OpenCongress releases 13 new features that allow you to more efficiently track your federal legislators. Have fun and remember to vote early and often.

Ben Fried justly blasts NY state Sens. Jeff Klein and Eric Adams for their pollution-friendly proposal to suspend tolls on bridges and tunnels in NYC during major holidays.

In Minnesota, the good guys are on the brink of putting a medical marijuana bill on the governor’s desk. But they have a roadblock:

Unfortunately, Gov. Pawlenty — on the short-list for McCain’s VP, incidentally — has said he “stands with law enforcement” on the issue; meaning, presumably, in opposition to it and inclined to veto based on the opposition of a small but vocal contingent of cops and prosecutors.

One problem: that small but vocal contingent has been exaggerating, offering misleading testimony, and occasionally lying outright about the bill.

TidBITS finds hand-coding HTML still gets great favor from Web developers:

It’s therefore rather amusing to recognize that after 14 years of such editors – FrontPage, PageMill, GoLive, Dreamweaver, and many others, with few surviving the hecatomb – hand coding still rises to the top as the preferred method of building pages. Khoi Vinh, design director at The New York Times, noted in a recent reader Q&A segment on the Web site, “It’s our preference to use a text editor, like HomeSite, TextPad or TextMate, to ‘hand code’ everything, rather than to use a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) HTML and CSS authoring program, like Dreamweaver. We just find it yields better and faster results.” (GoLive, by the way, bit the dust today.)

Admittedly, I’ve relied on the nifty WYSIWYG editor for posts to NTFHT, but it does feel a bit cheap. So perhaps I’ll get back into the swing of things with hand-coding. (via @PatrickRuffini)

Thanks to the efforts of upset bloggers and cycling activists, State Farm has removed its “Humiliated Cyclist” ad.

That’s right. We here at NTfHT are clean-livin’.

Created by OnePlusYou

Those who can’t handle this truth are invited to &*%$ themselves.

Also, Happy April Fool’s Day.

Normally I’m not such a big fan of driving or anything that promotes driving, but this condensed map of the Eisenhower Interstate System is pretty neat. (Thx, RJ.)

Via RCP Blog (via CBS News):

 – Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., walked over to the Republican side of the floor and handed McCain a piece of paper. McCain started reading it and immediately started laughing out loud. A practical joke of some sort. They really are very friendly. McCain has been pulling the paper out and showing it to other Senators — big laughs all around.

What’s the joke? Don’t Americans deserve to know? And with a looming recession and bitter campaigning to come, couldn’t we use a good joke — especially a bipartisan one?

Would the true candidate of change — whoever (s)he is — support a new White House design?

With the Democratic primary contest appearing to narrow down to Sens. Clinton and Obama, perhaps it’s worthwhile to take a gander at the city where Clinton spent her youth and where Obama cut his political teeth.

(via StrangeMaps)