White House During the Blizzard
More Pete Souza works from the White House: Snow blankets the White House grounds during a blizzard February 6, 2010. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza) 
MyBlog
Will NFL Players Go on Strike Next Year?
I hardly ever read the sports sections, so perhaps this is old news. It sounds to me as if there might be a football strike next year. Soccer, here’s your chance! (Toward the end of this clip.)
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Snow Blogging
10:01 a.m.,Washington, D.C.
9:47 a.m., Washington, D.C.
12:29 a.m., Washington, D.C.
11:54 p.m., Washington, D.C.
11:28 p.m., Washington, D.C.
10:24 p.m., Washington, D.C.
10:00 p.m., Washington, D.C.
8:41 p.m., Washington, D.C.
7:18 p.m., Washington, D.C.
Aziz Ansari
This comedian is pretty hysterical. He talks to Terri Gross on “Fresh Air.”
Science Friday: Paralyzing Worms with Light
Below and here.
Bonus: Science and the federal budget.
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Civics Blogging: More Q and A with the President
This time, it’s the Senate Democrats’ turn to mix it up with the president. That latter half is the best.
Spending Freeze?
Maybe this is what they mean by a spending freeze: This grants.gov program is offering 45 grants out of $5 in estimated total program funding. Spend it wisely!
Buried in the Budget
A good thing about the week the White House releases the federal budget is that I no longer have to trek to the Government Printing Office to pick up paper copies and lug them to a home or ancillary office. (Living 10 blocks from GPO in paper-only days meant I was always stuck with that task, risking life, or at least straining limb, to get these huge docs back safely so we writers could meet our publication deadlines.) Now that it’s online immediately after it’s released, the budget can be covered by anyone with a computer, even though the national media will still film Tom, Dick, and Sally picking up the big books on North Capitol Street.
This is not to say there are no physical risks–carpel tunnel syndrome could result from clicking the various .pdf appendixes to see what the president wants to spend on education or health in 2011. Or you could get astigmatism from squinting to see the figures for what programs would go up or down (if Congress, the final arbiter of federal spending, agrees).
And it remains to be seen if this online access has improved our collective knowledge of federal spending or just given more people more access to information in the budget to pick apart and fight over. There seems to be little consensus on a set of basic facts; on the deficit, on taxes, on what the priorities should be, we’re all over the map.
Still, from where I sit, I’m a click away from a ton of information, and that’s quite a nice development. It just might take until next year to figure it all out.