And this individual should feel even more lucky considering the fact that it was the one and ONLY job created in his/her congressional district!

Speaking of congressional districts… I wonder if Illinois is the only state with a 00 district? Who represents IL-00 and is it an open seat for 2010?

Inquiring minds want to know.

But, as has been pointed out by a few trusted friends, many of you don’t know me personally. The same can work the other way around… I don’t know many of you either.

As we plan and develop strategy on how to work together within a collaborative effort to save the free-market movement, I hope to be able to change this a bit. My hope is that we can indeed begin developing a better relationship and view what we all do as a team effort.

The last message I sent out about “infighting” within the Tea Party Movement sparked a lot of controversy. Even Keith Olbermann came after me. A handful of folks strongly disgareed with my sentiment, but hundreds of you emailed me to show agreement with the basic gist of what I was trying to say.

In essence, my message is simple. We have a lot of battles to fight and we need to choose them wisely. We can’t afford to spend all of our energy fighting big government at the Federal level if by doing so we’re going to lose all of our freedom in the local realm. I’m not suggesting we drop the ball on one or the other, but we need to be strategic in where we choose to place our time and energy, and we need to do so as a collaborative effort.

The Tea Party effort on April 15th was a powerful event. It was powerful in that, for the first time in many years, the free-market movement came together as a collaborative team. More than 800 organizers worked together to enable more than a million Americans to gather across all fifty states.

While many on both sides of the isle will scoff at us and giggle with insult, anyone with a level head on their shoulders will understand that what we did on April 15th was Historic. And not only Historic… but downright unprecedented.

My belief is that our foes desire us to focus on the wrong efforts moving forward. Those who oppose the free-market system would love nothing more than to see us waste energy in battles that have little relevance and force us to use our energy in ways that accomplish very little between now and election day of 2010.

In my opinion we need to build a much larger, much more comprehensive movement that can simultaneously be involved in multiple political battles… both federal and local. We need to fight back against socialized medicine, while at the same time get true free-market individuals elected all the way down at the school board level.

I’m working behind the scenes right now with a team of folks who get the big picture. We’re laying out a path that we believe will help us create an environment where you can take ownership of your efforts at the local level, but at the same time be a part of a larger, more collaborative fight happening nationwide.

I’m launching my own new site at EricJOdom.com. I plan on writing a couple of these messages per week, and I want to maintain an open blog comment policy where you can join in on the conversation. My desire is to share ideas with you, and use this online platform to enable you to do the same with me.

The team I’ve put together is preparing a major project launch on June 1st, 2009, and we hope each of you can/will get involved. Our goal is to develop an online environment that is unlike anything we’ve seen on our side to date. This new project will foster a true online grassroots movement where local activists can take ownership of local activism using the web as a mass messaging mechanism.

I want to ask you, as a personal favor and as a partner in this fight against socialism, to join my new list and subscribe to my RSS feed.

Together we really can move political mountains. Together we can take our country back.

Talk Straight, unlike most other investigative websites (which are mostly funded by the left), is looking to expose Barack Obama and his ties to far left money and corruption. The site will also work to reveal the shallow lines in Obama’s policy and promises. The founders plan to follow the dollars, expose Obama’s character, reveal his lies, tackle his policies, and debunk some rumors.

Indeed, the opposition is not only well funded… it’s actually owned and paid for by the Obama campaign. Meet Fight the Smears, an Obama campaign website looking to spin the message and fight back against sites and organizations who work to expose Barack Obama for who he really is.

The part I find most interested about Talk Straight vs. Fight the Smears is that one is a total grassroots effort and the other is a campaign controlled effort. In times where media, politicos, strategists, and virtually everyone else claims the left is controlling the online realm, it’s ironic that a group of center-right, online activists have single handedly launched an independent site that has the potential to counter Obama’s “Fight the Smears”.

The #dontgo Movement also recently proved to the world that center-right activists do indeed understand internet activism. The #dontgo Movement, of which I am proudly a part of, used Twitter and other social media tools to help dominate the energy message and organize a complete online movement.

Now Talk Straight goes live, proving that center-right activists can not only compete, but can be active from the bottom up, not like Obama’s top down method.

Three ways People can get plugged in:

1. Donate. We’re fronting the cost for all of this. Any help would be much appreciated.
2. Sign up for our Action Alert Newsletter. We’re not going to send you our blogs – this is a real action/task driven newsletter
3. Click our sponsor’s on our site and maybe buy a sticker or something. Everything is on sale and it helps us keep our sponsors.

Ali Akbar, the site founder and publisher, is proving to be one of the web’s top activists. Ali A. Akbar is a young Online Republican activist working to bring web 2.0 and interactivity to campaigns and right-leaning causes. He’s a previous BlogTalkRadio show host of RightTalkRadio. He also has a number of affiliations with today’s online Conservative movement sites.

Center-right campaigns and organizations need to pay very close attention to this rising star. If Akbar can continue publishing state-of-the-art political efforts such as Talk Straight, I believe he’ll be one of the true leaders in online activism moving forward.

If you haven’t done so yet, do yourself a favor and go check out Talk Straight.

-Eric Odom

While the Washington Examiner story explains the #dontgo Movement from the GOP side of the story, I would like to take you into the much larger, much more privately organized “outside the beltway” part of the movement.

Indeed, far left groups and blogs are frothing at the mouths to proclaim this grassroots movement an “astroturf” campaign with strings being pulled by Republicans and Big Oil Companies.

The mistake the left uses, however, is the ignorant assumption that this “movement” exists solely in the beltway. Note to OpenLeft… the folks protesting in your pictures are people who LIVE and WORK in Washington. Are you that dense that you would completely overlook the fact that people in D.C. represent a very small portion of the #dontgo movement? Or is this just your way of spinning the story to fit your anti-free market agenda?

I won’t hold my breath waiting for an answer…

Even more important with regards to this “astroturf” allegation, is the fact that not one single “D.C. Insider” or operative from within the beltway had anything to do with the beginning of the online part of this movement. Not one!

In fact, this entire thing was started by myself and good friend Allen Fuller. The Twitter #dontgo Twitter hashtag, now the brand of the entire movement, was the idea of Allen. After he instant messaged me the tag, I went straight to Twitter with it and starting using it to follow the House revolt.

A few minutes later Allen informed me that he purchased the domain name, dontgo.us. We decided to install Wordpress, I created some graphics and wrote some petition language, we took the site live, and we began sending the link out to folks we know.

THAT is how the grassroots side of this got going. The GOP in Congress acted, and we moved to promote it. We didn’t get a call on some oil rig shaped secret phone, we didn’t get a check in the mail, we didn’t get a call from the President. No, we just decided to act, and we acted.

On Saturday, good folks like Media Lizzy helped push this to the next level. Media Lizzy, joined by an army of Twitter users, along with the dontgo.us website were able to keep the thing alive and well throughout the weekend.

By Monday morning the online messaging machine was in place and we found ourselves at the reigns. I’m still not sure exactly how it happened, but it did.

On Tuesday morning I decided to launch www.dontgomovement.com to help create a hub for the online excitement that was swelling. It wasn’t more than a few hours after throwing up a splash page that I was contacted by reporters from several major media outlets, including CNN.

The CNN story went live just after the site was opened up, and the story was followed by The Next Right, Red State, Politico, Michelle Malkin, HotAir, Washington Examiner, and scores of bloggers. This wave of attention sent more than 60,000 unique visits to our site within 24 hours.

Yesterday I spent hours and hours trying to answer email all day long, and the support we have received has been nothing short of encouraging in every way possible.

Now we have an e-mail list that is well over 10,000 strong, our e-mail RSS subscriber list is about 1,200 strong, and we have a Twitter army that simply has yet to be matched in size.

I’m proud to be a part of this movement, and I’m proud to say that we have had ZERO influence from anyone outside of our homes.

THAT is something very few on the left can claim.

When asked what party I align myself with, I replied saying that I’m a proud member of the Illinois Libertarian Party. The response was something along the lines of “and you’re not afraid to admit that?”

I found this reaction a bit intriguing. Mainly because… well.. because in this day and time I would be far more ashamed to admit my party if it were the Republicans or Democrats. Both parties are an embarrassment, in my opinion. So, I started searching for something to send this person with regards to the true definition of Libertarians. I came across a a piece by Sam Wells and decided to post it here.

Enjoy!

What a Libertarian Is – and Is Not
by Sam Wells

A libertarian is a person – any person – who consistently advocates individual freedom and consistently opposes the initiation of the use of coercion by anyone upon the person or property of anyone else for any reason. (Coercion is here defined as any action taken by a human being against the will or without the permission of another human being with respect to his or her body or property. This includes murder, rape, kidnaping, assault, trespassing, burglary, robbery, arson and fraud.) Some libertarians (such as the late Robert LeFevre) not only oppose all forms of initiatory coercion, but also the use of retaliatory coercion (revenge or criminal justice). The vast majority of libertarians, however, maintain that physical force used in self-defense or defense of one’s family or property is fully justifiable.

But, all libertarians, by definition, at least oppose the initiatory use of coercion. They support the rational principle of the individual human rights of life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. This means that each individual has the right to keep what he earns for himself and his family, and this includes the right to use, trade, sell, give away, or dispose of his property as he sees fit. A person who violates the rights of others by initiating coercion, violence, or fraud against them forfeits his right to be left alone by government and may be arrested, charged, tried, and imprisoned, deported or executed if convicted (depending on the nature of his or her crimes). The basic, proper function of lawful government is therefore limited to protecting these rights of the peaceful individual from criminals and foreign aggression, and in not violating these rights itself, for if government is allowed to go beyond this legitimate function and itself initiates force in violation of the rights of peaceful citizens, it necessarily contradicts the only rational justification for its own existence by acting criminally itself.

Real libertarians take individual rights seriously – seriously enough to consistently uphold them against the initiation of the use of force by anyone (including government) for any reason. This means that government must be bound by the policy of “laissez faire” – which means that government has no business coercively interfering with the lives of peaceful (non-coercive) citizens in their private affairs and voluntary (market) relationships.

Libertarians may or may not approve of some of the things that some people may do in private or in voluntary relations, but whatever their own code of personal moral conduct is, they do not seek to ban any private or voluntary activities by the use of force, including the force of government action. To do so would be to violate the very principle of individual rights of person and property, and thereby undercut any rational argument in favor of freedom or defense of the free-market system. Those exception makers and outright coercive busy-bodies in our midst (referred to as “interventionists” or “statists” by libertarians) who do want to abandon government by principle and instead put Whim in charge of the use of legal coercion are the people who help set the stage for arbitrary and capricious governmental tyranny – leading in the direction of totalitarian dictatorship.

-Libertarians Are Not Conservatives

Libertarians are not “conservatives”; libertarians are radicals (principled advocates) for individual freedom and responsibility – and the pure free-market private-enterprise economic system which would result from a consistent application of that principle. A “conservative” on the other hand is one who wishes to preserve the status quo. The status quo in America today is the semi-socialist, semi-fascist mixed-economy welfare-state – a system inimical to personal freedom and responsibility. Libertarians do not support such a system, and oppose any and all measures to expand it while favoring the total repeal of interventionist laws and regulatory agencies.

Conservatives of the William F. Buckley or William Bennett variety are generally more concerned with imposing “order” than with allowing freedom. Although they often (and rightly) complain that government has got “too big” and too meddlesome in our lives, on some specific issues they themselves favor using the political power of government to legislate and enforce their view of morality upon the populace in “the national interest” or for the “social good.” William Bennett, for example, opposes the legalization and/or decriminalization of the sale and use of heroin and cocaine, and he continues to support the no-win “War on Drugs” which is causing violence to escalate in our society. Libertarians, on the other hand, realize that “enforced morality” (in such personal matters) is a contradiction in terms; without freedom of choice there can be no moral responsibility and personal growth.

Libertarians also perceive that freedom brings about a more complex, dynamic and harmonious order in society (co-ordinated by the market price mechanism) than any static view of order imposed by central political planning and regulations of our non-coercive behaviors.

Libertarians are for individual freedom – and this includes the freedom of people to do some things that we and other people may disapprove of. A person should be free (from coercive interference) to do what he pleases with his own life and property, as long as he does not violate (through coercive interference) the same right of other peaceful persons to do what they want with their lives and properties. (The second clause is logically implied in the first.) Libertarians do not oppose non-coercive persuasion, educational efforts, private advertising campaigns, organized boycotts, or even social ostracism as means of trying to effect changes in the private behavior of others. (Many people have stopped smoking tobacco in recent years partly as a result of education and persuasion by friends and family members.) What libertarians do oppose is the attempt by anyone (individuals or government officials) to impose their own views of “fairness” or personal morality on others through the initiation of the use of coercion, by either personal violence or political legislation and governmental action. This principled position sets libertarians apart from conservatives as well as other non-libertarians.

-Libertarians Are Not Welfare-State “Liberals”

Libertarians are not to be confused with the so-called “civil libertarians” which typify the membership and leadership of the American Civil Liberties Union. It is true that the ACLU has come to the defense of freedom of speech for certain minorities (e.g., nazis, communists, and anarchists) and this is commendable – but the podium has often been at taxpayers’ expense, which is a “no-no” from the real libertarian perspective. Many “civil libertarians” believe that some people have a “right” to violate the rights of others; they claim there is a “right to a job” or a “right” to welfare payments or a “right” to “free education” or a “right” to free child care – all at the expense of the people (usually the taxpayers) who are forced to pay for these so-called “rights.” Real libertarians are for true freedom, not “freedom” at the forced expense of others. The only obligation that true rights impose on persons is of a negative kind: not to interfere with the rights of other people – i.e., to refrain from the initiation of the use of coercion. This is the core principle of libertarianism and is sometimes called the ‘Non-Aggression Axiom’.

Welfare-state “liberals” and “civil libertarians” speak of “rights” of people as members of specially privileged groups, such as “women’s rights” or “gay rights” or “rights of the handicapped” or even so-called “animal rights”! Real libertarians know that there are only individual rights, not group rights. There is no such thing as “gay rights” or “black rights” or “white rights” or left-handed Martian rights. Government must not be used to dish out special privileges to any group for any reason, since government cannot give anyone anything unless it takes it away from others by force, thereby violating their rights. There can be no such thing as a “right” to violate the rights of others.

No doubt there are some well-intentioned ACLU members who do promote true civil liberties and uphold human rights; however, the ACLU has not come to the defense of the rights of school children whose freedom is being violated daily by compulsory attendance laws and the tyranny of Federally-ordered forced busing. Nor do I know of any case in which the ACLU has defended the constitutional rights of businessmen who are being harassed by OSHA agents and other bureaucrats, or hounded by such arbitrary and subjective laws as the antitrust acts. Indeed, many “civil libertarians” seem callously insensitive to the victims of crime and legal plunder – while they defend known criminals from justice.

Because of their consistent adherence to the principle of individual rights, libertarians are the only true defenders of liberty — civil or otherwise. Real libertarians understand that freedom of speech and other civil liberties depend on the sanctity of private property – not its violation by anti-discrimination laws and other forms of government intervention.

-Libertarians Are Not for Unlimited Majority Rule

Libertarians are not democrats. While majority rule may or may not be as good as any other mechanism for selecting the men and women who administer the offices of government, libertarians deny that anyone or any group has a right to rule over other peaceful (non-coercive) citizens – whether they are in the majority or minority at any given time. If stealing is wrong for an individual to do, it is still wrong when conducted by a large group or by a majority vote. The number of people involved in an act does not change the rightness or wrongness of the act. There is no magic number that turns an individual wrong into a collective right. In a libertarian republic, the basic policy of government (i.e., laissez faire) is set by reference to fundamental principle — the principle of individual rights — and not determined by a show of hands. Libertarians uphold the right of the peaceful individual to self-ownership and private property against any who would violate this right – even a majority.

-Libertarians Are Not Anarchists

Libertarians are not anarchists. While it is true that some individuals favor a political system of competing vigilante committees, and refer to this position as “anarcho-capitalism” (a view formerly held by libertarian economist Murray Rothbard), this is a confusing misnomer based on an apparent failure to clearly distinguish between the nature of market institutions (which do not involve the use of coercion at all, either initiatory or retaliatory) and the nature of coercive entities (criminal or legal). Actually, libertarianism rests on the concepts of individualism, self-ownership, private property, & voluntary (market) exchange. Classical anarchism not only opposed the political state, but also some voluntary organizations of which it disapproved. Most importantly, true anarchists opposed private property – without which no voluntary relationships are possible. Today’s libertarians are in the classical liberal tradition of Algernon Sidney, John Locke, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Edmund Burke, Herbert Spencer, and Frederic Bastiat – not the anarchist tradition of Proudhon, Kropotkin, and Bakunin.

-Libertarians Are Not Pragmatists

Libertarians do not advocate freedom or the free-market economy merely because “it works” (which it does better than any other system); they support it as the only non-coercive and just system – the system in which people are free to deal with one another on a voluntary basis as traders (exchangers of goods and services) instead of as masters and slaves – or as privileged class and exploited host. Others advocate government by whim. Libertarians adhere to certain principles, and without the guidance of principles and standards, all that is left is pragmatic expediency and the tyranny of government by whim. One might say that libertarians are “idealists” in the popular sense of that word; after all, libertarians stand for certain ideals – goals to strive for (e.g., less government intervention, more individual freedom and moral responsibility, free markets, etc.). Because libertarianism is based on man’s nature and the nature of reality, it is the most practicable social system. Libertarians are practical idealists.

We did the interview over skype, where the audio was recorded, and Jed moved it to text format for NetSquared.

You can read the full interview here.

These are the questions I addressed.

-Jed Sundwall: What is the stated mission of the Sam Adams Alliance?
-When did you get started with the Sam Adams Alliance?
-So Sam Adams did not begin as a tech centric initiative.
-What are your largest initiatives?
-Any notable successes?
-So it was fully open?
-Which social media tools have you found to be the most useful?
-What is your rationale for embracing open source software?
-I assume that your philosophy on what makes good software transfers over to your philosophy on what makes good laws as well.
-How do you propose to get people involved with these projects?
-Tell us more about Judgepedia.
-I’m looking forward to something like Fire-chief-pedia. I’m amazed at how many people we’re expected to vote for without having any idea who they are.

Go check it out. It’s a pretty good read.

Much to my own surprise, I now see the new media movement much differently than I did back when I first started dabbling with the concept. Back then I took the “sphere” part literally, and I focused a lot of my time on being a part of this “sphere” everyone was chattering about.

I remember the first time I read Hugh Hewitt’s book “blog”, and I remember finishing the last chapter with great enthusiasm. I studied the work of Lorelle VanFossen, Glenn Reynolds, Ed Morrissey, the guys at Powerline and many others. I monitored traffic trends, worked with PPC programs, watched networks work together in pushing big stories, and participated in just about every online forum possible.

I’ve been fortunate in my way of thinking in that I never sought blogging success for myself; Rather, I wanted to do what I could to help others succeed online with what they were already doing offline. I credit this mentality for what I see as a decent understanding of how it all works, and how we can immerse ourselves in it to further the freedom movement.

What stands out the most?

For starters, I’ve recently began noticing that a lot of the advice and consulting with regards to new media has evolved around traffic. Yes, over the past five years a common message on blogging has been increasing readership. Sure, increasing readership is important, but I think we might have put far too much emphasis on the numbers themselves. And in doing so we failed to express the importance of the readers we already have.

What makes me think this? Well, for starters I’ve seen countless bloggers throw their hands up and admit defeat in their blogging journey. Was it because they didn’t enjoy expressing themselves and sharing their opinions? Not likely. I would be willing to bet that most felt they simply didn’t have a readership.

But did they really lack readers?

I run a blog hosting community over at ConservaBlogs.com. We’re coming up on two years of being live now and we have more than 20 bloggers who post several times per week. You can see examples of these blogs here, here, and here. The site is no Townhall or Newsbusters by any means, but we see an average of 4,500 visits per day.

This traffic is nice, but it didn’t always exist. In fact, just last summer we weren’t even seeing half the traffic we see now. We were lucky if we got 1,500 visits in a single day. At the time we had more than 30 bloggers on the site and traffic was just starting to pick up. However, because the traffic was not there yet, several of our bloggers became discouraged and closed down shop. For two of them, it was the first time they had ever dabbled with blogging and will likely be the last.

One of the bloggers simply vanished. I’ve yet to speak with him since he closed his blog down and I have no idea where he is now. But I did get a chance to exchange e-mails with one of the other bloggers who had given up on his blogging efforts. When asked why he decided to bail on his blog, he said he didn’t feel it was worth the effort. He pointed me to his stats where it was apparent he never had more than 40 visits per day, and he insisted that other bloggers were telling him he should have much higher numbers.

Before I go any further I must admit that I’m probably a part of the problem here. You see, I’m one of those bloggers who has for years preached the importance of growing numbers and large traffic spikes. Now, I’m not asserting this is wrong, but I would suggest that it leaves a wide open gap in the understanding of how important new media can be.

A growing readership is important, and something every blogger should be mindful of. But more importantly, it’s the who, not the how many.

We political junkies too often look at the traffic stats when judging the importance and influence of blogs. Our national pundits and news makers have, in my opinion, completely missed the mark in identifying and crediting good bloggers. Most of the major players of the “conservative movement” will simply write off a blogger because, well, because who is that?

How ridiculous…

Many on the right assume that Townhall, Newsbusters, Redstate, HotAir and other major online news servers are some how the “A-List” bloggers of the center-right movement.

My question is simple… when was the last time Townhall.com worked to oust a school board member in Topeka Kansas, replacing him/her with a true liberty candidate? Name the last time HotAir.com worked with local bloggers in Texas to shoot down a tax increase?

Heck, Chicago just cranked the sales tax to 10.25%, the highest in the nation! Where were the “A-Listers”?

I’m not trying to say these sites are irrelevant, because they aren’t. In fact, they play an extremely vital role in disseminating news punditry. But without payrolls and full time staff would they be able to do what they do? Without big names on the roster would they have as many readers?

Think about it.

In my view, the rock star bloggers are the ones who are filing FOIA’s. The big dogs are the ones beating down tax increases and exposing local corruption. The brave bloggers are those who take on teachers unions with nothing more than a keyboard and a Wordpress login.

And guess what? I’ve seen bloggers with no more than 30 visits per day literally shift state policy. I’ve watched underdog candidates for school board knock entrenched politicians from their seats using nothing more than the internet and a few hundred dollars.

So in the end, I would argue that perhaps we should shift our focus away from being “A-list” or big traffic blogs, and start focusing more on what it is we are opining on. In my opinion, an effective blog is one that is driven by passion, honesty, and a blogger who isn’t afraid to link to a few other bloggers.

Sure, you might not see more than 40 visits a day for the first year, but those 40 visits may be the most important visits you’ll ever have.

Part two of this thought coming soon…

A little over a year ago:
1. Consumer confidence stood at a 5-year high;
2. Regular gasoline averaged under $2.30 a gallon;
3. The unemployment rate was down to 4.4%.
4. Americans were enjoying historically-high home equity.

Since voting in a Democrat Congress in 2006 we have seen:
1. Consumer confidence plummet;
2. The cost of regular gasoline soar to over $3.25 a gallon;
3. Unemployment rise to 4.8% (a 9% increase);
4. American home equity hit the lowest point in six decades;

H/T for the e-mail: Texas Rainmaker