Whoda thunk it?

I never would have thought that within just a couple hours of the new RogersWatch blog (Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood) going up, that it would receive so much attention. But it did.

I'm no dummy.

That tells me that I'm not the only one sick of Mike Rogers using my district as a pulpit for his extremely conservative agenda. That tells me there's hope for our district in 2008.

I'm much more politically active than most folks I know. Sometimes when I have a strong feeling on something, I try to gauge the rest of the world's temperature to mine, to see if I'm really just out in left field, or if I'm just the only one willing to stick my neck out there and speak up. On this issue, I know it's the latter.

I would like to clarify something though. Just because I'm a staunch liberal/Democrat/progressive, doesn't mean I'm against all Republicans. There's a lot of tenets of the republican platform that make sense. (Notice I said republican, not Republican - big difference these days.) There's some Republicans who do good work in office on behalf of their constituents. Mike Rogers is not one of those.

Identified time and time again as one of the most conservatives in D.C., it's hard to understand how Rogers claims to be working for us, his people. His campaign finance reports don't lie. It's the special interest lobbying groups that he works for.

Check out his voting record, how many times has a vote of his aligned right up with the Bush policy? More times than not. I'm not saying Mr. Rogers hasn't done some good work in D.C. I'm saying that most of his work has not been for the people, but rather for the special interests. That's where the problem lays.

That's why there's so many of us who are going to work feverishly between now and November 2008 to make sure the people of the 8th District Neighborhood see how out of touch Mike Rogers really is.

So during the next two years, keep tabs on LLP and The Neighborhood. The great thing about The Neighborhood is that it's not just one person spouting ideas. That blog is a community, made up by different folks from all across the District. Men and women, from the newly employed to the retired and everywhere in between. We're military veterans, homemakers, blue-collar workers and policy wonks, and everything in between. We want the same things you want, to have our government work for us the way it should - for the people and by the people. We don't all agree on the same issues, but we do agree that no matter where we stand, Mike Rogers stands against us.