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The following is not my work nor my words; from something about Alinsky that I found a long time ago. As you can see, some of the rules CAN be adapted to fit any group; others (ridicule) may fall beyond the boundaries of your moral sensibilities. If you read through these rules, you'll see how closely the Clinton War Machine followed them; too bad Republicans can never get organized enough to try out a few. Maybe we're just too busy earning a living!?!

"Here are eight of Alinsky's 13 Rules for Radicals. They take advantage of the patterns of weakness, arrogance, repeated mistakes, and miscalculations large organizations and their leadership make:

"Power is not only what you have, but what the target thinks you have.

"Never go outside the expertise of your people. Feeling secure stiffens the backbone.

"Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the target. Look for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety, and uncertainty.

"Make the target live up to its own book of rules. If the rule is that every letter or E-mail gets a reply, send thousands.

"Ridicule, especially against organizational leaders, is a potent weapon. There's no defense. It's irrational. It's infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force concessions.

"A good tactic is one your people enjoy. They'll keep doing it without urging and come back to do more. They'll even suggest better ones.

"Keep the pressure on. Never let up. Keep trying new tactics to keep the opposition off balance. As the target masters one approach, hit them with something new.

"Pick the target. Target an individual, personalize the attack, polarize and demoralize his/her supporters. Go after people, not institutions. Hurting, harassing, and humiliating individuals, especially leaders, causes more rapid organizational change.

"This sampling of Alinsky's rules illustrates why opposition groups enjoy opposing and why corporations and institutions fail to win. Simply put, large organizations are never as committed to victory as their opposition is committed to defeating them. There are few surprises here, just unprepared organizations."

That isn't original material, that's somebody else's riff on Alinsky who, having died in 1967, probably didn't have anything to say about email. Here's the real thing:
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Tactics mean doing what you can with what you have. Tactics are those conscious deliberate acts by which human beings live with each other and deal with the world around them. In the world of give and take, tactics is the art of how to take and how to give. Here our concern is with the tactic of taking; how the Have-Nots can take power away from the Haves.

For an elementary illustration of tactics, take parts of your face as the point of reference; your eyes, your ears, and your nose. First the eyes; if you have organized a vast, mass-based people's organization, you can parade it visibly before the enemy and openly show your power. Second the ears; if your organization is small in numbers, then...conceal the members in the dark but raise a din and clamor that will make the listener believe that your organization numbers many more than it does. Third, the nose; if your organization is too tiny even for noise, stink up the place.

Always remember the first rule of power tactics:

Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.

The second rule is: Never go outside the experience of your people. When an action is outside the experience of the people, the result is confusion, fear, and retreat.

The third rule is: Wherever possible go outside of the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.

The fourth rule is: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.

The fourth rule carries within it the fifth rule: Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.

The sixth rule is: A good tactic is one that your people enjoy. If your people are not having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.

The seventh rule is: A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag. man can sustain militant interest in any issue for only a limited time, after which it becomes a ritualistic commitment...

The eighth rule: Keep the pressure on, with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.

The ninth rule: The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.

The tenth rule: The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.

The eleventh rule is: If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside; this is based on the principle that every positive has its negative...

The twelfth rule: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. you cannot risk being trapped by the enemy in his sudden agreement with your demand and saying "You're right--we don't know what to do about this issue. Now you tell us."

The thirteenth rule: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

In conflict tactics there are certain rules that the organizer should always regard as universalities. One is that the opposition must be singled out as the target and "frozen." By this I mean that in a complex, interrelated, urban society, it becomes increasingly difficult to single out who is to blame for any particular evil. There is a constant, and somewhat legitimate, passing of the buck....

It should be borne in mind that the target is always trying to shift responsibility to get out of being the target....

One of the criteria in picking your target is the target's vulnerability--where do you have the power to start? Furthermore, the target can always say, "Why do you center on me when there are others to blame as well?" When you "freeze the target," you disregard these arguments and, for the moment, all others to blame.

Then, as you zero in and freeze your target and carry out your attack, all of the "others" come out of the woodwork very soon. They become visible by their support of the target.

The other important point in the choosing of a target is that it must be a personification, not something general and abstract such as a community's segregated practices or a major corporation or City Hall. It is not possible to develop the necessary hostility against, say, City Hall, which after all is a concrete, physical, inanimate structure, or against a corporation, which has no soul or identity, or a public school administration, which again is an inanimate system.