By Nancy Scola and Allison Fine

We know. It sounds ridiculous at first. But it might not be as crazy as you think. For far too long, the job of election protection has fallen largely to lawyers schooled in election law. But there's an opportunity before us right now and through Election Day for thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of citizens to identify and rectify voting problems in real time. Enter Twitter.

Can a loosely-organized Facebook group best the biggest name progressive blogs when it comes to fundraising? That's the question that longtime online organizer Jon Pincus is asking; Ever since Obama selected Joe Biden as his running mate, we're heard a lot about the role that the Catholic vote will play in states like Pennsylvania and Michigan. But when it comes to who Catholics might cast a ballot for, Church officials and advocates aren't letting the campaigns dictate to them -- or be the only ones using social media to persuade voters; The Obama campaign has kept its powder dry on the so-called Keating Five scandal -- until now; and a good deal more.

Medill Reports's Jason M. Breslow has a roundup of how Twitter is being used for politics these days. We're seeing folks use it to debate, to share ideas, to organize (though, as Jason mentions, we're not seeing either Barack Obama and John McCain use it to good effect). Witnessing the evolution of how people are pulling and shaping Twitter to fit their own political purposes is downright fascinating; What's most remarkable about the new Obama iPhone app is that it's actually the fruit of a relationship between the Obama campaign and a team of ten or so volunteers; The Christian Science Monitor's Ben Arnoldy asks the million-dollar question: can people-powered outreach really win presidential elections?; and quite a bit more.

Now's a good time to ask, what the heck happened with the defeat of the bailout bill on Capitol Hill on Monday?; Debate? What debate? Oh, there's a debate tonight. The Internet has bubbled up some ways to play along with Palin vs. Biden; Wow. The Obama campaign has released a gorgeous new iPhone app; Congress has okayed a bill that requires the government to regularly and accurately assess who in the U.S. has broadband access and who doesn't. If we may humbly advance an opinion: excellent!; and a good deal more. Honest.

The LA Times has the back story on Anne Kilkenny. Anne Kil-who? Oh, you know, the Alaskan who wrote an email critiquing her fellow Wasillan Sarah Palin that landed in your inbox at least one thousand times just after the Palin pick was announced; Media Matters senior fellow Eric Boehlert is slamming right-leaning bloggers for their quixotic campaign to tie an anti-Palin YouTube clip to the Obama campaign, despite, well, the total lack of evidence; The Obama campaign has taken heat for supposedly giving short shrift to progressive bloggers. Now, one of their own has tried to reach out; and much more.

"Far as I can tell, most if not all the people in my industry who get stuff done are for barack," says Craigslist's Craig Newmark, in introducing a Tech for Obama video; Hungry for Obama, which is said to have raised nearly $10,000 for the campaign thus far, joins the plethora of other grassroots efforts that aim to tap into supporter talents and expertise to support the Obama campaign; "It's the difference between open and closed source." That's the RNC's "eCampaign" director Cyrus Krohn on the Obama and McCain approaches to using technology to power their operations, as quoted by CIO Insight's Ed Cone in a four-part article he's working on concerning the Obama campaign's ground game; and a good deal more.

It was just last night that the 110-page Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 was finally hammered out, but members of Congress will be asked to render a vote on the bill as early as today -- making it unlikely that representatives and staffers without advanced Evelyn Wood speed-reading training will gone through the thing closely before issuing a yeah or nay; Have a grandma or grandpa living in the critical battleground state of Florida? Happen to be Jewish? Well then some activists want you to make The Great Schlep to the Sunshine State to hard sell your elders on Obama; Some of the more compelling online creativity we're seeing this cycle has nothing to do with two blokes named John and Barack; and more.

With word coming that the show will go on, we turn attention to tonight's first '08 presidential debate at Ole Miss. Change Congress's Larry Lessig and scores of other open democracy advocates from across the political spectrum (including PdF and techPres) have issued a call for the debates to be free. The ask? It's two-fold; : So, what on the political landscape has Twitterers tweet-tweet-tweeting away? Well, as of this morning, it's Sarah Palin's interview with Katie Couric and, relatedly, Miss Teen USA. Twitter has launched an Election '08 site; and a great deal more.

It's probably not every day that Vermont socialist Senator Bernie Sanders and Kentucky's uber-conservative Senator Jim Bunning get nearly the same emails for standing up against the same bill. But emails are pouring into every corner of Capitol Hill objecting to the Bush Administration's $700 billion no-oversight bailout measure; A quick peek at InTrade's Electoral Vote Predictor might be a fun way to take the temperature of the betting class, but FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver reports that the market seems funny of late; "Joe Biden's gaffes have become so excessive that we've now dedicated an entire site," says the Republican National Committee, which had previously been keeping track of the Dem VP candidates supposedly goofs with a simple clock; and much more.

Micah Sifry checks back in on the wave of protest that has greeted Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's $700 billion bailout plan; You don't have to follow polls that closely to know of the fears that cell phones threaten to kick the leg out of modern surveying. A new Pew Research Center study finds that while among all voters, modeling off of land lines to capture the leanings of the mobile-only crowd is a satisfactory approximate. But, there's a "but;" Does MyBarackObama.com break down at the point where volunteers might otherwise turn into self-organizing surrogates? MyDD's Shai Sachs has thinks it just might; and much, much more.