In preparation for Earth Day we took a look at the numbers behind the energy industry's influence in Washington. We compared them with contributions made by environmental groups and the results are telling:

We had the pleasure of joining Nicole Sandler, a leading voice in progressive talk radio and a longtime supporter of our cause, for a thorough discussion of money in politics and its corrosive impact on public policy.

We're thrilled to announce that Fair Elections Now legislation will be introduced in Congress tomorrow to enact citizen funding of elections for the House and the Senate. And very soon similar legislation will be introduced to update and improve the public funding legislation already on the books for the Presidency.

It's time to act. Click here and call on your Senators and Representative to support this bill.

Congress must be pretty busy these days, what with the economy collapsing, two wars, and all the other crises we see in the news each day. And yet they still have time for fundraising parties! Watch another fine piece of journalism from the American News Project's, below, as they attempt to attend one entire day's worth of fundraising events on Capitol Hill. You'll see the frosty reception they get from members of Congress as they try to raise huge amounts of money without attracting public attention:

Wednesday's Hardball with Chris Matthews covered the outrage over AIG employees receiving huge bonuses and tried to figure out how such things happen. As part of the coverage, Matthews interviews Senator Chris Dodd, chair of the Senate Banking Committee. At the 5:50 minute mark in the video below, you'll see Matthews point out that both Senator Dodd and then-Senator Obama received $104,000 in campaign contributions from AIG, among others. Matthews asks the right question: Didn't AIG receive some level of access in return for this investment in congressional leaders?

Dodd answers: "If I could write the law myself, we’d have public financing of campaigns instead of having to go out and raise the money. But, candidly, in the absence of that, in order to run for office, Democrat and Republicans, you raise money."

The more one learns about public funding, the more obvious a solution it becomes. But today we announce our support for another common sense reform: Congress should give themselves — and us — time to actually read bills before they pass them into law.

Now, this isn't rocket science. These bills are long. The recent stimulus bill approved by Congress allocated $789 billion over the courses of 1,100 pages. As Nancy Watzman of the Sunlight Foundation wrote, "This behemoth was available for just about 13 hours before Congress took it up-and most of those ticked by overnight, when most people were sleeping."

Here's what House Minority Leader John Boehner thought about the rushed consideration of the bill:

You can join the coalition of citizens and groups asking for a 72 hour rule at Read the Bill. Let's keep fighting for common sense reforms.

The more economic hearings Congress holds with Wall Street CEOs, the more we wish Congress didn't rely on the very same people for campaign funds. But they do. As our Wall Street Money in Politics (download | view online) fact sheet illustrates, Wall Street shrewdly targets its political donations to get a good return on their investments.

There's been an exciting development in the public funding movement. Thousands of small donors have pledged to go "on strike" and withhold donations to any federal candidate until they make congressional elections citizen-funded, not special-interest funded.

The campaign is spearheaded by Change Congress, a group founded by Larry Lessig. Change Congress launched last year to tackle corruption in our government, and quickly came to the conclusion that this could only be accomplished by enacting public funding of congressional elections:

Special interests pump millions of dollars into elections, giving them more influence over our political system than the rest of us. Until we fix our broken campaign finance laws, these special interests will block real change on issue after issue.

Especially as our nation faces an unprecedented economic crisis, now is the worst time for our politicians to spend their time begging for campaign contributions from the very special interests that got us into this mess.

We need a clean system of campaign financing—one where politicians pay attention to regular people, the very small-dollar donors who made such an impact in 2008.

We think the decision to donate to the candidate of your choice is a very personal one, but we'd love to hear what you think. Take our poll after the jump to let us know how you feel.

It's true that lobbyists are vilified, sometimes unfairly, for their role as messengers in a broader culture of corruption. After all, even groups like the Red Cross rely on registered lobbyists to communicate with decision-makers in Congress. Today's live chat discussed this fact in greater detail. But our chins dropped when we read that companies receiving billions in taxpayer-funded bailout funds are spending millions to lobby the government for yet more money.

Petition Congress to put an end to this outrage and ask for a real solution. Thousands have signed already — will you join us?

Robert G. Kaiser is following an excellent piece in Sunday's Washington Post with a live chat at 1pm EST over at the Post's website.