A Special Welcome and Thanks to Amos Davis
Posted by Jim Harper
Commenting on the recent 1,000,000th visitor post, one Amos Davis says:
I have never been a 1,000,000th anything (Visitor) or anything else. If this is in fact true, then I feel honored to be a part of Washingtonwatch.com history.
I use this site to locate information on pending and enacted legislation from the U. S. Senate, [...]
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Welcome 1,000,000th Visitor!
Posted by Jim Harper
We’re pleased to announce that WashingtonWatch.com has had one million visitors so far this year.
The site is on pace to easily double the number of visitors from last year, after growth of 350% in 2007. (Hey it’s easy to grow from the really low numbers in 2006.)
With the introduction of the WashingtonWatch.com blog in [...]
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Will Broadband Be in the Stimulus Package?
Posted by Jim Harper
“I want to see a stimulus package sooner rather than later. If it does not get done in the lame duck session, it will be the first thing I get done as President of the United States.”
So said President-Elect Barack Obama at his first press conference this past week.
Will subsidies for broadband be part [...]
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Good Luck to All the Candidates - We’ll Be Watching
Posted by Jim Harper
Here’s why you should vote, even if you think your favorite candidate is already destined to win or lose.
And while a lot of people treat this as the end of the political season, it’s not. It’s the beginning of the policy season - the season when things actually happen.
Your mental attitude may [...]
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Senate to Hold an Open House
Posted by Jim Harper
One of the keys to WashingtonWatch.com is good data about federal legislation. A reason why WashingtonWatch.com is not a much better resource is because it’s very hard to get good data out of the legislative branch.
So it’s nice to see that a new Open Senate Project is joining the Open House Project. These [...]
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National Defense Cost Confusion
Posted by Jim Harper
A commenter on S. 3001, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2009, which passed the House yesterday, pointed out a large discrepancy between the cost figures reported here on WashingtonWatch.com and on a worthy similar site, GovTrack.
The GovTrack page on S. 3001 recites costs of $23 per American. (The commenter actually reported [...]
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To Tweet or Not to Tweet
Posted by Jim Harper
[Update: Click on the image at right or here to see WashingtonWatch.com's tweets.]
A couple of months ago, I signed up for a WashingtonWatch.com Twitter account. Twitter is a micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (also known as “tweets”), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters [...]
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WashingtonWatch.com on the Blogosphere
Posted by Jim Harper
Tyson Chaney at Politics 2000 recently interviewed me about WashingtonWatch.com and posted the results on his blog. It provides a decent amount of insight into what we’re trying to do here, so I recommend giving it a read.
And I note with a mixture of joy and consternation that the recent post here on Fannie [...]
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Congress is Out of Session - CBO is Not
Posted by Jim Harper
Though Congress is away for the month, the Congressional Budget Office is not. CBO is the source for most of the cost estimates we use to report the cost (and occasionally savings) of legislation, and it continues its work even during the dog days of summer (- which haven’t been all that bad this [...]
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Bill Comments in 1,000 Characters or Less
Posted by Jim Harper
Just a quick note to tell you about an exciting update to our site. Well, actually it’s not all that exciting, but anyway . . .
A few months ago, we found that some visitors were leaving comments that were very long - such as copies of entire news articles. These probably aren’t terribly [...]
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