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Is this the end?
Today’s Downsizer-Dispatch…:::Today, we have a shocking but true story and a media announcement.
The story below is true. If the United States Department of Agriculture behaves like this now, we can only imagine how much worse it will get under the National Animal Identification System (NAIS). You can tell Congress to stop NAIS by clicking here.
It was a good deal . . .
In June, 2005 Darol Dickinson of the Dickinson Cattle Co. in Barnesville, Ohio was given the opportunity to purchase 472 Texas Longhorn cattle from a retiring producer in Oklahoma. The herd was allowed to stay at the Oklahoma ranch for up to a year, and Dickinson had begun selling the cattle to buyers across the U.S. In January, 2006 a cow named Rosey Barb was sold to a man in Dundee, Ohio.
Then in August, the man in Ohio was visited by a USDA investigator. What was the problem?
Good news!
DC Downsizers, we’ve run into a serious problem and we need your help.
During January, we sent some chills down people’s spines when I wrote that we had gotten a low level of feedback in response to a particular Dispatch. We got messages from concerned supporters. Was something seriously wrong?
As it turns out, there was. We were working with one arm tied behind our back for most of January.
Last month was a very good month in so many ways.
* We broke our monthly record for messages to Congress.
* We broke the January record for number of newly registered DC Downsizers.
* Compared to the months of 2006, January, 2007 would’ve been our forth best month for recruiting new DC Downsizers.
* We achieved our monthly budget of $14,000 in just nine days — faster than any month last year.
It was a good thing too because right after that, something went wrong. Donor response plummeted. Requests for your feedback (via feedback at DownsizeDC dot org) received a much lower response than normal.
And we started to watch our email subscription list shrink. So far, it has shrunk nearly 7,000. We hadn’t been purging closed email addresses from our list for a few months because we were using a new delivery system and just didn’t have the feature in place yet. When we turned it on, some shrinkage was expected, but not nearly as much as we actually had.
The last couple of weeks have been a nightmare. Why? Because America Online (AOL) has blacklisted us.
The result, in actual AOL addresses and related fall-out (like through Netscape addresses, which AOL owns as well) has been a loss of roughly 3,000 subscribers. But there’s a real possibility the actual damage is closer to 5,000, or possibly even 6,000 subscribers.
On top of that, anyone attempting to sign up with our system using an AOL or AOL-related address couldn’t confirm their registration. That means they didn’t get subscribed to our list at all.
NOTE: This blog entry is a supplement to our February 5 Downsizer-Dispatch message which can be found above (the Dispatch will be posted after this entry so we can’t link to it here).::::::In an earlier blog item in November we told you how a hacker attacked a minor vulnerability in our “Tell-a-friend” mechanism. It was fixed almost instantly. We won’t rehash that story. You can read it for yourself.::::::We’ve been blacklisted by AOL. All we were told was that we had a “compromised script.” We don’t know the specific nature of the compromised script, but the November Tell-a-friend hack was our first appearance on the AOL blacklist and we’ve had problems with that company ever since. We’ve been in a kind of “off and on” situation with them — more off than on — but it was mostly a minor, occasional annoyance. Each time that we would end up on the list, we’d wait 24 to 36 hours, and the problem would go away. ::::::That ceased to be the case, starting in about mid-January. Now we’re just plain “on” the AOL blacklist, and we’re having a very hard time getting off!::::::To make matters worse,
Today’s Downsizer-Dispatch . . . :::Sunday’s Downsize DC Conference Call radio show is going to be a repeat of last week’s episode. We’ll get to that in a moment.
But first, we want to talk about Breakfast with the Babka’s — in New Hampshire, February 24th.
Jim Babka will be giving a speech, at the Free State Project’s Liberty Forum. The speech is titled, “How New Hampshire can Change the Federal Government Forever.” We’ll give you a hint: Jim’s speech has something to do with the Read the Bills Act.
The Liberty Forum will be great fun. Other speakers include John Stossel from the ABC Show 20/20, Rob Kampia of the Marijuana Policy Project, and Congressman Ron Paul.
Would you run the ultimate experiment in Iraq?
Today’s Downsizer-Dispatch . . .::::::Please forward to concerned friends . . .::::::President Bush has had four years to bring peace to Iraq. Every experiment he’s tried to achieve that goal has failed. Now he wants to expend more American lives and money on yet another experiment. ::::::The Democrats, by contrast, seem to have adopted a “stay the course” strategy. They oppose the President’s new experiment, but seem in no hurry to leave the laboratory. ::::::U.S. policy is adrift, at the cost of innocent American lives and hundreds of billions of your tax money. It’s time to stop the experiments.
We stated our theme for 2007: AGGRESSIVE ACTION!
January lived up to it. We . . .
* Made our monthly budget goal in nine days. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could do that again?
* Set a new mark for messages to Congress — 45,024
* Had our 9th best month for recruitment with 651 new Downsizers (yes, only three months were better last year).
* Exceeded January of last year by 39,078 messages to Congress, and 461 new recruits
* Delayed a vote in the House on regulating grassroots organizations like DownsizeDC.org
* Defeated these grassroots regulations in the Senate,
* Proved the concept that we can join liberals, conservatives, and libertarians to work together for common goals and actually force Congress to change direction
* Started advertising the “Read the Bills Act” — our first ad will appear on Reason.com at any moment, and more are set to follow (we’ll let you know when our ad is up on the website)
* Raised our monthly pledges up over $6,500 . . .
Now we want to
Darol Dickinson gives an account of a visit from a USDA Investigator. Read all about it here. ::::::If this is how the USDA treats ranchers, farmers and vetinarians now, imagine how much worse it will get under the National Animal Identification System?