Sheer brilliance. (If that link to Collins' site dies, the original is here.)

Politicker ME has a recent article about a student privacy bill being considered in Augusta. I was hoping that it had to do with students' physical privacy, but it turned out that it had to do with collecting data to meet federal requirements. Since this is a large part of what I do (for medical purposes, rather than educational), I decided to look into it a bit more.

Part of the stimulus act provided for a website to allow people to track where the money goes. That site, Recovery.gov, shows the various states that have their own versions. Turns out that Maine is one of them. :-) There are already posts from Susan Gendron about how the money will be used for school projects, and a report about the apparent low bidder on a I-295 construction project. This should be interesting to follow for the next couple of months...

I was curious as to what the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 actually said, so I went and looked it up on Thomas.loc.gov, where the Library of Congress posts legislative information from Congress. The final version is the one that was "Enrolled as Agreed to or Passed by Both House and Senate".

Sorry, folks, Whitehouse.gov was a little slow getting these posted.

Obama's Executive Orders are being posted over at Whitehouse.gov. So far, we have the following:

Ethics Commitments by Executive Branch Personnel

Every appointee ... shall sign ... the following pledge:

In J. R. R. Tolkien's The Two Towers, Faramir refused to take the One Ring, even to save his city - because it ultimately would not do so.

...if it turns out to be true?

Mere days from assuming the presidency and closing the door on eight years of Bill Clinton, president-elect George W. Bush assured the nation in a televised address Tuesday that "our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over."

The New York Times has a good slideshow which clearly brings out how the country swung Democratic this year.

Thanks to brownsox@Daily Kos for the pointer.

The numbers as I got them at the Auditorium tonight (sorry I'm missing a few races):