In the House today:

• By 280 to 152, the Democratic-controlled House voted to require sponsors of the pet spending items to be publicly identified, a move that sponsors say will do away with some of the most egregious waste of the taxpayers’ money.
• [A separate] vote to reinstate the “pay as you go” rule [passed] 280 to 154. It requires that increases in spending on entitlement programs be offset by savings elsewhere, so as not to raise the budget deficit.

And yesterday:

• The new House rules bar members from taking gifts, meals or trips paid for by lobbyists, or the organizations that employ them. The rules also ban lawmakers from using corporate jets and reimbursing the owners.

It's time for the Senate to agree to abide by similar restrictions. And quickly, to avoid distraction from the overarching issue of the new year: resisting an escalation of the war in Iraq. It's encouraging to see the Democratic party credited with "fierce opposition" to the president's senseless and stubborn desire to do more of the same.

Harriet Miers, who once opined that President Bush was one of the most brilliant men she'd ever met and who was rewarded with an unsuccessful Supreme Court nomination, has had enough. She resigned from her position as White House Counsel, effective at the end of the month.

Asked why she was leaving, Snow said: "Basically, she has been here six years."

That's reason enough.

What do you think about this Op Ed?:

This past Election Day, the American people sent a clear message to Washington: Clean up your act.

. . . It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that this message was intended for only one party or politician. The votes hadn't even been counted in November before we heard reports that corporations were already recruiting lobbyists with Democratic connections to carry their water in the next Congress.

. . . Americans put their faith in Democrats because they want us to restore their faith in government -- and that means more than window dressing when it comes to ethics reform.

. . . The truth is, we cannot change the way Washington works unless we first change the way Congress works. On Nov. 7, voters gave Democrats the chance to do this. But if we miss this opportunity to clean up our act and restore this country's faith in government, the American people might not give us another one.

Our living Tower of Babel, Pat Robertson, wants us to know that a terrorist attack on the U.S. will result in "mass killing" toward the end of the year. God told him, so you'd think he'd have it on good authority.

“I’m not necessarily saying it’s going to be nuclear,” he said during his news-and-talk television show “The 700 Club” on the Christian Broadcasting Network. “The Lord didn’t say nuclear. But I do believe it will be something like that.”

Something like that? Pat, could you go on another prayer retreat and get back to us with more detail?

Fortunately, Robertson's prognostication record hasn't been much better than Jeane Dixon's. In 2005, he predicted Bush would win victory after victory on issues like Social Security reform, and in 2006 he was confident that a tsunami-strength storm would engulf a U.S. coast. (Well, to be fair, it did rain heavily in New England.)

Whoops. During a lively discussion on Fox News about Barack Obama's teen use of cocaine, a Fox reporter inaccurately said President Bush admitted using cocaine in the past.

Via Raw Story which has more details.

Here's the scoop on Bush's alleged cocaine use.

Jeff Toobin reminds us of another admirable aspect of former President Gerald Ford - his commitment to a diverse America and a first rate Supreme Court:

[Ford] wrote an Op-Ed article on this page titled “Inclusive America, Under Attack.” A pair of pending lawsuits, Mr. Ford wrote, would prohibit Michigan and other universities “from even considering race as one of many factors weighed by admission counselors.” Such a move would condemn “future college students to suffer the cultural and social impoverishment that afflicted my generation.”

As it happened, on Sept. 15, 1999, a month after the article ran, Mr. Ford had dinner with James M. Cannon, one of his former White House aides, in Grand Rapids, Mich. The men were in town to hear a speech at Mr. Ford’s presidential museum by his only nominee to the Supreme Court, John Paul Stevens.

By that point, Justice Stevens had long since proved a great disappointment to conservatives. But his nomination remained one of Mr. Ford’s proudest achievements as president, for Justice Stevens’ moderate-to-liberal record reflected Mr. Ford’s own later views, as his stand on affirmative action illustrated. At the dinner, Mr. Ford encouraged Mr. Cannon to do what he could to help the university in the lawsuit, which was heading for the Supreme Court.

I often forget that Gerald Ford named Stevens to the bench. The most important Justice holds back the reactionary tide thanks to Gerald Ford.

His most important legacy. Something to be remembered.

The cable networks are carrying the late President Gerald Ford's first funeral service in Palm Desert, CA live. The Palm Desert Sun is live-blogging it.

Betty Ford looks so sad, yet dignified. It's very quiet in the church, not a peep from anyone. He's then going to be flown to Washington and then to Michigan for his burial.

R.I.P., Gerald Ford.

As the president's poll numbers continue to decline (and you can expect them to decline further if he announces his anticipated plan to escalate the war in Iraq), he'll probably not be comforted by the knowledge that he won at least one poll this year. Respondents in an AP-AOL News poll named Bush "the biggest villain of the year," beating out second place Osama bin Laden by a comfortable margin.

With a much smaller percentage of the total vote, Bush also won "hero of the year," laughably defeating "soldiers in Iraq." Those who die to carry out the president's failed policies are apparently less heroic to some than the architect of those policies. Go figure.

To no avail, I've been searching You Tube since Thursday of a video of Chevy Chase on Saturday Night Live falling down in parody of former President Gerald Ford.

I suspect I have it on a VCR tape in storage somewhere, as I have most of them from the first few years of the show, but with the snow storm, I'm not about to head out to the storage locker.

Until someone else posts it on You Tube, we'll all have to make do with today's New York Times article about it.

If anyone has a video from 1975 -- the only year Chevy Chase was on the show, let me know. I'll be glad to convert it to a format You Tube will accept.

Former President Gerald Ford has died at age 93.

He was our country's longest-living President.

Ford was an accidental president, Nixon’s hand-picked successor, a man of much political experience who had never run on a national ticket. He was as open and straight-forward as Nixon was tightly controlled and conspiratorial.

He took office minutes after Nixon flew off into exile and declared “our long national nightmare is over.” But he revived the debate a month later by granting Nixon a pardon for all crimes he committed as president. That single act, it was widely believed, cost Ford election to a term of his own in 1976, but it won praise in later years as a courageous act that allowed the nation to move on.

In the new apple of the Left leaning eye, Bolivia, a black mark is given to left wing Bolivian President Evo Morales' professed commitment to progressive views. A Cuban dissident's criticism of Bolivia's close ties to Castro is met with a deportation order by the Bolivian government:

The Bolivian government has announced plans to deport a prominent Cuban dissident who publicly criticized President Evo Morales' close ties to Havana. Dr. Amauris Samartino, a Cuban who holds permanent residence status in Bolivia, will be expelled under a 1996 law forbidding immigrants to ''intervene in any form in internal politics or incite by any means the alteration of the social and political order,'' according to a government statement on Sunday. Samartino was arrested Saturday in the eastern city of Santa Cruz, a center of anti-Morales opposition, and later transferred to the Bolivian capital of La Paz. He will be flown home to Cuba once his case has been processed, the statement said.

Flown back to Cuba? Well, so much for the freedom loving Bolivian government. This is disgraceful.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger broke his leg skiing in Sun Valley, Idaho yesterday.

The 59-year-old former movie star broke the femur bone in his right leg and was taken to a local hospital for X-rays and later discharged, Adam Mendelsohn, the governor's deputy chief of staff for communications, said in a statement.

"When the governor returns to Los Angeles from his scheduled Christmas trip, he will have surgery to repair his femur. No one else was involved in the skiing accident," Mendelsohn's statement said.