Progressives need to pick up the phone NOW to counter the onslaught of conservative calls to Congress, and push the Senate to fight for a bold economic recovery bill that creates jobs and counters the recession.

Here are 3 simple steps to guide your calls…

Step 1) Dial 1-866-544-7573. You will be given brief instructions (which you can skip by pressing “1”) then forwarded to the Congressional switchboard operator. Tell the operator which state you’re from, and ask to be connected to one of your senators.

Step 2) Tell Your Senators: Pass a bold economic recovery bill that puts America back to work. Here are some talking points to help guide your call.

* I urge you to pass a big and bold economic recovery bill that puts priority on getting Americans back to work and ending the recession.

* Please resist attempts to weaken the bill with more corporate tax breaks and cuts in public investment.

* My community would benefit greatly from investments in infrastructure, green jobs, education, health care, unemployment assistance and state government aid.


(For more background information and talking points, please click here.)

Step 3) Tell us how your calls went. Report back to us so that we know where we've got Senate support and where pressure is still needed.

U.S. Senator Jim DeMint tells The Brody File that a newly discovered controversial provision in President Obama's stimulus plan is, “an attack on people of faith" … The Brody File contacted the Senator and he gave us the following response:

"Democrats are looking for every opportunity to purge faith and prayer from the public square. This will empower the ACLU with ambiguous laws that create liability for schools, universities, and student organizations. This is an attack on people of faith and I don't think Americans will stand for it." - Senator Jim DeMint (R-South Carolina)

DeMint's spokesman Wesley Denton says, "This is an ACLU stimulus, because any school that gets funds to upgrade a student center or building where Bible studies or religious meetings may be held will be slapped with a lawsuit. This bill declares a war on prayer at college campuses in this country. Students have [a] constitutional right to use public facilities regardless of their religious views, and President Obama needs to step in to ask Sen. Reid and Speaker Pelosi to stop this attack on students of faith.”

Mr. Obama’s errors on the helter-skelter stimulus package were also self-induced. He should put down those Lincoln books and order “Dave” from Netflix.

When Kevin Kline becomes an accidental president, he summons his personal accountant, Murray Blum, to the White House to cut millions in silly programs out of the federal budget so he can give money to the homeless.

“Who does these books?” Blum says with disgust, red-penciling an ad campaign to boost consumers’ confidence in cars they’d already bought. “If I ran my office this way, I’d be out of business.”

Mr. Obama should have taken a red pencil to the $819 billion stimulus bill and slashed all the provisions that looked like caricatures of Democratic drunken-sailor spending.

As Senator Kit Bond, a Republican, put it, there were so many good targets that he felt “like a mosquito in a nudist colony.” He was especially worried about the provision requiring the steel and iron for infrastructure construction to be American-made, and by the time the chastened president talked to Chris Wallace on Fox Tuesday, he agreed that “we can’t send a protectionist message.”

Mr. Obama protested to Brian Williams that the programs denounced as “wasteful” by Republicans “amount to less than 1 percent of the entire package.” All the more reason to cut them and create a lean, clean bill tailored to creating jobs.