I suspect this won't work without Republican contributors joining the effort, but at least they're trying:

A group of 27 major donors is vowing to withhold campaign cash from lawmakers who stand in the way of legislation that would allow for public funding of congressional campaigns. Over their careers, the donors have contributed millions to Democratic candidates -- and, on limited occasions, Republicans or independents -- but they say they've had it. And they don't mind if it means a lack of access.

Steve Kirsch kicked in roughly $10 million to try to elect Al Gore in 2000. "It is a trade off, because there are a lot of good things you can talk to them about, but most of the time they don't do anything about it anyway. Given the choice, I'd rather have campaign finance reform than access," said Kirsch, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and founder of Infoseek, among other companies.

The millions that the donors have given is just the beginning, and doesn't include the millions more they've funneled by organizing fundraisers or otherwise corralling contributions.

The 27 donors plan to lobby other rich folks to sign on, with a plan of passing the Fair Elections Now Act, which has 149 cosponsors, this year. The campaign's being run by Change Congress, co-founded by Lawrence Lessig and Joe Trippi, along with Common Cause and the Public Campaign Action Fund.

ChangeCongress, now that the effort is public, will be encouraging donors to pledge. Read the letter here.

It was kicked off by donors Alan Hassenfeld, the former chairman of Hasbro, and Arnold Hiatt, the former head of the Stride Rite Corporation. The pair wrote to friends and colleagues, urging them to stop giving.

"We're writing with a very unusual request -- that you pledge not to give any campaign contributions to any candidate for Congress until they have committed to support public funding for congressional elections," they wrote. "Once we have a critical mass of large contributors who have signed this pledge, the partner organizations will then launch an Internet-based campaign to get others to join as well. A pilot of this program was initiated last year. Very quickly, tens of thousands committed to the pledge. ChangeCongress.org's technology will enable us to estimate the value of their pledges, and whom it hits directly. The site will also make it easy for pledgers to lobby Senators and Representatives to join the bill."

The pair said they were sad to have to take the step. "If, 15 months into the Obama Administration, we were looking at a long list of accomplishments, with a long list of probable victories coming -- as many of us dreamed last November -- then we would not be asking you to take this step. But the picture is not nearly so promising because of the power of private money in the political system. We have all been part of that system. It is time for us to take the lead to change it," they wrote.

[...] Kirsch said that the access his money buys -- and the access he could lose -- is overrated. With so many donors with so many opinions, the best they can do is nod, offer to look into it, and put a donor in touch with a staff member. "In the meeting, they say they agree completely," said Kirsch. "'Let me do more research and thinking. Thanks for bringing to my attention.' There tends not to be a lot of follow through."

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Of course, we're all too familiar with Ann Coulter's schtick: Say something outrageous that will get you lots of attention, then compound it by saying something even more outrageous. It's all for show.

Yesterday on Fox News' weekly Geraldo Rivera show, Coulter was true to form, calling Vice President Joe Biden a "drunken Irishman":

Coulter: It almost is kind of effective to send out this drunken Irishman to respond to Dick Cheney. It's like sending out the White House dog. It's saying, 'We so don't respect you we're sending in Joe Biden.'

Funny how Ann Coulter always manages to sound like a Know Nothing, isn't it? She is, after all, the philosophical and cultural descendant of Bill the Butcher.

Coulter also told Rivera that she thinks Sarah Palin's not running for the presidency:

Coulter: I think I can save you a lot of trouble over the next three years. I don't even think Sarah Palin's going to run, and I think it's not particularly likely that she'll be our nominee. So she's huge, she's popular, she has enormous influence. The same can be said for Oprah, the same can be said for Rush Limbaugh. And I don't know why we have to keep asking in the media, 'Is she running for president?'

Of course, neither Oprah or Limbaugh are professional politicians with a history of office-seeking. Unlike, say, Sarah Palin, who now has no job outside of being a political celebrity -- while Oprah and Limbaugh both have lucrative day jobs. Of course she's running -- she just knows she can't announce too early.

We'll be saving this clip for the day Palin finally makes it official. Because Coulter, like so many right-wingers, has a terrific track record of being dead wrong.

But what really rankled Coulter was Joe Trippi's somewhat apt comparison of Palin to Jesse Jackson. This is more than Coulter can bear, who compulsively returns, like a dog to its vomit, to her earlier ethnic smear of Biden:

Coulter: How about comparing Joe Biden with Sarah Palin? She's twenty million times more qualified than he is.

Rivera: How do you say that? A two-year governor against a long Senate career. Anyway --

Coulter: How long are we gonna pretend Biden is not just some drunken Irishman embarrassing Obama?

Yeh, that's pretty damned funny. While Joe Biden served on the Senate Foreign Relations committee for 30 years, Sarah Palin was the mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, where her most important policy issues involved where to place sewage-treatment plants and whether or not to pave certain roads in town, and then served two brief years as the governor of one of the smallest state electorates in the nation. Twenty million more times, indeed.