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Oklahoma City is within a six-hour drive from hordes of Freepers in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Arkansas. It's within a 12-14 hour drive from even more, including me. My wife and I could leave here before dawn on Saturday, attend a late Saturday afternoon rally in OKC, get a motel room and drive back Sunday. Tens of thousands of other Freepers and conservatives would be able to do the same.

Take a page from the left-wing moonbats' playbook and ally ourselves with other groups such as VFW, American Legion and ... oh duh ... the Republican Party and other allied organizations like Young Republicans.

It would be difficult for the left-wing moonbats to organize an effective counter-protest for exactly the same reason that it's difficult for us to organize an effective counter-protest in DC: OKC is close to a lot of Freepers, but too far away from too many left-wing moonbats.

OKC has the added advantage of milder winter weather than some other venues I could suggest. There's a memorial there to the victims of the Murrah Building bomber. I'm sure that we could rally there; the speakers could weave that thread into "the need to fight terrorism wherever we find it."

One thing I know for sure: we could get one helluva lot more than 40 people there, and you know it.

We sponsored and assisted with nationwide rallies in 2001 and in 2003 that had venues in over 250 cities each. We wrote off national coverage and instead concentrated on local. It was effective and achieved the goals we set for ourselves.

So what if there was one large rally in the middle of the country? The local press would cover but with possible the exception of Fox, national media will ignore it. So you get coverage in one or two newspapers and maybe a tv station.

That's why calling for a national conservative rally in one city is a disaster. It relies on national coverage for success and that's unlikely to materialize. Every year the Pro Life movement has a rally in DC that has had up to one million people attend. They get zero media coverage.

That's why I don't understand the position Kristinn and TGSL took on this thread. They got a mention on Fox and that was worth everything whether 5 people or 5000 showed up. I would be ecstatic. This is my opinion, and I'm going to be brutal. I think some people's reasons for putting on rallies is screwed up. It seems the rallies are more about self validation than being politically effective.