DC Tea Party Looking to be a Huge Success
h/t to Ms. Chandler Ramelli at ANotSoCapitolIdea.com for the info, and for helping put this together.
For those who will be in the DC area tomorrow (April 15) between 11am – 3pm, I strongly urge you to attend the DC Tea Party, which will be staged at Lafayette Square and outside of the United States Treasury (yes, we’re talking belly of the beast here).
Here is a partial list of speakers scheduled to be in attendance:
Princella Smith, American Solutions
Grover Norquist, Americans for Tax Reform
Tobin Smith, Fox News
Brian Johnson, Americans for Tax Reform
Alan Keyes, Activist
Mike Church, Mike Church Radio Show
Rachel Hoff, College Republicans
Tom Schatz, Citizens against Government Waste
Josh Bolin, Reagan.org
For those of you unfamiliar with Washington, DC, below is a simple GoogleMap that I put together to illustrate the area.
View DC Tea Party in a larger map
While there is ample parking in the area, I warn you, it’s never cheap, unless you get lucky and score a street spot (usually around the monuments).
Instead of risking a $20 parking tab, or ranging parking ticket fee, my suggestion would be to find parking somewhere in Northern Virginia and just take the Metro in.
The event (both Lafayette Square and the Treasury) are located within a few blocks of 5 different metro stations: Farragut North, Farragut West, McPherson Square, Metro Center and Federal Triangle.
If you’re coming from Northern Virginia, both the Orange Line and Blue Line will get you to the event without transferring. If you have to take the Yellow line, you’ll have to transfer at L’Enfant Plaza.
Don’t forget your signs!
Just how popular is TaxDayTeaParty.com?
There have been many on the left who have been diligently trying to discredit the rapidly growing Tea Party Movement as nothing more than a few angry activists.
Well, I guess in terms of web traffic, these few angry activists are more energized than the ever-so-famous Barack Obama army.
What this link shows is the increase in traffic rank, as calculated by Alexa.com.
Of course, any computer geek will quickly rush in and discredit Alexa’s ranking system. However, if you look at some of the other metrics presented here, TaxDayTeaParty.com comes up strong in every category, bringing to question the real power of the post-election Obama machine.
For those of you who don’t follow this stuff regularly and may be confused, let me just walk you through the more important metrics.
While traffic rank is an interesting number to follow, most techies are more concerned with things like pageviews, as shown on the “pageview” tab here.
Now Alexa doesn’t provide you with the exact number pageviews, but instead displays the data as a percentage of overall online activity.
Even so, TaxDayTeaParty.com comes out strong again.
Using another metric, bounce rate, you can easily see how engaging a particular website is. Basically, bounce rate represents nothing more than a percentage of people who come to a certain page on a site and then leave without clicking to other internal links. This metric is important because if a site has content that isn’t relevant or interesting, they’ll leave.
Looking at the two sties, TaxDayTeaParty.com wins another round. Since this metric is based on a percentage of those who exit the site, it’s better to have a lower a number, which TaxDayTeaParty.com does, with a bounce rate of around 35% versus Obama’s 45%.
Yet they’re still trying to discredit this movement?
While I could easily stop there, I might as well finish this out by examining the “Time on Site” numbers.
This metric is self explanatory, it represents the average amount of time visitors spend browsing a particular website. If you’re a web developer, this is an important metric because the time spent on site will often reflect the quality of your sites content, structure, and interactivity.
So looking at the two sites, once again TaxDayTeaParty.com is the victor, with an average time on site of just under 3 minutes, versus Obama’s, which is right around 1 minute and 30 seconds.
While it’s easy to understand why TaxDayTeaParty.com is doing better than the Obama site at present, it’s important to note that in the weeks following the election, everyone was worried about what Obama was going to do with his “massive grassroots army.”
While he may still have a massive email list and a flashy website, in terms of measured attention, it looks like it’s become a model that can be (and is being) replicated by other organizations and movements successfully.
Just for kicks, here is how TaxDayTeaParty.com does against other sites:
TaxDayTeaParty.com vs. MoveOn.org
Winner: TaxDayTeaParty.com
TaxDayTeaParty.com vs. Democrats.org
Winner: TaxDayTeaParty.com
TaxDayTeaParty.com vs. DailyKos.com
Winner: DailyKos.com (for now)
Is your tea party listed?
A few weeks ago I created a GoogleMap to help a few co-workers and myself keep up all the different tea parties happening around the country. At first, this was an extremely easy project to manage, however, as the momentum started to build, these tea parties spread like wildfire, as the map shows:
View Larger Map
Odds are there are dozens of events that we haven’t even heard about yet, and if that is the case, please leave the details in the comments section below, and I’ll make sure I get them posted ASAP.
Also, if you want to embed this map on your blog or website, here is the code:
<iframe width=”425″ height=”350″ frameborder=”0″ scrolling=”no” marginheight=”0″ marginwidth=”0″ src=”http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=112875499027114938790.0004647d9f61bab744fd4&t=h&ll=36.713898,-96.379716&spn=21.879292,53.294898&output=embed”></iframe><br /><small><a href=”http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=112875499027114938790.0004647d9f61bab744fd4&t=h&ll=36.713898,-96.379716&spn=21.879292,53.294898&source=embed” style=”color:#0000FF;text-align:left”>View Larger Map</a></small>
Special thanks to Brendan Steinhauser for helping keep this map up-to-date!
Video: Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal (1933)
It’s sickening how many parallels have been observed between President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Barack Obama. As the video below shows, even the tone Obama is using now is almost exactly the same as Roosevelt’s.
What would an adult film download tax stimulate?
The answer is the New York economy, apparently.
It looks like New York Governor, David Paterson, is taking a new approach to stimulating the state’s economy. With this proposal, each dollar the taxpayers of New York spend on self stimulation, 4% of that will go towards stimulating Governor Paterson’s budget.
From NYDailyNews.com:
This is the best tax you ever had.
A state proposal to add a 4% tax for downloading movies and music will also apply to Internet porn.
Gov. Paterson recently suggested the so-called iPod tax to help close a $15 billion budget deficit, but few realized the levy would also apply to XXX-rated material.
This tax doesn’t just apply to adult film downloads, but instead applies to all downloaded media, including movies and music.
Unfortunately, this isn’t an unusual tax proposal in New York. This is also the same state that has proposed taxing Amazon transactions, as well putting a heavy tax on soda.
With that being said, I don’t see this proposal being the climax.