barbara,

Normally, you won’t receive a message from us more than once a week but this a rare week... Last night the Wall St. Journal’s Dan Henninger was on Nightly Business Report on PBS. He spoke about Spirit of America and the donor response generated in large measure by his recent column. It’s a great piece. Please read it below. The impact of Dan’s column was augmented mightily by the relatively unsung efforts of bloggers and by many of you forwarding messages to friends and families.
Glad we could help, Jim.
Here are the results. Overwhelming. Incredible. In the last five days we have received $764,408 from 4,088 donors.
764,408/4088 = 187. Given my paltry $20 donation, some people forked over big bucks to make this average. Go ahead, Donks and Arabs - spin this! (I know you will.)
Most of these funds are earmarked for the request made by the Marines for equipment needed to establish Iraqi-owned television stations in Al Anbar Province Iraq (described here). Our initial goal for this request was $100,000. The Marines are as stunned as I am.
Me, too. But I shouldn’t be. Americans are the most generous people on this earth, though you’ll never hear about it from the "mainstream" press, particularly concerning our troops.
I’ll remove the expletives of joyful surprise and forward some of their comments to you next week. They are also developing ideas for the expansion of this initiative. More on that soon. We are pressing ahead with fundraising. We understand we’re at the very beginning of the effort needed to achieve peace and stability in Iraq.
We understand that, too - too bad the LLL and the Euros can’t figure it out. Or maybe they have, which is why they’re trying so hard to prevent peace and stability in Iraq.
The Marines and others serving in Iraq have made clear that all the support we can muster will greatly assist their efforts to win the peace.
No chance of donations from the Left, then. But there never was.
Rest assured we do not confuse success in donor support with the real results we all seek to achieve. The real work lies ahead. But the funding makes the results possible and we now have a great foundation to build upon. We are now focused on delivering the basic equipment requested for the first seven stations. Thanks to you we will have everything at Camp Pendleton by next Thursday (April 29). That delivery will make it 21 days from receiving the Marines request to fulfilling it. [emphasis added]
Wow.
You can imagine what a response like this means to those on the front lines whose lives are at risk.
Then let’s keep it up.

Two other items:

• A number of bloggers have kicked off the "Heroes of the Blogosphere Challenge" - a very innovative collective effort to raise funds to support the requests we receive. It is the brainchild of Dean Esmay. More information is here.
  
• We are behind in answering many of your messages. We apologize. We’ll reply to everyone that has emailed us with questions and offers of assistance as soon as we can.
  Take your time; you’re obviously busy right now.

Again, thank you for your support.
No, thank you for the opportunity to support our troops.

All the best,

Jim Hake