Tea Party Movement

April 12, 2010 by Bob Livingston

Although President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, Majority Leader Reid and their elite socialistic foot soldiers cast it in pleasant, humanitarian terms as a means of providing healthcare to those who couldn’t otherwise afford it, the majority of Americans recognized Obamacare for what it was: a transfer of wealth to Big Pharma, trial lawyers, unions and other special interests and a power grab over society’s producers.

Hence, the growth of the Tea Party movement across the United States.

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Read the whole article here:

Tea Parties vs. Socialist Redistributionists

Obama and National Security

Blog Entry that is right on the money. 

Obama strikes "Islamic extremism" and "jihad" from National Security strategy documents

No word yet if he's replacing those terms with references to Christian militias:

President Barack Obama's advisers will remove religious terms such as "Islamic extremism" from the central document outlining the U.S. national security strategy and will use the rewritten document to emphasize that the United States does not view Muslim nations through the lens of terror, counterterrorism officials said.

The change is a significant shift in the National Security Strategy, a document that previously outlined the Bush Doctrine of preventative war and currently states: "The struggle against militant Islamic radicalism is the great ideological conflict of the early years of the 21st century."

The officials described the changes on condition of anonymity because the document still was being written, and the White House would not discuss it. But rewriting the strategy document will be the latest example of Obama putting his stamp on U.S. foreign policy, like his promises to dismantle nuclear weapons and limit the situations in which they can be used.

At what point, and I'm serious as I've ever been in asking, at what point will we see that the internal threats to our National Security are exceeding our external threats as to the degree of risk to the country?

Anyone?

America Under ObamaCare

America Under ObamaCare, Day 9: The CBO says Obama's student loan overhaul could add $52 billion to the deficit by 2020. Sallie Mae says the legislation will force the company to reduce its 8,600-person workforce by 2,500. Oh, and ObamaCare will cost Texas $27 billion. A wonderful economic recovery plan, wouldn't you say?

Guest David Byrd says ObamaCare could jack up your ski lift ticket prices. Small businesses are going to suffer and go under because of the mandates and fines in this law.

Demonizing Everyday Americans

Demonizing Everyday Americans

by Ken Blackwell

Ken Klukoswki contributed to this report.

There appears to be a concerted effort among the political Left and many mainstream media people to demonize and marginalize the expanding citizen-based movement known as the tea party movement. This effort flows from both a fear of what these tea parties represent and a contempt for everyday Americans. But those ordinary citizens are poised to be the ones laughing when it’s all over, when democracy takes its course.

There seems to be a consensus now among the liberal elite when it comes to the tea parties. Senior administration officials deride them, as do liberal congressional Democrats. These elitists characterize the tea partiers as extremists, some drawing analogies between these ordinary citizens and right-wing militias, fanatics, and religious zealots. Some members of Congress are even saying that these tea party people are racist, which is pretty much the worst label that can be slapped on you in modern politics.

And many leftist talking heads in the media parrot this message, with their own biting editorial, adding that some in the tea party crowd are dangerous. Some talking heads, including some Hollywood actors and others who don’t seem to have any credentials as policy analysts but are nonetheless given air time, are really playing up the racism angle, and even suggest that some tea party attendees may be domestic terrorists.

Try the decaf, people.

Agents of big government and their boosters in the mainstream media seem determined to throw cold water on this growing grassroots movement that is a reaction to the Obama administration’s power grab of the growth and expansion of this country’s central government.

There’s a great deal of diversity among tea party people. Some just want lower taxes, and some also want less regulation. Still others are pro-life voters or Christian conservatives that also want fiscal responsibility. Many others push for conservative judges, while still others hold up signs calling for a restoration of American sovereignty, or protecting America’s borders, or defeating cap and trade or card check.

But they all have two things in common: They all want smaller government, and oppose the trampling of the Constitution embodied in these efforts to radically expand the size and scope of government. And as part of that desire, they want this utterly-ludicrous spending binge to end before it bankrupts all of us.

There’s nothing extremist about that agenda, because common sense is never extreme.

Are there some people attending tea party rallies who are intemperate in their remarks? Sure. Whenever you get tens of thousands of regular folks together, you’ll always get a few who makes comments that they should reconsider. Even then, nothing we’ve seen is worse than the truly outrageous statements that we’ve heard from the Left in recent years about President Bush or Republicans.

Having been engaged in many gatherings of the tea party crowd, it’s offensive that many in the mainstream media are engaging in a systematic effort to marginalize American citizens who are simply trying to take a stand for individual liberty—a stand in opposition to big-government expansion. Also one of us speaking as an African-American (Blackwell), it’s especially insulting to suggest that these people’s opposition to President Obama is driven by racism.

America’s history of grassroots activism goes back to the founding of our republic. Government of the people, by the people, and for the people includes as a necessary element those same average, ordinary people being able to gather and speak out. This freedom to assemble was considered so essential to a free nation that our Founders put it in the First Amendment, right alongside the freedom of speech and freedom of religion.

Ironically, these rights are set side-by-side with the freedom of the press, as well. The leftists in the media would do well to remember that their liberty to be a free press comes from the same constitutional amendment as the tea party crowd’s liberty to gather together.

And our elected leaders would do well to remember that the First Amendment exists to protect average people from the government, not the other way around.

Blackwell and Klukowski are the authors of the forthcoming book, The Blueprint: Obama’s Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency, on sale April 27.

Obama, Democrats (Liberals, Socialist) vs Freedom

The Freedom Factor

by Bill O'Reilly

"Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose." -- Kris Kristofferson

The raging debate over Obamacare is not exactly all about health. It's really about freedom, or lack thereof. It's simple when you cut through all the overheated rhetoric: The anti-Obama folks believe the president is imposing a massive federal presence that will erode personal freedoms. The pro-Obama crew supports a huge federal apparatus to impose "social justice," believing that is the government's moral responsibility.

The personal freedom issue is pretty clear, as well. We have less of it today than we did this time last year. In an aggressive power grab, the feds now control the health care industry, and the IRS has increased its already enormous power, as it will enforce Obamacare mandates. In addition, your private medical records will no longer be private. They will be accessible by federal bureaucrats. If that doesn't make you queasy, nothing will.

And then there's higher education. The president wants the feds, not private lending institutions, to distribute college loans, and it looks like that will happen.

And then there's the banking industry. The Obama administration seeks tough oversight rules and wants to call major shots in the financial world. Federal regulation could strangle some banks and force most of them to do exactly what the government wants.

And then there's the energy industry. The president wants to mandate how private business consumes energy and to dish out financial punishment if federal rules are not followed. That's the cap-and-trade deal.

In addition to the direct intrusion on business and private behavior (through health insurance), the redistribution-of-wealth train is roaring toward its next destination. That would be a national sales tax like they have in Europe. The president well understands the huge debt that is piling up because of all the federal spending. He has to raise more money. Wealthy Americans are going to get hammered by income tax and capital gains hikes, but there are simply not enough rich folks to counter the red ink. So get ready for a proposed new tax on stuff you buy.

Even though everyone will pay the sales tax, there will be a variety of rebates for poor Americans so they will not suffer from the sales tax. The middle class will most likely bear the brunt of it. But it may not happen -- Democrats in Congress might well be voted out of power next November. That's one of the high stakes in the midterm election.

Not since the early days of the Vietnam War has there been such a stark divide between liberal and conservative Americans, between Republicans and Democrats. The battle lines are clearly drawn: individual freedom versus federal power. Take your pick.

Tom Hanks - Go Away

Tom Hanks’ racism flow chart
Tom Hanks shocked many Americans when he said recently that, basically, World War II happened because America was racist and the Japanese were different looking. Hanks may have forgotten about a little event called Pearl Harbor. Glenn, Pat and Stu play the amazing audio and there is a warning attached - do not listen if you don't want all Tom Hanks movies ruined. There are a lot of great movies that fall under that umbrella, so choose wisely. ( Transcript, Insider Audio)

Pelosi + Massa = More Lies

Report: Pelosi’s Office Knew Of Massa’s Questionable Conduct In October

March 16, 2010 by Personal Liberty News Desk

Joe Racalto, the chief of staff for former Representative Eric Massa (D-N.Y.), informed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office of his boss’s inappropriate behavior toward several unmarried male staffers in October of 2009, an unnamed source told The Washington Post last week.

Earlier in the month, Pelosi indicated that her staff had only learned in February of the concerns regarding Massa, who recently resigned from the House amid an Ethics Committee investigation into his conduct, Fox News reports.

According to the Post, Racalto called Pelosi’s director of member services because he was troubled that Massa, 50, was living in a townhouse with numerous young male staffers and had been using explicit language in front of them. Moreover, Racalto was concerned about a lunch date that the congressman—who is married with two kids—had set up with an aide in his 20s who worked in the office of Representative Barney Frank (D-Mass.).

Although the Ethics Committee has concluded its investigation into Massa’s conduct—as his resignation put him outside the reach of any punishment it could impose—House Republicans are calling for an inquiry into the manner in which Pelosi’s office handled the accusations.

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) said that the committee should continue to investigate, as there are "an awful lot of questions" that have been left unanswered.

Shame on Obama

With all of the wars, pain, suffering and unemployment in the USA this is how much it worries the president of our country.   I am so ashamed of him.

Obama Hosts White House Movie Night with Hanks, Spielberg

Updated: Friday, 12 Mar 2010, 8:43 AM EST
Published : Friday, 12 Mar 2010, 8:38 AM EST

(NewsCore) - President Barack Obama hosted a movie night at the White House for Hollywood heavyweights Tom Hanks and director Steven Spielberg on Thursday - at which they watched a preview of the star duo's new World War Two miniseries "The Pacific."

From Cuban BLOG (Sin Evasion/Without Evasion)

A few weeks have elapsed since the shocking deaths at the Psychiatric Hospital in Havana, and the photographs of the emaciated and battered bodies are already circulating through numerous computers. The pictures, almost unreal, are reminiscent of those other bodies stacked in Nazi death camps more than 60 years ago, and, once again, put salt on the open wounds of Cubans’ public opinion.

I will not turn now to all the horror and suffering revealed in each photograph, to the incredible thinness of those unfortunate ones, to the blows, evidenced by the bruises on their meager bodies, to the disrespectful overcrowding of several bodies on the same dirty stretcher –thus sentenced to post-mortem promiscuity- to the insulting filth at the scene, or to the moral poverty of a health system that proclaims itself as the most perfect one in the planet and revokes the rights of others to question it. And I will not turn to those things now because, almost at the same time I was able to contemplate the unimaginable squalor in which these anonymous martyrs of State socialism died, I was browsing through the always-misleading pages of Granma, where the speech made by Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla appeared. The speech was made on March 3rd of this year during the latest session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva, and I cannot decide if it disgusted me even more than the photographs. On the front page of the Thursday, March 4th printed edition, a quote from the words uttered without the slightest embarrassment by the high Cuban official jumps out as an irreverent mockery of the whole world:

“Cuba has a worthy and irreproachable track record in protecting the right to life, even by means of unselfish cooperation across its borders”.

It is impossible to sketch an insult out of words. I will just imagine each of these pictures of the deceased against paragraphs of the new herald of the State, to try to find some light, however dim, to explain how so much cynicism can fit into a government. Each of these photos, by itself, is an admonition and a condemnation of the Cuban regime. I wish I could further understand how a young person, such as Mr. Rodríguez Parrilla, looking almost naive, a nameless stranger only yesterday, whose hands were not blood-stained like those of his mentors, offers himself as the volunteer accomplice of crimes which until now –presumably- did not belong to him.

You cannot be civilized and, at the same time, keep your back turned to the Cuban reality. The government’s mask of compassion must not continue to mock essentially moral principles that implicate and compromise everyone. The dozens of emaciated pseudo-humans who have died or who still survive at Mazorra and other “hospitable” institutions of the generous State, political and common prisoners from the dark Cuban prisons, the memory of Orlando Zapata Tamayo and those who preceded him in martyrdom, and all of us who enjoy the dubious privilege of Human Rights Castro-style, should have a place in Geneva -even just a modest virtual, but permanent space- where we could represent ourselves before the world and where we would be listened to with the respect and the Rights we have not enjoyed in our own country for more than half a century.

Photograph taken from the blog “Penúltimos Días”

The Media and War

Patrick Kennedy went nuts on the floor this week, yelling at the media for not reporting on the war. In a Howard Dean-esque moment, he charged the press has been negligent reporting on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  He wants an immediate end to the wars, but his point is correct...where IS this media? The same media that couldn't stop reporting on the war while Bush was in office?