We lost a lot of bold leaders on Tuesday, but Senator Russ Feingold is in a class all his own.

He is one of the great heroes of the progressive movement -- standing up and fighting for the people of his state and Americans across the country time and again -- often when no one else had the courage to lead.

When other Democrats in Washington capitulated to President Bush and supported the war in Iraq, Senator Feingold stood up and voted against war. Two years later, he became the first Senator to call a withdrawal of troops from Iraq.

When the Bush administration pushed the Patriot Act on Congress, Senator Feingold was the only person is the Senate to recognize the bill as an attack on American civil liberties and vote "No."

And when unlimited and unregulated "soft money" threatened to overwhelm our political system, Senator Feingold authored and passed into law the most powerful campaign finance reform in history.

Senator Feingold has always been there for us. Please, join me in writing Senator Feingold a short thank you message for all the work he's done for us over the years.

Grover Norquist, leader of the conservative Americans for Tax Reform, suggested a high-stakes approach to tackling the issue of federal spending Thursday, saying that the GOP must be willing to go as far as to shut down the government in their pursuit of debt and deficit reduction.

"There's now a Fox television network. There's now the Internet, in a way there wasn't back then. So ... when Bill Clinton vetoed the budget and closed the government, saying the Republicans had closed the government, ... [that] is not something you could sell again," Norquist told Politico.

Furthermore, Norquist claimed, the new Republican leadership would be better at messaging the action.

"It was able to be sold the first time because everybody thought Gingrich was running the entire country because of the way the coverage [of him] had gone and because Gingrich acted as if he was running the country. Boehner's not going to do that," Norquist said. Politico's full story has more.

1) When President Clinton battled with the GOP over the budget, it was widely believed that Republicans were to blame for a full shutdown of the government. In the end, it damaged the GOP reputation and seemingly gave President Clinton a boost of political capitol that had lingering effects on everything else he tried to do. But the Official Republican Communications Department, you know, Fox News, was not available to blame President Clinton 24-7 for the shutdown.

2) There was a common wisdom that Gingrich was in charge. Both the sensationalism of the coverage surrounding the '94 elections and Republican chest-thumping over the mandate given to them from the voters led to that belief. The absence of Fox News was not the sole contributor to the backlash over the GOP's government shutdown maneuvering.