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Today will be a big day in the political history of America. Congress comes back to work, and this time the Democrats are running things. The Dems, before the November elections, pledged that in the first 100 hours of the new session they will take on:

• raising the national minimum wage to $7.25 an hour.

• putting new rules in place to "break the link between lobbyists and legislation."

• enacting all the recommendations made by the commission that investigated the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

• cutting the interest rate on student loans in half.

• allowing the government to negotiate directly with the pharmaceutical companies for lower drug prices for Medicare patients.

• broadening the types of stem-cell research allowed with federal funds -- "I hope with a veto-proof majority," incoming Speaker Nancy Pelosi said. (You can click here to send a note to Pelosi as soon as she is sworn in.)

More coverage of the "first 100 hours pledge" here.

President Bush yesterday issued his hopes for the new Congress.

You can track day-to-day votes in Congress here.

Libraries as Day Care

The New York Times touched on a topic we have talked about before on Al's Morning Meeting.

The Times said one library in New Jersey was shutting down between 2:45 and 5 p.m. on weekdays because kids are taking over the place. The libraries have not only become hangouts, they are a sort of a day care of last choice.

I suspect that with so many kids out of school until next week, you would find many libraries full of kids parked there by working parents. Libraries also become dumping grounds on "snow days," when schools close.

The Times' story includes this passage:

Increasingly, librarians are asking: What part of "Shh!" don't you understand?

About a year ago, the Wickliffe, Ohio, library banned children under 14 during after-school hours unless they were accompanied by adults. An Illinois library adopted a "three strikes, you're out" rule, suspending library privileges for repeat offenders. And many libraries are adding security guards specifically for the after-school hours.

In Euclid, Ohio, the library pumps classical music into its lobby, bathrooms and front entry to calm patrons, including those from the nearby high school.

A backlash against such measures has also begun: A middle school in Jefferson Parish, La., that requires a daily permission slip for students to use the local public library after school was threatened with a lawsuit last month by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Librarians and other experts say the growing conflicts are the result of an increase in the number of latchkey children, a decrease in civility among young people and a dearth of "third places" -- neither home nor school -- where kids can be kids.

"We don't consider the world as safe a place as it used to be, and we don't encourage children to run around, hang around and be free," said Judy Nelson, president of the Young Adult Library Services Association, part of the American Library Association. "So you have parents telling their kids that the library is a good place to go."

Rowland Bennett, who served as the director of the Maplewood [N.J.] Memorial Library for 30 years and is now president of the local school board, said libraries had become "the child care center by necessity."

Linda W. Braun, a librarian and professor who has written four books about teenagers' use of libraries, said the students want only to be treated like everybody else.

"If there are little kids making noise, it's cute, and they can run around, it's O.K.," Ms. Braun said of standard library operating procedure. "Or if seniors with hearing difficulties are talking loudly, that's accepted. But a teen who might talk loudly for a minute or two gets in trouble."

She added: "The parents don't want them, the library doesn't want them, so they act out."

That leaves librarians doing a job they did not sign up for: baby-sitting for kids old enough to baby-sit.

The Real Cost of Traffic Accidents

I was especially interested in this piece from The Washington Post, which takes an everyday story and puts it in some perspective:

Forty-four thousand people, give or take several hundred, will have died in auto accidents this year. To put that number in perspective, consider that:

• At the 2006 casualty rate of 800 soldiers per year, the United States would have to be in Iraq for more than 50 years to equal just one year of automobile deaths back home.

• In any five-year period, the total number of traffic deaths in the United States equals or exceeds the number of people who died in the horrific South Asian tsunami in December 2004. U.S. traffic deaths amount to the equivalent of two tsunamis every 10 years. [...]

• If you laid out side by side 8-by-10 photos of all those killed in crashes this year, the pictures would stretch more than five miles.

• If you made a yearbook containing the photos of those killed this year, putting 12 photos on each page, it would have 3,500 pages. If you wanted to limit your traffic-death yearbook to a manageable 400 pages, you'd either have to squeeze more than 100 photos onto each page or issue an eight-volume set.

[...] Automobile deaths are the leading cause of death for children, for teenagers and in fact for all people from age 3 to 33. Yet this annual tragedy is not a cause celebre.

Investigators at Work

As Al's Morning Meeting readers know, I have a real soft place in my heart for investigative reporters. Today, Poynter Online has interviews with some of the best in the country, including Stuart Watson, Roberta Baskin, Sally Kestin and Investigative Reporters and Editors' Brant Houston, among others.