Today is freshman Democratic Congressman Alan Grayson's 51st birthday.
Alan is a truly progressive Democrat and a dramatic improvement over his predecessor - Republican Ric Keller who was a Bush and GOP party line voter best known for introducing the "cheeseburger protection act" to protect fast food chains from law suits and very little else.
Here in Florida last November we managed to win back three House seats from the Republicans, two of them right here in Central Florida in the metro Orlando area. Alan Grayson's seat was one of those two. Suzanne Kosmas' seat was the other.
Congressman Kosmas, in turn replaced arch conservative Republican Tom Feeney who is best known for his golfing trip to Scotland courtesy of disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
Overall we've gone from being 1-3 in Congressional representation in the metro Orlando area to being 3-1 with Brown, Grayson, and Kosmas for the Democrats and Mica being the sole remaining Republican and the most moderate of the three Republicans who held the seats in the last Congress.
These seats were won back here in Orlando through hard and smart work on the ground with massive door to door canvassing by a combination of paid staffers and grassroots volunteers and by having candidates that weren't afraid to take difficult stands and stand up proudly and publicly for progressive values.
Before being elected to Congress, as a Harvard trained attorney Alan Grayson has been a successful fighter against defense contractor waste, fraud, and abuse in Iraq winning back millions of dollars for the taxpayer.
Before that he was the CEO of a Fortune 500 telecom company (IDT) and thus he knows how Wall Street works. He is now intent on getting to the bottom of the corruption and abuse that has gone on there and is intent on seeing that the taxpayers know where hundreds of billions, even trillions of their tax payer money is going to bail out these Wall Street players who gambled with your retirement money and lost.
Here he is recently taking the Federal Reserve Vice Chair to task for not being willing to tell us how it distributed 1.2 TRILLION dollars to various banks and not being willing to tell us to whom it was distributed.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mj0JAfq4eskI want to urge each and every one of my DU friends here to take a moment to visit Congressman Grayson's Congressional website and wish him a happy birthday today and thank him for being part of the change we all worked so hard to achieve!
http://grayson.house.gov/Thanks,
Doug De Clue
Orlando, FL