I Told You So

Unlike last year when it was so cold, snow flurries whipped through the air on the Morristown Green, the weather this year was absolutely gorgeous, a flawlessly beautiful spring day.

The tulips stood at attention, the cherry blossoms were at their pinkest, and the sky was that soft April blue that makes you so glad to be out in the fresh air.

Likewise, the tea partiers were polite, well-mannered, and attentive. The speakers were on message. And there were only a handful of tea party crashers – three with signs and the kids from Drew University in back – who enjoyed no success in disrupting the rally.

Nobody paid any attention to the party crashers, though. They were too busy listening to the speakers and cheering to care what they did. Everyone was so well-behaved – being all adults and then some, there was no reason to expect otherwise – that anyone who got out of line would have stood out like Uncle Sam at an anti-war rally.

The one sign was pretty funny. I couldn’t tell whether the sign bearer was a party crasher or not. She was certainly dressed like everyone else. She was carrying one of the “Kenya” signs (“A village in Kenya is missing it’s [sic] idiot”).

The incorrect punctuation was probably the tip-off. While I’m no birther (as I’ve often written), I still found the sign a good belly-laugh. That’s the thing about us partiers – we don’t let nonsense like that bother us. The sign was harmless, as far as any of us were concerned.

If someone wants to believe in a Kenyan birth certificate, or UFOs, or the Tri-Partisan Commission (or whatever it’s called), leave them alone. 9/11 Truthers are troublesome idiots, but it’s not worth arguing with them.

So, no one disrupted anything, although the crowd was ready for them, if they tried. A delivery truck driver shouted something unintelligible out his window, and it looked like some of the partiers were going to run out of the park after him – some of the women partiers.

The male partiers looked shocked. But he drove on and that was the end of the one and only incident in Morristown.

For my part, I was glad to have nothing more to do than relax, take photos, and listen to the wonderful speeches. The last speaker, the chairman of the Tea Party’s Small Groups initiative, was terrific.

He urged the crowd to talk to their friends and neighbors, that we couldn’t do it alone. That’s’ what I would have said. That’s what I’ve been saying from Day One. But he was a much better speaker and I was glad he and the others were on message and delivered it so well.

If I had gotten up to speak, I think would have spoken about taxes, something I skirted around when I was on the podium last year.

Critics seem to think we object to paying any taxes. They also say that our taxes aren’t as high as we claim they are. But looking at some of the porkulus earmarks, it’s obvious the government has WAY too much of our money to spend.

A shellfish conference in Missippi? Turtle research in Hawaii? A teapot museum in North Carolina (this was BTP – Before Tea Parties, in 2007)?

My brother’s ex-wife had a porcelain fetish. She stuffed porcelain plates, bowls, cups, vases, figurines into every corner, every cabinet, every nook of their 2,400 square foot center hall colonial home.

When she left and we helped my brother clear his house of all the junk, we were just amazed by all the waste. Nature abhors a vaccum, and so did his ex-wife, my brother would joke. She also couldn’t stand to an empty space go to waste.

If only our problems with Washington were that simple. We focus on the senselessness of these pet projects and don’t look beyond them. We don’t itemize the bill of sale. People don’t realize that these porkulus items are kick-backs.

Reading the news articles, you discover that all these pet projects donated huge campaign contributions. The politicians received kick-backs for bringing home the bacon. A political friend notes both parties are guilty.

Democrats are fond of research studies, Republicans, of employment-propping business contracts – corporate welfare. We need to pay attention to the government credit card bill when it comes in to find out just what our politicians are buying.

We also need to put a stop to the unfair redistribution of wealth. It’s very easy to say, tax my more affluent older brother in favor of my struggling younger brother, with me in the middle.

But who he gives his money to should be up to my big brother, not Big Brother. The government needs to mind his own business. We shouldn’t be providing unconditional support to people we don’t even know and can’t hold accountable for the expense.

We’re busy bailing out consumers who went way beyond their credit card limit, and now we’re picking up the bill, just as my brother had to pay the freight for all those empty porcelain bowls.

Crazy people have the strangest way of making you feel guilty for the crimes they’ve committed. It’s time to stop letting the crazy people run the asylum. We’re on the hook for an awful lot of money we have little hope of repaying.

I watched a commercial about an organization that helps indebted consumer get their hands on that free moo-lah that gets them off the credit hook, blaming the credit card companies for charging usurious interest (instead of cutting off their credit after the third month of non-payment).

These are the crazy people who voted for Obama. Why wouldn’t they? But even my younger brother didn’t vote for the Big O in the hopes of picking our olders brother’s pockets. Even has more integrity.

It’s long past time for Americans to turn off the spigot. Turn off the dripping government faucet, cut off their lifeline, turn out their lights. Slash the government’s credit card. Now.

Anyway, that’s what I would have said today, had I spoken. The pictures tell the rest of today’s stories.

The Tea Party – it’s a beautiful thing. I’m so proud of the tea partiers who fearlessly donned their tricorn hats (I wore mine), their Betsy Ross and Statue of Liberty costumes, their tea bag earrings.

They held up their signs, behaved like ladies and gentlemen, and cheered like good Americans.

  They don’t look like party crashers to me.

Morristown Tea Party Prez Richard Luzzi

Young, younger, and youngest, they were patriotic

If only Liberals had a sense of humor…

Or a sense of justice….

or just plain ol’ common sense

Instead, they worry about buttons, hats, and tea bag earrings.  The very imaginative things we love.  God bless buttons, hats, and tea bag earrings!

This lady’s wonderful – she’s been with Morristown since the beginning.

In summary, it was a beautiful Tax Day Rally on the Morristown Green!

Signs of the Times

 Bernardo: Who’s there?

Francisco: Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself. [Hamlet, Prince of Denmark]

With great tidings, the Liberals have announced they will “infiltrate” tomorrow’s Tea Parties.

This is hardly news to the Tea Parties who have been battling them this past year. The Liberals have come with racist, homophobic, misspelled signs to unhinge our movement, to little effect.

During the last year, our Tea Party sent out card readers to urge the extremists to remove themselves and their signs, spell checkers with white-out and magic markers to correct spelling, and an Intervention Squad to isolate the malcontents.

They claim they’ve infiltrated the general meetings. But the indoor meetings are nothing like the rallies. Our rallies, at any rate, were set up precisely to discourage disruptive behavior by inviting speakers to address the crowd.

This gave the crowd a focus and limited the opportunity for misbehavior. The real Tea Party crowds are a law-abiding group, polite, well-mannered, and focused. Anyone who interrupts one of the speakers will soon find themselves with more attention than they ever intended, of the wrong sort.

You’ll know immediately who the real Tea Partiers are and who the party crashers are.

 The real intent of the party crashers is to have the signs removed and to cast doubt and confusion among the Tea Party crowd. The Liberals have read the signs of the times and they’re duly frightened.

For last year’s Tax Day rally, I had an idea for a comedy skit about the Porkulus bill. At first, it was well-received. But by the day of the rally, the humor simply didn’t fit in with the angry mood of the Tea Party crowd.

They don’t mind tricorn hats, for those are authentic, historic symbols of the American revolution. Mine was a symbol of rebellion against a communist history professor in high school.

I will wear it again tomorrow, though all the world may paint me a fool. I’m proud of my hat, of that rebellion against tyranny some 34 years ago, and of today’s mutiny against socialist tyranny.

Anyone who rebels against the Tea Party, at their own events, mimicking the behavior they think represents the Tea Party, will only find themselves performing in an echo chamber spotlight, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Of Dandelions and Defiance

 Brave little Dandelion!/Fast falls the snow/Bending the daffodil’s/Haughty head low

Children grow so quickly, parents quickly forget the antics of one age when new escapades replace them. They only remember all many years later, when they can dare to laugh at the antics that gave them gray hairs.

I was reminiscing with our band’s snare drummer about an antic of his daughter’s that I had not even witnessed. I’d only heard about it second-hand. But it stuck in my memory longer than his.

We were discussing his seven year old’s first communion. He and his wife were worried what the girl would do when she tasted the sacramental wine. Would she maintain her ladylike composure or spit it out all over her snow-white communion dress, staining it a grape color?

Happily, he reported, she did not spit it out, much to her mother’s relief.

I then reminded him of an episode several years ago, when she was about four or five. Our band had traveled to a seaside resort for our annual summer holiday trip. I had already returned home.

However, this family and another, complete with grandparents in tow (one of whom told me this tale), returned to the amusement pier for one last fling. As they went along the street, the drummer’s daughter and his friend’s daughter spied dandelions in the grass.

The snare drummer’s daughter, “Sylvia”, plucked up one of the golden weeds. “Joanna,” his friend’s daughter, picked one, too.

His friend said to “Joanna,” “No, no, ‘Joanna.’ That’s nasty. Put that down.”

The girl regarded the flower for a moment. When her father insisted further that it was yucky, she replied, “Oh, all right” and tossed it away.

The snare drummer took his friend’s cue.

“No, no, ‘Sylvia.’ That’s nasty. Yucky. Put it down.”

“Sylvia” pondered the flower then looked up at her father, towering over her. She did not put the dandelion down. Instead, she put the weed blossom first into her mouth and proceeded to chew it down. With slow, careful determination, and very big bites, never taking her eye off her father.

The dandelion disappeared, chomp by chomp, down her gullet, until all that remained was the stem. She let the root dangle for a moment, for effect, and then consumed it, too.

Anyone who knows anything about this weed, knows what a bitter morsel it is and what pluck it took for this little girl to eat it with such relish.

When she finished, she took a step forward, stomping her foot at her father.  “Sylvia” gave him one, last triumphant look and smacked her lips.

After a moment of stunned silence, I’m told, the entire group broke into hysterical laughter.

Tonight, her father couldn’t recall the incident.

“Usually, we fathers,” he said, “try to remember the good stuff, the good stories.”

I assured him it was a very good story and that I was only sorry I hadn’t been present to witness this mutinous act first-hand. When I first started my blog – when it had its original name, before I changed it – that was the very first tale I told.

I retell it now, near the eve of the Tax Day Tea Parties, so that the Tea Partiers may benefit by “Sylvia’s” splendid example of rebelliousness and fearlessness (when she was 18 months old, to her mother’s horror, she plunged headlong into the deep end of the motel pool and swam its entire length).

If anyone tells you they object to your home-made sign, or that you shouldn’t criticize Obama, or that you’re a right-wing conspiracy theorist, or that you’re a racist, homophobe, etcetera and so forth, that you should volunteer to redistribute your wealth, tear up the Constitution, and become a citizen of the world….

Tell them to go eat a dandelion.

The Fifth Column

During the 1936 siege of Madrid at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), Nationalist General Emilio Mola broadcast a message that four columns of his forces outside the city would be supported by a “fifth column” of supporters inside the city whose purpose was to undermine the Republican government from within.

Madrid held out for three years amidst heavy fighting and eventually fell to Generalisimo Francisco Franco’s Nationalist forces in March 1939.

After the failed coup d’etat in July 1936, the Republican government wasn’t sure what to do. While it wanted to put down the coup, the leaders didn’t know if it could trust the armed forces. Nor did they want to arm the trade unions. And indeed, later in July, the government sent the Guardia Civil to put down a rebellion in Seville.

However, the guardias defected to the insurgents upon reaching the city. Meanwhile, a military general within Madrid, sympathetic to the Nationalist movement, was preparing to launch the military rebellion in the city.  Yet, when he tried to march out of the barracks, his 2,500 troops were forced back inside the compound by hostile crowds.

The Nationalists were supported by Nazi Germany and Italy; the Republicans, by the Soviet Union. Franco declared he would bomb Madrid to pieces rather than allow the Marxists to occupy it.

So it is with this threat of fifth column action that the Liberals threaten this year’s Tea Party movement.

By definition, a fifth column is a group of people who clandestinely undermine a larger group from within to aid an external enemy. Within Madrid, the fear of this column was so great that many nationalist prisoners were executed.

Though the term was coined in the 20th Century, the notion of a Fifth Column, the infiltration of an enemy city is nothing new. The Greeks tried it, successfully, with the Trojan Horse.

There’s nothing new about the Liberals’ attempts to infiltrate the Tea Parties from within. From within the organizations themselves. Like Mola’s Fifth Column, they’ve only had limited success.

From the early days of the Tea Party with which I’ve been involved, they made such attempts. They found people like me waiting for them. My father, you see, had instructed me well about the dangers of Fifth Columns when I was a child and I was ready for them when the battle ensued, years later.

How ironic that the Liberals should threaten us with Fifth Column action, a term coined during a conflict between a government that relied on communist assistance even as it feared its own labor unions, and a national-socialist insurgency.

Always, it’s the moderate people in the middle whom such extremists wish to either subdue or conciliate. Even as they prepare for battle, they plan their strategy for manipulating these pawns of peace.

If you suppose that the Tea Party people were grateful for my defense of their cause, you’d be wrong; they were horrified. They castigated me for insulting these “ambassadors” from the other side.

I was cast out of their website (which eventually was shut down anyway) for taking on the enemy. As late as last week, a Liberal had infiltrated the general meeting. I spotted her immediately, and though I knew who she was, and she knew I knew, I said nothing.

This past week, the Tea Party declared that there was no necessity for being quite so “nice.” If the enemy would infiltrate their ranks, they would have to bear the slings and arrows of outrageous insults when they were discovered.

Bravo for that Tea Party!

Now the Fifth Columnists threaten to show up with right-wing signs, advocating racism and homophobia and who knows what else. My tea party has already had experience with these Fifth Columnists. The adversary claims to know how to counter them.

Fifth Columnists wish to cast doubts in the minds of timid middle-of-the-roaders who fear the Media’s portrayal of the Tea Partiers is accurate. They count on the fact that Conservatives are, by nature, timid and view anyone who would attend a public rally as “outlandish”.

They count on the Media to portray the Tea Parties as they have done this past year – unfairly. Only last week, Gary Trudeau in his Doonesbury cartoon, portrayed a Tea Partier as a clown with a red nose wearing a tricorn hat.

Trudeau’s portrait did not ring true and his jokes fell surprisingly flat. Even when you hate Trudeau, you have to admit his humor. Yet, in this series, that sense of humor failed him.

He didn’t pay attention to his background for one thing. An artist should know better. In the background were angry Tea Partiers, normal American men and women, among whom his clownish Tea Partier singularly stood out.

Then he attacked the Tea Partier as “The Man” whom his character has always protested against. “The Man” has had various incarnations, but he started out as the heroin pusher of the ghetto. This charge comes from Doonesbury’s main drug pusher character, Zonker Harris. Who should be wearing the clown nose?

Finally, Trudeau and the Liberals underestimate the “hatred” average Americans have for them. It’s not hatred of gays or blacks or legal immigrants that brings them out onto the streets. It’s hatred of Liberals and the havoc they’ve wreaked upon America, most notably in the last 50 years or so.

So how will bystanders be able to tell the difference between Tea Partiers and the Fifth Columnists?

The Columnists will be carrying signs that say: “We hate [fill in the blank]!!”

The Tea Partiers will be carrying signs that say: “We love America!”

Tea Party Conspiracy Theories

Wow.  Even Fox News is worried about the fringers who stand at the borders of the Tea Parties.

 The top three conspiracy theorists Fox fears Tea Party foes will use against this grass roots movement are:

1. The Birthers, who don’t believe Obama was born in the United States

2. The Muslimists, who think Obama is a secret Muslim

3. The Socialists, that is, “fringers” who think Obama is a socialist

The best way Fox News could silence the Birthers is by publishing the truth, instead of shying away from it. The story is Hawaii destroyed all its original, long-form birth certificates in the 1960s and put them on microfilm. They now use an online, short form for certifying births.

However, the state will print out the microfilm, long-form version for earlier birthdates with permission from the individual in question, or a family representative, if they’re deceased.

Obama refuses to release permission, which is within his purview. In any case, his mother was born in the United States, so at least one of his parents was born a U.S. citizen.

Newspaper notices from that period in 1961 also published the birth. Finally, astrologers world-wide are convinced of the authenticity of his birth certificate. If astrologers are convinced, you can be sure the certificate is the real deal.

Astrologers don’t care about politics. They want to know the truth, the facts, the real date, not conspiracy theories.

Item Number Two: Obama is a secret Muslim. Well, he claims he’s a Christian. Many people claim they’re Christians. They don’t say whether they’re good Christians or bad Christians. Or secret Christians.

What’s really in his heart is a secret known only to Obama and God. We won’t know whether we’re really Christians until we get to the Pearly Gates. If our pass works, we’ll know we were good Christians. If not…

Whether Obama will renounce Christianity in favor of Islam is the matter to be studied. We will only know that if and when it happens. Obviously, many fringers are betting their last wills and testaments that it will happen.

Finally, there’s that outrageous accusation that Obama is a secret socialist. What will the fringers think of next? How did the right wing wingnuts ever get that into their addled skulls?

 Could it be the universal health care reform law that he just rammed through? The stimulus bill? Telling Joe the Plumber that he wanted to spread the wealth around.

Or is just the imaginings of iron-cross toting fringers?

 Maybe they got the idea because of Obama’s heavy leaning towards labor unions. (Actually that would make him a meliorist – a radical theory that holds that industry and government should be run by labor unions).

Much is made over the labels of Liberal and Socialist, but they’re pretty much synonymous. Meliorist is one of those labels sandwiched in between Socialist and Marxist.

If you don’t believe Obama is a socialist – that just because he hung out with Stalinists and Leninists and Marxists – even though he admitted he went out of his way to be befriended by radicals – let’s go to the source: The Communist Manifesto.

Marx and Engels had the organizational foresight to provide a sort of “To-Do” list for their followers. They’re sometimes referred to as “The Ten Planks of Communism.”

Let’s see how we’re doing on the checklist.

 1. Abolition of [private] property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.

Check!

2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.

Check!

3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.

Nearly checked off. The death tax is helping us along that route.

4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.

Wasn’t sure about this one until the government forced the Swiss banks to reveal U.S. holders of off-shore accounts.

5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.

Bingo! Obama’s claim to fame.

6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. AMTRAK. Just to name a couple. And of course, Obama’s wealthiest supporters sit on the boards of directors of the nation’s major liberal newspapers and media outlets. Net Neutrality is also on its way.

Check, check, check!

7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of wastelands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.

Can anyone say “GM – Government Motors”? By the way, that soil improvement deal didn’t work out too well for Communist China, did it? CHECK!

8. Equal liability of all to labor. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

Look for the union label and the union organizer who will put a stop sign through your windshield if you don’t sign up. Card CHECK!

9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of the population over the country.

Thanks to the Liberals strong-arming the banks into making sub-prime loans, now your suburban neighborhood can look just like Camden, N.J. Thank you, Barney Frank. Check!

10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production.

This almost sounds noble. But as always, you have to watch out for that word “free”. There’s always a catch and always a price to pay.

When you combine education with industrial production, you get kids learning to pound nails instead of the books. They learn to read auto manuals instead of Shakespeare, and recite Communist propaganda instead of the Declaration of Independence.

Fox News, instead of cringing at home-made signs accusing Obama of being a socialist, ought to be cringing at the Tea Party leaders quaking at the signs. They should also be more amazed at the critics who are complaining about such “accusations” of socialism.

Methinks the critics doth protest too much.

Aqua Et Igni Interdictus

This will have to be a short blog, as I had to do my taxes last night and had a concert rehearsal this evening, so there was no time for writing.

A writer in the U.K. has been keeping tabs on the worldwide censorship of the Internet. The House of Commons passed the “Digital Economy Bill” in the middle of the night, giving the government power to restrict and filter any website that is deemed to be undesirable for public consumption.

The bill has to go back to the House of Lords for final approval, where it’s expected to pass.

The author cites examples from other parts of the world, including the United States where freedom of speech is expected to meet its doom.

http://www.prisonplanet.com/death-of-the-internet-unprecedented-censorship-bill-passes-in-uk.html

Here in the U.S., the author says, Congress and the FCC are contemplating something called Internet.2, with rights severely pared down for content providers.

We may have to return to World War II-era ham radios, at this rate.

Once we’ve lost our freedom of speech, all we’ll have left is ultima ratio regum.

‘Tea Bagging’ the Tea Parties

The TEA Parties. It was such a simple idea. A bunch of friends and neighbors gather on their town square and hold up signs protesting big government.

What could be easier?

Well, maybe it wasn’t that easy. Permits had to be granted by the town. Sound equipment had to be rented, speakers lined up, and event insurance purchased. In the first rallies, the speaker portion was easy: ordinary citizens who had a story to tell.

But it could be done, and was. The TEA Party to which I belonged did a fantastic job. And they’re going to do it again.

As last summer wore on, the Tea Parties grew larger and larger. People began to take notice, especially the adversaries. With their dirty minds, they immediately came up with a pejorative terms, which only a Liberal mind could concoct: ‘tea baggers’.

You could hear the wheels in their Liberal minds turning. While they pasted on their best Pelosi, joker-face smiles, on the inside they were worried. These tea partiers were very dangerous. They were talking about liberty. Freedom. The Constitution.

What if someone heard them?

The propaganda machine went into 24/7 crisis mode to attack the Tea Parties. We were angry. Racist. Vioent. Homophobic. Xenophobic. Stupid. Moronic. Sore Losers. Look at those idiots in their tri-corner hats. Can’t accept the fact a black man won the election.

Somehow, they had to get inside these tea parties to disrupt them. We had agitators inside our Tea Party from Day One, before we even got to the first rally. They were shown the door.

We fought them at the meetings. On the website (when we still allowed comments; eventually that feature was eliminated). They threatened us with lawsuits. During the summer, one of the guest speakers received death threats. He canceled his appearance.

They tried subtler approaches. ‘You should carry manufactured signs, to present a uniform message.’ ‘You should concentrate on campaigns not rallies.’ ‘You need to be more politically active.’ ‘You need to speak one-on-one with the legislators.’

‘Town Hall meetings are more effective than rallies.’

This was all bunk. But as the crowds grew larger, it was harder for a single, lone voice to be heard: “Don’t believe any of this garbage!! They’re snow-jobbing you!”

Manufactured sign would take away all the individuality and creativity from the hometown crowds. Fortunately, the hometowners told the suits where to go with their conformity.

Liberals tended to crowd into the town hall meetings.  They lined up at the end so they would have the last word at the microphones and exceeded the one-minute limit.  And the town hall was the politician’s party; they ruled the event.

But Tea Party activists listened eagerly to exhortations that they head straight for Washington, D.C. ‘We have to do more, we want to do more than just the rallies!’ they cried.

For my part, I threw up my hands. I’m not into telling people what to do. ‘So go to Washington, if you feel that’s what you need to do. Who am I to say? Whatever works.’

Privately, I knew that wasn’t where the real power and influence was. The real influence was back in those town squares. That’s where votes come from: from voters. The Tea Party activists didn’t need to convince the politicians.

Politicians are puppets. Empty suits. Scarecrows that bend with the slightest breeze. It’s Americans who will determine America’s fate. They’re the ones you have to convince to vote for responsible legislators who won’t sell us down the river.

The rallies are everything. They’re the whole deal. They’re what it’s about: the people, not the politicians. The Tea Parties being in Washington made for great television and made the activists feel important.

It even made for great advertisement for their rallies back home.

Only now, those rallies are in danger. A hacker or a mole has infiltrated the National Tea Party Coalition website. They’re systematically erasing the April 15th rally information. They started out alphabetically, replacing the town information with a new notice.

They’re shifting gears, they claim, to become a political activist organization, fundraising, campaigning for politicians. Activities in which the Tea Parties were never meant to engage. In fact, the original hometowners eschewed all political activities.

They wanted the rallies to be about their voices, not those of politicians. But gradually, the local speakers were replaced with professional speakers. Not a bad idea, really. However, it was one more step away from the original intention of the rallies.

At my local tea party, we had politicians in a panel forum. Their only function was to answer voters’ questions. No speeches. No stumping. No campaigning. When they tried to campaign, they were booed, and stomped off the podium in a huff.

Bravo for those Tea Partiers. A year later, though, the Tea Partiers seemed to have bitten the poisoned apple. Now they are signing petitions and campaigning for candidates. A week out from the Tax Day Tea Parties, someone is shutting down the clearinghouse for April 15th rallies.

Politics is like a nuclear reactor: the closer you get to the core, the greater the danger of contamination. Think of the U.S. Capitol building as a giant nuclear reactor. When friends said last summer, ‘Come to Washington with us for the Tea Party rally,’ I replied, “Thanks. But no thanks. I do my best work from my computer.”

At their request, I sent letters to my representatives which I knew would be ignored. I would have preferred to give another speech to average people, encouraging them to gather together to support one another and proselytize within their social circles.

Not prepossessed of a camera-ready appearance, I started this blog instead.

At the beginning of the Tea Party movement last year, someone began a national website to serve as a clearinghouse for the movement. Then they dropped the ball. Now someone is dropping the ball again, this time deliberately.

This National Tea Party Coalition, which now declares itself a “caucus”, claims going to rallies is a waste of time and money; money better spent in their campaign coffers.  ‘If you want to find out the location of a rally in your area, you won’t find it here,’ the website flatly tells visitors.

‘Don’t waste your time and money on going to rallies.  Donate to us instead.’  Yeah, right.

But who was it who wasted our taxpayer money on the Stimulus and other big government extravaganzas but the politicians?

Who wasted our time and money but politicians we sent to represent conservative values and blew all their political capital on scandals? Who reached across the aisle to the enemies of freedom and liberty?

Who is courting the vote of illegal immigrants, hoping that once they become legal citizens they’ll vote for the criminals who made criminals official citizens? On our dollars?

The Tea Party rallies a waste of time and money? The Tea Parties came into existence thanks to the corrupt politicians who are now trying to subvert it. The real question is why anyone in the Tea Party movement is listening to them!

Only a few people will probably read my blog. But I’ll advise you to do just what you did in the beginning: do it yourselves. Don’t depend on anyone else to keep this movement going for you. Expect them, in fact, to try to sabotage it.

Go back to your social networking. Talk from group to group to group. Let each other know what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. Support and encourage one another. Use your own voices, not those of politicians or even the media.

Get back out there and be seen on your greens. Quark at your parks (quarks are fractional elements of a greater whole). Dare to square. You know what to do. You did it before and you can do it again. If you haven’t done it before, do it now.

Don’t get sucked into the political reactor (how do you think politicians got the way they are?). We’re a representative republic for a reason. You shouldn’t have to be doing their jobs for them. If they’re not doing their jobs, you need to let them know.

Exercise your First Amendment rights to assemble and speak freely, for yourselves. This is something you have to do for yourselves, for your families, for your country, and for the future.

Don’t waste your time thinking anyone else will speak for you.

Political Winter

In October 1962, I was only three years old. I wasn’t exactly sure what atom bombs were and only had a vague idea of where Cuba was.

But I knew something was wrong. My older brother, then six, came home with tales of air raid drills, of children hiding under their desks. I remember seeing a somber President Kennedy talking on the television set.

Most of all, I knew that my parents were worried. There were no fabulous Bible stories that night to entertain me and my brothers. Only my mother hugging me sadly as we sat on one of the boys’ beds, while my father stood nearby, more serious than usual.

If she thought we weren’t going to live to grow up, she wouldn’t have had us, my mother said. It wasn’t fair to us. Was it really worth all this risk, all this anxiety? My father said the president had done the right thing, that he’d stood up to the Russians.

I knew it had something to do with ships out on the ocean that weren’t going to be allowed to dock on an island south of Florida. That the merican ships wouldn’t let them pass.

That one way or the other, my father said, it would mean war and the end of America as we know it. Russia couldn’t be allowed to store those missiles in Cuba.

My mother asked how long it would take for the missiles to arrive? Not very long, my father replied. Not very long at all. Would there be enough time to get us children in the car and drive to safety?

With enough warning, he thought we might be able to drive just far enough north to get out of harm’s way. But he didn’t think the government would sound any warning at all, in spite of all the drills. An alert would cause lots of panic but not much else.

He also thought having children hide under desks was absurd. That would be no protection at all. He’d heard about the tests in Los Alamos and so had Grandpa (Mom’s father). And of the after-effects of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs.

We lived outside of New York City. Just far enough away to know what was happening but not far enough away to get away in time.

But the crisis was averted and our family lived happily everafter. At least until now. Freedom prevailed, barely, through the Sixties. But communism was on the march, with our young people tearing down their own flag, as Kruschev predicted.

I remember the shoe-banging incident at the United Nations, too.

No one needs to bang any shoes today.

Sixteen days ago, the House of Representatives passed the Health Care Reform and today, Obama vowed to destroy all our nuclear weapons in the United States in the name of world peace. No mother need hug her daughter in fear of a nuclear winter.

Another sort of winter is fast approaching us, though – a political winter. This storm’s winds will wreak as much damage as any physical maelstrom, uprooting the trees of liberty, sweeping away homes and families, smashing windows, ripping away roofs, and devastating the country.

Civilization will be turned over to the savages and barbarians. Crime will rule the streets and anarchy our highways and byways. Cities and towns once orderly and peaceful will be left in ruins. Our prosperity ill be looted and left strewn in the gutters.

Our gardens will be trampled, our orchards stripped bare of fruit and leaf. The winds of change will howl through their barren branches. Birds will no more warble to the west wind in their boughs nor children climb to their heights.

A frost will leave our landscape barren. Words will be weighed carefully. We will all march to the beat of a single, relentless drummer. No dissent will be allowed, no deviation from the frozen track laid carefully before our feet.

There will be no warmth among neighbors; only suspicion and distrust. Children will not be free to gambol. Our time will be measured out for us. Our days will be long and our nights all too short. The fire of freedom will be stomped out and we’ll be left to freeze.

Men of great wealth will sit contentedly upon their hoards, glorying in the power they’ve accumulated. They will reap what we have sown and deliver it to their devotees, lazy, ignorant, and unprincipled.

We will serve as slaves at their pleasure and bow to their dictates. If this life seems familiar, know that in the autumn we only tasted the augur of this austerity. The tempest has only begun to toss us about, helpless and frustrated.

Any defenses we might have had, any supplies, any arsenal, whether financial, emotional, political, physical will be torn from us. Those nuclear weapons Obama wishes to ban were the sentinels against a political holocaust that is now breaking over us. The calamity they were built to prevent surges around us like a tsunami wave, drowning freedom, democracy, and capitalism.

Any foreign army will be able to march upon our shores without a challenge. Waves of illegal immigrants may flood over our borders. Criminals, vagrants, thieves, and their ilk will have free reign over us.

 Nothing will stop them from robbing us and enslaving us in our own country. Obama bowed down to foreign potentates all over the world, and now he will surrender our last, best, if nightmarish, defense against tyranny and oppression.

 Hilary Clinton, I believe, said that we have no need of nuclear weapons in this day and age. No indeed, for the communists, the Marxists, the socialists have their victory and their champion in Barack Obama.

He has won a bloodless, radiation-free coup against the free world. Why would he launch nuclear weapons against countries such as Russia and China, Cuba and Venezuela, whom he regards as allies?

We have met the enemy – and he is our president.

Neutralizing the Net

In response to a 17-word question about over-taxation at a town hall meeting last Friday, President Obama gave a 17-minute, 12-second, 2,500 word answer, overtaxing his listeners.

He claimed there was a whole lot of “misinformation” about the Health Care Reform law and that he was going to work hard to clean up all the “misapprehensions”.

“Let’s talk about that,” he began. But this week, he and Congress are also going to work hard to make sure that only he and his propagandists will be doing to the talking, thanks to the Net Neutrality bill (HR 3458) which Congress and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbiawill be considering  this week.

According to the Wikipedia entry, “Network neutrality (also net neutrality, Internet neutrality) is a principle proposed for user access networks participating in the Internet that advocates no restrictions on content, sites, or platforms, on the kinds of equipment that may be attached, and on the modes of communication allowed, as well as communication that is not unreasonably degraded by other traffic.”

Well, that sounds “fair”, doesn’t it?

The entry continues with a simplified explanation, “If a given user pays for a certain level of Internet access, and another user pays for the same level of access, the two users should be able to connect to each other at the subscribed level of access.”

That last line, though, “communication…not unreasonably degraded by other traffic.” Just what is that supposed to mean?

Conservative pundits say it’s Liberal language for destroying competition. In other words, if you have three popular Conservative bloggers and one unpopular Liberal blogger, the carrier has to ditch two of those popular Conservatives.

The Fairness Doctrine, for the broadcast and cable industry, which was struck down in the 1980s, made the same argument.

Carriers can also be forced to place content providers who displease the government on lower bands with weaker signals where they’re less likely to be read or heard. The government will cite discrimination against less popular bloggers.

For years, The National Endowment for the Arts has used federal funds to support politically-favored but culturally unpopular artists, dancers, and musicians. One famous, or infamous artist, created a work showing a cross in urine.

Not only was it religiously offensive, but…yuck. The NEA claimed it was freedom of expression.

On our tax dollars. And now they’re going to use our tax dollars to stop us from expressing our opinions on the Internet.

Major Internet content providers like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck can afford the highest fee levels, but all their capital won’t save them from the politically-correct ambitions of this bill. It won’t matter how weak their competition is; they have the backing of the U.S. government.

Just like General Motors.

As for us, the small-fry of the Internet, our voices will be relegated to the lowest level of the Internet food chain, on that weakest signal, the most we can afford, where no one will ever hear us or read us.

We won’t be able to afford to blog and reach a wider audience anymore than we can afford to buy a radio or television station, or publish a newspaper. Even now, it’s not easy to crawl our way onto one of the major search engines.

Service providers will have the lure of higher fees both from providers and their audience. Some have been on Obama’s bam-wagon all along.

We shouldn’t let this bill sneak by us unchallenged. The Liberals are desperate to silence us (they didn’t think we’d catch on to this Internet stuff. They thought we were too stupid, stuck back in the Fifties, hopeless dolts who couldn’t program our VCRs).

They sure got that wrong. We’re all over the Internet and now they want to stomp us out like the pests we are. They want to silence Glenn Beck and Rush, but Glenn is right: they’re really terrified of our power.

 The Liberals need to pull the plug on us before we become self-actuating.

 Before we become independent of them.

Easter Charade

 “He is Risen.”

Mine was the lot of the biblical Martha yesterday. Fixing Thanksgiving dinner yesterday for my family, I paid little to heed the tidings of Easter.

Still, I had hoped to at least follow it on television as I did my work, as Martha heard Jesus talking to her sister Mary, seated at his feet.

But not one station saw fit to mark the Easter holiday. Only at five o’clock as I was finishing the preparations for dinner, did one of the cable networks play “King of Kings”, with Jeffrey Hunter.

The host of the cable show saw fit to sneer at Hunter’s blue-eyed portrayal of Christ.

However, another network (perhaps the same one) did show “The Silver Chalice,” with Paul Newman. Here, the host saw noted that it was the movie Newman hated the most and even urged fans not to go and see.

But it’s Jack Palance who literally “steals the show” as Simon the Magician, who covets the silver cup of Christ in order to crush it and prove Christ was merely a magician, like Simon himself.

In these kinds of denouncements does the real anti-Christian evil work. The Anti-Christ, whoever he is, works to destroy faith. No better ally exists for this purpose than the mundane workings of the natural world.

In The Ten Commandments on Saturday, Ramsees is heard denouncing the plagues of God as nothing more than natural occurrences. A mudslide in distant mountains that poisoned the water, killed the fish, the crops, and the beasts, unleashing yet more plagues of lice, frogs, and locusts.

 Taking that lead, a modern-day documentary postulated that the final plague, the deaths of the first-born of Egypt, was the final result of the original calamity: that the first-born were given the bread from the diseased grain first, dying first.

 Anything God can think of to do, Men of Science can explain away. They can figure out how to cure the sick just as well as He can. They don’t need to beg the rich to feed the poor; they’ll force them to do it. Why make the poor wait on an uncertain magnanimity?

 They have a logical explanation for the creation of the universe and a theory for its eventual demise. In the Sixties, they even declared that God is dead.

 But they can’t explain that empty tomb. Up until recently, even if they’d discovered Jesus’ remains, they couldn’t have proven it was him. But now, with DNA and genetic testing, they have the means at their disposal.

 They’ll find him, even if they have to dig up every grave in Jerusalem and its environs. They’ll prove to us yet that this Son of Man (as he called himself) did not rise from the dead and live forever.

 They’ll crush his bones and Christian faith the way Simon the Magician wanted to crush the Silver Chalice. They’ll find this Jesus and put an end to all the doubts.

 They can dig up every graveyard in Jersualem, search every crypt, open every sarcophagus until they locate him. But that’s trying to find Jesus the hard way.

A ll they have to do is pray.