I’m So Proud Of Us!

It has taken roughly 2 years, a lot of morphing, and a lot of paying attention to what our government has done to us, to finally get recognized by the largest left leaning Newspaper in the country. While others were writing us off as racists and bigots, or as simple-minded kooks on the fringe of the Conservative movement, we kept the pressure on and allowed the cream to slowly rise to the top. We still have a way to go, so don’t give up now. If anyone asks you if you are one of those Tea-Partiers, you can now proudly say…”Hell yes!”.

In fact, because of us hanging in there we finally are getting recognized as the power we have truly become. Even the NYT’s has bowed to pressure and has no choice but to recognize us (going broke will make you change your thinking a bit). I almost enjoyed reading the piece that everyone in the media has talked about today. Your chance to read it is below. Keep it up folks, WE ARE MAKING A DIFFERENCE! Emphasis in Green are mine.

Gio-

Tea Party Lights Fuse for Rebellion on Right

SANDPOINT, Idaho — Pam Stout has not always lived in fear of her government. She remembers her years working in federal housing programs, watching government lift struggling families with job training and education. She beams at the memory of helping a Vietnamese woman get into junior college.

But all that was before the Great Recession and the bank bailouts, before Barack Obama took the White House by promising sweeping change on multiple fronts, before her son lost his job and his house. Mrs. Stout said she awoke to see Washington as a threat, a place where crisis is manipulated — even manufactured — by both parties to grab power.

She was happily retired, and had never been active politically. But last April, she went to her first Tea Party rally, then to a meeting of the Sandpoint Tea Party Patriots. She did not know a soul, yet when they began electing board members, she stood up, swallowed hard, and nominated herself for president. “I was like, ‘Did I really just do that?’ ” she recalled.

Then she went even further.

Worried about hyperinflation, social unrest or even martial law, she and her Tea Party members joined a coalition, Friends for Liberty, that includes representatives from Glenn Beck’s 9/12 Project, the John Birch Society, and Oath Keepers, a new player in a resurgent militia movement.

When Friends for Liberty held its first public event, Mrs. Stout listened as Richard Mack, a former Arizona sheriff, brought 1,400 people to their feet with a speech about confronting a despotic federal government. Mrs. Stout said she felt as if she had been handed a road map to rebellion. Members of her family, she said, think she has disappeared down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories. But Mrs. Stout said she has never felt so engaged.

“I can’t go on being the shy, quiet me,” she said. “I need to stand up.”

The Tea Party movement has become a platform for conservative populist discontent, a force in Republican politics for revival, as it was in the Massachusetts Senate election, or for division. But it is also about the profound private transformation of people like Mrs. Stout, people who not long ago were not especially interested in politics, yet now say they are bracing for tyranny.

These people are part of a significant undercurrent within the Tea Party movement that has less in common with the Republican Party than with the Patriot movement, a brand of politics historically associated with libertarians, militia groups, anti-immigration advocates and those who argue for the abolition of the Federal Reserve.

Urged on by conservative commentators, waves of newly minted activists are turning to once-obscure books and Web sites and discovering a set of ideas long dismissed as the preserve of conspiracy theorists, interviews conducted across the country over several months show. In this view, Mr. Obama and many of his predecessors (including George W. Bush) have deliberately undermined the Constitution and free enterprise for the benefit of a shadowy international network of wealthy elites.

Loose alliances like Friends for Liberty are popping up in many cities, forming hybrid entities of Tea Parties and groups rooted in the Patriot ethos. These coalitions are not content with simply making the Republican Party more conservative. They have a larger goal — a political reordering that would drastically shrink the federal government and sweep away not just Mr. Obama, but much of the Republican establishment, starting with Senator John McCain.

In many regions, including here in the inland Northwest, tense struggles have erupted over whether the Republican apparatus will co-opt these new coalitions or vice versa. Tea Party supporters are already singling out Republican candidates who they claim have “aided and abetted” what they call the slide to tyranny: Mark Steven Kirk, a candidate for the Senate from Illinois, for supporting global warming legislation; Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida, who is seeking a Senate seat, for supporting stimulus spending; and Meg Whitman, a candidate for governor in California, for saying she was a “big fan” of Van Jones, once Mr. Obama’s “green jobs czar.”

During a recent meeting with Congressional Republicans, Mr. Obama acknowledged the potency of these attacks when he complained that depicting him as a would-be despot was complicating efforts to find bipartisan solutions.

“The fact of the matter is that many of you, if you voted with the administration on something, are politically vulnerable in your own base, in your own party,” Mr. Obama said. “You’ve given yourselves very little room to work in a bipartisan fashion because what you’ve been telling your constituents is, ‘This guy’s doing all kinds of crazy stuff that is going to destroy America.’ ”

The ebbs and flows of the Tea Party ferment are hardly uniform. It is an amorphous, factionalized uprising with no clear leadership and no centralized structure. Not everyone flocking to the Tea Party movement is worried about dictatorship. Some have a basic aversion to big government, or Mr. Obama, or progressives in general. What’s more, some Tea Party groups are essentially appendages of the local Republican Party.

But most are not. They are frequently led by political neophytes who prize independence and tell strikingly similar stories of having been awakened by the recession. Their families upended by lost jobs, foreclosed homes and depleted retirement funds, they said they wanted to know why it happened and whom to blame.

That is often the point when Tea Party supporters say they began listening to Glenn Beck. With his guidance, they explored the Federalist Papers, exposés on the Federal Reserve, the work of Ayn Rand and George Orwell. Some went to constitutional seminars. Online, they discovered radical critiques of Washington on Web sites like ResistNet.com (“Home of the Patriotic Resistance”) and Infowars.com (“Because there is a war on for your mind.”).

Many describe emerging from their research as if reborn to a new reality. Some have gone so far as to stock up on ammunition, gold and survival food in anticipation of the worst. For others, though, transformation seems to amount to trying on a new ideological outfit — embracing the rhetoric and buying the books.

Tea Party leaders say they know their complaints about shredded constitutional principles and excessive spending ring hollow to some, given their relative passivity through the Bush years. In some ways, though, their main answer — strict adherence to the Constitution — would comfort every card-carrying A.C.L.U. member.

But their vision of the federal government is frequently at odds with the one that both parties have constructed. Tea Party gatherings are full of people who say they would do away with the Federal Reserve, the federal income tax and countless agencies, not to mention bailouts and stimulus packages. Nor is it unusual to hear calls to eliminate Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. A remarkable number say this despite having recently lost jobs or health coverage. Some of the prescriptions they are debating — secession, tax boycotts, states “nullifying” federal laws, forming citizen militias — are outside the mainstream, too.

At a recent meeting of the Sandpoint Tea Party, Mrs. Stout presided with brisk efficiency until a member interrupted with urgent news. Because of the stimulus bill, he insisted, private medical records were being shipped to federal bureaucrats. A woman said her doctor had told her the same thing. There were gasps of rage. Everyone already viewed health reform as a ruse to control their medical choices and drive them into the grip of insurance conglomerates. Debate erupted. Could state medical authorities intervene? Should they call Congress?

As the meeting ended, Carolyn L. Whaley, 76, held up her copy of the Constitution. She carries it everywhere, she explained, and she was prepared to lay down her life to protect it from the likes of Mr. Obama.

“I would not hesitate,” she said, perfectly calm.

A Sprawling Rebellion

The Tea Party movement defies easy definition, largely because there is no single Tea Party.

At the grass-roots level, it consists of hundreds of autonomous Tea Party groups, widely varying in size and priorities, each influenced by the peculiarities of local history.

In the inland Northwest, the Tea Party movement has been shaped by the growing popularity in eastern Washington of Ron Paul, the libertarian congressman from Texas, and by a legacy of anti-government activism in northern Idaho. Outside Sandpoint, federal agents laid siege to Randy Weaver’s compound on Ruby Ridge in 1992, resulting in the deaths of a marshal and Mr. Weaver’s wife and son. To the south, Richard Butler, leader of the Aryan Nations, preached white separatism from a compound near Coeur d’Alene until he was shut down.

Local Tea Party groups are often loosely affiliated with one of several competing national Tea Party organizations. In the background, offering advice and organizational muscle, are an array of conservative lobbying groups, most notably FreedomWorks. Further complicating matters, Tea Party events have become a magnet for other groups and causes — including gun rights activists, anti-tax crusaders, libertarians, militia organizers, the “birthers” who doubt President Obama’s citizenship, Lyndon LaRouche supporters and proponents of the sovereign states movement.

It is a sprawling rebellion, but running through it is a narrative of impending tyranny. This narrative permeates Tea Party Web sites, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds and YouTube videos. It is a prominent theme of their favored media outlets and commentators, and it connects the disparate issues that preoccupy many Tea Party supporters — from the concern that the community organization Acorn is stealing elections to the belief that Mr. Obama is trying to control the Internet and restrict gun ownership.

WorldNetDaily.com trumpets “exclusives” reporting that the Army is seeking “Internment/Resettlement” specialists. On ResistNet.com, bloggers warn that Mr. Obama is trying to convert Interpol, the international police organization, into his personal police force. They call on “fellow Patriots” to “grab their guns.”

Mr. Beck frequently echoes Patriot rhetoric, discussing the possible arrival of a “New World Order” and arguing that Mr. Obama is using a strategy of manufactured crisis to destroy the economy and pave the way for dictatorship.

At recent Tea Party events around the country, these concerns surfaced repeatedly.

In New Mexico, Mary Johnson, recording secretary of the Las Cruces Tea Party steering committee, described why she fears the government. She pointed out how much easier it is since Sept. 11 for the government to tap telephones and scour e-mail, bank accounts and library records. “Twenty years ago that would have been a paranoid statement,” Ms. Johnson said. “It’s not anymore.”

In Texas, Toby Marie Walker, president of the Waco Tea Party, stood on a stage before several thousand people, ticking off the institutions she no longer trusts — the federal government, both the major political parties, Wall Street. “Many of us don’t believe they have our best interests at heart,” Ms. Walker said. She choked back tears, but the crowd urged her on with shouts of “Go, Toby!”

As it happened in the inland Northwest with Friends for Liberty, the fear of Washington and the disgust for both parties is producing new coalitions of Tea Party supporters and groups affiliated with the Patriot movement. In Indiana, for example, a group called the Defenders of Liberty is helping organize “meet-ups” with Tea Party groups and more than 50 Patriot organizations. The Ohio Freedom Alliance, meanwhile, is bringing together Tea Party supporters, Ohio sovereignty advocates and members of the Constitution and Libertarian Parties. The alliance is also helping to organize five “liberty conferences” in March, each featuring Richard Mack, the same speaker invited to address Friends for Liberty.

Politicians courting the Tea Party movement are also alluding to Patriot dogma. At a Tea Party protest in Las Vegas, Joe Heck, a Republican running for Congress, blamed both the Democratic and Republican Parties for moving the country toward “socialistic tyranny.” In Texas, Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican seeking re-election, threw his support behind the state sovereignty movement. And in Indiana, Richard Behney, a Republican Senate candidate, told Tea Party supporters what he would do if the 2010 elections did not produce results to his liking: “I’m cleaning my guns and getting ready for the big show. And I’m serious about that, and I bet you are, too.”

Turning Points

Fear of co-option — a perpetual topic in the Tea Party movement — lay behind the formation of Friends for Liberty.

The new grass-roots leaders of the inland Northwest had grown weary of fending off what they jokingly called “hijack attempts” by the state and county Republican Parties. Whether the issue was picking speakers or scheduling events, they suspected party leaders of trying to choke off their revolution with Chamber of Commerce incrementalism.

“We had to stand our ground, I’ll be blunt,” said Dann Selle, president of the Official Tea Party of Spokane.

In October, Mr. Selle, Mrs. Stout and about 20 others from across the region met in Liberty Lake, Wash., a small town on the Idaho border, to discuss how to achieve broad political change without sacrificing independence. The local Republican Party was excluded.

Most of the people there had paid only passing attention to national politics in years past. “I voted twice and I failed political science twice,” said Darin Stevens, leader of the Spokane 9/12 Project.

Until the recession, Mr. Stevens, 33, had poured his energies into his family and his business installing wireless networks. He had to lay off employees, and he struggled to pay credit cards, a home equity loan, even his taxes. “It hits you physically when you start getting the calls,” he said.

He discovered Glenn Beck, and began to think of Washington as a conspiracy to fleece the little guy. “I had no clue that my country was being taken from me,” Mr. Stevens explained. He could not understand why his progressive friends did not see what he saw.

He felt compelled to do something, so he decided to start a chapter of Mr. Beck’s 9/12 Project. He reserved a room at a pizza parlor for a Glenn Beck viewing party and posted the event on Craigslist. “We had 110 people there,” Mr. Stevens said. He recalled looking around the room and thinking, “All these people — they agree with me.”

Leah Southwell’s turning point came when she stumbled on Mr. Paul’s speeches on YouTube. (“He blew me away.”) Until recently, Mrs. Southwell was in the top 1 percent of all Mary Kay sales representatives, with a company car and a frenetic corporate life. “I knew zero about the Constitution,” Mrs. Southwell confessed. Today, when asked about her commitment to the uprising, she recites a line from the Declaration of Independence, a Tea Party favorite: “We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”

Mr. Paul led Mrs. Southwell to Patriot ideology, which holds that governments and economies are controlled by networks of elites who wield power through exclusive entities like the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations.

This idea has a long history, with variations found at both ends of the political spectrum. But to Mrs. Southwell, the government’s culpability for the recession — the serial failures of regulation, the Federal Reserve’s epic blunders, the cozy bailouts for big banks — made it resonate all the more, especially as she witnessed the impact on family and friends.

“The more you know, the madder you are,” she said. “I mean when you finally learn what the Federal Reserve is!”

Last spring, Mrs. Southwell quit her job and became a national development officer for the John Birch Society, recruiting and raising money across the West, often at Tea Party events. She has been stunned by the number of Tea Party supporters gravitating toward Patriot ideology. “Most of these people are just waking up,” she said.

Converging Paths

At Liberty Lake, the participants settled on a “big tent” strategy, with each group supporting the others in the coalition they called Friends for Liberty.

One local group represented at Liberty Lake was Arm in Arm, which aims to organize neighborhoods for possible civil strife by stockpiling food and survival gear, and forming armed neighborhood groups.

Also represented was Oath Keepers, whose members call themselves “guardians of the Republic.” Oath Keepers recruits military and law enforcement officials who are asked to disobey orders the group deems unconstitutional. These include orders to conduct warrantless searches, arrest Americans as unlawful enemy combatants or force civilians into “any form of detention camps.”

Oath Keepers, which has been recruiting at Tea Party events around the country and forging informal ties with militia groups, has an enthusiastic following in Friends for Liberty. “A lot of my people are Oath Keepers,” Mr. Stevens said. “I’m an honorary Oath Keeper myself.”

Mrs. Stout became an honorary Oath Keeper, too, and sent an e-mail message urging her members to sign up. “They may be very important for our future,” she wrote.

By inviting Richard Mack to speak at their first event, leaders of Friends for Liberty were trying to attract militia support. They knew Mr. Mack had many militia fans, and not simply because he had helped Randy Weaver write a book about Ruby Ridge. As a sheriff in Arizona, Mr. Mack had sued the Clinton administration over the Brady gun control law, which resulted in a Supreme Court ruling that the law violated state sovereignty by requiring local officials to conduct background checks on gun buyers.

Mr. Mack was selling Cadillacs in Arizona, his political career seemingly over, when Mr. Obama was elected. Disheartened by the results, he wrote a 50-page booklet branding the federal government “the greatest threat we face.” The booklet argued that only local sheriffs supported by citizen militias could save the nation from “utter despotism.” He titled his booklet “The County Sheriff: America’s Last Hope,” offered it for sale on his Web site and returned to selling cars.

But last February he was invited to appear on “Infowars,” the Internet radio program hosted by Alex Jones, a well-known figure in the Patriot movement. Then Mr. Mack went on “The Power Hour,” another Internet radio program popular in the Patriot movement.

After those appearances, Mr. Mack said, he was inundated with invitations to speak to Tea Parties and Patriot groups. Demand was so great, he said, that he quit selling cars. Then Andrew P. Napolitano, a Fox News legal analyst, invited him to New York to appear on his podcast.

“It’s taken over my life,” Mr. Mack said in an interview.

He said he has found audiences everywhere struggling to make sense of why they were wiped out last year. These audiences, he said, are far more receptive to critiques once dismissed as paranoia. It is no longer considered all that radical, he said, to portray the Federal Reserve as a plaything of the big banks — a point the Birch Society, among others, has argued for decades.

People are more willing, he said, to imagine a government that would lock up political opponents, or ration health care with “death panels,” or fake global warming. And if global warming is a fraud, is it so crazy to wonder about a president’s birth certificate?

“People just do not trust any of this,” Mr. Mack said. “It’s not just the fringe people anymore. These are just ordinary people — teachers, bankers, housewives.”

The dog track opened at 5:45 p.m. for Mr. Mack’s speech, and the parking lot quickly filled. Inside, each Friends for Liberty sponsor had its own recruiting table. Several sheriffs and state legislators worked the crowd. “I came out to talk with folks and listen to Sheriff Mack,” Ozzie Knezovich, the sheriff of Spokane County, Wash., explained.

Gazing out at his overwhelmingly white audience, Mr. Mack felt the need to say, “This meeting is not racist.” Nor, he said, was it a call to insurrection. What is needed, he said, is “a whole army of sheriffs” marching on Washington to deliver an unambiguous warning: “Any violation of the Constitution we will consider a criminal offense.”

The crowd roared.

Mr. Mack shared his vision of the ideal sheriff. The setting was Montgomery, Ala., on the day Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat for a white passenger. Imagine the local sheriff, he said, rather than arresting Ms. Parks, escorting her home, stopping to buy her a meal at an all-white diner.

“Edmund Burke said the essence of tyranny is the enforcement of stupid laws,” he said. Likewise, Mr. Mack argued, sheriffs should have ignored “stupid laws” and protected the Branch Davidians at Waco, Tex., and the Weaver family at Ruby Ridge.

Legacy

A popular T-shirt at Tea Party rallies reads, “Proud Right-Wing Extremist.”

It is a defiant and mocking rejoinder to last April’s intelligence assessment from the Department of Homeland Security warning that recession and the election of the nation’s first black president “present unique drivers for right wing radicalization.”

“Historically,” the assessment said, “domestic right wing extremists have feared, predicted and anticipated a cataclysmic economic collapse in the United States.” Those predictions, it noted, are typically rooted in “antigovernment conspiracy theories” featuring impending martial law. The assessment said extremist groups were already preparing for this scenario by stockpiling weapons and food and by resuming paramilitary exercises.

The report does not mention the Tea Party movement, but among Tea Party activists it is viewed with open scorn, evidence of a larger campaign by liberals to marginalize them as “racist wingnuts.”

But Tony Stewart, a leading civil rights activist in the inland Northwest, took careful note of the report. Almost 30 years ago, Mr. Stewart cofounded the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations in Coeur d’Alene. The task force has campaigned relentlessly to rid north Idaho of its reputation as a haven for anti-government extremists. The task force tactics brought many successes, including a $6.3 million civil judgment that effectively bankrupted Richard Butler’s Aryan Nations.

When the Tea Party uprising gathered force last spring, Mr. Stewart saw painfully familiar cultural and rhetorical overtones. Mr. Stewart viewed the questions about Mr. Obama’s birthplace as a proxy for racism, and he was bothered by the “common message of intolerance for the opposition.”

“It’s either you’re with us or you’re the enemy,” he said.

Mr. Stewart heard similar concerns from other civil rights activists around the country. They could not help but wonder why the explosion of conservative anger coincided with a series of violent acts by right wing extremists. In the Inland Northwest there had been a puzzling return of racist rhetoric and violence.

Mr. Stewart said it would be unfair to attribute any of these incidents to the Tea Party movement. “We don’t have any evidence they are connected,” he said. Gio says…‘Then why did the author of this piece bother to mention anything about violence and racism if there is/was NO evidence of either, of Tea-Partiers involvement?” The New York Times will never grow-up!

Still, he sees troubling parallels. Branding Mr. Obama a tyrant, Mr. Stewart said, constructs a logic that could be used to rationalize violence. “When people start wearing guns to rallies, what’s the next thing that happens?” Mr. Stewart asked.

Rachel Dolezal, curator of the Human Rights Education Institute in Coeur d’Alene, has also watched the Tea Party movement with trepidation. Though raised in a conservative family, Ms. Dolezal, who is multiracial, said she could not imagine showing her face at a Tea Party event. To her, what stands out are the all-white crowds, the crude depictions of Mr. Obama as an African witch doctor and the signs labeling him a terrorist. “It would make me nervous to be there unless I went with a big group,” she said. Gio says… “I’m not buying this paragraph, not one damn bit. If she were to go to a  Tea-Party event/rally, she would more than likely be in one of the safest and most welcoming places in the USA. Especially if people were carrying firearms.”

The Future

Pam Stout wakes each morning, turns on Fox News, grabs coffee and an Atkins bar, and hits the computer. She is the hub of a rapidly expanding and highly viral political network, keeping a running correspondence with her 400 members in Sandpoint, state and national Tea Party leaders and other conservative activists.

Mrs. Stout forwards along petitions to impeach Mr. Obama; petitions to audit the Federal Reserve; petitions to support Sarah Palin; appeals urging defiance of any federal law requiring health insurance; and on and on.

Meanwhile, she and her husband are studying the Constitution line by line. She has the Congressional switchboard programmed into her cellphone. “I just signed up for a Twitter class,” said Mrs. Stout, 66, laughing at the improbability of it all.

Yet for all her efforts, Mrs. Stout is gripped by a sense that it may be too little too late. Yes, there have been victories — including polls showing support for the Tea Party movement — but in her view none of it has diminished the fundamental threat of tyranny, a point underscored by Mr. Obama’s drive to pass a health care overhaul. Gio says… “this should NOT be ignored’!

She and her members are becoming convinced that rallies alone will not save the Republic. They are searching for some larger answer, she said. They are also waiting for a leader, someone capable of uniting their rebellion, someone like Ms. Palin, who made Sandpoint one of the final stops on her book tour and who has announced plans to attend a series of high-profile Tea Party events in the next few months.

“We need to really decide where we’re going to go,” Mrs. Stout said.

These questions of strategy, direction and leadership were clearly on the minds of Mrs. Stout’s members at a recent monthly meeting.

Their task seemed endless, almost overwhelming, especially with only $517 in their Tea Party bank account. There were rallies against illegal immigration to attend. There was a coming lecture about the hoax of global warming. There were shooting classes to schedule, and tips to share about the right survival food.

The group struggled fitfully for direction. Maybe they should start vetting candidates. Someone mentioned boycotting ABC, CBS, NBC and MSNBC. Maybe they should do more recruiting.

“How do you keep on fighting?” Mrs. Stout asked in exasperation.

Lenore Generaux, a local wildlife artist, had an idea: They should raise money for Freedom Force, a group that says it wants to “reclaim America via the Patriot movement.” The group is trying to unite the Tea Parties and other groups to form a powerful “Patriot lobby.” One goal is to build a “Patriot war chest” big enough to take control of the Republican Party.

Not long ago, Mrs. Stout sent an e-mail message to her members under the subject line: “Revolution.” It linked to an article by Greg Evensen, a leader in the militia movement, titled “The Anatomy of an American Revolution,” that listed “grievances” he said “would justify a declaration of war against any criminal enterprise including that which is killing our nation from Washington, D.C.”

Mrs. Stout said she has begun to contemplate the possibility of “another civil war.” It is her deepest fear, she said. Yet she believes the stakes are that high. Basic freedoms are threatened, she said. Economic collapse, food shortages and civil unrest all seem imminent.

“I don’t see us being the ones to start it, but I would give up my life for my country,” Mrs. Stout said.

She paused, considering her next words.

“Peaceful means,” she continued, “are the best way of going about it. But sometimes you are not given a choice.”

New Action Alert

THE 3 STOOGES!

From the Desk of:
Steve Elliott, Grassfire Nation

Dear Patriots:

Next week’s nationally televised healthcare “trap” is
getting worse.

Reports from the Hill now indicate that Obama and the
Democrats are working behind closed doors to craft
the final language of the “new” ObamaCare bill BEFORE
the televised discussion even takes place. According
to Politico:

      “Obama hopes to walk into the Feb. 25 summit with an
      agreement in hand between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
      and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on a final
      Democratic bill, so they can move ahead with a reform
      package after the sit-down.”

In other words, the televised “sit-down” is pure political
theatre designed to paint opponents in a bad light and
justify ramming ObamaCare through Congress.

Republican leaders are asking Democrats to disavow these
reports of a secret, backroom deal. But they refuse.

      Not only are Democrats refusing to take ObamaCare off
      the table before the meeting, they appear to be working to
      finalize their final bill in advance of any “talks”!

That’s why Grassfire Nation is calling on our team members
to send a message loud and clear to Congress:

      NO HEALTHCARE TALKS UNTIL GOVERNMENT-
      RUN HEALTHCARE IS D.O.A. AND OFFICIALLY
      OFF THE TABLE!

You can use our FaxFire system to send this message right
now to your two Senators, your Representative AND the
President — along with other key members of Congress.
Go here to schedule your faxes:

http://www.grassfire.com/3122/offer.asp?ref_id=500062

(As always, we provide all the information for you to
send your own faxes if you prefer. Just click the
above link.)

+ + Yet another backroom deal to pass ObamaCare!

As we’ve discussed earlier, Obama and the Dems plan on
passing ObamaCare without even ONE Republican vote.
This plan is already in the works.

The televised media event is simply designed to provided
political “cover” for ramming their latest backroom deal
through Congress.

If they succeed, ObamaCare will pass — despite the
Massachusetts Miracle and despite the clear rejection of
government-run healthcare by the American people.

      Go here right now to send your faxes and tell Obama and
      your members of Congress that ObamaCare must be taken
      completely off the table before any health care talks can
      begin:

hhttp://www.grassfire.com/3122/offer.asp?ref_id=500062

Unless grassroots Americans express outrage and demand
that a “Do Not Resuscitate” order be place on ObamaCare,
Democrat leadership will continue with their “trap” and
then move to pass their government takeover of healthcare.

Thank you for taking action!

Steve Elliott
Grassfire Nation

Visit Patriotic Resistance at: http://www.resistnet.com/?xg_source=msg_mes_network

The Lessons Of Politics

“We have let Obama down”. Those five words are the title for the article below,  posted in the UK., Guardian. I have no idea why a news service from Great Britain would have a statement like that, so please don’t ask.

I laughed really hard when I read the title of this article, so I had to wait until my eyes cleared before I read the entire piece. Once I did read it, I stopped laughing. I stopped laughing not because I read some sad truth spouted by some whiny progressive in the media. No, I stopped chuckling and snickering like a happy drunk, when I realized how much info this Clancy fella condensed into an opinion that is only 9 paragraphs long.

The fastest way for me to point these out to the reader will be a trick I use from time to time. I will be doing all my edits on this piece in bright Red.

Gio-

We have let Obama down

Clancy Sigal

Both Barack Obama and I are Chicago boys, schooled in the tough-minded, arm-twisting don’t-mess-with-me attitude of crushing rather than compromising with your unforgiving enemies. We are both products of machine politics, I from the west side’s “rotten borough” 24th ward loyally turning out Democratic party majorities of almost, and sometimes exceeding, 100% (“Vote early, vote often!”), and Barack from a south side community-organising operation that got things done door-to-door, block by block. This entire paragraph is bothersome to me, and it should bother everyone that has at least a shred of honesty left in them. This guy sounds like he’s very proud of his tough Chicago attitude of crushing, lying and cheating, and so should Obama. And according to him, you don’t compromise with your enemies (meaning: political enemies). This then lends itself to thinking along the lines of a Dictatorship. Which personally, I think Obama is capable of. Mr. Sigal seems to relish in the idea that it’s OK to vote as often as you can, on the same day. When in fact, doing so is very illegal! NOTE: Keep in mind what he writes about Obama going door to door, and block by block.

In the 2008 election campaign President Obama’s most important strategist was the Chicago fixer David Axelrod, a master of hard-knuckle progressive neighbourhood politics who had masterminded the re-election campaign of Chicago’s first African American mayor Harold Washington. But after Obama’s inauguration the new president appears to have muzzled Axelrod in favour of Rahm Emanuel, a ferociously combative, rightwing Democratic political assassin. The enforcer Emanuel has so far failed to enforce much of anything for Obama by way of decent legislation, and Axelrod is sidelined except as a mouthpiece. I’m a little concerned here about his use of ‘hard-knuckle progressive neighborhood politics’. Does he mean hard-knuckle in the sense of knocking on a lot of doors, or does he mean it in a more pugilistic sense? Let’s hope he means knocking on doors. I’m not sure where this guy did his research, but I found that Harold Washington was elected Mayor of Chicago in 1984 and died in office in 1987. So I want to know what David Axelrod has done since then. I mean, has he always been an “important Strategist” or “master” who “master-minded” everything around him? From what I could learn in a few minutes of research… Axelrod did very little to help Washington get elected. Enough of that… I’m also a bit puzzled by Mr. Sigal’s use of “rightwing Democrat political assassin” when describing Rahm Emanuel. Does he mean Rahm will politically assassinate moderate Democrats, or should I say more Conservative Democrats? If so, Sigal don’t know squat! Rahm Emanuel was the one that won back both houses of Congress by recruiting more Conservative candidates?!

No wonder that at home on my desk is a manila folder file labelled OBAMA BETRAYALS OF CAMPAIGN PLEDGES, so full it’s bursting apart. I was about to start a fresh new file of his latest missteps when suddenly I caught myself. Hey, wait a minute, I’m falling into the same old tired habit of reflexive negativity honed in the Bush years. This is the part where he tries to defend his Messiah. He should just stick to the folder he mentions because that’s where the truth lays.

Howard Zinn, the historian-activist who before his recent death was probably the wisest mind on the US left, told us he was not disappointed in Obama because he never expected much in the absence of a national movement to push him in a good direction. Zinn – a lifelong student of the American abolitionist, labour, civil rights, feminist and gay rights movements – preached that real change “will have to work its way from the bottom up”. Alas, we at the “bottom” have not really been there for Obama to fight for his ear, which currently belongs to Wall Street. I find this paragraph very interesting. Howard Zinn seems to have had a lifetime hatred of any business that either made a profit, or got a government contract. In a Capitalist system, he was considered an oddity. But I’m going to give him high marks for the end of this paragraph because he accidently told the truth about Obama and Wall Street being in bed together. The comment he made about the “bottom up” sounds a lot like the Tea-Partiers across the country. So Sigal may have accidently gotten this one correct.

Franklin Roosevelt, the president we hoped that Obama would be like, had a huge advantage over our new president. At FDR’s disposal were powerful mass movements – Huey Long’s “Share the Wealth”, Father Coughlin‘s radical racist anti-capitalist broadcasts, the elderly Townsend Clubs, the veterans’ bonus marchers and militant labour unions with their sit-down strikes – that were an effective threat, a countervailing force to rich rightwingers eager to destroy the New Deal. FDR’s good angel, his wife Eleanor, constantly reported to him about just how bad it was in the real world of the Great Depression. But Roosevelt told Eleanor and anyone else who came to him with demands for progressive change: “OK, you’ve convinced me. Now go out and put pressure on me.” This paragraph is a lesson we need to drill into our heads. So once again, learn it… especially the last two sentences.

That’s where we’ve let Obama down. We on the American left – in a dysfunctional marriage with a bought-and-paid-for Democratic party, tamed by leechlike dependence on “non-profit” liberal foundations themselves funded by corporations, a women’s movement obsessed by the abortion issue, a gay movement fixed on gay marriage – simply aren’t up to the job. We have not backed up Obama with a serious antiwar movement (there isn’t any), and our Big Labour is too weak to fight for itself, let alone for the rest of us. Grassroots activism still exists, but during the 2008 presidential campaign we slipped into the habit of allowing ourselves to be used purely as fundraising vehicles. Fundraising is no substitute for hell raising, as the Palin-loving Tea Baggers and Town Hallers are teaching us. This paragraph is mostly whining, however, the last two sentences are two more that need to be noted and remembered.

Obama came into office with a mandate for change. That should have been our signal not to sit back and wait for him to deliver but to mobilise to make sure he followed through. Instead, we relaxed our “Chicago muscle”, the hard volunteer work that elected him. And I started my self-satisfying, ultimately pointless OBAMA BETRAYAL file. Here he goes getting all confused again. Obama had no such mandate when he got into office. Usually a mandate is when one side wins in a landslide, and the other side slinks off knowing it got it’s ass kicked. No such thing happened in the 2008 presidential elections. If Sigal has no use for it, I may ask him to send his OBAMA BETRAYAL file to me!

Last week in America’s northwest, Oregon voters, who are traditionally anti-tax-increase, showed how Chicago muscle works. Against fierce opposition led by Nike and other big businesses, they delivered a huge progressive victory by approving tax-raising measures on the wealthy and corporations. They did it the low-tech way, slogging door to door, volunteers from an improvised coalition of unions, community groups and small businesses, working together to overcome a well-funded rightwing scare campaign. Forget the last 6 words of this paragraph. The rest of this paragraph is telling us exactly how campaigns will be won in the future. Learn the lessons for our side, or our side will perish. 

Sooner or later we on the American left will rise again and look beyond single-issue obsessions, sever our dependence on corporate charity, and – as FDR and Howard Zinn advised – relearn the lesson of how to apply pressure on a president who needs us more than we need him. Blah, blah, blah, blah…

Let me wrap this up by pointing out the lessons learned…

First we learn that the left will work hard, cheat, and lie, to get one of their own elected. Then we learn, or should learn, how to win elections for the foreseable future, we earn them. Many Conservatives may be loathe to get out and go door-to-door making personal connections with people, but it is the way elections will be won from now on. As we have recently seen, throwing money into commercials can no longer be counted on to bring in the votes. We are now in an era where real Grass-Roots campaigning will win over gobs of money, so we must take advantage of this while we still have time.  And finally, we learn to win elections by Hell Raising, not fundraising. Let’s also throw in… ‘the pyramid of power’ needs be turned upside down, just as our Founding Fathers wished for, the power must come once again from the bottom-up.

One last thing that Clancy Sigal accidently taught us. If we work hard to get polticians elected, we must have something of a public cryer to give daily public updates on what he/she politician is doing. “Keep the pressure on” is how Clancy put it. If a candidate runs on a platform of rooting out corruption from public office, then he/she should be expected to start doing so on day #1 of their term.

You may have noticed that I have not used the names “Republican” in any of my comments, so I’m hoping nobody jumps to conclusions. When ”We The People” want to win an election, we should use the methods I mention above so people win elections, not parties!

Obama Whines About Inheritance

Bobs A's public notice to Obama lovers.

Bob A. from Florida wrote this wonderful little piece and I wanted to share with everyone.

I’m Sick of “Inherited” 

The Washington Post babbled again today about Obama inheriting a huge deficit from Bush, blah blah blah.  Amazingly enough, a lot of people swallow this nonsense.

 So once more, I’ll try a short civics lesson.

Budgets do not come from the White House.  They come from Congress, and the party that controlled Congress since January 2007 is the Democratic Party.  They controlled the budget process for FY 2008 and FY 2009, as well as FY 2010 and FY 2011.  In that first year, they had to contend with George Bush, which caused them to compromise on spending, when Bush somewhat belatedly got tough on spending increases.  For FY 2009, though, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid bypassed George Bush entirely, passing continuing resolutions to keep government running until Barack Obama could take office.  At that time, they passed a massive omnibus spending bill to complete the FY 2009 budgets.

And where was Barack Obama during this time?  He was a member of that very Congress that passed all of these massive spending bills, and he signed the omnibus bill as President to complete FY 2009.

Let’s remember what the deficits looked like during that period:

If the Democrats inherited any deficit, it was the FY 2007 deficit, the last of the Republican budgets.  That deficit was the lowest in five years, and the fourth straight decline in deficit spending.  After that, Democrats in   Congress took control of spending, and that includes Barack Obama, who voted for the budgets.  If Obama inherited anything, he inherited it from himself.

In a nutshell,  what Obama is saying is I inherited a deficit that I voted for and then I voted to expand that deficit four-fold since January 20th.

 

 

WAKE UP, AMERICA , BEFORE ITS TO LATE

Presidents Day Open Thread

Here’s a loaded question as a topic starter…

Who were the 3 best presidents the USA ever had?

Who were the 3 worst presidents the USA ever had?

Gio-

Review Is In: Tea-Party A Success!

What I Saw at the Tea Party Convention

The attendees want politicians who will deliver on Obama’s promise of clean and open government.

By GLENN HARLAN REYNOLDS

Nashville, Tenn.

There were promises of transparency and of a new kind of collaborative politics where establishment figures listened to ordinary Americans. We were going to see net spending cuts, tax cuts for nearly all Americans, an end to earmarks, legislation posted online for the public to review before it is signed into law, and a line-by-line review of the federal budget to remove wasteful programs.

These weren’t the tea-party platforms I heard discussed in Nashville last weekend. They were the campaign promises of Barack Obama in 2008.

Mr. Obama made those promises because the ideas they represented were popular with average Americans. So popular, it turns out, that average Americans are organizing themselves in pursuit of the kind of good government Mr. Obama promised, but has not delivered. And that, in a nutshell, was the feel of the National Tea Party Convention. The political elites have failed, and citizens are stepping in to pick up the slack.

Associated Press  Angela McGlowan enters the GOP

primary to represent Mississippi’s First District.

This response has brought millions of Americans to the streets over the past year, and brought quite a few people to the posh Opryland Resort (with its indoor waterfalls and boat rides, it’s like a casino without the gambling) for the convention.

Pundits claim the tea partiers are angry—and they are—but the most striking thing about the atmosphere in Nashville was how cheerful everyone seemed to be. I spoke with dozens of people, and the responses were surprisingly similar. Hardly any had ever been involved in politics before. Having gotten started, they were finding it to be not just worthwhile, but actually fun. Laughter rang out frequently, and when ne w-media mogul Andrew Breitbart held forth on a TV interview, a crowd gathered and broke into spontaneous applause.

A year ago, many told me, they were depressed about the future of America. Watching television pundits talk about President Obama’s transformative plans for big government, they felt alone, isolated and helpless. That changed when protests, organized by bloggers, met Mr. Obama a year ago in Denver, Colo., Mesa, Ariz., and Seattle, Wash. Then came CNBC talker Rick Santelli’s famous on-air rant on Feb. 19, 2009, which gave the tea-party movement its name.

Tea partiers are still angry at federal deficits, at Washington’s habit of rewarding failure with handouts and punishing success with taxes and regulation, and the general incompetence that has marked the first year of the Obama presidency. But they’re no longer depressed.

Instead, they seem energized. And surprisingly media savvy. William Temple donned colonial dress knowing that it would be an irresistible lure to TV cameras. When the cameras trained on him, he regaled interviewers with well-informed discussion of constitutional history. Other attendees were hawking DVDs, books, and Web sites promoting tea-party ideals, while discussing the use of tools like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter for political organizing.

Press attention focused on Sarah Palin’s speech, which was well-received by the crowd. But the attendees I met weren’t looking to her for direction. They were hoping she would move in theirs. Right now, the tea party isn’t looking for leaders so much as leaders are looking to align themselves with the tea party.

It’s easy to see why. A recent Investor’s Business Daily/TIPP poll found that three-fourths of independent voters have a favorable opinion of the tea party. This enthusiasm, however, does not translate into an embrace of establishment Republicanism. One of the less-noted aspects of Mrs. Palin’s speech was her endorsement of primary challenges for incumbent Republicans, something that is already underway. Tea partiers I talked to hope to replace a lot of entrenched time-servers and to throw a scare into others.

One primary challenger is Les Phillip. He is running against Republican Parker Griffith in Alabama’s fifth congressional district. Mr. Phillip, a black businessman and Navy veteran who immigrated with his parents from Trinidad in his youth, got his start in politics speaking at a tea-party protest in Decatur, Ala., last year.

“Somebody had to speak,” he told me, “so I stepped up.” He did well enough that he was invited to speak at another protest in Trussville, Ala., after which things sort of snowballed. Of the tea partiers, he says, “Their values are pretty much mine. I live in a town in North Alabama where there are plenty of blacks driving Mercedes and living in big houses. Only in America can someone come from a little island and live the dream. I’ve liked it, and that’s what I want for my children. [But] I saw the window closing for my own kids.”

Mr. Phillip has gotten tea-party endorsements, as well as one from Mike Huckabee. The Republican establishment is siding with Mr. Griffith, who only recently switched from Democrat to Republican. That support is perhaps understandable as realpolitik, but it’s not the sort of thing that sits well with tea partiers, who think that too much realpolitik is what rendered the Republican Party corrupt and ossified over the past decade.

Mr. Phillip isn’t the only black tea-party candidate in the deep south—Angela McGlowan, who spoke in Nashville, has entered the Republican primary in Mississippi’s first district—and primary challenges aren’t the only way activists are exerting influence. Cincinnati tea-party activists are running candidates for Republican precinct executive in every precinct in their area—if elected, these candidates will help set policy platforms within the GOP and have sway over which candidates the party endorses. Activists in other states are doing the same. Adam Andrzejewski, who ran in the Republican primary for governor in Illinois, told me he will run candidates in each of Illinois’ precincts, and Utah activists are turning that state’s convention-based nominating system into a trial for incumbent Republican Sen. Robert Bennett. Plus, tea-party activists used their convention to launch a political action committee.

If 2009 was the year of taking it to the streets, 2010 is the year of taking it to the polls. With ordinary Americans setting out to reclaim the political process, it’s likely to be a bumpy ride for incumbents of both parties. I suspect the Founding Fathers would approve.

Mr. Reynolds is a law professor at the University of Tennessee. He covered the National Tea Party Convention for PJTV.com, an Internet television network.

Wanna Have Fun W/Progressives?

First, I’ve got to h/t Bob for sending me this link before it’s scrubbed off the internet. I’m NOT the sharpest tack in the box when it comes to technology, so could somebody explain to me the easiest way to record this video for perpetuity? In the meantime, make sure that the next time you argue with any progressive on the internet (even if it’s your Mom), that you have the following video ready to go. Progressives will go insane and make babbling noises beacuse they have been taught that the financial collapse was all Bush’s fault, but as it turns out, he tried to do something about only to be blocked by DEMOCRATS!

Have fun… Gio-

September 24, 2008
The Bush Admin and Senator McCain warned repeatedly about Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac and what thus became the 2008 financial crisis — starting in 2002. Democrats resisted and kept to their party line, extending loans to people who couldn’t afford them — just like you would expect of socialists.

Sea Levels In Question

This is sea level rising you can believe in. Surfs Up!

This is pretty hilarious especially when you consider that Al Gores bull-shit movie, An Inconvenient Truth is playing tonight on one of the satellite channels called Planet Green. LOL… Enjoy!

Climate scientists admit fresh error over data on rising sea levels

Latest embarrassment comes as key sceptic Benny Peiser backs down in row over fabricated quote. -Robin McKie, science editor

Climate experts have been forced to admit another embarrassing error in their most recent report on the threat of climate change.

In a background note – released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) last night – the UN group said its 2007 report wrongly stated that 55% of the Netherlands lies below sea level. In fact, only 26% of the country does. The figure used by the IPCC included all areas in the country that are prone to flooding, including land along rivers above sea level. This accounts for 29% of the Dutch countryside.

“The sea-level statistic was used for background information only, and the updated information remains consistent with the overall conclusions,” the IPCC note states. Nevertheless, the admission is likely to intensify claims by sceptics that the IPCC work is riddled with sloppiness.

The disclosure will intensify divisions between scientists and sceptics over the interpretation of statistics and the use of sources for writing climate change reports, disagreements that have led to apologies being made by both sides of the debate. Last week a key climate-change sceptic apologised for alleging that one of the world’s leading meteorologists had deliberately exaggerated the dangers of global warming.

In an email debate in the Observer, Benny Peiser, head of the UK Global Warming Policy Foundation, quoted Sir John Houghton, the UK scientist who played a key role in establishing the IPCC, as saying that “unless we announce disasters, no one will listen”.

But in a letter to the Observer, Houghton said: “The quote from me is without foundation. I have never said it or written it. Although it has spread on the internet like wild fire, I do not know its origin. In fact, I have frequently argued the opposite, namely that those who make such statements are not only wrong but counterproductive.”

Houghton said he was incensed because he believed the quote attributed to him, and to the IPCC, an attitude of hype and exaggeration and demanded an apology from Peiser.

For his part, Peiser told the Observer that he welcomed the clarification. “For many years, the Houghton ‘quote’ has been published in numerous books and articles. I took Sir John’s failure to challenge it hitherto as a tacit admission that the ‘quote’ was accurate and reflected his view on climate policy. Now that he has publicly disowned the statement, I will certainly refrain from using it.”

Houghton’s “quote” has become one of the most emblematic remarks supposed to have been made by a mainstream scientist about global warming, and appears on almost two million web pages concerned with climate change. The fact that it now turns out to be fabricated has delighted scientists.

“We do not over-egg the pudding when it comes to the evidence about global warming – and I hope people will now appreciate this point,” said Alan Thorpe, head of the Natural Environment Research Council.

Weekend Open Thread

All topics are open for bashing and smashing.

That reminds me… The 2010 NASCAR racing season officially kicks-off this weekend. Will and myself will be glued to our TV’s come Sunday afternoon for the Daytona 500.  Yeeeeehaaahhhh!!!

Oh yeah, don’t forget Sunday is also Valentines Day. You could ask her to share the experience of watching the race with you as a Valentines Day gift to you. Just a thought. ♥♥♥

Gio-

This is gonna hurt!

Americas Next!

We know that politics and corruption have gotten out o hand in this country. We also know that Obama is only making matters worse. Here’s a few stories that could have all sorts of bad implications for where the country is heading. Pray for your country every day, she needs you.

All headlines below are linked to story.

Gio-

Euro Falls for Fifth Week Versus Dollar on Greece, Growth

 

World markets’ gyrations shake up US stocks

 

Barack Obama Is Being Punk’d

 

USA Similar To Greece?

 

Who Is Gonna Save America?

 

Could USA Be Next?

Obama To Go ‘Gangsta’?

Obama’s closest associates are slightly better than street thugs, and we may have had good reason to think that. Now, Roland Martin comes along and pleads for Obama to act like a thug by giving him advice like this… “Channel your inner Al Capone and go gangsta against your foes. Let ‘em know that if they aren’t with you, they are against you, and will pay the price.” What in the hell have we done to our country by electing this Chicago style Marxist Bully? God help us.

Gio-

Time for Obama to go ‘gangsta’ on GOP

By Roland S. Martin, CNN Political Analyst

(CNN) — Civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer made famous the phrase, “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

For me, I’m sick and tired of Democrats having power and being unwilling to use it. I’ve always respected Republicans when they had power because they were willing to use it and maybe apologize later.

Today, President Obama walked into the White House briefing room and took some questions, and one of them revolved around recess appointments.

He has watched Republicans block many of his appointments, and now he says he made it clear to them that he will “consider” making some when the U.S. Senate goes into recess.

“One senator, as you all are aware, had put a hold on every single nominee that we had put forward due to a dispute over a couple of earmarks in his state,” President Obama said.

“In our meeting, I asked the congressional leadership to put a stop to these holds in which nominees for critical jobs are denied a vote for months. Surely we can set aside partisanship and do what’s traditionally been done to confirm these nominations.

If the Senate does not act — and I made this very clear — if the Senate does not act to confirm these nominees, I will consider making several recess appointments during the upcoming recess, because we can’t afford to allow politics to stand in the way of a well-functioning government.”

This is where the president needs to show his toughness and just do it. Forget the threats. The actions of Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Alabama, and other Republican obstructionists will continue if President Obama allows them to run roughshod over him. When you’re the top dog, you do what you have to do to govern. Allowing Republican senators to continue to deny your appointments is nonsense.

If all of them choose to support a filibuster, then you take it to the American people and show the obstructionists for what they are. You get your grass-roots movement fired up to stand up and do something. The political right used its base to go after Democrats who blocked appointments to the federal bench and other positions. So why not be just as aggressive?

If there are members of your own party who stand in the way, such as Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Nebraska, then you also blast them and make them pay for acting so foolishly.

This president got rolled by the Senate over health care. His team made some boneheaded mistakes, and now they are paying for them. Continuing to play footsie with opponents will only get him into more trouble. He should set a deadline to have his folks confirmed. If not, appoint them all during the recess and go on about your business.

Obama’s critics keep blasting him for Chicago-style politics. So, fine. Channel your inner Al Capone and go gangsta against your foes. Let ‘em know that if they aren’t with you, they are against you, and will pay the price.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Roland Martin.

Ecofascists Hate Me

Ecofascists DO NOT want you to see this graph, and one quick look explains why. I’m so happy that Ecofascists are finally being called-out on their asinine claims. While I’m at it, let me clue you in on wind power. When the wind blows you get electricity but when it doesn’t blow you get nothing. That is because it is impossible with current technology to store alternating current. Direct current wind power can’t be stored in batteries. As a result consumers need redundant power plants. Sucks, huh?!

USA Similar To Greece?

 Funny how things work out sometimes. Just yesterday I posted a piece on how Greece is broke and how the Unionized Government workforce refuses to accept any scaling back on wages or benefits, so they did what most greedy Unions do, they go on strike like little boys and girls throwing hissy-fits. Well their hissy-fits has shut down Greece, with their government on the verge of collapse, and the people close to full-scale revolution.

Read the article below and then think if there are any similarities that relate to the problems Greece is having, and the position that Obama is determined to put us in.

Gio-

I support the Tea-Party Express.

February 12, 2010

Barack Obama may not have learned much at Harvard regarding the Constitution, but he did learn in Chicago how politics works: the Chicago way. Reward supporters, and keep the bribery as opaque  as possible. Chicago mores have been brought to Washington.

 

There has recently been a flurry of critical columns examining the devastation done to our nation’s fiscal health by government workers. Our cities, states, and federal government are in critical condition. Cities have begun declaring bankruptcy, and states such as California and Illinois are tottering. The federal government, which supplied a big chunk of stimulus dollars merely to keep states on life support, is running massive deficits and accumulating debts as far as the eye can see. What caused the problems?

 

There are two sides of the ledger responsible. Declining state tax receipts (considered “earnings” by government) played a role (the receipts side). But the real scourge has been on the expense side of the ledger: salaries and pension benefits given — and I do mean given — to government workers.

 

Public-sector unions have amassed great power to extract taxpayer dollars from politicians. Politicians reward government workers with our dollars, and they in turn are rewarded at election time by donations, free labor (phone banks, people who pass out flyers), and votes.

 

“Fully one-third of the ‘stimulus’ money went to state and local governments — an obvious payoff to public employee unions that contributed so much to Democrats,” as Michael Barone noted. Barone describes the corruption at the core of this dealing:

Public-sector unionism is a very different animal from private-sector unionism. It is not adversarial but collusive. Public-sector unions strive to elect their management, which in turn can extract money from taxpayers to increase wages and benefits — and can promise pensions that future taxpayers will have to fund.

The results are plain to see. States such as New York, New Jersey and California, where public-sector unions are strong, now face enormous budget deficits and pension liabilities. In such states, the public sector has become a parasite sucking the life out of the private-sector economy.

 

Obama and the Democrats have been well-rewarded for their patronage. Unions contributed up to 400 million dollars to Democrats in 2008 and engage in skullduggery to advance their aims. The latest revelation: a union-funded slush fund secretly targeting GOP candidates through the use of money-laundering and front groups. Unions have funded all sorts of political activity — undoubtedly the major reason Obama, in one of his first acts as president, ended union disclosure rules requiring them to report how their members’ dues were being spent. So much for transparency.

 

This is one reason why the recent Supreme Court decision leveling the playing field, allowing corporations to exercise their First Amendment rights by contributing to candidates, inflamed unions and President Obama. He violated precedent by attacking the Supreme Court in his State of the Union address. Maybe the title should be changed to State of the Unions.

 

Franklin Roosevelt, of all people, was alert to the danger of this collusion between politicians and unions. He maintained that “the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.” Yet it has been transplanted; today, a majority of union workers for the first time work for the government. And the government has brought good things to them.

Government work is one sector of our economy that is booming (besides pawnshops and bankruptcy lawyers). Rich Lowry noted the paradox: We suffer, and government workers prosper.

For most Americans, the Great Recession has been an occasion to hold on for dear life. For public employees, it’s been an occasion to let the good times roll.

The percentage of federal civil servants making more than $100,000 a year jumped from 14 percent to 19 percent during the first year and a half of the recession, according to USA Today. At the beginning of the downturn, the Transportation Department had one person making $170,000 or more a year; now it has 1,690 making that.

The New York Times reports that state and local governments have added a net 110,000 jobs since the beginning of the recession, while the private sector has lost 6.9 million. The gap between total compensation of public and private workers has only widened during the downturn, according to USA Today. In 2008, benefits for public employees grew at a rate three times that of private employees. 

Nor does the boom look likely to end anytime soon.

 

The President’s new budget can be symbolized by the old wartime poster: Uncle Sam Wants You. Until Barack Obama came into office, the number of federal employees had held relatively constant. But that was so 2008. That number jumped from 1.875 million in 2008 to 1.98 million in 2009, and it looks to jump a farther in 2010 — a 14.5% leap in two years. (And the boom is in federal agencies, not the military; hiring at the IRS, EPA, and the Justice Department is a big portion of the increase. Big Brother is getting bloated — maybe we can get Michelle to work on this obesity problem.)

 

These jobs come with munificent salaries and benefits.

 

Federal workers now earn, in wages and benefits, about twice what their private sector equivalents get paid. They often have Cadillac health plans and retirement benefits far above the private sector average: 80 percent of public-sector workers have pension benefits, only 50 percent in the private sector. Many can retire at age 50.

 

The pensions are manipulated upwards and gold-plated, too, as I noted in “Taxpayers: Eat your hearts out, suckers.” Many others have begun to notice the drain on public finances by pensions for government workers, and the public pension tsunami has just begun.

 

This is the engine driving our ballooning deficits and public debt. Merely rolling federal employee pay back to where it was in 1998 relative to the private sector and shifting state and local government pay back to 2005 relative levels would save $116 billion annually from government costs.

 

We know this will never happen as long as Democrats are in power. They like this perpetual motion machine. A government bureau, Ronald Reagan quipped, is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on earth. But we can try, and there is certainly potential for Republicans to seize on this problem as it begins to gain traction in the public mind. The issue seems tailor-made for Tea Partiers.

 

Meanwhile, Big Brother, like many big brothers, has become a bully. The Internal Revenue Service is on a hiring binge to crack down on taxpayers; fees on candy, plastic bags, iPod downloads, sugar, and many other things that make life fun are going up and up; our tax rates are inflating; and studies show that there has even been an explosion in parking tickets and fines for every picayune sort of “violation” that the bureaucrats can dream up in all their spare time — phantom taxes, they have been called. The leviathan must be fed.

 

The massive debt accumulating will be our responsibility to pay in the decades ahead. Obama blames Bush for the problems he inherited, but we know whom to blame for the problems our children and grandchildren will inherit. This debt will be an albatross around the neck of our economy. Our taxes will go toward these pensions and debt repayment instead of investments that will help our economy grow.

 

But even this good deal is not good enough for Barack Obama. He is a very mischievous man whose Modus Operandi is to distract and defame and engage in a great deal of sleight of hand. If he truly is a “sort of God” (as one of his adoring Newsweek pundits characterized him), that God would be Janus of two faces. While he talks the talk about the deficit and freezing discretionary spending, Obama engages in a spending binge that would make Imelda Marcos proud. But look what else the Magician-in-Chief  is doing: giving even more money and benefits to government workers, and doing it in a very untransparent and sneaky way.

 

Barack Obama is planning a major overhaul of the Federal government pay system that would boost pay for government workers while loosening scrutiny on how they do their jobs.

 

When he released his budget, there was a section titled “Improving the Federal Workforce.” Sounds good, right? But watch what the man and his minions do, not what they say.

 

First, the document tries to justify the high salaries government workers are paid (responding to the mounting criticism).

 

But then comes the trickery, disguised as “reform” and “refreshing” the system. This team is addicted to euphemisms (and their thesauruses are well-thumbed).

 

John Berry, director of the Office of Personnel Management, is engaged in a major effort to overhaul the G.S., or General Schedule, classification and pay system that began in 1949. Change is coming, and it will gladden the hearts and fill the wallets of government workers. In a Washington Post interview, Berry

mused about eliminating the first two ranks of the 15-grade GS system and adding grades 16 and 17. Berry did not explicitly advocate a pay raise for federal workers during the interview, but those in the added grades presumably would be paid more than the current top rate.

 

Berry made noises about tying pay to performance (consider this chaff to deflect observation and criticism), but then he tipped his hand:

 

“I’m a strong proponent of breaking the chain to the desk and breaking the chain to the time clock,” he said. He wants government to “move in a direction to empower and trust our employees to get the job done … and not focus so much on where they’re sitting and what hours they’re sitting there.”

 

Does that sound like a plan to increase efficiency of government workers? Give them higher pay, but allow them to set their own hours and work from…where? Starbucks? Home? The zoo?

 

And how is this “reform” going to happen? Are the people or our representatives going to have a say in how our money is spent? Need one ask?

 

The plans are in the final stages and will be put in place by a presidential memorandum or executive order. In other words, they’ll be implemented by presidential fiat. This is the form of government we have now — or at least did, before Scott Brown was elected.

 

Government work…our growth industry.

Ed Lasky is news editor of American Thinker.

Obama and the Government Employees

Obama Abusing Race Card

Once again the h/t goes out to FS for dropping this off in my email-box. We should be used to it by now, but I for one, can’t let it go. Yes, there are some really mean hateful racist people in this country, but they in no way speak or represent the majority. Knowing human nature the way that I do, I expect racism to be around forever. I would honestly love to see racism just go away, never to rear it’s ugly head again, but as long as there are people that have a different skin colors, there will be those that will compensate their own inferiority by pretending to be superior to that other race. Fortunately, we have come a long way in the United States when it comes to race issues. Since we have those on both sides of the color spectrum that want to use the difference in color as an excuse to further their cause, or use it as a wedge for political reasons. The article below is about the ‘wedge’, even though the author of the piece doesn’t know it. He’s much too busy using the race card to further his cause, to even understand what he’s doing. This has got to stop. But it won’t… it’s that unfortunate human nature thing I mentioned.

Gio-

Professor in Chief

Barack Obama has been called a lot of things since he hit the national stage: Celebrity, elitist and even one who “pals around with terrorists.” But as his poll numbers come back down to earth, and an emboldened conservative movement sharpens its attacks, the label that seems to be sticking to Obama as much as any lately is that of “professor.”

Speaking to Tea Party activists in Nashville last week, Sarah Palin did her part to keep the “professor” dig in circulation.

“They know we’re at war, and to win that war we need a commander in chief, not a professor of law standing at the lectern,” the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee told a frenzied crowd.

Obama’s years on the University of Chicago’s faculty have proven a double edged sword. While his supporters accept his higher education experience as evidence of a thoughtful pragmatism, the “professor” label has just as easily been used as a bristly brush, painting the president as an out of touch dreamer who formed theories in the Ivory Tower that can’t be translated into concrete policies from the White House.

The attacks on Obama aren’t new to politics, and they reveal longstanding stereotypes about the professoriate that continue to speak to a subsection of the electorate for whom higher education is regarded with skepticism, a number of political thinkers and academics said in interviews.

“When Palin and others describe Obama as professorial in style, they are invoking themes and tropes that have a long history in American politics,” says Neil Gross, an associate professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia. “That longstanding tendency in American politics is also in this case being drawn together with an implicit criticism of liberal professors, which really only became a mainstay of conservative discourse in the 1950s.”

A leading voice in that discourse was the late William F. Buckley Jr., who famously opined that he’d “rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.” Other conservatives took aim at Harvard faculty as well, including Richard Nixon, who derided that pesky special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, as a “fucking Harvard professor,” according to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s account in The Final Days.

The use of “professor” as a term of derision may have hit its stride in the 1950s, but it dates back to scolding characterizations of Socrates, according to Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguistics professor at the University of California at Berkeley. By the 1940s, Hollywood had cashed in on the stereotype with a film called “Ball of Fire,” which cast Gary Cooper against type as a naïve professor who learns the real ways of the world from a nightclub dancer called Sugarpuss O’Shea. In the political realm, Adlai Stevenson was similarly labeled an “egghead” in his 1950s campaigns for the presidency, Nunberg added.

If the term professor is used in politics, it’s seldom a compliment, and instead “implies dry, hectoring, unemotional, self important, all of the negative stereotypes of somebody who is vainly certain of his own superior mental capacities but doesn’t have a human connection,” says Nunberg, author of The Years of Talking Dangerously and a frequent contributor to NPR’s “Fresh Air.”

Obama Mentor sees Race at Play

Watching the “professor Obama” label bandied about again, one of the president’s longtime mentors says he doubts it will gain traction outside of Tea Party rallies. Taken to its logical conclusion, the message just doesn’t make sense, says Charles J. Ogletree, a Harvard professor who has known Obama since he was a law student there.

Photo: The White House

President Obama and his senior advisor David Axelrod listen during a climate change meeting in the Roosevelt Room of the White House Oct. 14, 2009. While supporters describe Obama as methodical, critics have suggested he’s slow to act.

“I think anyone who examines it closely and carefully will see this type of criticism of Obama will ultimately be counterproductive,” Ogletree says. “Do you want to tell your children we don’t want smart people in government?”

Ogletree, founding and executive director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice, says he sees the “professor” label as a thinly veiled attack on Obama’s race. Calling Obama “the professor” walks dangerously close to labeling him “uppity,” a term with racial overtones that has surfaced in the political arena before, Ogletree said. Describing his divisive confirmation hearings as a “circus,” Justice Clarence Thomas called the proceedings “a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas.…” It is perhaps ironic, then, that Ogletree, who represented Anita Hill when she made harassment allegations against Thomas in 1991, now sees a bit of the “uppity” label being placed on Obama.

“The idea is that he’s not one of us,” Ogletree says of the professor label. “He has these ideas that are left wing, that are socialist, that he’s palling around with terrorists — those were buzzwords, but the reality was they were looking at this president as an African American who was out of place.”

Thomas L. Haskell, a professor emeritus of history at Rice University, agrees that racial bias may be implicit in the attack on Obama’s professorial past.

“For me and a lot of other academic types, we identify with Obama precisely because he is an intellectual,” Haskell says. “But what does that mean to John Q. Public? I don’t know. John Q. Public may be frightened of these people, especially because this particular intellectual is a black.”

Attacks on the professoriate or intellectuals in general, however, are certainly not limited to African Americans. The late Richard Hofstadter, a historian at Columbia University, explored such attacks in his 1963 book, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. David S. Brown, author of Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography (University of Chicago Press, 2006), says Hofstadter would probably see shades of Barry Goldwater’s brand of conservatism among the Tea Party activists.

It’s no surprise that the anti-intellectualism that Hofstadter wrote about has resonance among some Americans today, says Brown, a historian at Elizabethtown College. Higher education programs are increasingly moving toward the pre-professional variety, and students and parents are inclined to press colleges about how their programs will lead to jobs — not to intellectual growth, Brown says. In that context, the stereotypical liberal arts professor is ever more marginalized.

“A traditional humanities professor is going to be engaged in criticism and speculative ideas, and will probably have more questions than answers,” says Brown. “But we’re a culture that wants answers.”

And wants them fast. Some of the harshest critics of Obama’s professorial style have come at moments in his presidency when he appeared slow to act, giving rise to former Vice President Dick Cheney’s suggestion that Obama was “dithering” while deciding on troop levels in Afghanistan.

Academe Criticized in New York Congressional Race

Obama isn’t the only modern Democrat to see his higher education credentials derided as handicaps. Campaigning for reelection to represent New York’s First Congressional District, Democratic Rep. Tim Bishop has taken shots for the 29 years he spent as an administrator at Southampton College. Bishop said he’s faced such criticism periodically throughout his public life, and his Republican opponent, Randy Altschuler, revived the anti-academic charge in a press release last month.

“When it comes to creating jobs, Congressman Bishop has three strikes against him. He’s an academic, a career politician and someone who walks lockstep with the high tax policies of Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama,” the release noted.

Bishop, who served as Southhampton’s provost, says in an interview that he’s baffled but not terribly surprised to see his opponent take such a tack.

“[This press release] comes from an individual with an undergraduate degree from Princeton, a graduate degree from Harvard and a Fulbright scholar, but he is being derisive of me being an academic,” Bishop says.

“I think the term academic is often used interchangeably with elitist, so there is this notion that if one is well educated that that person is also an elitist and therefore out of touch with the concerns that everyday people have, as if people who are well educated aren’t everyday people,” he adds. “I also think the term academic is used derisively as a means of burnishing one’s populist credentials.”

A spokesman for Altschuler said the press release was meant to point out that Bishop lacks experience in producing private sector jobs.

“I think Congressman Bishop is out of touch, because he’s never had to personally make a payroll,” says Rob Ryan, Altschuler’s senior communications adviser. “He’s never personally had to see that his employees’ insurance is paid for. He’s never had to make those hard decisions that the private sector has to make. He’s always playing with someone else’s money.”

That argument is also not new to campaigning, says Gross, who has researched public views of academe.

“The idea that politicians are to be vaunted for their practical skills as decision makers and effective managers and so on, and that their alleged intellectualism is a drawback, is a very longstanding theme in American political discourse,” he says. “You can find echoes of that in various campaigns and debates over the course of the 20th century, and even earlier.”

— Jack Stripling

Progressives Biggest Fear

My favorite poll…

Obama Whines About His Problem

I may need to stop in mid-sentence and count to 10 to calm myself down, but let’s see what happens anyway. This is the second time that Obama has come out in the past couple of weeks to complain about healthcare costs rising. The part that grates the cheese off my pizza is… the costs have skyrocketed this past year because of Obama!

You pinheaded Progressive/Marxists want to know how I could possibly blame your crappy president, right? This is gonna be easy… When Drug Manufacturers and Healthcare Providers figured out that Obama was serious about pushing Congress until he got a Healthcare Bill, they had to sit down and make business decisions. And the decision they made was not an easy one, but it was very understandable considering all the nonsense that the Dems were putting into the bill. These companies had to raise their prices so dramatically to create a new price baseline for their products. Anotherwords, they felt confident that sometime in the next 10 years they would be forced into a situation where they would start losing money so they needed to make some of that difference up now. Plus, once the Government controls Healthcare they took an educated guess that Government was going to want lower prices so they had to have some room to negotiate from.

The bottom line is… If the price of your medicines went up like crazy this year, or your Healthcare is now costing you both arms and a leg, you can blame Obama. He’s the driving force behind all of it! Some prez huh?

Gio-

WellPoint Takes Heat Over Rates

By LAURA MECKLER

WASHINGTON—The Obama administration is seizing on a big health-insurance rate increase by WellPoint Inc. in California as fresh evidence of the need for action as it tries to resuscitate its health-care legislation.

WellPoint, the country’s largest insurer by number of members, responded Thursday to repeated criticism with a letter blaming the 39% increase in the individual market on the economy and rising health costs. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius hit back with a statement saying she wasn’t satisfied.

All week, Democrats from President Barack Obama on down have cited the company’s rate plans as a justification for a health-care overhaul that would remake the individual market, where people who don’t get insurance through their jobs shop for coverage.

Complete story here.

Who Is Gonna Save America?

Earlier today I posted about the riots breaking out in the country of Greece. The short story is… Greece is broke, so…. Greece decided to cut back on benefits and wages for government workers. Greece has something like 20% of their civilian workforce working for the government. Greece government workers belong to a large Union. The Greece government workers have gone on strike effectively shutting down the country because the Union says they won’t give up a cent in bennie’s or salaries. Greeks are on the verge of starting a bloody revolution.

Europe Vows to Save Greece

Pledge to Prevent Athens Default Is Watershed for Euro Zone; Details Remain Vague

My question is… Considering the path our government is on, how long until we go through what Greece is suffering? More importantly…

Who is going to save the United States of America?

Obama Steals From Muhammed Ali

Look, I like the one and only Ali as much as the next person. In fact, in my younger days I was involved in the fight business, but now my pugilistic desires are fixed by the sport of MMA. Anyway… many people have tried to steal from Ali, but nobody has ever been as successful on such a world-wide scale. Read the piece below and see if you think Obama could pull it off. Personally, I don’t think he has the chops, but Tom does bring a couple of good points. Enjoy!

Gio-

Obama’s Rope-a-Dope Strategy

 

I won’t give Obama credit for much of anything but I will give him an “E” for effort, his attempts at getting the Republicans to attend his bipartisan healthcare summit is classic rope-a-dope strategy: Make your opponent think you are in a weakened position and allow him to exhaust himself trying to win, whereas you deliver the knock-out blow when your opponent is too weak to carry on.

 

My big concern is will the Republicans on Capital Hill fall for this obvious deception, I would like to say thay are smarter than this. We all know that the neither the democrats in the House or Senate are not going simply tear up their healthcare reform proposals and start from scratch again, that’s just not going to happen no matter what Obama says. The liberals are more than happy to place the moniker of “The Party of No” on the Republicans as if it were something to be ashamed of, I say wear it as a badge of honor. As Conservatives/ Republicans we are about the only thing that stands between freedom and the oppression of this administration and government.

 

My message for the Republicans on the Hill is this, don’t make the mistake of falling for the lies and deception of this administration, by now you should know that when democrats speak of “bipartisanship” it means giving in to THEIR will and giving up YOUR principles. Another thing you should also remember, the American people are watching every move you make, you know the same people that attended TEA Parties by the millions around the country last year, that took democratic AND republican senators and congressman to task at the town hall meetings last summer and let’s not forget the elections in New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts. Yes, those people that with the pull of a lever, the dash of a pen or a click on a computer screen can end your political career come the next election. So I think if you value your position you should stand with your constituents against Obama and this healthcare sham. BE PROUD TO BE THE PARTY OF NO!!!!! The American people will thank you in the end.

 

Tom in NC

One For The Good Guys?

This is G-R-E-A-T news, but with Obama in the White House, there is always a ‘but’.

Gio-

Tuesday saw a huge victory for American employers and workers, as Congress rejected the nomination of radical union activist Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

Your grassroots response to our Monday action alert made this victory possible, as thousands of you emailed your Senators in opposition to the Becker nomination.

As you recall, Craig Becker is a former union lawyer whose out-of-mainstream views would have tilted the NLRB far in the direction of Big Labor — and posed a direct threat to American jobs.

If nominated, Becker could have allowed the unions to achieve their entire agenda (including their dangerous “Card Check” legislation) by “administrative fiat” — without the approval of Congress.

Unfortunately, some are now concerned the White House will bypass Congress by sneaking in Becker as a recess appointment.

Becker’s radical views would disrupt years of established precedent in current labor law. We urge the White House to respect the democratic process and nominate a new bi-partisan candidate to replace Becker.

How would you feel about a recess appointment of Becker by the White House? Please take a few moments to vote in our quick poll below:

Recess Appointment of Radical Union Activist Craig Becker?

Thanks, again, to so many of you for making your voices heard.

Sincerely,

Bill Miller
Senior Vice President and National Political Director
U.S. Chamber of Commerce

Great Political News Florida!

H/t goes out to FS once again for sending me this alert.

The video you will see has been posted here before. Although it’s a couple of years old, it reminds you of the kind of people that should be elected to represent us. Not the pack of hyenas and jack-asses we have now. Enjoy!

Gio-

February 11, 2010

Col. Allen West is running

Alan Fraser

We have written before on congressional candidate Col. Allen West (here and here).  Well, thank God he’s back.  He is running again for Florida’s 22nd District seat against his old opponent of November 2008, Ron Klein.  It’s a district that leans Democrat but had a Republican Congressman for 14 years until Democrat Ron Klein won that seat in 2006.

This is a few months old but remains a must-see little video of an excellent speech Col. West gave in October ’09.  If you like what you see and hear, jump over to his campaign site and give something to a man who for some many years gave to us.