I did something today that I’ve never even given more than a passing thught to doing in the past. I exercised my right to call out, or rather call on, my elected representative to Congress. The nice staffer at Congressman Blackburn’s office was very polite when i explained that I was a registered voter in the Tennessee 7th, a federal employee, and that I’d very much like to go to work on Monday. She assured me that my message would make it to the congressman straight away. Yeah, I’m not sure I bought that part, but someone less jaded would have probably appreciated it as a helpful throwaway statement.
I have no idea what made me think of doing that. It just struck me that some effort needs to be made to keep the scale from being completely filled with the voices of the radicals who want to believe that Jesus hates compromise. We need serious structural changes to how the government does business. What we don’t need is 800,000 more people unemployed on Monday morning because the elected leaders of the United States of America can’t find their honorable asses with both hands and a flashlight.
JEFFREYTHARP.COM 
I am a DoD employee in the Huntsville/Redstone Arsenal area in NE Alabama and I feel your pain. By the way, you should call out the Tea Baggers by name. They are the ones most responsible for all this. I would call up my congressmen, but I know it won’t do me any good. I’ve complained to them in the past (Jeffrey Sessions and Richard Shelby) and they even wrote me back. But all they did was try to validate their actions to me.
I figure I’ll be getting a form letter telling me how important my opinion is sometime in the next few days. It’ll be a good long time before an incumbent gets my vote.
I used to write those for state representatives. Numbers count. If one or two people called, we brushed it off as “not important.” If a dozen or so called, we thought it merited the representative’s attention. You have to actually scare them into action.
I’d be willing to bet they’ve had more than a few calls this week.