RestoreTraditionalAmerica.com (RTA) is a grass-roots website designed to help you to do your job as a U. S. Citizen. That is, to keep an eye on your government to make sure that it does not steal your liberties. Think of RTA as a citizen's tool box.

For about 100 years, the socialists have been working their programs in to the fabric of America. The last 2 years have been a virtual free fall into socialism. This has been rejected by the American people in the most recent election and, for the moment, the free fall has been arrested. The big danger, now that the Republicans have taken the House and Senate, is that we will fall back to sleep, thinking that everything will get better. It will not!! All of the liberal spending programs are still in place and the debt bomb is still ticking. We will not be able to repeal much of the Obama agenda because he will veto any repeals. There will not be sufficient Republican strength in either house to override a veto, so the programs will stand. The Democrats know that once a liberal spending program takes hold, it is virtually impossible to overturn them. That is why Obama is willing to be a 1-term president and why so many liberal democrats are willing to “fall on the sword for this stuff”. They have established a new “norm” from which we will operate, and they will be “fallen heroes” of the liberal left.

We may be in the most dangerous of times, because organizations like the Tea Parties may loose their steam. They were organized to stop the march of socialism and they would have accomplished that goal. With Republicans in charge talking about reduced spending and repealing the Obama agenda, it is unlikely that this type of organization can sustain itself. On the other hand, RTA was not established to stop the march of socialism, but rather to turn it back. Our work is still in front of us. We need to build up our numbers and settle in for the long siege. We are what the left doesn’t know is coming. We will take a page from their play book. Year after year, we will hammer away at the massive bureaucracy that they have spent 100 years creating. By the time they figure it out, we will be too strong for them to stop us.

Our name, Restore Traditional America, is also our mission statement. We believe that the principles of limited government and self-reliance are what made the country great and can make it great again. We need to, once again, become the kind of citizens that our forefathers were. Those that watch our government and speak out when it goes astray. We can no longer kick back, watch TV and let someone else do it. This is our fight. Years from now, our descendents will look back on this time and either see this period as a reassertion of liberty or the final loss of it. It is up to us.

There are many organizations that are politically active right now. So what makes this one different?

Most websites provide information that they hope will move you to action. We assume that you are well informed and ready to act. We need people that are ready to DO something. If that isn't you, you're on the wrong website.

Almost all current websites are reactionary. That is that they respond to the outrage of the day. This is like playing defense all of the time. We will do some of that, but we intend to play offense, as well. Congress will get e-mails from us "out of nowhere". We will start to set the agenda, not just respond to it. This is a long-term effort. Statists have taken 100 years to get the country where it is. One of the best explanations of how they did this is called "The Drumbeat". It is an article written in the American Thinker in September of 2008. It explains how committed statists wear us down with their constant pushing of their agenda. Always forward. Sometimes painfully slowly, but always forward. Click on the link. It is chilling, but well worth the read.
We must start a counter "drumbeat" of our own. We will take the time. We will not quit. We will not abandon the battlefield to those who would take our liberty, even if they are only doing it one brick at a time.

Most websites provide information that they hope will move you to action. We assume that you are well informed and ready to act.

Most political organizations fill the web (and your e-mail) with millions of messages in the hope that a small percentage of people will respond. We, on the other hand, have members that are already committed to action. We will send e-mails only when action is warranted. If you have subscribed to one or two of these organizations, you probably spend a lot of time deleting e-mails. You will rarely see more than one or two e-mails a week from us.

Many organizations are market themselves very aggressively. They send surveys as a ruse to get you to send money. They pass around or sell your e-mail so You get e-mails out of nowhere, from organizations that you did not subscribe to, asking for support or some sort of action. We have a very low-key marking effort. We rely on personal relationships, radio, and TV advertising to get out the word. We may give you a "nudge" from time to time, but we will keep it to a minimum. We will not give away your e-mail, nor will we sell it.

Have you ever joined an organization and not been able to figure out how to Quit? Our defunding link is right beside our funding link; right on the Main Menu.

Do you have organizations sending you e-mails constantly and would like them to stop, but don't know how? We have an "inactive" link right on the Main Menu. With three clicks, all e-mails stop. Actually, we have two options. If you choose to become inactive, we will send you an e-mail every 6 months to see if you would like to restart. We don't want you to forget us altogether. If you choose to close the membership. There will be no e-mails at all. Either way, it's still three clicks.

Our menus and screens are very simple to use. We don't hide things in layers of tabs and links. It is like driving a car. You can see all of the "buttons" all of the time. You are on our Visitor's menu now. It is identical to the Main Menu for Members. Look on either side of this text. Like we said, you can see everything all of the time.

We give credit to very active members by assigning ranks, based on activity. We are honoring our servicemen by adopting the US Army ranking system. You start as a "Private" and, given enough work, end up a Five-Star General. We try to make if fun by listing the highest-ranking member in each congressional district and state. If you are among the hardest working members in the website, your rank will show it.

This is not a single-issue organization. As a citizen and voter, you need to be concerned with a broad range of topics, not just one or two. We offer a number of topics to choose from. You can choose only one if you like, but we would like you to choose three or more. We are starting with a few of the most relevant topics for today. We choose them, not only for their relevance, but also for our ability to affect them with our methods. We have a message board where we encourage you to provide input to our issues, strategies, and tactics.

We take voting seriously. It is the ultimate weapon of the citizen. We also have a unique way of evaluating a politician. To us, a politician is nothing but a series of votes. A politician does all kinds of things, but the only thing that he does that can affect you is vote. Forget the speeches, photo ops, glossy literature, impeccable clothes, appealing demeanor, and impressive offices. His / her vote is EVERYTHING, and it doesn't matter why the vote was given. There are lots of reason why they vote that has nothing to do with the good of the country; to get support for a bill that he wants to pass, to support the party, to get a chairmanship. None of this matters. A bad vote hurts us just the same.

As citizens, and RTA Members, we have two tools that we can employ to affect our government. We can 1) petition our representatives to act as we would like and 2) if they don't respond, we can vote them out. It doesn't sound like much, but it is enough. It is true that you only have one vote and can only write so many letters or e-mails to your congressman. That's why you need to be part of an organization. Politics is all about numbers. If you have them you win. If you don't you loose.

Please do not believe that this will be quick. Even if we fend off or reverse some of the more recent egregious acts, we have a long way to go to get back to the vision of our founders. For many decades we Americans have voted each election and then put it on auto pilot, leaving the governing to the politicians. What a wreck they have made of the country! Some think that if we just elect the right people, everything will be OK. It won't. The environment in Washington is to toxic that the best person in the world, in a few short years, will be part of the problem. The only guarantee is an involved citizen. That's us. We may not like it, but we are stuck with it. The best we can do is make it easy. That is what RTA does. We make it easy.

Should you decide to join us, this is how it works:

You will be asked to create a user ID and a password. Nothing new here, you have to do that for almost every website. However, you will also be asked to answer a few questions about you, like your income level, race, and education level. These questions are entirely optional. We simply would like to know how broad our group is and what makes it up.
You will be asked what state you are from and who your congressman is. These questions are not optional. To be effective, we need to know how much of the political landscape we are covering, and more importantly, you need to know who your representatives are.
You will be asked to choose which issues you have an interest in. We want you to choose only those for which you feel strongly enough to be willing to write an e-mail or make a phone call. Be sure to read our strategy for each one, since that is a statement of our position and a preview of what you will be asked to do.

Here are the ones that we can think of that we believe are most pressing at the moment. This list will change as we grow.

War on Terror

Taxes

Education

Health Care

Border Security

Social Security

Economy

Environment

Energy

When you choose an issue, be sure to including a weighting factor. Some issues will be more important to you than others, so this weighting factor is used when evaluating your representatives' voting performance. It will produce a unique score that is based on what is important to you.
You will need to get set up to write your congressmen. We don't want your participation in this to take much of your time, and with a little set-up, you can do it very quickly. This involves putting your congressmen's website on your browser favorites and creating a directory for your e-mail text. We will show you how to do this so that you can send an e-mail to both your senators and your congressmen in less than 15 minutes, start to finish. Over time, you will be asked to write a lot of e-mails. You need to be good at it.

You need to send a "test e-mail" to your congressmen. This is simply an e-mail to your congressman and senators on any subject that you choose, so that you have the experience of having done it. It is a dry run of your "e-mailing system" and prepares you for the first time you are asked to join us in an "action". It is possible that there will an ongoing action for one of the issues that you have chosen. If you like, just participate in the action. You can take double credit the first time you do it.

You need to monitor the website and participate in the discussion on our strategies. We start with what we believe are ideas with broad appeal, but we hope to have a vigorous debate on how to attack this problem. We want as much input from you as possible.
We will occasionally send you an e-mail asking you to write or call your congressman on a particular issue. This is called an "action". We will supply ideas on what to write, but we want you to write the e-mail in your own words. It is much more effective if all of the e-mail do not look alike. We will also ask you to do it within a particular time period. This is because it is more effective to have a bunch of e-mails at once than to have them dribble in over an extended period.

Some of our actions will be offensive and some defensive. The defensive ones will be in response to a particular outrage that is going on in Washington. The offensive ones will be RTA setting the agenda. For these, you need to depend on our queue. However, for defense, you should feel free to act on your own in addition to the actions that we suggest.
When you respond to an action, we ask that you record your action on the website. This is because you are acting on your own and we have no idea how effective we are as a group unless you do this. It is simple to do (just click on an item and type in a date). You will also be able to monitor the actions that you have taken over time since we will give you access to your own records.

Note that this is one of the unique parts of our strategy. Rather than you filling out a petition and giving it to us to present, you send it directly. At least at the beginning, this will act to our advantage. A congressman realizes that for every person that writes, there are many more that feel the same way. Until they catch on to us, this should work in our favor.
You need to decide if you want to fund us. If you do, we ask for a small amount monthly, sent automatically. We suggest funding in this way in order to put the smallest burden on both you and us as possible. We suggest no more than $10 a month. That's why it needs to be automatic. If you have on-line banking, this is very easy to do. If you don't, just relax and use the website for free.

You need to take this funding issue seriously. Our competitors are very well funded and we cannot seriously compete on a shoestring. We need millions of members and will have to advertise extensively to get them. Money is power and our competition has a lot of it. If you decide not to fund us, find another group that you are passionate about and fund them. This is one of the most important means of having your voice heard. You cannot afford to let the opposition have this power to themselves.

Should you decide not to fund us, feel free to use the website for free as long as you like. We need lots of people who are willing to write e-mails whether they fund us or not.

That's our case. Please feel free to look around the website as much as you want. We hide nothing. You have access to every part of the website except the parts that only make sense to members.