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September 28, 2006

Can’t wait till Congress goes home

I have an awful lot to tell you in today’s message. Some of it is good news, and some of it is bad. We’ve asked you to read a lot in the last ten days. Congress makes a DC Downsizer’s job much more difficult before they leave on recess. Frankly, I can’t wait until they get out of town.

Let’s start with the most important item — good news. Our monthly budget need is down to only $2,203. The amount needed is now less than 10cents per subscriber. But only a small percentage of subscribers will respond, which is why we need YOU to consider a generous contribution. (If you’ve already contributed or pledged this month, thank you.)

It’s possible that one person reading this message could make the contribution that covers this entire amount. You know who you are. We need you now. 

“You can’t save the world, if you can’t pay the rent,” said Morton Blackwell. That’s why we begin today’s message with an appeal. We’ve paid the rent — the situation is not that dire. But we can’t afford to begin deficit spending with holidays right around the corner. Please, make a generous donation or monthly pledge today.

Do you DIGG “Read the Bills?”

The world is changing fast. One of the Top 500 visited sites on the web is called Digg — as in, “I really digged that story.” Users promote news or commentary (Digg) or they supress others (bury). If you’ve never heard of it before, welcome to the club.

Our friends at FreeTalkLive have set up a Digg page of their own. It’s called FreeMarketDiggers and can be found here: http://digg.freetalklive.com/

One of the first items they posted was our Read the Bills Act. And it received enough “Diggs” to get promoted. At one point, it was even on Diggs main page! As I write this, it’s on page 2 of Political News pages. The closer to the lead our entry is, the more people will hear about Read the Bills and visit our site. We want that, right?

Well, here’s the link. Please visit. Once you register with Digg you Digg or comment. As I write this, we have 580 Diggs and 68 comments. You can even Digg or bury the comments! If we push that MAIN Digg number up fast enough, we’ll move up. Time works against us. This is a NEWS site. So the older the story, the harder it is to stay on top. Fresh stuff replaces it.

So please, act quickly: Visit, Digg, and consider commenting. And to help us leverage this publicity and get even more traffic to our site, use the blog link (if you have a blog) or the email link to send the Digg to friends. They too can visit, Digg, and consider commenting or vote on other comments. 

Tribunal/Torture bill

My friends, I have bad news to report. We’ve basically lost. The House voted yesterday to approve the Tribunal bill. The opposition in the Senate could not generate the 41 votes to block cloture and the vote is going to happen today. It is almost certain to pass there as well.

Some are still holding out hope that because there are differences in the House and Senate versions of the bill, that they won’t be able to reach agreement before the election recess, and further, that if they come back with the GOP losing either the House or the Senate, that the bill might be improved in conference committee.

As I’ve written recently, the politicians in Washington frequently respond to a great evil, not with good, but with a lesser evil. Then, they compromise and we still get great evil.

Warrantless Spying

But there’s still a fight we can win and are winning. We must not let up on the pressure. And that fight is against the warrantless spying on Americans phone and Internet use. We can still stop this and I encourage you, if you haven’t already, PLEASE send a message to your Representative and Senator today.

And if you’ve already sent a message, please call Senator Russell Feingold 202-224-5323 and plead with him to lead a filibuster if and when Majority Leader Frist seeks cloture on this bill. And if you’ve already done that as well, the please, tell others about our campaign, “No Warrant? No Search.”

Victory?

When will the victories start coming, one after another? When we’re big enough to promote the Downsize DC approach everywhere, everyday. That’s why we ask you to tell others about our campaigns. That’s why we push to keep the funds coming in. We want to grow so large that Congress cannot afford to ignore us.

So in review:

* Please donate today. We need your help.

* Send a message to Congress – No Warrant? No Search.

* And tell friends about the RTBA DIGG and No Warrant? No Search.

Thank you for being a DC Downsizer,

Jim Babka
President
DownsizeDC.org, Inc.

If your comment is off-topic for this post, please email us at feedback@downsizedc.org

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