Congressional Report Cards

Via Hit&Run, two lonely-voice-of-sanity organizations have issued their Congressional "report cards" for last year, the Council for Citizens Against Government Waste and the Club For Growth. You'll want to git on over to those sites and be prepared to fire off e-praise or e-vitriol to your elected representatives.

In my case, I was mostly pleasantly surprised: CCGAW rated New Hampshire's delegation at 74%, tied with Oklahoma for first place. (Not surprisingly, Massachusetts came in with the lowest score, 10%, with Vermont tied with North Dakota as second-worst at 11%.) Senators Sununu and Gregg scored 95% and 75%, respectively. Congressman Jeb Bradley came in at a needs-improvement 62%, below average for Republicans (73%)

Turning to the Club for Growth: Senator Sununu scored 100%, in a three-way tie (with Sens DeMint and Kyl) for first place. We'll award him a gold star. Heck, make it two. Senator Gregg scored only a 99%. And, finally, Congressman Bradley got only a 55% from CfG, putting him in 157th place in the House.

I think I'll drop Jeb a note encouraging him to do better. A good rule of thumb seems to be: check how Dennis Kucinich is voting, and go the other way.

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada

[Amazon Link]
(paid link)
[3.5
stars] [IMDb Link]

This movie stars, and was directed by, Tommy Lee Jones. It's a little arty for me, maybe a tad pretentious too. For example, in case we missed the point of the title The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, each burial is announced with a bilingual title card.

But anyway, Tommy Lee plays Pete, friend of the eponymous Melquiades. Melquiades winds up dead in the first few minutes of the movie, the victim of negligent homicide. Complicating things: (1) Pete has promised Melquiades that he would return him to his home town in Mexico for burial; (2) the local legal authorities aren't very interested in bringing the killer to trial. So Pete sets out to keep his promise and administer some impromptu justice.

I'm not sure if I was supposed to laugh at the hijinks involved in all this, but I did so in a couple of places.

Fans of The Band may want to avoid this, because Levon Helm is in it, and doesn't look very good at all.


Last Modified 2024-02-03 8:08 AM EDT