Online Activists Say "Thanks, But No Thanks, Henry!"

"Online activists rise against the bailout" from Politico reports that beyond the usual flood of e-mails, phone calls to Congress, the public is reaching beyond the mainstream media's patented stories about the bailout - e-mailing columns that protest the bailout and forming online activities.

Watchdog groups such as the National Taxpayers Union and the Project on Government Oversight were angrily spreading the word while our colleagues at the Sunlight Foundation posted the full text of Paulson’s proposal (all eight pages of it) and Sen. Chris Dodd’s counterproposal, with each paragraph demarcated for easy commenting over on PublicMarkup.org. By midweek, the site had received hundreds of links and comments.

Perhaps the surest indicator of online sentiment against the Paulson plan was the rapid spread of satirical e-mails and websites poking fun at it. An e-mail purporting to be from Paulson read like one of those Nigerian e-mail scams we all get in our inboxes: “Dear American,” it started, “I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude. I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars U.S. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you. ... This transactin is 100 percent safe.” A site called Buy My Sh-tpile, Henry, was the first insta-site to pop up Monday, soliciting users to post pictures of their own worthless junk to be bought by the Treasury. By midday it was getting more than 10,000 hits an hour.

"An Inconvenient Truth""Constituents Make Their Bailout Views Known" from the New York Times