First Things First

Taken directly from 912dc.org:

It's time to take the tea party movement directly to Washington, D.C. Please join thousands of local organizers and grassroots Americans from across the country as we gather in our nation’s capital to deliver a message to the politicians: Enough!

We are gathering on 9-12-2009 to deliver our message in person that we've had enough! Oh, and in case you were under the misapprehension that The One takes us seriously -- he doesn't really:

At his 100th-day town hall meeting in St. Louis Wednesday, President Barack Obama took direct aim at the anti-tax "tea party" demonstrations that have cropped up over the last month and took a veiled shot at the Fox News Channel, the cable news network closely associated with the protests.

[snip]

"Those of you who are watching certain news channels on which I'm not very popular, and you see folks waving tea bags around, Obama said, "let me just remind them that I am happy to have a serious conversation about how we are going to cut our health care costs down over the long term, how we are going to stabilize Social Security."

Of course, the too-cute reference to Fox News is a strawman -- but this guy needs his strawmen, because as RedState puts it, "If you really want to have a conversation on our financial situation, Mr. President, that’d be great. Can we start with this?"

There are a lot of TEA Parties going on! TEA is an acronym for "Taxed Enough Already." You'll no doubt hear a lot from the usual suspects about how these protests are "hate" parties organized by "extreme rightwingers" (or Fox News, or whatever strawman is handy). It's not true, of course -- the right wing has never been very organized. At least one news story gets it right:

The movement is leaderless and only aligns indirectly with party politics. While many participants will be Republicans, the anti-spending message is more closely aligned with libertarian themes of small government, with many people angry at both Democrats and Republicans. "These are folks who have never been involved in the political process before," said Eric Odom, who designed and is running two Web sites to connect supporters and corral information about the protests. Odom said he supported Libertarian Bob Barr for president last year. "This is a birth of a completely new movement, with a new face, that hasn't been seen anywhere in the country," Odom said.

The left and much of the media -- sorry for any redundancy -- will try to make the protesters out to be dumb hicks bitterly clinging to their guns and their religion. (That is, of course, how our President feels about people who don't particularly like trillion-dollar budgets leading to generations multi-trillion-dollar deficits.) But then, statists don't get it and likely never will:

Today American taxpayers in more than 300 locations in all 50 states will hold rallies -- dubbed "tea parties" -- to protest higher taxes and out-of-control government spending. There is no political party behind these rallies, no grand right-wing conspiracy, not even a 501(c) group like MoveOn.org.

So who's behind the Tax Day tea parties? Ordinary folks who are using the power of the Internet to organize. ...

I spoke to an organizer for the Knoxville tea party who said that no "professional politicians" were going to be allowed to speak, and he made a big point of saying that the protest wasn't an anti-Obama protest, it was an anti-establishment protest. I've heard similar things from tea-party organizers in other cities, too. Though critics will probably try to write the tea parties off as partisan publicity stunts, they're really a post-partisan expression of outrage.

What's most striking about the tea-party movement is that most of the organizers haven't ever organized, or even participated, in a protest rally before. General disgust has drawn a lot of people off the sidelines and into the political arena, and they are already planning for political action after today.

These people are drawn together by what was, once, a common and shared distrust of Big, Strong Government:

Anyone with any fundamental understanding of the United States Constitution, and the process by which it was negotiated, shouted over and eventually ratified, would tell you of the horror and shock that would confront every single one of them if they were to see what we have become: a gigantic, ever-growing welfare state that breeds resentment and dependency, perpetuated by a ruling oligarchy of 535 congressmen, 9 Justices, a president, vice-president and cabinet that contain people with three, or four, or five decades away from the people they represent and who function as an imperial aristocracy — because they are.

[The Founders of our republic] signed a document knowing that was their death sentence, should their ramshackle collection of farmers and brewers and smiths fail to prevail against the most powerful military force the world had ever seen. A death sentence. They did that, not because they craved money, or social position, or political power – as with all revolutions before or since. Most of them had that in abundance. This was a risk they took not to gain everything, but to lose it.

They did it because they believed that men should be free: free from the petty tyrannies of other people telling you what to do for your own good. They risked their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor for you. If we cannot take two hours out of work to repay that debt, then we deserve everything that is coming to us.

There's likely to be a TEA Party near you. Perhaps I'll see you there!

Today's the day that more than 40 Tea Party protests are being held around the US. (More are planned -- here's a schedule.)

People are pissed.

Not just about the "mortgage bailout" -- that's just the last straw. Before that was the $787-billion crap sandwich they call the "stimulus" package. Before that was multi-billion-dollar bailouts for auto makers and their unions who, quite literally, dug their own financial graves. Before that was the first TARP, a.k.a. "bank bailout." (Yes, Virginia: there will be a TARP II. And probably a Stimulus II.) And, of course, today Obama announced that taxes will need to rise by nearly a trillion dollars to pay for his trillion-dollar wish list.



(And no one's yet talking about his plan to -- let's call it what it is -- socialize the US health-care system. Yet.)

People are getting pissed about a President who can't stop proposing more spending, and a Congress eager to indulge him. They're spending like lunatics; they're way past mortgaging our future. They're mortgaging our grandkids' future.

And it's not merely the money; it's the process by which they're doing it:

What started in its infancy as a ragged coalition of libertarians and Republicans (not noted for getting along very well), waving signs, eating symbolic roast pork and donning false pig snouts, has coalesced into a more sharply-focused declaration of outrage not about the product coming out of Washington, D.C., but about the process. ... The Tea Party movement has rescued a fading vestigial echo of pre-Revolutionary outrage, the acutely distilled frustration that surfaces when the social contract between government and governed is breached.

No legislation without deliberation should become the rallying cry of conservatives, liberals and moderates alike, but specifically for opponents of the sort of measures currently being moved through Congress at warp speed, creating a space for debate is essential. The causes of the current economic downturn are complex. The effects of proposed solutions must be considered before votes are cast. Deliberation should have never become an optional portion of the process, and its priority must be restored if these laws and the government that is enacting them can expect to be given legitimacy. Citizens have the right to organically grapple with issues on the basis of information and reason, rather than fear and false urgency. At the very least, reading the actual legislation prior to passage would ordinarily be considered essential.

Even if we agree that our nation’s economic state is the equivalent of a house engulfed in flame, legislators and voters need to decide with the input of constituents and experts if what they are pointing at their home is a fire hose or a flamethrower.

And, you know, he's right. This monstrosity rocketed through Congress in record time, with Obama browbeating them every day with cries of "We must not delay!" and "This is an emergency!" There were no committee hearings in the House (and, btw, the Republicans were locked out while Nancy Pelosi and Co. wrote the damned thing. Yes, they had no input whatsoever. That's a major reason that none of them voted for it.) The Senate delayed only long enough to gull three Republicans into helping it pass. The House-Senate conference rocketed it through in, literally, the dead of night (again with no GOP help), and then both houses passed it on a Friday.

And then? Obama took a three-day weekend vacation before signing it. Um, sorry; you said it was an emergency, right? Right?

Input from We, the People? Zero, zip, zilch, nada, nichts, nil. Congressional aides reported jammed phone lines, overfull inboxes, and lots and lots of taxpayers saying "WTF?" as the price tag grew like Topsy. There was no debate; hell, our elected 'representatives' didn't even read the thing before they passed it.

So, yeah. People are getting really pissed. And, could you tell? I'm one of them.