It’s 3pm and as promised, here are the first day vote tallies to determine which members of Congress become FDL Fire Dogs, and receive community fundraising and GOTV support in 2010. The contest will continue until next Tuesday, and each day at 3pm we’ll be announcing the running tally. We encourage people to campaign for [...]

Last night on the Rachel Maddow Show, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) came out in support of Sen. Tom Udall’s (D-NM) effort to change the Senate’s rules to fix the dysfunctional institution and restore majority rule: Rachel Maddow: Is it your sense that your caucus, the Democrats in the Senate are will to look at a [...]

Democrats in Congress have not learned all the wrong lessons from the Massachusetts special election–just most of the wrong lessons. They have at least realized that the special deals and selective carve outs, like Ben Nelson’s extra Medicaid money for Nebraska, put in the health care bill were very unpopular and angered voters. Yet, instead [...]

Rahm should publicly apologize to MoveOn and promise to respect their independence in the future. And if he wants to put the “R” word incident behind him, here’s an idea: he’d be the perfect spokesperson to do a PSA for R-word awareness. You know, speaking straight into the camera. With feeling. And March 3 is R-word Awareness Day.

I’ll personally pledge a hundred bucks toward putting it on the air.

The Hill is reporting that Republicans are looking to exploit a loophole to obstruct reconciliation measures. Republicans say they have found a loophole in the budget reconciliation process that could allow them to offer an indefinite number of amendments. Though it has never been done, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) says he’s prepared to test the [...]

The Democratic Party seems to be settling around the reconciliation sidecar strategy as their only path forward. It would require the Senate to pass a set of fixes to the original Senate health care bill and then the House to pass the original bill and the reconciliation measure of “fixes” at the same time. Nancy [...]

It’s going to be a tough election year in 2010 so helping good incumbents keep their seats is going to be as important as supporting challengers was in 2006 and 2008.

You get to decide — who should we help? Which member of Congress gets to be an FDL Fire Dog?

Two thousand people who hailed from their districts nominated 180 members of Congress. Voting is now open to the entire community.

Vote Now!

It looks like the DNC spent nearly half-a-million dollars to praise Ben Nelson for ruining health care reform. According to Joe Sudbay at Americablog: Last month, Ben Nelson did a TV ad defending his vote on health care. He talks straight to the camera and disses those “who wanted a government takeover.” That sounds like [...]

Recently, there has been some talking about breaking up health care reform into multiple bills. Others have argued that this is impossible because most of the components of the health care are too interconnected. While it is true that some reforms can’t easily be separated, the reality is that the current health care bill is [...]

Just as the tea parties were getting going in April of 2009, the White House met with bankers in the wake of the AIG scandal who told them to put the kibosh on the harsh anti-bank rhetoric. And so calls went out from the White House to the unions to put a pin in it.

They did.

Which left the field wide open for the tea parties (who were being heavily juiced by Fox News) to reap all of the economic discontent. “Our side” abandoned the field.