One of our most consistent supporters is an overqualified blogger from the midwest who, like a large percentage of the country, has struggled to find a job for a number of months. He’s reached out beyond his previous career path and tried just about everything…

If you look at the backgrounds of many of the top conservative bloggers and social media activists who have emerged in the last year, you may notice that the economic downturn has been a blessing in disguise for conservative advocacy online. More than a couple of our brightest lights turned to blogging to fill their time after the struggling economy left them with too much free time. We’re happy to see a couple of those individuals struggling to maintain their blogs as they succeed in their quest for employment. However, there are still many more who are frustrated to hear the President’s bizarre braggadocio regarding the success of his “stimulus” legislation.

We’d like to see some of the more excellent online activists find a way to make a living fighting for their beliefs as a career. We’ve noted that many have improved their skills substantially over the last year and could add considerable value as legislative staffers, public relations and new media types, and as journalists. So, for that reason, we’re not going to wait around for the President’s second stimulus “jobs” legislation to try to help create a little employment. Instead, we’re going to refer one and all to the Leadership Institute’s ConservativeJobs.com.

Conservativejobs.com is a site for both job seekers and recruiters whose goals involve employing conservatives. They do not charge any kind of finder’s fee, but actually offer a “confidential and free Employment Placement Service.” Here’s a quote from the web page:

“Move up quickly with the many opportunities available through our confidential and free Employment Placement Service. Register to market your unique skills and experiences to prospective employers.

You will find that our Employment Placement Service offers the best compilation of resources for employment in public policy. We provide assistance in every step of job-hunting, from writing the resume and cover letter to interviewing for a particular position. Your talent deserves the best a job can offer. We make possible the opportunities to help you get what you deserve.”

Even if you don’t want hand-holding, you can always peruse the job listings available on Conservativejobs.com. The listings are diverse and go way beyond advertisements for legislative assistants these days.

Click the thumbnail link below to visit ConservativeJobs.com:

Tabitha does self-promotion just about as well as any other conservative new media personality. Early on we thought she’d burn out, but we are glad we were wrong. Here’s a recent interview AIM did with one of the biggest personalities behind the surge in participation in online activism amongst female conservatives.

For years, conservatives debated the Balanced Budget Amendment, a proposed amendment to the federal constitution requiring Congress to balance the federal budget just as many state governments are required to balance their budget by their state constitutions. Everyone was for a more responsible approach to government spending, of course, but the debate over the amendment splintered factions in the movement in such a way that the amendment did not receive the support from conservative opinion-makers and the Republican party that many people today believe that it should have.

What kind of conservatives would object to a balanced budget amendment? Elite economists and some supply-siders believed that there was a time and a place for deficit spending to stimulate growth so long as the spending level was kept to a reasonable percentage of overall economic output or GNP. Others grumbled that the amendment wouldn’t do a thing to prevent spending if there wasn’t political will for it, but it would provide a justification for tax increases — one columnist envisioned a crisis in which the Supreme Court ordered Congress to raise taxes in order to comply with the amendment and continue its entitlement commitments. National security conservatives believed that the amendment would weaken the country’s ability to spend sufficiently to fund a “war of civilizations” effort and pointed out that the amendment’s exception to allow deficit spending during a time of war didn’t mean much when war is all-too-frequently engaged in, but so rarely declared by Congress in modern times. Constitutionalists pointed out that the framers already included a means of dealing with excess spending, which was namely, “throw the bums, out!” Furthermore, some just opposed the amendment because it took a truly beautiful document and sullied it with a reflection of contemporary weakness and vice in a way similar to those who opposed an amendment to ban abortion on the grounds that abortion is a nasty subject to include in our country’s primary defining document.

So, what happened to the BBA? Republicans talked about it and even forced a vote or two to reveal how many Democrats wouldn’t support balanced budgets, but in the end they didn’t push with the tenacity necessary to amend the United States Constitution. All talk, no walk. After awhile, the BBA simply disappeared from the political landscape.

Today, however, the BBA made a startling appearance on the national political scene. In an op-ed piece, Jeb Hensarling, Mike Pence, and John Campbell proposed a new version of the BBA that addresses some of those old concerns and taps into the new conservative consensus that spending is out of control and drastic action is necessary. Basically, it limits spending to 20% “as a share of the economy.” Being from a state like California where legislators have gotten better at manipulating economic figures to define the budget than actually cutting spending or increasing revenues, we like the amendment’s emphasis on capping spending versus balancing budgets. Still, we can’t help but wonder how much wiggle room there is concerning the definition of the economic pie we are taking a percentage of? Should the number be 20% or perhaps… 10%?

The one page summary of the proposed amendment is here. Feel free to click on the thumbnail link below for the in-depth review:

Here’s a link to Erik Erikson’s endorsement.

John Hawkins of RightWingNews.com has slowly, but surely begun reaching beyond his base of conservatives to provide content to other people who might enjoy his unique world view. We’ve already written about his success with linkiest.com, one of the internet’s most eclectic collection of viral video, irresistible photos, and conservative opinion, but his latest website, SelfHelpQuotes.net, reaches even farther beyond John’s base to the public speaking and word warrior crowd.

If you’re looking for a quote to throw in to your latest effort at Rotary or your latest syndicated column, why not try John’s collection of quotes? It’s not Bartlett’s, but it’s the only source of quotables we know that leans to the right with over 200 quotes from Ann Coulter…

To visit SelfHelpQuotes.net, please feel free to click the thumbnail link, below:

If we have one suggestion for John, it is to bring the search box up above the fold. The advertising in the right hand column pushes it down and many laptop users or people with smaller monitors may never find the search box, something that is pretty essential to a full experience of the website.

A sizeable majority of early web designers learned design as desktop publishers for traditional print applications. The aesthetic judgment and driving passion to create beautiful web pages common to these design professionals is something that just about every internet user has benefited from at some point or another. However, more and more marketers and internet entrepreneurs are learning that functionality and high quality content are beating pretty pictures on a consistent basis.

Case in point: SaveOurMovement.com. SaveOurMovement.com is by all means an ugly site. It’s not really a blog, but it is built using a blog design. However, the held-together-with-duct-tape appearance didn’t stop the site from toppling the Republican National Committee’s attempt to use the “tea party” name as a subdomain of its flagship gop.com site. In fact, the site’s low-budget look only enhanced its pro-grassroots theme and the easy availability of key information like Micheel Steele’s RNC telephone number made the site effective. Recently, the GOP’s much more aesthetically pleasing teaparty.gop.com was taken offline.

You can read more about the latest struggle by tea party leaders to reign in Republican enthusiasm at Newsmax.

Here’s a thumbnail link to SaveOurMovement.com for those who might be interested in achieving that “grassroots” look:

Don’t Tread on Me Brand is having a President’s Day Sale. Here’s their banner:

Their t-shirts are a bizarre mix of patriotism and cutting edge style. We’ve profiled the t-shirt designer in an earlier post because of the unique and excellent fit of the retro combed cotton shirts and designs that don’t shy away from appealing to patriotic teenagers.

Note, you may want to do the math before purchasing if you haven’t already checked prices at Amazon or have Amazon Prime for free shipping.

A number of conservative activists online use Facebook as a kind of poor man’s news and commentary aggregator, kind of like a social, interactive RSS. This use is slightly different than what Facebook’s designers may have anticipated for the friend’s newsfeed feature. As a result, recent changes made by the Facebook team have caused some unanticipated problems for many conservative Facebookers.

Heather Powers, whose vocals we recently featured on Daily Uprising, passed on a quick note on a fix for those who have noticed that their news feeds seem lighter these days:

Hey All,

I know MANY of us have been wondering how this new format works and have been missing A TON of friends in our news feeds….well, we figured out how to fix it!

FACEBOOK IS BLOCKING ALL YOUR FRIENDS NEWS FEEDS EXCEPT THE 250 THEY CHOOSE. TO UNDO: from HOME page scroll to bottom of page, click “Edit Options” ( to the right side ~ left side is “older posts”). Select NEWS FEED SETTINGS. reset 250 to 5000 for FB’s max. friend limit and your feed will..l work right again. Pass it on to your friends and feel free to re-post this

Blessings….

Heather

Thanks, Heather!

Ned Ryun has announced the search for a new core cadre of trainers for American Majority, a rapidly growing conservative activist training organization. He’ll be calling his new recruits the “American Majority Mechanics.” Why mechanics? Ryun explains:

“In the days before the Revolutionary War, Paul Revere organized the Mechanics, a group of determined patriots that grew out of the Sons of Liberty. The group established an intelligence network that monitored the actions of the British army in Boston, and then sent news of the movements to patriot leaders. It was the Mechanics who discovered that British troops were planning to march on Lexington and Concord on the evening of April 18, 1775, which led to Revere’s famous midnight ride to warn Samuel Adams, John Hancock and other colonists that the British were coming.”

The application deadline for the AM Mechanics’ program is the close of business, February 26th, and all submissions should be submitted to team@americanmajority.org. Those accepted into the program will be notified by March 5th.

Here’s a thumbnail link to a copy of the application questionnaire:

I never mistook Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown for the second coming, but here’s an idea that could serve as a useful model for conservative activists looking to organize future events:

“Pickup Truck Rally!
Drive your Pickup Truck if you have one.
Prizes for Most Patriotic, Greatest Miles, or Oldest Truck

Master of Ceremony:
Inga Barks, KERN
“Let’s drive the politicians out of Sacramento!”

Mindless “we the people” populism isn’t the answer, but it does promise to be a lot of fun. One of my pet peeves with political campaigns is that they sometimes cater exclusively to those looking to buy access and ignore the fact that there may be a number of people with substantially untouched networks who are looking to be part of a movement and have a little fun. Particularly in more rural areas, a pickup truck rally can be a fun celebration of local culture, a rejection of silly political elitism, and a great way for people to participate, have fun, and begin to make conservatism or a particular candidate a part of their identity.

NOTE: The event above was scheduled in support of Ken Mettler, a local builder and conservative activist running for office. We interviewed Ken almost a year ago, but decided not to use the footage on Daily Uprising because we feared that being associated even tangentially with our logo and the Uprising might jeopardize his credibility as a candidate in the future. What a difference a year makes! Ken’s support of all things “tea party” and activist has been a large part of the considerable momentum he brings to his race for a California Assembly seat.

For those in the neighborhood, you can check out the event’s Facebook page by clicking on the thumbnail link below:

Traditional activists frequently tell us about their ideas for blogs, prank pages, internet petition drives, or online fundraising efforts. Most of these ideas never become reality because the activists, many of whom are excellent at working social media networks such as Twitter and Facebook, have never learned to transform their ideas into their own web pages or web sites.

Enter Wordpress. Unlike other popular hosted blogging platforms Wordpress has a special characteristic: It gives users a free easy-to-use, but powerful starting point before it slowly, but enthusiastically teaches its users the most popular and versatile languages of webcraft, such as html, css, php, and sql, and provides for them a framework for building websites far beyond the limitations of mere blogging. Wordpress was not designed to create web designers and web developers out of bloggers, but in many, many cases it does just that. If you don’t believe us, please reference the community of plugin developers and themers at Wordpress.org who began as users of the platform or the number of sites that even zealous advocates of competing CMS systems like Joomla or Drupal choose to develop on Wordpress because it is the first CMS they learned and really the only one they feel comfortable with “under the hood.”

Here’s how I believe that Wordpress can take even the newest online activists from beginner to effortless master of online activism in just a couple of months.

1. First, the activist begins by using a Wordpress powered hosted blog service like Wordpress.com or Eric Odom’s Blogivists. This is similar to signing up for a service like Facebook or Myspace, which is just to say that the learning curve associated with getting started will be very, very low. Most hosted services provide some kind of free (as in beer) option for users to begin tinkering with. A user should be able to get immediate results within a couple minutes of registering with the hosted service. Over the next couple of weeks, the activist will learn and understand the Wordpress standard interface or “backend” and begin to get a grasp of the issues involved with designing a Wordpress blog of their own, such as the differences between pages and posts and how categories and tags are used.

2. Now after awhile, our activist-turned-hosted-Wordpress-blogger will hear about thousands of plugins for Wordpress that would make his or her site much, much snazzier. Unfortunately, those plugins won’t always be available on the hosted platforms, so the activist will need to make the jump towards self-hosted blogging. Users who start with a different blogging platform such as Google’s Blogger often have to start over and learn an entirely new system when they want to begin self-hosted blogging; which makes this step a much more considerable one. It’s at this stage that users typically learn a little bit about FTP as well as CPANEL and phpmyadmin, but they can be assured that their solid foundation in how to blog will remain the same because the essential experience of using Wordpress won’t change too radically… in fact, they’ll probably be able to find and activate the magic plugin that motivated them to move to a self-hosted blog by using the same backend interface that they’ve been using to post and respond to comments.

3. It’s at this stage that the activist begins to discover Wordpress’ simple approach to themes and starts to realize the full potential of Wordpress. To begin with the activist will typically pick a theme created by someone else but licensed under GPL… and then learn to hunt through the CSS to substitute his or her own logos or change colors and font-styles to customize the look and feel of the site. In the process, the person will be learning html and css the only really effective way: by using it. There are a couple of good Wordpress theme creation and alteration tutorials available free online. (The team at Ithemes.com has a premium tutorial on how to change around an existing theme available at their training site, WebDesign.com.) The tutorial is Wordpress theme specific, but actually a fairly good primer on CSS in general and users will be able to select one of the thousands of pre-constructed themes and then radically change its colors and element attributes after tinkering a bit.

4. Here’s where the new Builder theme enables Wordpress to fulfill its potential. See, there’s a difference between altering a theme’s element attributes and substituting images on the one hand and creating a new layout on the other. Traditionally web designers tended to learn table-based web-design first before moving on to superior, but often more difficult to grasp, CSS-based layouts. Today, it’s almost difficult to find resources on learning HTML table-based design and many, many an ambitious spirit has been reduced to insurmountable frustration by the materials available for learning CSS layouts. We used to recommend people use the 960gs system as an initial crutch to be able to layout sites effectively without fully mastering CSS layouts. Builder, however, follows the true spirit of Wordpress and allows our activist turned blogger to create new layouts by using the tools he or she is already comfortable with in a slightly different fashion. The administrative backend is used to laydown elements of a Wordpress layout like images and the loop with a click of the mouse and much of the layout process can involve placing text widget boxes, a quick and extremely versatile approach to constructing a layout using the familiar widget process. This is important because advanced CSS layouts are the obstacle that cause many, many Wordpress enthusiasts end their journey towards effortless web creation; the road to theme mastery without the gentle transition provided by Builder is rocky, indeed. Other systems that require mastery of Smarty or other templating enginers have an even lower rate of people who advance in skill beyond this point.

5. Using Builder to do layouts, our activist learns about the role of page templates and loops and can now not only change the look of his or her website, but drastically change its organization and really the entirety of its presentation. Having learned the Wordpress approach, the activist will be able to transform just about anything he can draw on a piece of paper before laying out in Photoshop or GIMP and finally transforming his or her vision into a Wordpress site. It’s at this stage that the use can extend it with similar tools that also follow the Wordpress approach like user profiles and social media engine, Buddypress, or forums engine, bbPress. Along the way, the user has seen more than a bit of php and might just decide to use it to create new content types with WP PODS. We recently discovered PODS through the Ithemes gang and Benjamin Bradley (who seems to be something of a libertarian, BTW), but it basically allows you to create your own content systems the way Content Construction Kit does with Drupal. It is at this point that Wordpress users start breaking beyond the page and post view of web design, but the transition is, once again, gradual as POD makes excellent use of the Wordpress backend and Wordpress terminology. Users who simply start with such concepts by beginning with other CMS systems will often fail to survive the initial challenge, but the activist who takes the Wordpress path is able to generate *almost* any basic site quickly and with a great deal of creative control.

We’re concerned that because we’ve justified Wordpress based on its educational benefit as a user moves from Step 1 to Step 5, above, that many activists will think that the system won’t perform for them early on. Nothing could be further from the truth. Wordpress is the easiest and most effective CMS for search engine optimization I’ve ever used. Even without the excellent free SEO plugins available, the blog platform does a great job of introducing an activists idea’s to the world through Google and RSS. Almost immediately activists will begin to attract traffic from the search engines and by the time they work their way to step 5, many activists will have developed a successful following that can appreciate our activists newly developed web skills. Best yet, Wordpress with caching plugins scales as well or better than any other open source CMS system we’ve used. At the end of the day, that means that Wordpress is not only better for beginners, but also better for experienced pros looking to deal efficiently with considerable traffic and the growing pains of success.

Finally, while it isn’t essential, we’d like to point out that the open source Wordpress community doesn’t seem to be as openly Leftist (or political for that matter) as the crowd surrounding Drupal, our second favorite system for simple projects. Wordpress emphasizes “free” while the community still allows and even cheers a number of module and theme developers who sell their creations for premium prices.

In the next couple of weeks, we’ll be launching tutorials for each of the five stages taking any activist who’d like to try his hand and webcraft a journey from Stage 1 to Stage 5. Let’s see if we can’t enable a few activists to turn those website dreams into something real.