.

The geocoding information provided by sitemeter is rather interesting. It's usually the location of your ISP, which can be quite close to where you are, or it can be way, way off. Anyway the distribution of locations where people are coming from is pretty interesting data, and I've come up with a use for it.

I've exported my sitemeter log data and imported it into a "visits" table in my database. I've also written a widget that looks at your IP address when you hit the site and looks up the data from previous visits (if it's there). If sitemeter has recorded your country, city, and state, as well as your longitude and latitude, the widget will see if it can get a National Weather Service 5-day forecast for your location. If It can do that it will present you with a link to the forecast page.

Sitemeter doesn't keep track of my visits, but for me, the link looks like this...

Weather for Covington, Washington

If this is your first time visiting the site, you won't see a forecast link. If you've visited before but I haven't imported the data, you won't see a forecast link. If sitemeter can't get reasonable geocoding data you won't see a forecast link, and you won't see one if you're not from the United States.

That's not because I don't like foreign visitors. I think it's cool that people from other countries have read my site (some on a regular basis). It's just that the United States National Weather Service doesn't provide forecast data for locations outside the United States.

If you see the link, let me know what you think.

Trackposted to The HILL Chronicles, Pursuing Holiness, 123beta, The Uncooperative Blogger, Culturetastic, The Uncooperative Blogger ®, Woman Honor Thyself, Pirate's Cove, The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns, Outside the Beltway, Adam's Blog, The World According To Carl, The Right Nation, The Amboy Times, Perri Nelson's Website, Blue Star Chronicles, Madman Returns, third world county, The Renaissance Blogger, Is It Just Me?, The World According to Carl, Conservative Cat, Stuck On Stupid, Planck's Constant, The Random Yak, and The Bullwinkle Blog, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

Extended Trackback Party

This weekend I've decided to extend open trackbacks throughout the weekend to see how Ferdinand T Cat's linkfest festival works...

Let's see how this works shall we? If I understand things correctly, instead of linking directly to this post, what you really want to do is use the ping chooser at http://www.linkfests.info/. That will help you to link to all of the hosts in the linkfest and to ping them all as well.

Update: When I first published this post, I think I linked to the wrong linkfest. The link above has been updated.