Thursday, December 31, 2009A Modest Proposal Posted by: Carol Platt Liebau at 3:57 PM In the spirit of Jonathan Swift, could I just close out 2009 with one modest proposal: How 'bout asking former Vice President Dick Cheney to take over Al Qaeda and all the terrorist groups in the world intending to do the US harm? That way, maybe The White House would actually be committed to a swift, aggressive response.
Get well soon, Rush, and Happy 2010!!!
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Quote of the year
posted at 9:30 pm on December 31, 2009 by Allahpundit
Share on Facebook | printer-friendlyI’m going to make you vote this one out, but feel free to suggest your own in the comments. Happy new year to Hot Air readers everywhere!
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- How a Community Organizer Became President
- Community Organizing Continues
VOL. 42, NO. 7 P.O. BOX 618, ALTON, ILLINOIS 62002 FEBRUARY 2009
In the chapter on Communication, Alinsky teaches his organizers how to direct the thinking of his people while letting them think they are making their own decisions. The organizer should develop skills in the manipulative technique of asking "loaded questions designed to elicit particular responses and to steer the organization's decision-making process in the direction which the organizer prefers."
Google Ads are provided by Google and are not selected or endorsed by Eagle Forum The chapter called In the Beginning describes how to train the community organizer in how to make himself acceptable to the Have-Nots in the local community. "From the moment the organizer enters a community he lives, dreams, eats, breathes, sleeps only one thing and that is to build the mass power base of what he calls the army. Until he has developed that mass power base, he confronts no major issues."
The organizer's "biggest job is to give the people the feeling that they can do something." The organizer's job is "to build confidence and hope in the idea of organization and thus in the people themselves: to win limited victories, each of which will build confidence." The organizer will learn that "Change comes from power, and power comes from organization."
"The organizer's first job is to create the issues or problems," and "organizations must be based on many issues." The organizer "must first rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; fan the latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expression. He must search out controversy and issues, rather than avoid them, for unless there is controversy people are not concerned enough to act. . . . An organizer must stir up dissatisfaction and discontent." He can provoke class resentment by painting Wall Street as villains.
The organizer "begins his 'trouble making' by stirring up these angers, frustrations, and resentments, and highlighting specific issues or grievances that heighten controversy." The organizer must remember that "Organizations need action as an individual needs oxygen. The cessation of action brings death to the organization."
At the same time, "The job of the organizer is to maneuver and bait the establishment so that it will publicly attack him as a 'dangerous enemy.'" Alinsky reminds his organizers that "To attempt to operate on a good-will rather than on a power basis would be to attempt something that the world has not yet experienced."
Alinsky's book is full of examples of issues and organizational victories from the decade of the 1960s (such as the Vietnam War, civil rights litigation, urban renewal, and campus riots) which are not meaningful to younger Americans today. However they emphasize his strategy that organizers must use current issues and "must be aware of the tremendous importance of understanding the part played by rationalization on a mass basis."
In the chapter called Tactics, Alinsky reminds his trainees that power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have: "The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself." He lists some of his recommended tactics:
"Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."
"Keep the pressure on, with different tactics and actions." "The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition." "Multiple issues mean constant action and life" for the cause. (Obama never harps on one issue as Hillary did with health care. His platform is packed with grievances from "economic justice" to "reproductive justice" to "environmental justice.")
"Ridicule is man's most potent weapon." Alinsky's advice was to "laugh at the enemy" to provoke "irrational anger." (Obama used the ridicule tactic on John McCain at a rally in Las Vegas. Attacking McCain's chairmanship of the Senate Commerce Committee, Obama sarcastically said, "Well, all I can say to Senator McCain is 'Nice job. Nice job.'")
"A mass impression can be lasting and intimidating." (Obama moved his acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention to a football stadium and bused in 55,000 supporters.)
"Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules." "You can club them to death with their 'book' of rules and regulations." That means, taunt them every time they appear to violate their own principles, which Alinsky believes everybody does frequently.
A leader may struggle toward a decision and weigh the merits and demerits of a situation, but he must convince the people that "their cause is 100 percent on the side of the angels, and that the opposition are 100 percent on the side of the devil," even though that is a lie because there is "really only a 10 percent difference." Alinsky justifies this lie to achieve the transfer of power.
Alinsky describes some of his successful mass demonstrations:
- Buying 100 tickets to a Rochester symphony concert for 100 blacks, feeding them lots of baked beans beforehand so that they had to get up and go to the restroom during the first musical selection. This created "a combination not only of noise but also of odor, what you might call natural stink bombs." He reminded his readers that there is nothing illegal about needing to rush to the restroom.
- Tying up all the restrooms at O'Hare Airport by having his demonstrators lock themselves in the toilet booths equipped with a book to read, and then staying there all day.
- Dropping wads of chewing gum all over the walks on a college campus.
- Paralyzing a bank by having 100 people show up at once with $5 or $10 to open a savings account (which they would then come back to close the following day). There is nothing illegal about this, but it created chaos for the bank. Alinsky called this "a middle-class guerrilla attack."
- Engaging in proxy fights with corporations.
Alinsky reveals his total contempt for the Haves and their devotion to self interest. He says, "I feel confident that I could persuade a millionaire on a Friday to subsidize a revolution for Saturday out of which he would make a huge profit on Sunday even though he was certain to be executed on Monday."
When Alinsky approached the end of his Rules for Radicals and projected future strategies in the chapter entitled The Way Ahead, he laid out his plan to go after "America's white middle class. That is where the power is." They are the "Have-a-Little, Want Mores."
Alinsky boasts that, "With rare exceptions, our activists and radicals are products of and rebels against our middle-class society. . . . Our rebels have contemptuously rejected the values and way of life of the middle class."
Here is where Alinsky's hypocrisy and duplicity become obvious. He had trained his community organizers to adopt a "middle-class identity" and familiarity with their "values and problems" in order to organize his "own people." Now, realizing "the priceless value of his middle-class experience," they will "begin to dissect and examine that way of life as he never has before." "Everything now has a different meaning and purpose."
Alinsky instructs his trainees to "return to the suburban scene of your middle class with its variety of organizations from PTAs to League of Women Voters, consumer groups, churches, and clubs. The job is to search out the leaders in these various activities, identify their major issues, find areas of common agreement, and excite their imagination with tactics that can introduce drama and adventure into the tedium of middle class life."
And a word of Alinsky caution: "Start them easy, don't scare them off." When Alinsky's community organizer moves from organizing the "poor" to organizing the "middle class," he "discards the rhetoric that always says 'pig.' . . . He will view with strategic sensitivity the nature of middle-class behavior with its hangups over rudeness or aggressive, insulting, profane actions. All this and more must be grasped and used to radicalize parts of the middle class." (Obama never talks like an angry radical. He usually wears a coat and tie, and he speaks in calm, measured tones.)
Community Organizing ContinuesWill the Alinsky strategies that nominated and elected Barack Obama President of the United States be put on the back burner for four years, lying dormant until they are needed to reelect him in 2012? Not likely. Those strategies are available right now to push through the radical legislation and gigantic spending programs that he promised his followers.
The pro-Obama New York Times laid out the plan on its January 26 front page under the headline "Retooling a Grass-Roots Network To Serve a YouTube Presidency." Obama's staff has already started "transforming the YouTubing-Facebooking-Texting-Twittering grass-roots organization that put Mr. Obama in the White House into an instrument of government. That is something that Mr. Obama, who began his career as a community organizer, told aides was a top priority, even before he was elected."
President Obama's staff has created a group, headquartered in the offices of the Democratic National Committee, called "Organizing for America." Its mission is to "redirect the campaign machinery into the service of broad changes in health care, environmental and fiscal policy. They envision an army of supporters talking, sending e-mail messages and texting to friends and neighbors as they try to mold public opinion." Three days after Obama was sworn in as President, an announcement video was sent to 13 million people.
The Obama team understands very well that traditional methods of communicating with voters are being replaced by new channels built around social networking. In the 2008 campaign, liberals dominated conservatives by more than 10-to-1 on the Internet, and the Obama campaign exploited that advantage fully and profitably. This massive Internet advantage enabled Obama and leftists to raise ten times more money than conservatives over the Internet, and to create a climate of extreme bias in the media against conservative candidates. Sarah Palin was savaged on liberal blogs with little resistance from conservatives.
This 21st Century use of Internet technology and new-media communication was reflected in Obama's truly incredible record of money-raising. He raised nearly $750 million for his presidential campaign. By contrast, in 2004, George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry together collected less than $650 million. For the general election, Obama had more than three times what John McCain had at his disposal, and Obama still had $30 million in the bank after the election.
Obama's technology/Internet superiority continues. DailyKos.com, a liberal blog site, ranks 3,631 in daily traffic out of many millions of internet websites. This is far higher, often by a factor of 100, than conservative sites. Many other liberal websites also outrank conservative sites, such as Moveon.org, a website started a decade ago in defense of Clinton during his scandals.
Previous Presidents recorded and released a radio speech every Saturday morning, but Obama instead records a video speech, then posts it on the White House website and YouTube where it can be picked up and forwarded to millions of followers who weren't listening to radio on Saturday mornings. His first speech was a sales talk for his $825 billion economic so-called stimulus package. By Sunday afternoon, more then 600,000 people had viewed it on YouTube.
It is virtually impossible for a candidate to win when he is outspent 10-to-1 by the other side. It is essential that conservatives assert themselves on the Internet in order to regain competitiveness in both ideas and in money.
Further Reading: "Social Justice"
February 22, 2009
SOME ADVICE ON FUTURE “TEA PARTY” PROTESTS, from a media producer who attended the Overland Park affair:
I attended the invigorating protest outside Congressman Dennis Moore’s Overland Park, Kansas office yesterday.
I hoped 10-15 souls might show up. I was thrilled to see hundreds. Here are some suggestions. I don’t really want my name used. Sadly, it could really hurt my business, which is already hurting.
As a professional media producer, here are my concerns:
1. Incoherent message - the signs were all over the place. There were lots of agendas. That’s fine. The color and signage look good on TV.
But, when it came to the microphone - the overall message was tepid and unsure.
2. Create a theme - like “We want Senator So-and-So to resign for voting for this bill.” Or, “We want the Stimulus Repealed!” “Start Over.” Have a definitive purpose to your Assembly. A central theme will also help public speakers to focus. And don’t be afraid to personalize this. Put it on your Senators, Congress people, and the President. That’s what they are doing to anyone who objects.
3. Speakers not prepared for the media - the organizer was asked to name some specific objectionable items in the stimulus. She couldn’t do it. I doubt many of us could.
If you are an organizer, or the “face” of the event - take an hour to prepare. You don’t need to know everything about the stimulus. Just find 2 or 3 things - hard facts - you can point to and credibly say - these are wrong, wasteful spending items. Or, these items grow government, not the economy. It is critical.
4. Pass out talking points, just in case Joe or Jane Protestor gets buttonholed by a reporter.
5. This is all about image. If we don’t present the media with a professional, organized and, unfortunately, scripted image, they are going to make their own, and it won’t be favorable.
6. Recruit some help to pack the area around people being interviewed for background. God love the guy in the crazy Uncle Sam suit, and we certainly need the Minute Men, but these folks will quickly become THE story because they are colorful or controversial i.e., Good TV. Welcome their support. Maybe give them a minute on the mic. But I recommend trying to pack in mainstream, boring looking, and diverse Americans around the camera. No offense to anyone. Anytime a TV camera comes out, a certain number and type of attention seeker will flock to it. Now is the time for Grandma and Grandpa, the Plumber, the Young Executive, and the Homeschooling Mom to flock to the camera as background. Don’t be shy. Remember, how do you want your cause to be presented by the media? As crazies? Or as Concerned Neighbors?
7. Have an Agenda and a Time. We’re going to Assemble at this Time. We’re going to have a Sign-In Table. We’re going to have a Sign-Making Area. We’re going to have speakers at 10:30. We’re going to March to the Senator’s Office at this time and demand she resign. We’re going to end with Chants, and a Call-to-Action for the next Protest. That, and Protestors want to know what’s going on. If they become unsure, they leave. Organization wins, and it also intimidates the opposition. And the opposition is going to start showing up.
8. Share the Day’s Agenda with the Media. You have to create your own press. The event in Overland Park was HUGE, but only one news station came out to cover it, and there’s not even a photo in today’s Sunday paper. Sell it to them. They love good stories.
That’s it. I hope this helpful. These things are only going to get bigger, and people need to realize that a great responsibility comes with this wonderful opportunity. Get a Message. And Get It Out.
Time for a Tea Party
LOCATIONS:
Northeast
- Boston - Friday, February 27, 2009 noon, The Barking Crab Restaurant, 88 Sleeper Street, Boston
- Hartford, CT - Friday, February 27, 2009 12:00pm - 1:00pm, State Capitol
- New York City - Saturday, February 28, 2009, 2:00pm - 3:00pm, City Hall Park, New York
- Philadelphia - Friday, February 27, 2009 12:00pm - 1:00pm, Independence Hall
- Washington D.C. - Friday, February 27, 2009 12:00pm - 2:00pm White House on the Lafayette Square Park side
- Pittsburgh - ***May be postponed due to rain *** Friday, February 27, 2009 12 pm - 1 pm, Market Square
Southeast
- Atlanta - Friday, February 27, 2009 12:00pm - 1:00pm at the Georgia State Capitol Building ~ Downtown Atlanta Washington Street Exit
- Fayetteville - Friday, February 27, 2009 12:00pm - 1:00pm, Liberty Point Resolves Marker, downtown Fayetteville, Hay Street
- Asheville, NC - Friday, February 27 from 10:00 am to 1:00 pm, Pritchard Park, Corner of Haywood St. and Patton Ave.
- Columbia, SC - TBD
- Greenville, SC - Friday, February 27, 2009 6:00pm, on the banks of the Reedy River and on the walking bridge just west of Main Street
- Orlando - Friday, February 27, 2009 12:00pm - 1:00pm on Lake Eola across from Panera Bread
- Tampa - Friday, February 27, 2009 12:00pm - 1:00pm, Federal Courthouse, 801 N. Florida Ave., Tampa
- Gainesville FL - Friday, February 27, 2009 2:00pm - 6:00pm, Ale House, 3950 SW Archer Rd
- Fort Meyers Beach - Friday, February 27, 2009 11:30am - 1:00pm Bowditch Park, 50 Estero Blvd., Fort Myers Beach
- Sarasota - Friday, February 27, 2009, 12:00pm - 1:00pm, Island Park and Marina Jacks, Bayfront Drive (41) and Ringling Blvd, Sarasota
- Nashville - Friday, February 27, 2009 12:00pm - 1:00pm Legislative Plaza
- Shelby County Alabama - Friday, February 27, 2009 12:00pm - 1:00pm, entrance to Eagle Point Neighborhood, Highway 280
- Jackson, Miss - Friday, February 27, 2009 12:00pm - 1:30pm, On the steps of the Capital Building in Jackson
Midwest
- Cleveland - Friday, February 27, 2009 12:00pm - 1:00pm Public Square in Downtown Cleveland, 1 Public Square
- Chicago - Friday, February 27, 2009 11:00am - 12:20pm at
Daley Plaza Civic Center, 50 W Washington St.- Lansing, MI - Friday, February 27, 2009 12:00pm - 1:00pm, State Capitol bldg
- St. Louis - Friday, February 27, 2009 11:00am - 12:00pm The Steps of Arch, Wharf Street
- Springfield, MO - Friday, February 27, 2009, 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm, Lake Springfield Park
- Kansas City - Saturday, February 28, 2009 10:00am - 2:00pm J.C. Nichols Foundation, 47th and J.C. Nichols Parkway K.C. MO
- Wichita, Kansas - Friday, February 27, 2009, 11:30am - 12:30pm, Farm Credit Bank Building, 245 N. Waco
- Omaha - Friday, February 27, 2009, 11:00am - 12:00pm, Douglas County Courthouse, 16th and Farnam St, Omaha
- Davenport, Iowa - Saturday, February 28, 2009, 12:00pm - 1 pm, Corner of Brady & Locust Streets, Davenport
Southwest
- Austin - Friday, February 27, 2009, 11:00am - 12 pm, Capitol steps
- Dallas - Friday, February 27, 2009, 11:00am - 12 pm, Victory Plaza at the American Airlines Center
- Fort Worth - Friday, February 27, 2009 3pm to 7pm at the Cowtown Bar & Grill, 7108 Camp Bowie Blvd, Fort Worth
- Houston - Friday, February 27, 2009 11:00am - 2:00pm, Fondren Green at Discovery Green Park, in front of Amphitheatre
- San Antonio - Friday, February 27, 2009, 11:00am - 12 pm, Alamo Plaza
- Oklahoma City - Friday, February 27, 2009, 11:00am - 12:00pm, State Capitol Steps, Oklahoma City
- Tulsa - Friday, February 27, 2009 11 am to 1 pm, Veteran’s Park, 21st & Boulder
- Phoenix - Friday, February 27, 2009, 10:00am - 11:00am, State Capitol, 1700 W Washington St, Phoenix
- Tempe AZ - Friday, February 27, 2009 noon, Tempe Beach Park, west of the Mill Avenue Bridge
Rockies
- Denver - Friday, February 27, 2009 10:00am - 12:00pm Colorado State Capitol Building - West side steps 200 E. Colfax Ave.
West Coast
- Seattle - Friday, February 27, 2009, 12:15pm - 1:15pm, Westlake Park, 410 Pine St. by the big arch
- Portland - Friday, February 27, 2009 9:00am - 10:00am Pioneer Courthouse Square @ the corner of Broadway & Morrison (in front of the STARBUCKS), 715 SW Morrison St
- San Diego - Friday, February 27, 2009 9-10 am, Just north of the Star of India on San Diego Bay
- Sacramento CA - Friday, February 27, 12 Noon, California State Capitol, North Steps, L Street, Sacramento
- Los Angeles - Friday, February 27, 2009, 9:00am - 10:00am, Santa Monica Pier
- Orange County - Friday, February 27, 2009, 9:00am - 10:00am, Huntington Beach Pier
Here is a list of online resources for the growing revolt against the stimulus package, the proposed government fix for those not paying their mortgages, pork busting, and other government waste issues.
Tips for Tea Party Organizers on the Media. If you look no farther, please read this before you start organizing.
Pajamas Media American Tea Party Coverage
Facebook:
Top Conservatives
New American Tea Party3,583 views Tags: economic stimulus plan, government pork, obama, tax revolt, taxpayer revolt, tea party, unpaid mortages
