Pelosi

The sun is still shining! The grass is still green! Puppies are still adorable! Whew.

Despite the gloom and doom predictions, Congress’ failure to pass Paulson’s original bailout plan yesterday did not lead to the immediate implosion of our economy. In fact, the stock market was up this morning. So I think we can now safely set aside the threats of those who tried to frighten us into accepting an awful bailout plan. It seems that there is a brief time for us to address this problem fairly, effectively and responsibly.

So what should we do?

Let’s seize this opportunity to propose a truly progressive solution. We should tell Congress, and especially the House leadership, that we need a fresh, thoughtful alternative centered on the following key principles:

1. Do more to make Wall Street, not working families, bear the brunt of the financial burden.

2. Adopt stronger rules to protect us from banks that are “too big to fail” and the reckless, over-the-top borrowing that left our financial system teetering on the edge.

3. Do more to help struggling families stay in their homes -- including allowing bankruptcy judges to let homeowners negotiate new terms for their mortgages.

4. Commit to the public investments that we know will pay off for America – including clean energy, health care and education.

If you support these goals, please go to Progressive Future's website and send an email to Nancy Pelosi telling her that you expect a fair, progressive solution to this crisis.

We should take action to make our economy stronger; but let’s not leave behind our values as we do it.

Alright, so I know I have ranted on this before, but the video I just saw on Politicker has me riled up again. Here is the video:

Notice a few things here. First, the poster the guy is holding in the video spells YouTube wrong. Bad sign. Second, McCotter has only had the account for 3 days, after the whole Twittergate scandel broke.

Now this isn't just some tech geek having a gotcha moment with a screen shot (it is that, but not just that). The point I made in my earlier post is that bringing the franking rules up-to-date was something that both Republicans and Democrats could have both supported and worked together to do in a timely and cooperative fashion. Unfortunately, the Republicans don't want to let that happen.

I'm a true believer in the concept of Congress 2.0 and using the new tools the internet has provided us to enable our elected officials to communicate more effectively. As a matter of fact, most of the Democrats and young voters I have spoken to agree. The idea that the Republicans have turned this into a partisan battle sickens me, especially since there isn't really any disagreement to be fighting about. They have created a straw man argument in order to call the Democrats Stalinists and use all those Russian sounding Communist words they remember using back in the Cold War.

Progressive organizations have been leading the way in the use of the internet and social networking tools in the political sphere. The Republican Party is not the great defender of the freedom of the internet (just look at their stances on net neutrality).

So how about we stop with the rhetoric and name-calling, put our Russian-to-English dictionaries away, and actually work to get these rules updated since it's something almost all of us agree on. And please try to spell the name of the website right in a video that you are posting to that website.

So that's my rant. If you were expecting a useful internet tip or something I actually wrote one on my personal blog. Ironically, it is about the self-populating Twitter links used by the Let Our Congress Tweet site.

So, what are your thoughts on this whole thing? Let us know in the comments.