I'll take a shot of the Absolut.

Yay for all of us. I had a lot of fun, even when you and Smash were picking on me ;)

How did you go up 5K to none for us? It's all the same pot of money for SoA so it matters not, I'm just curious. Was that the Hugh Hewitt money?

This was incredible. And I have so much to be thankful for....
We done good, eh? Feels good to BE good and share it all with such amazing people.
I have allot of thank yous to work on!
S

You guys really kicked ass. Funny part is, you were the biggest group--did you see that happening when this started? Heh.

But everybody who participated kicked ass.

I think even more important than the money raised was raising awareness though. More people than ever are aware of the good things our people are doing overseas, and that has a real impact too. I'm SO tired of our military being thought of as people who just go kick people's asses.

(Looking over shoulder at boots in closet) Well, we are good at that - but the one thing that has made the American soldier relatively unique is that most people he comes in contact with like him - as long as they surrender.

I was surprised at how big we got - but as I said during the event, I had a ready-built horde in the Milbloggers webring, many of them people who are ready to jump on a good bandwagon.

You and Michele stood it up, though, and, especially in Michele's groups offerings (if I kept everybody straight) some real creativity.

It might not make any difference at all, but I wonder how we'd have done if we'd actually planned it, rather than, in military parlance, done it 'in stride'?

I was concerned on my side that the milbloggers shared a faithful, but pretty in-bred group of readers. That's where Smash and Matt and the massive cross-linking we all did paid off for us, what with scoring Instapundit multiple times, and NRO at least three times, and Hugh Hewitt. Lessons learned there.

All that linkage pushed me from 120 to 56 in TTLB's ecosphere - and the volume pushed me up in the traffic tracker sites, too.

Now I get to watch the slow sinking back to my natural level as all the link-loving fades!

But I got a screen-cap of #56!

It was fun. But I don't want to do it again anytime soon - especially not when I'm working 12 hour days!

"In stride" worked pretty dang well, thanks to the unceasing efforts of our Fearless Leader and Dean, Kevin and Michele.

It's quite a satisfying feeling to know to what useful purposes the funds will go. I would be interested in dioing this with an actual plan ahead of time -- in a while.

Proud to be a blogger,

I ain't ashamed to say it, sumbodies gotta; I love you guys...you're a class act.

Too bad asshat's like Koppel can't focus their pulpit to do something positive. Imagine what we could do with that budget and bandwidth!

Zowie!

Hey, I donated, but through another channel not through any one of said organizations. Still, I donated.

And speaking of which, check this out...
http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/dhenninger/
(note: dated link, check quick!)

$50k is a ton of cash, but we are part of a much larger whole... But the way I see it is this:

we have become part of something greater than ourselves, and in the process, became greater people than who we were before.

A salute to the coalition, and epecially Castle Arrrgh! and the Fighting Fusileers of Freedom!

There will never be any way to tell how many donations went in that were uncredited to anyone, because a number of people were giving directly by check, or by simply clicking the Blogads, or encourating people to give without endorsing one of the coalitions.

It's cool. :-)

I will note one odd thing: the Liberty Alliance--which turned out to be the smallest alliance by the way!--totals always had one odd quirk. EVERY time there was an update, including this latest update, we always came out to an exact dollar amount, never any pennies. I have to wonder if something was mildly off on our tally, it seems unlikely to be a coincidence.

Not that it matters. It's just odd.

That was awesome! Thanks for giving so many of us an opportunity to be part of something bigger than we could do by ourselves. I think I liked it because it felt more personal than an isolated donation to an organization.

Would you all consider doing something like that with SOA or another project on a semi-regular basis? I commented elsewhere that I donated for this project because there are no war bonds to buy. Care packages and letters are a good outlet, but I want to do more, something concrete, to help with the outcome of this war, and aparently, I'm not alone in that feeling.