A TowDog

Getting all the various state #TaxRevolt groups on one page

Since the sudden outbreak of unruly moms and dads into Tax Revolt status, groups have been popping up everywhere. Spontaneously it seems these groups all want to protest what they see are excesses in our state legislature and federal government as well.

Rick Santelli proposed a July 4^th Tea Party on his now infamous Rant of the Year, but we as a whole were angry now, today!

Starting February 27 in nationwide, events appeared everywhere! Largely ignored by the big media, nonetheless we knew and bloggers covered many in real time.

Still it wasn’t enough, and many are scheduled for the week of April 15 to coincide with our national Tax Day.

So where does one go to find a list, to see if there may be one in your particular area?

In trying to keep abreast of events for CATCOT, I’ve been faced with the daunting task of mining Google, Facebook, and other sites just to try to keep as many people informed as possible. It’s been like chasing individual shot pellets from a shotgun blast.

We have California Tea Party, Fresh Tea Daily, and California Tax Revolt 2009 to name a few I’ve found. In addition there are numerous Facebook groups I’ve yet to discover who don’t advertise on any outside web site.

Do all these groups talk to one another? No.

One group I’ve found just now while mining Facebook is California Tea Party which hopes to; “Coordinate and Provide Support to all future Tea Party Protests across the Golden State. Next protests scheduled for April 15, 2009.” Only problem here is there are events scheduled for the 11^th of April.

The issue in getting everybody to at least mine each other’s pages seems to be one of ego. I contacted one group coordinator/originator about possibly listing his event at the TCOT/SGP/DONTGO site and his response was; “They should list their events on our site, meetup.com is a better place to organize”. Ugh.

While I would agree it looks like at first his site would be a good one, I posted a question last week which as yet remains unanswered, and it doesn’t seem to generate email when one is posted.

While I appreciate the energy which is boiling today ready for release, what seems to be happening is ego causing constant re-invention of the wheel, and this in turn makes it hard for mom and dad to find out where to go or even to get them involved.

At this point I’m wondering if a group with resources shouldn’t think about possibly paying either for Google Adwords or there is a Google Grants program for non-profits if any one group really qualifies.

As of now at the grassroots level, trolling the comments areas of local newspapers online and pasting links where appropriate seems to be gathering some traction. Someone is always angry in articles about taxes, and replying to their post with a link to a TaxRevolt site can help not only point them in the right direction, but also anyone else reading the comment stream.

Many newspapers also have their own forum areas, and these are also useful to get the word out to people fed up with the destruction of our economy and out of control spending.

As we learn from our mistakes, this all leads up to a really big event on July 4^th. We have momentum going and the present Administration is supplying plenty of fuel almost on a daily basis.

It’s time to get everybody on one page, and I think we can do it if we can just decide where that page will be.