real time

I have spent the last few days working on a couple of new features for the site.

Congressional Tool

First off you may have noticed the new widget in the sidebar to search for members of Congress. This is a great tool to find your representatives and ways to contact them, but it doesn’t stop there. You can also use the widget to show all the committees in Congress and who sits on them. If you are viewing a member of Congress and click on the “additional information” link, you will also find what committees that person sits on.

This great tool is powered by the Sunlight Labs API.

Tweetville

Another new feature I decided to build is something I am coining as “Tweetville”. I have what Twitter lists set up to follow members of Congress. Those lists are further broken down by party. You may have noticed the new Tweetville widget on the right. That shows the last 3 tweets from each list, cycling through each list every 10 seconds. There is also a link at the top of the page to go to Tweetville. From there you can view real time updates to those lists. You don’t need to refresh your browser, just go to the page and select the list you want then you are set.

I will be adding more lists to this feature in the near future, including Bloggers and Media types.

I hope everyone enjoys these new features and finds them highly valuable. Please let me know if you spot any problems so I can get them hammered out.

Damn I hate when Real Time’s season ends. Here is the new rules from last night. Bill’s last new rule was golden.

Last night on Real Time, Terry McAuliffe refused to answer Bill's question of Bill Clinton's foreign policy experience when he took office. Instead he resorted to a right wing talking point; "it's a changed world since 9/11".

The real interesting part is at the end when Bill made a joke about Bill Clinton. Suddenly Terry's satellite feed is gone. Things that stop and make you say hmmmmm.

Jack Kingston appeared on Dan Abrams last night to continue his meme about Obama being unpatriotic. Just like on Real Time, Kingston once again appeared with out his lapel pin to blast Obama for (dramatic pause) not wearing a lapel pin.

Freakin' awesome! Can we make Kingston the spokesman of the RNC, that way Americans see what a bunch of retards they really are?

(h/t Mike for the video tip)

She is standing by her words last night that she would support Clinton over McCain.

This is neo-con meltdown in real time. Isn't it fun to watch?

This past Friday, General Wesley Clarke had a discussion about the current climate in D.C. and what we need to do to change it this November. He highlighted some very good points including the Democrats National Security plan, which was muted by the President changing a press conference time to coincide with the Democrats press conference time.

CLARK: At the right time. And there's a real art to this, because it's not that the Democrats don't have a message. We've got lots of messages and we've got lots of messengers. What we don't have is the pure forum to do that when we need to do it.

I was in a conference on the 30th of March, where we announced our national security agenda. And just to show you kind of the way this works, we had all of the House and Senate Democrats at Union Station. We had Senator Reid and Congresswoman Pelosi there, Madeleine Albright, myself, a couple of other people. We gave the Democratic position.

When President Bush heard we were going to do it, he scheduled his own briefing on Iraq at a competing forum. He started his briefing ten minutes before ours, and he had 100% network coverage. And it's a game.

Of course the typical Republican response has still been "The Democrats have no plan".