My fondness for liberals, smart people, and Wisconsin politicians (not to mention good food) aided in my decision to read the Environmental Working Group's recent email on their Organics Petition.

Even though Development Associate David (no, I didn't realize that was his title until I searched their site) once spent a good amount of a phone call laughing at my Wisconsin accent when I was trying to explain tags, I enjoy working with the EWG.

But even more notably, I enjoy well-crafted campaigns. This action nicely displays a few ways to make them suck less (albeit in the service of an uphill struggle):

Step 1: Pictures are worth a thousand words.

This video was short, energizing, and provided a terrific visual of the support already behind the bill. It's one thing to be told about an issue, but to see an example of what an organization is already doing is quite motivational.

At least the healing, back-to-fundraising process can begin in the bosom of YearlyKos, whose namesake shared these observations on FISA capitulation day:

We are a full-fledged partner in the progressive coalition ... with our allies in the labor movement, our friends in the issue groups, and our party leadership.

...

[E]arly hostility – based on substantive differences – is now giving way to new respect and trust.

We in the club, yo! What's systematic, institutional betrayal if not a call for more and better Democrats?

Thousands of pages of DoJ documents related to the fired attorneys thing posted on the House Judiciary Committee website have been scattered to the readership of Talking Points Memo for perusal and analysis.

Posted at 12:51 a.m. -- the middle of the night -- the request has generated as of this writing (nine hours hence) 35,900 words* of responses/comments, en route to its imminent canonization to the constellation of "network power rewrites political rules" anecdotes. (Stand by, Sunlight Foundation.) (Update -- we beat their story.)

The Sunlight Foundation is sponsoring a contest for data mashups that display information about Congress for "Sunlight Week" Mar. 11-17.

Click here for the details. Not geeky? Try this out ... they've got their own contest which might score you an iPod into the bargain.

Atrios uncovers a decade-old column by that scold of Washington conventionality dating to the adolescence of the Internet as a tool of mass communication. Cokie's thrust is summed up by a respondent's sarcastic letter to the editor, "The Internet is nothing but a cyber-sewer, full of smut, cults, and now an even greater danger: easy access to government officials."

The horror!

They also get in touch with each other on public policy issues. According to Love, it's like an electronic town meeting. That analogy makes our blood run cold.

Lame duck nuthin': Macaca checks out for the holidays. (Link)

As the coalition of vendors (including DIA) providing email-your-rep services to advocacy organizations continues to churn away at the Congressional email deliverability logjam, the changing times may be in the process of evolving the question -- at least on the national level -- towards obsolescence.

The Center for Citizen Media got a post-election pitch to buy an updated legislative directory, and sensibly wonders ... why does this cost money?

"[M]aybe someone could create a wiki to keep track of comings and goings"? Congresspedia has it covered. And a tool like Google's Google Earth/electoral district mashup basically covers the part of the equation that determines a legislator from an address.

With the last remnants of the 109th Congress reconvening this week for their parting shots, it's a good time to surf over to Public Citizen's Lame Duck Hunt, which sounds seductively like The Most Dangerous Game but turns out to be a project to let the sunshine in on the shenanigans of lawmakers past the grasp of voter accountability.

With Capitol Hill a ghost town as members scramble to retain their peerages, the lull in legislative activity offers welcome pause to step back from the e-mail deliverability fracas of recent weeks.

A great many of the unmet expectations and bad feelings that have become bundled up in online write-your-rep actions ultimately trace to the unspoken assumptions various parties have about the communicative framework in which the action takes place.

That point was underscored in the live chat with Washington Post reporter Jeffrey Birnbaum the day his column ran Capitol Advantage's deliverability study.
In response to a question about how to differentiate grassroots campaigns from astroturf, Birnbaum opined, "I'm afraid if an interest group incites a flood of e-mails, that's Astroturf lobbying by definition."

This post is a bit of a catch-up; a couple of weeks before we launched this blog, the Congressional Management Foundation released a report about how Congress is handling the flood of citizen e-mail.

As we've known for a while, they're struggling.

I did my time in the Capitol Hill intern factory in the mid 90's. The communication was pretty much all of the traditional variety, but here's how we handled it:

• Mail and faxes went to a back room, where a recluse spent the entire day shuffling it into various subject cubbies ("Defense," "Environment," etc.), which then went to the staffers covering that area. These in turn parsed them however they liked to get a feel for the issue, and had their interns generate the tedious blow-off replies you get when you write to Congress.
• Phone calls relating to upcoming votes generated a tally. We rotated duties and just put a mark on a sheet: Fer it or agin it. We all indulged the temptation to cook those tallies now and again. At the end of the day, we'd pass on the sheets of tally marks.
  

Every office is a little different, but this is not the sort of institutional agility that was going to make a rapid adaptation to a medium allowing thousands of instant communications. Nowadays, your best case scenario for an Internet campaign is that it's handled like those phone calls and tallied, or at least approximated.