widget

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.

Instead of debating Iraq, they choose to go after a political ad. A political ad has never killed anyone. Iraq has killed thousands. Now there is even more evidence that they should have done their job on debating Iraq. Today's Washington Post has a front page article on how Petraeus did cook the books. He did go before Congress and lie about the numbers. He did betray us.

On Sept. 1, the bullet-riddled bodies of four Iraqi men were found on a Baghdad street. Two days later, a single dead man, with one bullet in his head, was found on a different street. According to the U.S. military in Iraq, the solitary man was a victim of sectarian violence. The first four were not.

Such determinations are the building blocks for what the Bush administration has declared a downward trend in sectarian deaths and a sign that its war strategy is working. They are made by a specialized team of soldiers who spend their nights at computer terminals, sifting through data on the day's civilian victims for clues to the motivations of killers.

Now this is something that we have known about. The media has been reporting this variation in numbers for the past couple months. Now here is where it gets interesting: