We're always keeping an eye open for what people in politics are doing to experiment within the boundaries of the email form. Bit of an art, really. Here's something new, from Florida Representative Alan Grayson, a Democrat: an email from his 12-year old daughter that highlights the etymology of her name. The full email is after the jump...

Florida's colorful Democratic Representative Alan Grayson isn't finding to laugh at in a spoof of his CongressmanWithGuts.com website. Grayson has sent a complaint to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder asking that the creator of the MyCongressmanIsNuts.com website and PAC be fined and sent to the slammer for a five year sentence. Grayson's objection is that the organization's originator doesn't live in the 8th congressional district that he represents, and is thus fundraising disingenuously by referring to Grayson as "my congressman."

Grayson also draws Holder's attention to the fact that while the PAC's FEC's filings pledge to that it "supports or opposes more than one Federal candidate," there's little ambiguity that Grayson is the one in the crosshairs here. If the name of the PAC alone wasn't proof of that, there's the fact that MyCongressmanIsNuts.com is nearly an exact replica of Grayson's own PAC website, right down to the prominent YouTube placement and electric blue grunge font.

You can read Grayson's four-page complaint yourself right here.

(Updated to include DFA's actual remarks. They somehow got lost in editing. Sorry for the bother.)

Yesterday we covered how the progressive blogosphere was afire with activity around Florida Democrat Alan Grayson's "money bomb," which has thus far raised, according to a campaign tally, more than $505,000 through the efforts of several progressive blogs (Open Left, Daily Kos, Crooks & Liars, Digby) and the hitting of email lists of high-profile progressive groups, including MoveOn, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, and Democracy for America. Discussing the tactic with some smart folks, a question came up. Why launch an all-out online fundraising offensive on behalf of a candidate whose own election isn't for another year (and who happens to be personally wealthy) one day before voters go to the polls in hotly contested elections in New Jersey and Virginia and major gay-related ballot measure votes in Maine and Washington State? Is it an unnecessary distraction, or can the netroots handle doing two or three or four things at once?

It's a worthwhile, if provocative, question that becomes even more interesting when you consider it in the context of an online left made up of blogs big and small as well as network-based organizations whose mailing lists constitute their major -- if not only -- point of political leverage. Here's what Democracy for America's political director Charles Chamberlain had to say...

It's perhaps cliched, but no less true, that Democratic Representative Alan Grayson of Florida is a Rorschach test of contemporary American politics. If you ask people working in politics about the fiery, hard-charging, bulldog-ish Grayson, the responses tend to reflect a view of politics how it should be, in the eyes of the respondent, rather than a close read of the reality of things circa 2009. On the one hand, the wing of the blogosphere that grew out of Iraq War-resistance, a.k.a. the netroots, tend to love Grayson's spitfire approach that has him boiling down the Republican health care plan to a recommendation that the sick "die quickly."

But on the other, what you might call the political establishment, or "villagers" in netroots-speak, bristles at Grayson. And it's not just because Grayson wears purple suits and American flag ties (although, let's be honest -- that probably doesn't help). The sentiment seems to be that Grayson, ideology aside, crosses the invisible yet sacred line of acceptable behavior expected from an elected official. Election prognosticator Stuart Rothenberg, after mocking Grayson as a pompous, Deuteronomy-spouting show-off, says that Grayson is on track towards being out of a job come next year's election. The New York Times has called him "the liberals' problem child." Even New York Democrat Rep. Anthony Weiner, no quiet mouse himself, called Grayson "one fry short of a Happy Meal" before backing off.

All of which adds up to make today's "Money Bomb" from Grayson a compelling demonstration of resistance to the conventional wisdom from Grayson's allies. Grayson is today blogging on Daily Kos and Crooks & Liars, and getting backup from the likes of Digby, once-congressional candidate Darcy Burner, and the folks on Open Left (whose co-founder, Matt Stoller, now works with Grayson in the House), as well as the progressive groups MoveOn and Democracy for America, all to the ends of a simultaneous fundraising blitz. It's a team effort, and is shaping up to be a considerable show of force. Grayson's team set as a goal $4o0,000, and the total reflected on Grayson's new CongressmanWithGuts.com hub is, at the moment, $402,000. Some $300,000 of that has come through ActBlue, via the collection of individual fundraising pages set up to fill Grayson's coffers (though it's not entirely clear that all that money was raised today, and wasn't in the bank pre-money bomb).

Of course, you don't have to even be that insightful to predict that Grayson's rally of support amongst the online left can and will be flipped around by his critics to be a liability, as a demonstration that he's more popular with the netroots than he is with the voters in his Orlando area district. There probably won't be any silencing Grayson's critics until and unless those voters re-up his job assignment come next election day.

Orlando-area Democrat Rep. Alan Grayson is
continuing in his pattern of framing the debate over health insurance reform as a matter of life and death -- and driving Republicans absolutely crazy while he does it. Grayson has launched Names of the Dead, a barebones website that asks the public to send in the names of some of the 44,000 Americans that Grayson, apparently citing an upcoming report in the American Journal of Public Health, reports die from lack of health insurance each year.

(Grayson's new site features what might win the award for least-disguised email list building tool in all of recorded history. A poll on the site is curious, "Do you believe Congress should pass health care reform now?" Answer yes or answer no, your email address is still required.)

Over on Townhall, Matt Lewis is arguing that Grayson is breaking House ethics rules with the site. Now, House rules do treat harshly overtly political websites hosted on .gov domains. (Trust me on this one). Taxpayer dollars, the thinking goes, shouldn't go to trumpeting baldly political work. Besides the camaraderie of the House -- and public trust in the institution -- would be diminished with every MyOpponentsAreBloodyFools.gov domains. The free-flowing and often free Internet blurs the line between "official" and "unofficial." But on the technical points, Grayson's Names of the Dead is a dot-com site. And it is tagged with the note "Paid for by Congressman Alan Grayson." Grayson, a personally wealthy man, could surely cover the tab on this simple site, and political websites like leadership PACs and campaign sites don't carry the restrictions that official congressional websites do.

That said, those charged with protecting propriety in the House might not look kindly upon the fact that Grayson did announce the new site in a speech on the House floor. Lucky for Grayson that his fellow Democrats are running the show, and making the rules.

The New Republic's Marin Cogan profiles "the blogosphere's man in Congress," otherwise known as first-term Representative Alan Grayson, Democrat of Central Florida. A taste:

Shortly after taking office, Grayson--recognizable on the Hill for his 6'4" frame, which fills his pinstripe suits and flamboyantly mismatched shirts and ties--began making opposition to the bankers and regulators who precipitated last year's financial collapse the signature issue of his first term. He poached Matt Stoller, co-founder of the OpenLeft site and one of the netroots' most prominent liberal bloggers, to advise him on financial services. "Usually I have to push candidates to become more aggressive," Stoller wrote on his blog after meeting Grayson, "in Grayson's case, he pushed me."

Cogan's brief character sketch of Grayson is intriguing. But one hungers for more. It's not just that Grayson is a darling of the online left, though he is. His candidacy was boosted on blogs including Open Left and Howie Klein's Down With Tyranny, and his persistant but monotonally gentle questioning of Federal Reserve Inspector General Elizabeth Coleman has attracted a startling 1.8 million views on YouTube since mid-May. But you know where at least some number of those views came from? Through an unlikely fan, FoxNews commentator Glenn Beck. Beck embedded the video on GlennBeck.com and praised Grayson for his "fine work being done to keep up on things at the Fed."

Grayson is a different kind of politician, a flamethrower with footnotes, willing to challenge assumptions and be thought of as excessive by his colleagues and the press if it gets the job (at least, what he sees as his job) done. It's probably safe to say that bloggers, left and right, tend to like that sort of thing. Whether that will make for a successful political career is a fascinating, and open, question.