Cool Tool

I recently discovered GovTrack.us, which is a pretty cool site. They have a page for each member of Congress, which you can put in your feed reader. I put mine right into Blogger's little "Blogs I Follow" there on the dashboard, as that's the closest I come to checking a reader. In addition to notifying you of things that your own Congressmen do, GovTrack has a bill tracking feature that will let you check out bills, monitors their status in terms of "sent to committee" or "passed the House" or what have you between introduction and implementation. It's pretty cool. Since I've discovered it I've written my representatives in DC about a number of things, from the "Quality Cheese Act" to the "Federal Reserve Transparancy Act of 2009."

I also discovered this little bit of text, proposing forced servitude as outlined first in HR1388 and then moved to HR 1444 requiring a commission be established to investigate, "Whether a workable, fair, and reasonable mandatory service requirement for all able young people could be developed, and how such a requirement could be implemented in a manner that would strengthen the social fabric of the Nation and overcome civic challenges by bringing together people from diverse economic, ethnic, and educational backgrounds."

I'm waiting on replies from all my Congressmen as to what they have to say about that little bit of unconstitutional filth. It makes me angry that when they were called on how unconstitutional this bit of text is, rather than dropping it they moved it to a different bill. I reminded them to check the Thirteenth Amendment:

"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

The website is a wonderful tool for keeping track of what our Congress is doing. I highly recommend taking the time to explore a bit and figure out how to make it work for you!


In other news, I have a new computer. This means that I have to get all those cute pictures from the old hard drive to the new one before I can post them. But I've got some on there that are intended to be on the blog...