sisu

"Sissy Willis, Scott Brown doesn't want to hear from you"

"Sissy Willis, he doesn't want to hear from you," Dan Riehl just twittered in response to our own early-afternoon tweet:

Just called Scott Brown's local number, again as yesterday & phone mailbox full. Arggh!

But the DC office of our junior Senator did pick up, with a real person on the other end after a two- or three-minute wait on hold with a tasteful Mozart concerto playing in the background. As we wrote in the comments of Dan's related blogpost, "Usual Suspects: The Dodd-Frank Sell-Out":

When I asked which way the calls were trending, [the woman who answered the phone] said she couldn't say. I asked whether that meant she WOULDN'T say, and she said yes. Sounds to me like they're trending NO!

For a reality check, we ran our gut reaction by Tuck, who agreed with our assessment but had this bit of sadder-but-wiser wisdom to add:

The no's are the people who WOULD call. Those who don't call don't know what's going on anyway.

Update: Some thoughtful perspective from fellow Brown campaigner Professor Jacobson of Legal Insurrection. Be sure to read the whole thing:

I'm not going to engage in the name calling some have directed at Brown. I believe Brown was sincere in his belief that the legislation does more good than bad. And I'm still glad that I supported his campaign, because Brown stood firm on health care and other negative Democratic initiatives [Also, our own view, the "Massachusetts Miracle" served as a catalyst to break up the incumbent logjam, promising "term limits by other means" in local and national elections this spring and come November].

But Scott Brown failed to see the forest for the trees on financial reform.

Whatever good the financial legislation accomplishes could have been accomplished without another impenetrable behemoth, sprinkled with lobbyist-induced goodies, which expands government for the sake of expanding government, and which constitutes a cure which is worse than the disease.

Update: Michelle Malkin "Buzzworthy" link!

Update II: "A Sissy Willis Scott Brown Tribute" from Dan.

Update III: Instalanche!

Update IV: Interesting email exchange this evening with Professor Reynolds:

We: He's getting an earful from us Tea Party people today. Too late for FinReg, but maybe next time?

Glenn Reynolds: Indeed. Somebody should make noises about running a Tea Party candidate against him in the primary if he drifts further. . . .

Note: Brown will be up for election to a full term in 2012.

Update V: "Sissy Willis I have one thing to say to you," says blog/twitter buddy DaTechGuy:

This post is spot on, I wish I wrote it.

Crossposted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

Scott Brown had tapped into a long-repressed, almost religious yearning to breathe free

We drove up Rte 1 to Kowloon Restaurant in Saugus — just north of Boston — to meet and greet Hottie McAwesome, who stopped by our neck of the woods on his "Citizen Open House Tour" early afternoon. To top-down control freaks like the entrenched Democrat machinesters into whose gears Scott Brown had thrown a monkey-wrench last week, it might have seemed sheer chaos, but for our grassroots tribe of Yankee-style individualists — lifelong Republicans like ourselves, current and former Democrats, Independents (known here in Taxachussets as "Unenrolled"), it was an intelligent mob.

A happy, happy throng pressed in upon their conquering hero. We estimate a crowd of about one thousand.

Spontaneous chants broke out as celebrants thanked Scott Brown for breaking the back of the Beacon Hill mob.

Scott Brown had tapped into a long-repressed, almost religious yearning to breathe free amongst us Red Staters living behind enemy lines here in Taxachusetts. As one woman — a 71-year-old resident of nearby blue-collar Revere who proudly told us she was still working — put it, she'd been a lifelong Democrat until about ten years ago, when she realized the state had turned radically left and unresponsive to citizens' concerns. For her and so many of us, Scott Brown's electoral victory was a lamp beside the golden door.

Pajamas Media scoops Washington Post on Scott Brown internet story

Caption from our September 2004 post "To sleep perchance to blog": Classic pajama in silky satin charmeuse with a subtle luster. An everyday luxury, for sleeping or blogging, from Victoria's Secret. See also "Just a gal sitting in our living room in our virtual pajamas."

"With hats off to Glenn Reynolds, our Army of Davids is disintermediating the old-boy networks via the Internet and laying waste to the enemies of freedom. Twitter at will!" we wrote in the comments to Prof. Jacobson's concise, terse, pithy tongue-in-cheek putdown of the media powers that were:

Talk about dominance of the Internet.

Patrick Ruffini has an article in The Washington Post, which relates how Republicans won the internet in the Scott Brown election.

I'm shocked.

AND the article flew in over his virtual transom Saturday noon, a day before the WaPo's official publication date, via author Patrick Ruffini's tweet. How apt. 'Course Pajamas Media scooped the Post by days with its exclusive pair of columns by Prof. Jacobson and ourselves covering the beat last Wednesday and Thursday. Flashback to September 17, 2004:

Jonathan Klein, former CBS news executive: It's an important moment, because you couldn't have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of checks and balances, and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing what he thinks.

Indeed.

Scott Brown election: Massachusetts voters read the tea leaves

"So while Anglo-Saxons depended on 'enlightened self-interest,' the Europeans felt the need to legislate virtue," writes Lionel Chetwynd, shining a revelatory light upon the fundamentally Un-American underpinnings of the leftist project:

America was born as the former. But a corrupt academy, a narcissistic underpaid media (all of whom slavishly worshiped the Europeans), and a century and a half of immigration brought the collectivist view into the American mainstream. The health-care debate is not really about who should be covered, but about taking decisions that were once the responsibility of the individual and turning them over to the collective.

Although born long after the Civil War, I have lived through this struggle before. In the 1960s, Pierre Trudeau took Canada, then a country of self-reliant, broad-shouldered, rugged individualists, and by sheer force of political magnetism, transformed it into a post-modern society, a European clone of overtaxed politically correct worrywarts subject to heavy taxes designed to redistribute wealth. For a long time, it was a winning formula that even conservatives found seductive. After all, as George Bernard Shaw observed, if you rob Peter to pay Paul you can most certainly count on Paul’s vote. It took almost a half a century for Stephen Harper to reawaken Canadians’ sense of self-respect and begin the first faltering steps toward dismantling the monstrosity that Trudeaupian liberals had created.

"It appears the voters of Massachusetts required a mere 11 months and 28 days," adds Chetwynd, referring to the timespan between Scott Brown's Tuesday election to The People's Seat and Rick Santelli's "Rant for the Ages" — a truth-to-power call for a new "Tea Party" February 19, 2009 in response* to "President Obama's redistributionist mortgage-bailout plan — delivered from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade this morning to the delight of traders and television viewers alike," as we blogged that day in "Santelli reads the tea leaves." Citing Lee Cary's American Thinker essay "Awaiting the Awakening of the Forgotten Man," we wrote:

Looking at the above CNBC poll of readers ready to join Rick Santelli's "Chicago Tea Party," together with a groundswell of pitchfork-bearing bloggers, we'd say the awakening may be happening sooner rather than later. Professor Sumner foresaw where utopianists always go wrong:

All schemes for patronizing "the working classes" savor of condescension. They are impertinent and out of place in this free democracy. There is not, in fact, any such state of things or any such relation as would make projects of this kind appropriate. Such projects demoralize both parties, flattering the vanity of one and undermining the self-respect of the other.

Thank you, Mr. President, for your assist in awakening the forgotten man.

In related thinking, TigerHawk is asking readers to answer the question "Who have been the enemies of business in history, and what have been their arguments or tactics." We left some suggestions in his comments and recommend our readers if so inclined head on over and offer your own suggestions.

*"The first revolt [actually] took place on President’s Day in Smurf-blue Seattle," as rabble rouser Michelle Malkin noted at the time, but Santelli caught the nation's attention and soon became primogenitor in the nation's imagination.

Scott Brown disintermediation: The replacement of political parties by internet enthusiasts

Look, Ma. We're featured in the totally awesome Chris Muir's Day by Day: "Zed, new media RULED on Brown --  SISU, Legal Insurrection, Ace of Spades ..."

"There was a lot of some internet-based disintermediation going on" in the runup to the Scott Brown victory in the Massachusetts Senatorial election, Glenn Reynolds suggested to Michael Barone in a must-see PJM "Instavision" interview, "MASS UPHEAVAL: The Dems' Super Majority Is Gone, and Michael Barone Says It's Only the Beginning":

Reynolds: One thing that struck me about the Scott Brown campaign was that he really didn't seem to be getting a lot of support from the RNC, and there was a lot of some internet-based disintermediation going on. People who supported Scott Brown went directly to the campaign, he ran the Moneybomb that raised a million dollars a day for the whole week before the election, he brought in thousands of volunteers who came in from out of state, who came in on the internet, and this seems to me to be another step in sort of the replacement of political parties by internet enthusiasts ... Am I overreading this, is this my notorious internet enthusiasm, or is there really something to this?

Barone: No. I think you've got an institutional position to defend as the proprietor of Instapundit.com, but I think you're dead-on right about this. The fact is that Scott Brown was able to use the internet as a means of communication with voters across the country ...There's a larger point here than just campaign malpractice though. The only places that Martha Coakley, the Democrat, carried were a few old mill towns [and] what David Brooks called in a NYT column a couple of weeks ago the "educated class" ... some of the affluent suburbs west of Boston. But the fact is there are more town folks than gown folks in Massachusetts.

 "What advice would you give people in the Tea Party movement about what to do next?" asked Reynolds:

Barone: Go around and search out candidates, and find some people locally. One of the fascinating things about this Massachusetts race is that I, the co-author of The Almanac of American Politics, never heard of Scott Brown two months ago ... He was not high on my radar screen. Now he's a major national figure, and that victory speech he gave last night, which was terrific, was almost in the nature of a State of the Union Address ... I think Scott Brown set the parameters for where this country wants policy to be headed ... We've got an awful lot of talented, bright, energetic people out there that people like me have never heard of. The Tea Partiers have got an opportunity, I think, to coalesce around some of these people ... The Tea Party People can make their voices heard ... Compare the Obama enthusiasts of 2008 with the Tea Partiers of 2009 and 2010. The Obama enthusiasts were entranced by style . . . the Tea Party People are concerned about substance. 

We noticed that former Hillary sparring partner Rick Lazio is following the Brown disintermediation-by-the-internet playbook,* having learned via Twitter that some of Brown's former advisors are advising Lazio in his run for Governor of New York. Are these the same Romney advisors who helped orchestrate Brown's Perfect-Storm campaign? Is it all part of a larger Romney strategy for Oval Office 2012?

Update: We were wondering about the parallel understory -- the Shakespeareanesque play within a play? -- of Chris Muir's cartoon, too, all those teabagging references. Sounds like something the boys at Red Eye would have served up. Not exactly our cuppa, but good for a few laughs, again in the Shakespearean sense of the buffoonish foil? And as with Shakespeare, all part of the great tragic-comic "world's a stage."

Update to the update from Chris Muir himself:

I would say rather more in the Chaucer/Canterbury Tales buffoonery!

Quite a rude Tale, when one reads Chaucer ...

:)

Update II: No time to say more now, but Prof. William Jacobson of Legal Insurrection nails it:

While Facebook and blogs were important to fundraising and messaging, Twitter is what allowed pro-Brown activists to stay in contact with each other, to feed each other news links, and generally to keep up each other's spirits at a time when the radar was showing that Brown had no chance,

I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that this was the first American Twitter revolution.

Update: Dan Riehl links: "We be intermediatin' anyway! heh!"

*We picked up on Lazio's Brown advisors via Twitter, started following Lazio, and shortly thereafter found that we were being followed by Lazio, who direct messaged us a welcome aboard: "Thank you for being part of our movement. Please consider taking a moment to sign up."

Social networking key to Brown’s success: Pajamas Media lead story

"Been following your coverage of the MA senate election and was wondering if you wanted to write a piece for PJ Media about it," Pajamas Media's Chicago Editor Rick Moran of Right Wing Nuthouse emailed yesterday evening:

It will be a challenge; we're looking for 800 words of the kind of local color you've been writing about blended with some analysis by noon on Wednesday. Perhaps if you could give us some more personal reflections of both you and those you've met in MA, that would complement another piece we'll have on pretty much the straight politics of it.

Piece of cake. Nerve-wracking to work under deadline, but it gets the creative juices flowing, and besides, our frenetic send-Mr-Brown-to-Washington blogathon of the last couple of weeks had prepared us to focus and produce. Word count is a snap with free online count tool. As per PJM policy, a short excerpt below. Click here to read the whole thing. Update: The full article is now crossposted below:

Social Networking Key to Brown’s Success
The inside story of how Tea Party twitterers, Facebook friends, and Blogspot buddies helped win the race for Scott Brown.

The big story of the Massachusetts special election was so small it flew in under the radar of the old-boy networks and their allies in the legacy media.

As Glenn Reynolds wrote way back in 1999 — prefiguring locally what is happening now on a national scale — "The powers-that-be aren’t anymore." When Tennessee poobahs tried to ram through higher taxes that year, opponents "simply bypassed the traditional gatekeepers in the media and took their case directly to the people. The people responded."

That's what happened in Massachusetts yesterday. Republican Scott Brown and his Army of Davids bypassed the gatekeepers who would have us believing the Democrat establishment's hand-picked candidate, Martha Coakley, was a shoo-in. The citizens were mad as hell and weren't going to take it anymore, and thanks to the viral nature of electronic social networks like blogs, Facebook and Twitter, they started to find and encourage each other to create an "intelligent crowd" that took its first baby steps at the Tea Parties and Town Halls of last year, then found its voice in embracing Scott Brown's long-shot candidacy during the whirlwind six weeks between his primary win December 8 and the January 19 special election.

As Jonathan Hoenig wrote about the Tea Partiers when we were just getting started last April, "They're angry about the taxes, yes, but they're really angry about the philosophy behind the taxes, and that's collectivism," a point consistently lost upon Northeast Corridor elites from both sides of the aisle, who fiddled while Rome burned, amusing each other by dissing us as lunatic-fringe "teabaggers."

Blogging was my own gateway to the Tea Party movement. A former armchair activist, I had ventured into the blogosphere first as a visitor just before 9/11 and then as an active participant a couple of years later. Here was a way to say what was on your mind and reach like-minded — and sometimes dislike-minded —souls out there in cyberspace. Links from other blogs, large and small, extended your audience, and some of the people you met through blogging would become good friends. Then came the 2008 Presidential election, and things turned serious. You watched in horror as the Obama juggernaut mobilized to ram a collectivist nightmare down the throats of the American people. By then you'd become an obsessive twitterer with over 1,000 followers, a purveyor of what Jordan Raynor calls "crowd-sourced journalism," able to spread the word almost instantaneously from your own followers to your followers' followers, a smart mob self-organizing to pursue a shared goal. Driven by a visceral fear that the lights were about to go out on the Shining City Upon a Hill, thousands of believers in American exceptionalism began to apply the online social-networking skills they had developed as amateurs in a virtual life-or-death struggle.

Starting December 9, the day after Scott Brown's primary victory, bloggers like myself and Cornell Prof. William A. Jacobson of Legal Insurrection took Bill Kristol's idea to make Scott Brown's race a "referendum on Obamacare" and ran with it. We both communicated directly with the campaign through Facebook and Twitter, and both burst out of our virtual worlds from time to time to help get out the vote by phone banking at regional offices. At campaign headquarters in Needham one day, Jacobson was actually kicked off the phone "because I was spending too much time on Twitter!" Blogging and twittering our on-the-ground experiences, from phone banking to informal exit polling, fired up our readers — from Massachusetts, around the country and beyond —  to contribute and volunteer.

The campaign itself was totally social-networking savvy. As New York Times columnist Russ Douthat wrote, Brown "used Internet fundraising to put the fear of God into" the old-boy network. If you were from out of state or unable to come in to one of the regional offices to phone bank, they had the technology to allow you to make calls from home.

Like-minded big-time bloggers like Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit and Michelle Malkin showered Prof. Jacobson, myself and others with links. The message had gone viral, and the comments and tweets poured in, a groundswell of Tea Party Fever that would bring in dollars and volunteer time to get out the vote and help sweep our long-shot candidate to an astonishing 52-to-47 percent victory, with one in five Democrats supporting Brown, "who benefited from high suburban turnout" according to a Rasmussen Reports poll, enough of an edge so the Beacon Hill machine couldn't cheat.

"Winning is fun," fellow blogger-in-arms Dan Riehl of The Riehl Review twittered on victory night, adding the "beauty of New Media is getting local perspective." Indeed. The ability of bloggers on the ground "behind enemy lines" to use social-networking tools to share experiences instantaneously with hundreds of thousands of Tea Party sympathizers across the nation and the world is akin, perhaps, to the way Radio Free Europe was once used to give hope to oppressed peoples behind the Iron Curtain.

No longer dependent upon legacy media to tell our story, we are able — in Glenn Reynolds's formulation — to disintermediate the old-boy networks via the internet.

Sissy Willis is a Tea Party Fever sufferer who blogs and twitters behind enemy lines in Taxachusetts.

"Brown bags it"

"He did it!" says the  Boston Herald. "You did it!" says the man of the hour, US Senator-Elect Scott Brown. Thanks to the disintermediation-via-the-internet factor, the vox populi was heard yesterday above the din of bloviating, self-appointed elites who would have us believe they know better than we tea partiers do what's good for us:

"I thought it was going to be me against the machine. I was wrong. It’s all of us against the machine,” Brown told rollicking supporters at the Boston Park Plaza Hotel. “You have shown everyone now that you are the machine.

Gentlemen, start your engines!

Update: Sarah to Greta: "All along I was rootin' for him!"

Exit polling: High fives among dems, indeps at sight of my Scott Brown sign

We exchanged the secret signal —  big grins, high fives and friendly banter prompted by the sight of our Scott Brown sign — with lots of fellow citizens as we walked to and from our polling place at the Williams School in Chelsea this morning. These two affable gentlemen were on their way to a job and said they would vote for Brown later on. Both were independents, the largest voting bloc in Taxachusetts, polling strongly towards our man Scott, and were delighted to pose holding the sign.

"Light snow in Chelsea but avalanche of happy faces, high fives among dems, indeps at sight of my Scott Brown sign," we twittered in 140 characters or less following informal "exit polling" this morning. The snow was dusting the sidewalks as we hurried back home after voting here in Chelsea-by-the-Sea just north of Boston, our Scott Brown sign held high. It was species recognition with all but a handful of people we passed. Those few looked grim, shaking their heads in resignation when we asked would they be voting for Brown. What an up it was to see that free-at-last aura that came over most of our fellow pedestrians as they eagerly shared their enthusiasm over having a real choice in the special election to fill The People's Seat.

More "exit polling" of the social-media kind from a few of our commenters. Here's out-of-stater Gayle Miller of And you thought YOU were cranky?:

I wore my "It's the people's seat, stupid!" tee shirt yesterday roaming around Virginia having lunch with Sis and all for the Holiday and everywhere I went people were saluting the shirt and all knew what it meant! That says something. We in Virginia apparently are rooting for Scott Brown is my best take on the matter! Our new governor took office this past Saturday!

"Sissy, no matter how it turns out, Brown or Coakley, the message has been delivered," comments Granite Stater Tom Bowler of Libertarian Leanings:

The question remains, will the good old boys pay attention or ignore it?

And from our venerable father and most reliable commenter, Goomp:

Idealists should understand that working hard and honestly to produce better material goods at lower prices produces profits and makes a kinder, better society than hand wringing and imposing incurably inefficient government controls. Vote for change. Vote for Scott Brown.

The warm and wonderful women known as inspectors who "man" the polls — There were a few men, but mostly women — told us voting was heavier than for the primaries, and the animated banter among voters was all about Democrats and Independents fed up with what Mark Steyn calls "Hopeychange." As a young person who had voted for the first time in 2008 told a Boston Globe reporter [via Instapundit], " All my friends voted for Obama … All my friends are saying Obama promised a lot but he’s doing nothing."

Then there was the woman we chatted with outside the polling place who told us she and her husband, son and 90-year-old mother — who had voted absentee — were lifelong Democrats who had had it up to here with unresponsive, overreaching government and were relieved to have "a good man" like Scott Brown to help steer the ship of state back on course.

Finally, the arch stylings of a commenter calling himself Sir Archy, who reminds us that if history is a guide, the Democrats aren't going to give up without a dirty fight:

I went to Mr. Curley earlier Today with my Vote.  He laugh'd in my Face, saying the Matter had been decided.  "What?" says I, "My Ballot has not been cast! I should be pleas'd to inform you how I would vote."  "You are not only a duly enroll'd Voter," says he, "in a Voting Machine in East Boston, but your Vote for Mrs. Coakley has aleady been registered.  Did you honestly think the Opinions of either the Living or the Dead carry much Weight with the Democratick Party?"

The answer, of course, goes back to that "avalanche of happy faces" in our opening paragraph. As Tea Party pal Stoutcat of Grand Rants writes — in a variation of Hugh Hewitt's famous line — "If It's a Landslide, They Can't Steal It":

Please. Get out and vote today. The weather’s not at its best, but don’t let that stop you.

Scott Brown ran an honest, clean, and professional campaign. He’s a good man, and will be a good Senator for us in Washington. He’s well ahead in the polls and he should win this election. Don’t let it be just another election stolen by Democrats. Get out and vote. Take your friends with you.

Meanwhile, comments are coming in fast and furious from all around at Prof. William Jacobson's "Brown vs Coakley LIVE all day." It sets the heart beating faster to watch the comments scroll by and hear them coming in over the transom. Head on over to read what people on the ground are saying and add your own two cents' worth. Here are three recent ones from Norsu, one of the earliest and most dedicated promoters of the Brown candidacy on Twitter, who manages to condense enormous amounts of telling information into the fewer-than-140-characters format:

I hit 4 polls Metro West - running 70-80% Brown, Some Coakley sign holders lifeless not into it. Browners socializing

metro west all going Scott Brown here - but its inner cities where Coakley may carry some. I think Brown 10 points up

Talk radio, Boston voters may be turning Browns way, thats game over

Turning Brown's way? If he does, James Michael Curley will be turning over in his grave.

Update: Instalanche! "SISSY WILLIS: Exit polling: High fives among dems, indeps at sight of my Scott Brown sign. Well, it’s not scientific …"

"Scott Brown used the internet to put the fear of God into the old-boy network"

"Today the Massachusetts race for US Senator has the attention of the nation," headlines local WCVB-TV news anchor Bianca Delgarsa, and "The good news is the roads are mostly clear today, with a few showers and a dusting of snow outside Rte 128." It's time for Massachusetts citizens to vote and to get out the vote for Scott Brown, US Senator! Click here to find your polling location and make GOTV calls from home. For all the latest from the grassroots up, check in early and often with Prof. William Jacobson, who will be live-blogging the election today.

"For a brief shining moment, late in the 2008 campaign, Democrats thought that they might own the Internet," writes NYT columnist Russ Douthat (via Instapundit), but a funny thing happened on the way to the January 19 special election to fill the people's seat here in Massachusetts. Presumably a liberal, Douthat gives a first-rate report of the facts on the ground, but blinded by his own ideology, he misses the bigger picture. First a few excerpts from his "Internet Politics From Both Sides Now" and then our own critique below:

Republican politicians have taken over Twitter. Sarah Palin has 1.2 million followers on Facebook. And in liberal Massachusetts, Scott Brown, the Republican Senate candidate, has used Internet fund-raising to put the fear of God into the Bay State’s establishment.

Last Monday, Brown raised $1.3 million from an online “money bomb,” and his campaign reportedly went on to raise a million dollars a day throughout the week. The race’s online landscape looks like last November’s in reverse: from YouTube views to Facebook fans to Twitter followers, Brown enjoys an Obama-esque edge over his Democratic rival, Martha Coakley …

But win or lose, he’s demonstrated there’s no necessary connection between online organizing and liberal politics. The Web is just like every pre-Internet political arena: ideology matters less than the level of anger at the incumbent party, and the level of enthusiasm an insurgent candidate can generate.

It isn't the "level of anger at the incumbent party" per se but disgust with the old-boy networks of both parties that got under the Tea Partiers' skin. As we wrote in a letter to the editor of the Harvard Crimson last April:

Perhaps had you been on the scene and talked to some of us "hysterics" in person [at the Boston Common tea party in front of the State House] last Wednesday — rather than rely on biased media screeds — you might have gotten a clue.

For many of us Tea Partiers it wasn't about taxes per se. Instead, it's the Rahm Emanuel thing about "taking advantage of a serious crisis" by ramming through big-government initiatives that citizens would never approve were they not distracted.

Douthat writes wistfully about the internet's "capacity to disappoint idealists":

Indeed, it may be crueler to dreamers, because it offers an artificial sense of intimacy with politicians, without delivering any practical results …This is the bitter lesson many net-roots types have drawn from Obama’s first year in office. The promises of transparency have given way to the reality of backroom deal-cutting.

And there's the difference between liberals and conservatives.* Clandestinely funded top down by shady anti-American Soros money, the nutroots were the unwitting astroturfers the left kept accusing us of being. Their "brief shining moment," as Douthat calls it, may have turned out to be a flash in the pan, but the Tea Partiers had their eyes on a loftier goal, the Shining City Upon a Hill of American exceptionalism.

"This is not the crowd that plans to stay home on election day," writes fellow Tea Partier Tom Bowler of Libertarian Leanings, who notes that "Tea Party fever in the form of active support for Scott Brown has spread north of the border into the Granite State," quoting one of his commenters to make the point:

This weekend I was amazed to see a couple folks waving at passing motorists while sporting "NH Conservatives for Brown" placards along the "strip" (Commercial avenue that NOW looks like ANY well developed Mass. retail strip — complete with vacant stores and buildings) of our resort community that caters heavily to folks from, well, Mass. folk with "extra" cash to spend on affordable recreation and tax-free retail shopping.

I wonder if our southbound guests made the connection, as they returned to their home state from the weekend?

The usual local suspects. No "imported" astroturf folks.

Yup. Grassroots from the ground up. Not to mention disintermediating the old-boy networks via the Internet. If you're a like-minded Bay Stater, be sure to vote for Scott Brown in the special election today.

*Dan Riehl gets the difference between liberals and conservatives down to 140 characters or less on Twitter: "Lib win=light candles, join hands, sing "we shall overcome"/ Cons get drunk, laid & fire guns'n chit. I think that's why I'm a conservative."

Scott Brown: DON'T VOTE ALONE. If it's not close, they can't cheat!

The People's Rally for Scott Brown for US Senator brought down the house yesterday at Worcester's historic Mechanics Hall, "an acoustical masterpiece … internationally regarded as one of the world's great concert halls for its superb acoustic and inspirational beauty."

We're emailing the following message to all our Massachusetts friends and relatives as part of Scott Brown's voterbomb push to get out the vote for tomorrow's special election:

Tomorrow's the big day.

We Tea Partiers behind enemy lines here in Taxachusetts sprang to life under ideal growing conditions afforded by big-government overreach last year, and now is our moment to fire "The Scott heard 'round the world."

Scott Brown has asked me and other volunteers to write to our friends and neighbors to fulfill a pledge to make sure you will be voting for him in tomorrow's special election to fill what some have called the "Kennedy seat." As our candidate explained to a clueless David Gergen in last week's debate with Democrat Attorney General Martha Coakley:

"It's not the Kennedy seat. It's not the Democrats' seat. It's the people's seat!"

Here's the message from campaign headquarters:

"It’s crunch time. This is it; the moment when the Massachusetts Miracle morphs from an impossible dream into reality. Tell Scott Brown how many voters you will personally ensure show up and vote on Tuesday. This means you are saying you will be responsible for verifying that your network ACTUALLY VOTED, how many voters you will personally ensure show up and vote on Tuesday. This means you are saying you will be responsible for verifying that."

Quite a responsibility, and maybe a little pushy, but the Democrats have shown they are perfectly ready and willing to use dirty tricks to steal the election should our candidate appear to be winning. The latest poll numbers are encouraging, but we've got to get out the vote.

As Hugh Hewitt famously said, "If it's not close, they can't cheat."

I strongly encourage you to join "Don't Vote Alone" by contacting your own network of Massachusetts friends and neighbors so our GOTV effort will go viral. If you agree, click here to pledge the number of people you will contact.

And may the best man win!

Note: For your enjoyment and edification, my full series of "Scott Brown for Senator" blogposts is available here.

If your network of friends includes Massachusetts voters, please join Scott Brown's "Don't Vote Alone" and spread the word!

This just in from the estimable Professor Jacobson of Legal Insurrection:

This blog will go "live" tomorrow, starting in the morning, following the developments in the Massachusetts Senate special election.

Assuming the technology works (!), I'll have a live window in which people can see my posts and comment in real time (note to trolls, I still can block you).

There also will be live Twitter feeds from people "on the ground" [including ourselves, on the ground here in the heavily Democrat/immigrant Chelsea-by-the-Sea just north of Boston] as well as updates to news links and photos (which commenters can post also).

At the end of the evening, we'll either celebrate or commiserate together.

This is going to be fun!

Update: Sol of Solomonia links. Thanks, old friend!

Update II: More Malkin Buzzworthy. How sweet it is.