First off, I'd like to thank all my readers for their continued patience. If all goes well, today will be the final "re-run" column in a long time. Because this weekend is going to be Upgrade Weekend here at ChrisWeigant.com. So allow me to present an Upgrade Weekend FAQ for you here.

What will this mean to you? The site may be down for extended periods this weekend. We may be unavailable from roughly Saturday afternoon until whenever we get everything working. That's kind of a vague estimate, I realize. Target is to get everything done by Sunday evening, at the absolute latest. But since this is our first upgrade ever, it is impossible to estimate the downtime better than that, sorry. If everything blows up, then at some point we will restore the whole site from backups, and regroup and try again later, so worst-case scenario (hopefully) is that Monday you'll see exactly the same site you saw Friday.

What will this mean for the site? The biggest changes won't even be visible. What we are doing is upgrading the core software which runs the site (WordPress) to a newer version that is more stable and has much better security. This involved upgrading all of the custom files which actually display the site as well, but if everything works perfectly then the site will look almost exactly the same as it did before. There are a few exceptions. The first is that the Login page and the "User Settings" page will both look different to you, as a site user. These pages come straight from WordPress itself, and they have a new look and feel to them, but are pretty easy to learn how to use. Your password will not change, if all goes well, so logging in should still work the same. Feel free to change it yourself, if you'd like (for good site security, you should change your password every so often, and make it as complicated as you can easily remember).

Isn't there anything new? Why, yes. Yes, indeedy! I'm glad you asked. The biggest new feature to the site will be (finally) giving the ObamaPollWatch.com and FridayTalkingPoints.com pages their own look-and-feel. These pages will have new headers, new sidebars, and new features, most of which were not even possible with the old WordPress software. So, when you check the site Monday, don't forget to check out the ObamaPollWatch.com and FridayTalkingPoints.com areas.

Will there be any future changes? Yes, but I can't swear when they will happen. What we are doing (especially with the OPW.com and TFP.com pages) is building a framework that we can add features to later. Right now, getting the framework up and running and bug-free is the main objective. So some of the features on these new pages will be rather basic, at first. But later, we hope to expand and improve these over time.

What should I do if I notice something that isn't working right? Send me an email. Drop me a note for any reason -- something's broken, something doesn't look or work right, or any other problems you notice. Also, let me know if there's something about the site that bugs you or you'd like to see improved in the future, as we're looking at ways to change things for the better.

Thanks again for all the patience and understanding. It's taken three or four weeks to get to the point where we're ready to begin the upgrade, but we're finally at the point of starting the process this weekend. Actually, if truth be told, we were pretty ready last weekend, but since the OPW column ran Monday, we thought it'd be a better idea to bump it back a week, since that is one of the highest-traffic columns of the month. Speaking of traffic, I'd like to end by thanking everyone for their support of the site, as even though we ran a lot of re-runs last month, it was our biggest traffic month ever, with over 100,000 page views. This wouldn't have been possible without you, so I thank you all for your continued support.

Because this Program Note was so long, we will run today's "from the archives" column as a separate post.

-- Chris Weigant

President Barack Obama has the potential of having a pretty good second year in office. Conventional inside-the-Beltway wisdom is that "nothing much gets done in a congressional election year," but this ignores the fact that life itself does not halt for electioneering, but rather keeps right on happening. And there are quite a few positive things either explicitly scheduled for 2010, or at least very likely to happen. This doesn't automatically mean the president is guaranteed to have a great year, but it certainly sets the scene for Obama managing to have a fairly good year.

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The national Tea Party movement is planning something to mark the first anniversary of Barack Obama's inauguration. Or, to be more accurate, they're planning "nothing" -- they're planning on staying home. With a vengeance.

The Contra Costa Times recently reported on this phenomenon, and the article is remarkable when you read between its lines. Now, perhaps this is just because the Times is a regional paper (the East Bay of San Francisco Bay) and not a national one, or perhaps the article was longer and was edited down for space or something. Because the most striking thing, to me, about the article is the degree of disagreement in the Tea Party movement.

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December was a busy month for Barack Obama, with many conflicting events pulling his poll numbers in different directions for differing reasons. And although December marked the first time Obama's monthly average sank below the fifty-percent threshold, this dip mostly happened before the month actually began, and Obama stayed remarkably stable after the dip was absorbed.

Now, I do realize that we're all getting sick of looking back at 2009, and although I really would much prefer to be writing about looking forward to 2010, we simply must provide a final glance rearwards before moving on to prognosticating the future. Because it is time once again for Obama Poll Watch -- our monthly look back at Obama's approval ratings for the previous month!

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Welcome back to my annual outright theft of The McLaughlin Group's awards categories for the past year in politics. What's that? We're sorry, but out lawyers insist we instead use the phrase "my annual legally-allowable constitutionally-protected parody" instead. So sorry. For those of you who missed it, Part 1 of this column ran last week, on Christmas.

Which brings up a point. One of the categories today is "Worst Idea," and I have to say on a very personal level that "writing these columns on Christmas and New Year's Day" was my worst idea of the year. Thankfully, this calendar coincidence won't happen again for a number of years, because it is too much work for what is supposed to be a holiday!

Hung-over grumblings aside, though, let's get to it.

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Ku ka punohu ula i ka moana;
Hele ke ehu-kai, uhi i ka aina;
Olapa ka uila, noho i Kahiki;
Uina, nakolo,
Uwá ka pihe,
Lau a kánaka ka hula.
E Laka, e!

-- Traditional Hawaiian "Oli" or "Tiring Song"

In years past, I've opened these year-end articles with a quote from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's epic "Song of Hiawatha," in honor of Lake Superior State University (which, by all rights, should really be named Gitchee Gumee State University), the intrepid folks who tirelessly publish each year's official "Banished Words List."

But this year, in the spirit of our Hawaiian president, I decided to go with a different native-American-influenced theme. The above is from the hula ceremony, and is introduced (on the web page where I found it) with the following:

The girls of the olapa, their work in the tiring-room completed, lift their voices in a spirited song, and with a lively motion pass out into the hall to bloom before the waiting assembly in the halau in all the glory of their natural charms and adornments:

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While that may seem a rather redundant headline the day before a world-wide party is scheduled, it was actually less provocative than my original concept of selling the theme that America needs more than two viable political parties, which was: "Party! Party! Party! Party!" But then I noticed I had already used one exclamation point in a headline this week; so I realized if I ran my original choice, I would be jeopardizing my standing among the Professional Journalists And Wannabes Who Play One On The Web Guild (the beloved PJAWWPOOTWG, pronounced like... um... well, it's best not to try to pronounce the acronym until you've got at least three stiff drinks under your belt). Where was I? Oh, right, party headlines.

While my generation was the first to use the word "party" as a verb (known technically as "verbalizing" it... no, wait, that can't be right... "verbizing" it perhaps?), we were not the first to heartily endorse the concept. When I was growing up, friends of my parents had a sign in their den, over the built-in bar: "I support the two-party system. One party a week is not enough!" Showing that, while the language may indeed change, the party instinct is as old as mankind. Or at least as old as my childhood neighbors (who seemed pretty old to me at the time).

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Program Note: First off, my apologies for the brevity of today's offering. But, in exchange, we are promising you instead a column this Thursday, on New Year's Eve itself. And don't forget to tune in Friday, for Part 2 of our Annual "McLaughlin Awards," as well, on New Year's Day.

Thursday's column, with luck, will be another year-end tradition -- the annual "banished words" list from northern Michigan. Last year, I wrote about the list and had such fun doing so that I'm going to end 2009 by doing the same. But this means that today is pretty much the last chance you have to enter phrases you'd like banned from everyday usage by your peers. And 2009 was a rich year for grating phrases, from "death panels" to "teabaggers." In any case, check out the official Lake Superior State University "Banished Words" site, and enter your nominations today!

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Democrats should realize, by this point, that they're going to have to reposition themselves a bit if they stand any chance in next year's midterm congressional elections. Fortunately for them, there are two issues out there just begging for exploitation. The first is the Republican Party, who has reportedly decided they are going to run next year on taking something away from voters which Democrats have given them -- the healthcare reform bill. And the second is a little-noted bill introduced a few weeks ago by Senators Maria Cantwell (D-WA), John McCain (R-AZ), and Russ Feingold (D-WI), which would bring back a chunk of the banking regulations passed in the Great Depression known as "Glass-Steagall." Together, these two issues present an opportunity for Democrats to reap some of the populist anger brewing out there in the electorate.

Not that it's going to be easy to do so. The Republicans, after all, are reacting to a movement (the Tea Partiers) which is routinely labelled "populist" itself. But there is populism and then there is populism. After all, both Barack Obama and Sarah Palin -- for very differing reasons -- were called "populist" by the media at one time or another during last year's campaign. Populism is not so much a political stance (as "conservatism" is, for instance) as it is a political tactic. Meaning it can be used equally well by either side of our current American political divide.

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Welcome once again to our year-end wrapup and awards ceremony. Honesty dictates that I immediately genuflect to The McLaughlin Group, from whom I have stolen all these award categories. We will begin this week with Part 1 of these annual awards, and then next Friday on New Year's Day, we will present Part 2, with reduced volume levels (for those who are nursing hangovers... ahem).

Before we begin, though, we have to insert a free plug, for another year-end awards column with a slightly different theme -- awards for idiocy in the mainstream media (a subject near and dear to my own heart, I confess). Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting has their "2009 P.U.-Litzer Awards" up, and I heartily encourage everyone to read it as well, because it is excellent and well worth your time.

And, for comparison, it simply wouldn't be Friday around here if I didn't throw in a few plugs for my own columns, so if you'd like to peruse my McLaughlin Awards from years past, here are the previous three years' worth:

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