Fantasy Congress

Welcome to the New Dawn. Do you have your Fantasy Congress team in place yet?

It's not unlike other fantasy leagues - you draft and manage a team, competing against others by scoring as many points as possible. How? You score by orchestrating your team of junior and senior legislators in both chambers to push bills along. Real legisislation is used, a measure's progress is updated in the FC database in real time. A quartet of Claremont McKenna College students dreamed it up.

And it's lifelike: you win by getting bills passed, not by passing good bills.

If you get really into it, you might want to make up baseball cards with stats, like Kevin Hoffmann, who is in touch with his "inner dork political self."

Players who'd drafted U.S. Rick Santorum, R-Pa. will have some big shoes to fill. With 1,599 points, he ranked among the top five in Congress. (Sen. John Warner, the Virginia Republican, led the league with 1,991 points.) The also-outgoing Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa. had 131.

I'm already in Fantasy Tech Company, and Novell killed me this week.

-- Deals with Microsoft :  -20 points

Brutal.

The cheerful news this otherwise gloomy morning is that Pennsylvanians have given the nation a gift by voting Rick Santorum out of office.

The mean-spirited can’t-be-soon-enough ex-Senator is truly a man of limited intellectual means whose stridency and extremism finally caught up with him.  If ever there were a politician who preached the gospel of inclusion while never practicing it, he was Rick Santorum.

He will not be missed.

Good one, Tom.  Santorum didn't represent me, but I'm happy to see him go, nonetheless.