I really appreciate Nancy Pelosi's newsletter. You can sign up on her House Minority Leader website. The latest issue has information about the Federal Propaganda Prohibition Act, The Iraq election, the latest Republican attack on Social Security (women live longer so they should get less), the real budget crisis and supporting choice.

On the hopeless/hapless side, I see that the Republicans have completely walked around Brian Baird's commonsense proposal of what to do if members of Congress are eliminated in some disaster -- they're just going to let whoever is left call the shots. Brian has been trying for several years to get a mechanism in place in the case of such a tragedy.

The U.S. House has passed a controversial doomsday provision that would allow a handful of lawmakers to run Congress if a terrorist attack or major disaster killed or incapacitated large numbers of congressmen.
``I think (the new rule) is terrible in a whole host of ways - first, I think it's unconstitutional,'' said Norm Ornstein, a counselor to the independent Continuity of Government Commission, a bipartisan panel created to study the issue. ``It's a very foolish thing to do, I believe, and the way in which it was done was more foolish.''