Hi, this is Hans from Conscious Lake, New Mexico, where I am a park ranger with the Army Corps of Engineers.

I am currently standing among over 500 dinosaur tracks at the beautiful little gem of a state park called Clayton Lake in Northeastern New Mexico.

This podcast was recorded at...

Dinosaurs content. It is 12.53 Eastern on Friday, December 3rd.

Things will likely have changed by the time you hear this, but these dinosaur tracks will just add a little bit more time onto their already over 100 million year old lifespan. Enjoy the show!

It makes six years of the NPR Politics podcast feel like not that much.

Unless you count how many episodes we've done.

Yeah. Hey there, it's yet again the NPR Politics podcast. I'm Scott Detero, I cover the White House.

I'm Tamara Geath, I also cover the White House. And I'm Kelsey Snally, cover Congress.

Like many of us out there, Congress kicked off the week with an extensive to-do list. Same here, I would say I got most of mine done.

Speak for yourself. Yeah. I have. I got none of mine done.

An envelope of junk mail here with it all written and sharpie. And you know what, most was an exaggeration. I got some of it done.

And I guess that is the same for Congress, but they did cross off one big thing by passing a short term spending bill.

And Kelsey, look, given the toxicity and dysfunction of Congress, clearing this very low bar and doing it relatively far before the deadline and that, you know, at least 24 hours before the deadline, that does feel kind of notable.

Hey, a whole day.

I mean, yeah.

I mean, they were out there taking victory laps and sending out press releases about how they kept the government open. So I guess they would agree with that.

I mean, yes, they were able to get this done. You know, it's one of those situations where I spent most of the week walking around talking to members about how they thought they would get this done.

And like with many things lately with Congress, none of them actually had a good answer for how they were going to solve the problem.

They were all mad at each other about being in the situation where they were getting close to a shutdown.

They were all mostly agreeing that they didn't want to have a shutdown, mostly, mostly, and yet they were still in this situation where they, you know, they are doing a short term spending bill because they haven't done the very basic job of writing a full year spending bill.

This isn't even the way they're supposed to fund the government, but this is where we are and they were able to pass something that will last until February, February 18 to be specific. But that's not a very long time.

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