Dear President-Elect Obama,

Let me be approximately the 60 billionth person to offer you congratulations on your victory in the presidential campaign - and to make a request of you.

Please blog!

Having trouble keeping your propositions straight? Ballotpedia to the rescue! 

The collaborative site is like Wikipedia for local propositions and initiatives, helping citizens of states with lots (and lots) of such measures up for consideration to learn about and keep track of them all.

Reporters Without Borders released its annual Press Freedom Index today.

The good news: the United States moved up 12 points from last year. (A higher ranking indicates more press freedom.) The bad news: we're still only #36 out of the 173 countries indexed.

In case you aren't already convinced that next month's election is pretty frickin' important, here's something else to consider: the next president will almost certainly have the power to shape the future of the Supreme Court for decades to come.

Radar magazine has a great interview this week with Linda Greenhouse, who recently retired after 30 years of covering the Supreme Court for The New York Times.

Here's more video from Sarah Palin's interview with Katie Couric — in which Couric asks her to name Supreme Court decisions she disagrees with and she lapses into confounded silence after naming only one, Roe v. Wade.

It was a weird week to become an American. I was sworn in on Tuesday, in the federal courthouse in D.C. on Constitution Avenue, as a financial crisis entirely of the country's own making was inspiring descriptions like "armageddon" and "apocalypse."

Via ThinkProgress, news of a recent Pew Hispanic Center study that found one in 10 Hispanics are stopped by authorities who question them about their immigration status.

Pop quiz, fellow progressives: how do you refer to the two sides of the abortion debate?

Did you say "pro-life" and "pro-choice"? Those are the terms I generally use when talking about the issue too. And, as I was reminded by a conversation between colleagues this morning, it doesn't make much sense.

One of the amazing and historic things about this presidential campaign is that it's made us blasé about how amazing and historic it's been.

No one's really talking anymore about the fact that the Democratic Party just nominated its first African-American candidate for president. Or that a female candidate got closer than any woman's gotten before to securing the nomination.