-The news this week has been pretty grim, but we all know when the going gets tough, the tough gets going. Here are a few ways you can get going in the tough fight for financial reform:

- Welcome to the inaugural "In Case You Missed It", our weekly look around for interesting happenings in the fight for financial reform. This week we mostly focus on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission's first hearings:

Want to feel like you were you in the hearing room? Catch up with liveblogs from Campaign for America's Future and SEIU.

Mary Bottari at Bankster.com reminds us accountability, and an active Department of Justice, was a key component to our coming to grips with the Keating 5 and Savings & Loan scandals of the 1980s. Too big to fail doesn't mean too big for jail.

New Deal 2.0 has a great collection of posts from the FCIC hearings. They seem to think the Bankers gave flimsy excuses for their sociopathic nature (could there possibly be a good excuse?).

Public Campaign and Common Cause joined forces to give us some raw numbers about the four Wall Street CEOs that testified before the FCIC: their employees & PACS gave more than $43 million to federal candidates since 2000, and the four companies spent an astounding $109 million to lobby Congress during the same period.

Do you have a question for the fat cats that testified before the panel? Huffington Post is collecting questions from their readers and promises to deliver them to the Commission.

Lastly, this one isn't related to the FCIC, but it's nice to take a break and recognize the US Chamber of Commerce had a pretty bad 2009, and 2010 isn't really looking much better for their PR department.

Since I announced Friday the formation of Accountable America to educate the public about right-wing and business-oriented groups and their leaders and donors, some conservatives have reacted with outrage and asserted First Amendment issues.

These harsh reactions, though, have been isolated.  Americans across the country, still angered by the false and vicious Swift Boat attacks in 2004 and concerned about their new counterparts in 2008, have embraced the announcement, and since our launch we have raised tens of thousands of dollars over the Internet without spending a dime on advertising or email lists.

Nonetheless I want to expound on the rationale for engaging in this effort.  It is rooted in deeply-held views about democracy and elections.

First, it is my right.  Free speech like mine is especially protected when the information is of “legitimate concern to the public,” which I would argue is inherent in a political or public policy debate – as the Supreme Court declared 44 years ago in New York Times, Inc. v. Sullivan, there is “a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust and wide-open.”

Conservative groups and their donors have the same rights, and I honor and respect them for exercising them.  And, part of public debate is having one’s speech and political activity met with other speech and political activity, including criticism and freely posed challenges to the credibility and interests of the messengers and their financiers.  Nobody, including Accountable America and me, is owed some sort of immunity from criticism, and certainly the principal funders of conservative groups are not exempt simply because they are rich, influential or prefer privacy despite their ventures into the public sphere.

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