Today a friend sent me a link to Crowdrise, a new Web site to assist individuals and charities in fundraising and volunteering. It was founded by the actor, Ed Norton, and launched on May 12. My friend is promoting the page for the David Lynch Foundation, which is raising money to pay for school children to learn the Transcendental Meditation program. The TM program is not a religion and does not compete with any religion. There is a lot of research showing that it improves the ability to learn and there is new research showing that it is helpful for children and teens with ADHD and ADD. I’ve heard in-person the testimonials of a couple of teens who participated in the ADHD research when they were attending American University in Washington, D.C., and they were very moving and impressive. So I do think this is a worthy cause.

Crowdrise strikes me as an example of people on the Left not knowing they really are fiscal conservatives, not the socialists they think are. I am amused that the Left doesn’t seem to understand that one of the purposes of socialism is to kill all the projects that flourish as a result of the individual being allowed to keep enough of his or her own money to decide which charities to support and the liberty to choose which ones to volunteer for. Just in case any Lefties/liberals have stumbled in here and are puzzled by that statement, the backstory is that the point of socialism is to give the government control over most of your money and time on account of how smart people in government know better than you do how to spend your money and time. One result is that only the projects the government approves of get funded and done. The problem with this is that it causes stagnation because the distributed intelligence of crowdsourcing is millions of times more powerful and efficient than the intelligence of centrally planned anything, plus most endeavors would never get government funds. The detailed explanation is in The Road to Serfdom, by economist Friedrich Hayek.

Update, 5/15/2010, Sat.: Thanks to a post by Purple Avenger at Ace of Spades HQ on a group of students who are working on creating a site that will rival Facebook while preserving its users’ privacy, I found out about the site that allowed the young entrepreneurs to raise money for their venture online: Kickstarter.com. It allows creative people to raise money for their ventures, including publishing books, while keeping ownership of their project. I’m going to be looking into this — since my book on the conservative arguments for lesbian and gay equality is something that neither conservative nor mainstream (i.e., Leftie) publishers would be interested in, although it HAS a market, I’ve been thinking I need to turn to my readers and online marketing for the equivalent of the publisher’s advance. Dear gentle readers, what say you?

In this post I propose that conservative organizations and wealthy conservatives put their wallets together and provide Robert Stacy McCain with a VERY prosperous and steady income so he can focus full-time on the conservative networking and mentoring of conservative bloggers he does through his blog, The Other McCain.

I wrote it 10 days ago and held it due to concerns that my proposal would embarrass him. However, today four things came together to persuade me to publish my proposal.

First, in Andrew Breitbart’s column today published at his Web site, Big Hollywood, as “Rules for Conservative Radicals” and the Washington Times as, “Online activists on the right, unite!,” he describes the dirty tricks and skulduggery employed by Obama and the Left, including paying and scripting trolls to post on right-wing blogs and “seminar callers” (coordinated by a left-wing group and coached with talking points) to dominate conservative talk radio call-in shows.

I find the best reporting on the Obama blog trolls comes from HillBuzz, which was an early target of the practice and quickly learned the prepared blogging points and shifts of the Obama trolls assigned to bring down their blog. Click here and read comment 25, which really does seem to be from one of Obama’s paid trolls coming clean.

Reports of an Obama 2.0 organization with a war chest of $75 million in private funds to keep much of Obama’s campaign organization intact during his presidency to pressure members of Congress and destroy his enemies began to be published immediately after the election in November. An overview of Obama 2.0 from the Los Angeles Times from Jan. 13, 2009, is here.

That means we of the conservative blogosphere are An Army of Davids
blogging for little or no money while fighting Obama’s well-paid and scripted trolls.

It’s fairly obvious that we need to organize and fund a similar organization — and maybe it’s just me, but I believe it does NOT already exist as the Republican National Committee.

If there were such an organization, would we have to fight the left wing with the same evil tactics they use on us? No. While Andrew points out in his column the following:

So now that the right is vanquished and thoroughly out of power, why doesn’t it learn from its conquerors and employ similar tactics?

The answer is obvious. The right, for the most part, embraces basic Judeo-Christian ideals and would not promote nor defend the propaganda techniques that were perfected in godless communist and socialist regimes. The current political and media environment crafted by supposedly idealistic Mr. Obama resembles Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela more than John F. Kennedy’s America.

The Huffington Post, Daily Kos and other left-leaning sites benefit from the right’s belief that there are rules and decorum in political debate and civic engagement. Of course, every now and then, a curious right-winger will go in and engage in discussion at a left-wing site, but rarely under purely disingenuous and mass coordinated means.

… we conservatives can employ similar tactics without adopting the same tactics. That means, we can coordinate our message and pay our own angels — because they will be NOT be trolls — to comment on left-wing blogs and — are there any left-wing radio shows? It’s funny, I can’t think of a single one.

Oh, and by “coordinate our message,” I mean in the voluntary sense, what with conservatives being individualists and all. The difference between left-wing trolls and conservative angels will be that angels will stick to facts, educate their readers, stay courteous and appeal to the idealism of their readers, which has been perverted and appropriated by left-wing propaganda. After all, think of NYPD Blue, when Sipowicz was trying to get the most hardened criminals to confess, sometimes the most effective angle was to appeal to their better nature. (Yes, I know Sipowicz is not a real person.)

I do think that while we are fighting for the economic life of the United States that fiscal conservatism is our common ground. We can form our circular firing squads over social conservative issues again after we save the U.S. as the capitalist engine of global prosperity from Obama.

Second — you thought I forgot I was numbering my points, didn’t you? — Little Miss Attila wrote today about “A Pep Talk from R. Stacy McCain.” Just go, I’ll wait.

Third, as Little Miss Attila points out, I was dissed by Stacy on linkage — plus he wrote an exceptionally nasty diatribe against gay marriage on 3/27 KNOWING THAT GOD WILL SMITE HIM FOR THIS –

see more Lol Celebs

– so I don’t care if I embarrass him by proposing publicly that conservatives give him a steady income WAY into the six figures BECAUSE THAT IS JUST THE KIND OF VINDICTIVE BITCH I AM!!!

Four, I’m blog of the day at Conservative Grapevine — thank you, John Hawkins! — so this is a good time to draw attention to this cause.

OK, here’s my post I first wrote 10 days ago proposing that conservative organizations and wealthy patrons figure out how to pay Robert Stacy McCain to coordinate and train the conservative blogosphere, which was originally entitled, “When the goose is laying golden eggs, for heaven’s sake, make sure it has food and can afford its nest!”

I think I first came on Robert Stacy McCain’s blog, The Other McCain, in February through Little Miss Attila, whom I found in December or January through GayPatriot’s 2009 annual “Grand Diva Conservative Bloggress” contest, whom I found in the fall from Michelle Malkin’s blog, which I found from the National Review Online in September, which I found in early September from hunting down a reliable place to find Jonah Goldberg’s columns after I found him by Googling for “Obama is tanking” stories after I saw Sarah Palin’s luminous and galvanizing acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, which I watched because there was no way I was going to vote for Barack Obama after he piggishly refused to nominate Hillary Clinton as his running mate, although even then I would not necessarily have voted for him due to his opposition to gay marriage and his unbreakable allegiances to illegal aliens, open borders, Muslims and Black Liberation Theology, to say nothing of his alliances to people who want Israel destroyed as a nation and Jews wiped out as a religion and people.

Are you following me?

My point is that even a lesbian, die-hard liberal Democrat like me can find her way to fiscal conservatism through the network of the conservative blogosphere.

I know I’m new around here, but it looks to me like no one knows all the players — from the bigshots to newbies like me — better than Robert Stacy McCain.

It also looks to me like no one works harder than Robert Stacy McCain at every level of the conservative blogosphere to keep conservative bloggers in touch with one another. He is the goose that is laying the golden eggs, and the names of those eggs are “Sense of Community,” “Warm Feelings of Camaraderie,” “Friendship,” “Cooperation” and “Reciprocity.”

Stacy also appears to keep his eye on every sparrow and generously and selflessly not only mentors newbies but also delivers practical boosts in the form of links and traffic because there’s nothing like a taste of success early in your career to fan the embers of ambition into the passionate fire in the belly that produces real, lasting achievements. The names of those golden eggs are “Teambuilding,” “Mentoring” and “Matchmaking” and “Networking.”

In my own life, I’ve always felt that when I have a goose that is laying golden eggs for me, the way to get more eggs for longer is to make sure that that is the happiest, best fed, best housed, most prosperous goose that it is in my power to provide.

I know other people who believe the golden eggs will always come, that the goose will find a way through any amount of pressure and stress and deprivation to lay the golden eggs. And maybe she will.

But I prefer the sure thing in these situations. So I provide for the goose.

What I am proposing here is that conservative organizations that benefit from a lively, healthy, well-connected conservative blogosphere — which is all of them — put their heads together and figure out to give Robert Stacy McCain contracts to pay him to write whatever he wants at The Other McCain and continue to do what he loves to do to ensure the vibrancy and cameraderie of the conservative blogosphere. It wouldn’t hurt if some prominent conservatives who are prosperous also contribute to this cause.

I am concerned that this post will embarrass Stacy — you know, more than I’ve embarrassed him already here and here.

I didn’t tell him about it in advance. I don’t have his permission to do this. He definitely did not put me up to this.

When Virginia Woolf described in an essay what enabled her to produce her novels, and what women would need to be productive as writers and artists, the formula was very simple: “a room of one’s own and an independent income.” Indeed, “A Room of One’s Own” is the name of her essay, which was based on a speech. Read it, it is absolutely luminous and wonderful and poignant and true. But, in essence, she was saying that you need some privacy and quiet — “a room of one’s own” — to be able to write, and freedom from lack and worry over money — “an independent income” — which Woolf obtained when an aunt died and left her a small trust.

I believe we can leave it to Stacy to find his room to write, away from the claims his six children and beautiful wife have on his attention.

But just imagine how much more Stacy could accomplish if conservative organizations banded together and provided him with an income that would give him freedom from lack and worry over money. What a boon that would be for the conservative movement!

So, what say you in Right Blogistan about calling on conservative organizations and prosperous conservatives to give Stacy contracts and REAL MONEY  so he can do that voodoo that he does so well?

Update, 3/31/09: Gateway Pundit has the story on Democratic dirty tricks in South Carolina.

Angie Harmon, actress, played assistant prosecutor Abbie Carmichael on "Law and Order" from 1998 to 2001.

Angie Harmon proved last week she has the biggest pair in Hollywood and today the sexist dolts at Fox News trivialize and belittle her courage in the “Entertainment” section of their Web site under their aegis for trivializing and belittling women, “Pop Tarts.”

Andrew Breitbart was just in D.C. a couple of weeks ago to talk to conservatives about Hollywood’s totalitarian liberal anti-conservative McCarthyism, which blacklists and blackballs conservatives at every level in the entertainment industry AND in every aspect of the entertainment business. They are likely to punish Harmon swiftly and viciously. THAT is why Harmon proved she has the biggest pair in Hollywood.

But not a word about THAT from the twit reporting the story for Fox.

Here’s what Fox News reported that Harmon said at the Los Angeles launch last Thursday of Latisse, a new eyelash-growing formula:

“Here’s my problem with this, I’m just going to come out and say it. If I have anything to say against Obama it’s not because I’m a racist, it’s because I don’t like what he’s doing as President and anybody should be able to feel that way, but what I find now is that if you say anything against him you’re called a racist,” Harmon told Tarts at Thursday’s Los Angeles launch of the new eyelash-growing formula, Latisse. “But it has nothing to do with it, I don’t care what color he is. I’m just not crazy about what he’s doing and I heard all about this, and he’s gonna do that and change and change, so okay … I’m still dressing for a recession over here buddy and we’ve got unemployment at an all-time high and that was his number one thing and that’s the thing I really don’t appreciate. If I’m going to disagree with my President, that doesn’t make me a racist. If I was to disagree with W, that doesn’t make me racist. It has nothing to do with it, it is ridiculous.”

Speaking of dislikes, the starlet has also had enough of the double-standards in the media.

“I do think McCain would have done a better job, only because I think he has more experience. I also think if W or John McCain or Reagan would have gone and done a talk show, the backlash would have been so huge and in his face, and ‘What is our president doing? How unclassy!’ But Obama does it and no one says anything,” Harmon said.

And in spite of the scornful opinions most of her Tinseltown counterparts have shared on Gov. Sarah Palin, Harmon remains a true fan.

“I admire any kind of woman like her. My whole motto is to know what I stand for and know what I don’t stand for and have the courage to live my life accordingly and she does exactly that. The fact that this woman has made the decisions she’s made and literally lived her life according to that and takes heat for it is absolutely disgusting to me,” she added. “People cannot look at this woman. I really think they’re afraid of her and her morals, ethics and values and the fact that she hangs on them. Is she the most experienced person in the world? But she was running to be the Vice President, so we then put the most inexperienced person as the President. That didn’t make any sense to me.”

God bless Angie Harmon. I always did like her. And now, more than ever.

Update, 3/31/09: Gateway Pundit has more on “Angie Harmon proves she has the biggest pair in Hollywood.”