Monday afternoon, I happened to turn the TV on just as the House of Representatives was voting on the $700 billion Bush-Paulson-Pelosi bailout bill. Watching the split-screen coverage of traders on the floor of the U.S. Stock Exchange as they stared, transfixed, waiting to see if the public, through its representatives in Washington, was going to save their skins, was exhilarating. And then, when the bill went down to defeat, and the market went back to plunging, I was thrilled.

Here's why: I'm tired of living in a de facto plutocracy. I also believe we are on the verge of a revolution in participation in government, powered by new technology that is making it possible for many more of us to connect together and have a meaningful voice in the process. The bailout bill, and the process by which it is being jammed through Congress, is an affront to those democratic values. We can do better. And the vote Monday showed, in nascent form, how the same forces that are eating away at the underpinnings of "broadcast politics," the capital-intensive way of electing a President whose demise we've been chronicling here at techPresident, are also starting to unsettle "business as usual" on Capitol Hill.

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.

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.