WASHINGTON – Progress for America today, in an exclusive strategy briefing for leading bloggers, unveiled a new feature on www.UpOrDownVote.com called the “RAGE GAUGE” – a tool to measure the extreme rhetoric of liberal special interest groups and senators who represent the far Left wing of the Democrat party.

“Liberals like Senator Schumer and Ralph Neas have resorted to using words in this debate like ‘war,’ ‘catastrophe,’ and ‘emergency,’” said Brian McCabe, president of Progress for America. “Just as Howard Dean’s aggressive scream backfired, Americans will reject the far-Left’s rage, hyperventilation, and hyperbole designed only to scare people and thwart the president’s nominee to the Supreme Court.”

Added McCabe: “The Rage Gauge will help expose the Left’s irresponsible and unproductive tar and feather strategy.”

As Progress for America predicted in Tar & Feather, Inc.: A Liberal 10-Step Plan for Judicial Character Assassination, the Left’s special interest machine is in full-blown hysteria-mode:

-Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chairman and Judiciary Committee Member Chuck Schumer proudly declared on his cell phone aboard a DC-NYC Amtrak train: “We are contemplating how we are going to go to war over this.” (Drudge Report, 7/6/05)

-On Saturday, the National Organization for Women, declared “a state of emergency.” (Dallas Morning News: One Justice, Many Cases, Lots of Power, 7/03/05)

-Says Ralph Neas, president of People for the American Way: “Replacing such a conservative, mainstream justice with a right-wing ideologue would be constitutional catastrophe.” (TIME: The Supreme Battle, 7/4/05)

Progress for America, Inc. (“PFA”) has pledged an initial $18 million to combat dishonest attacks on any U.S. Supreme Court nominee. For more information on the Rage Gauge, please visit www.upordownvote.com.