It’s good to get to see another side than the administrations “rose colored glasses” attempts to persuade the American populace that they’re actually turning things around.

Here is one that I found, in particular, to be worth reading. Called “Is there life after debt“, it is spot on in its analysis by stating:

For a long time debt in the rich world has grown faster than incomes. As our special report this week spells out, it is not just government deficits that have swelled. In America private-sector debt alone rose from around 50% of GDP in 1950 to nearly 300% at its recent peak. The origins of the boom go even further back, reflecting huge changes in social attitudes. In the 19th century defaulting borrowers were sent to prison. The generation that lived through the Great Depression learned to scrimp and save. But the wider take-up of credit cards in the 1960s created a “buy now, pay later” society. Default became just a lifestyle choice. The reckless lender, rather than the imprudent debtor, was likely to get the blame. (emphasis mine)

I agree. The politicians most definitely don’t want to blame the borrower, nor do those pathetic “We’ll fix your credit” companies who are so sympathetic to these people who found themselves with 10,000+ dollars in non-secured consumer debt, sometimes even more. I do blame the credit card companies as well. I remember all to well their presence on college campuses offering T-shirts or some other trinket if you’d sign up for their credit card, stupid college students, low on cash and seeing some “free money” were easy marks.

But the important thing is to remember, that whether you are a consumer, or a government, you can get so far into debt that you will not be able to get back into the black.

The federal government, and the state governments, are learning this lesson. Well, the state government are since they can’t borrow from foreign entities or print more money….

They saw (and listened)…to a bunch of speakers and entertainers.

They partied…as in a Tea Party.

And they included yours truly and his camera. So without further ado, let’s see what those seditious astroturfing vast-right-wing-conspirators look like.

Here’s part of the angry mob, er, crowd.

From closer to the stage:

Here’s one of the many signs from various Tea Partiers. I also like the message on the maroon T-shirt, “The Second Amendment…America’s Original Homeland Security”.

Two more signs…

…and three more signs:

No Tea Party would be complete without someone making fun of Barry, Harry and Nancy.

I like visiting Europe, but like this guy, I don’t want the US to become Europe.

This gal gladly showed off her sign.

The makers of this four-part sign asked everyone to add their names. Seems like John Hancock would approve.

Don’t tread on these people, the Tyranny Response Team.

A few historical actors showed up, this one in Revolution-era military garb…

…and these people in a variety of outfits.

From the more recent past, Saturday Night Live alumna Victoria Jackson performing her song There’s a Communist Living in the White House, several hundred yards from said White House.

Yeah, I admit it. I used to have fun with that “Mister Bill” stuff during the Clinton presidency. But now, on to serious matters.

In 1995, after the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City was destroyed by Timothy McVeigh’s truck bomb, then-president Bill Clinton tried to place some of the blame on rightwing talkshow hosts, warning us that “Words have consequences.” The idea was that overheated rhetoric had motivated McVeigh into carrying out his dastardly deed. On the 15th anniversary of that act of domestic terrorism, Clinton returned with a new warning for the critics of the current administration. As it was 15 years ago, the message was basically, “Be careful what you say, or you might cause some extremist to do something terrible.”

While there is certainly some merit to the idea that we should criticize, but not demonize, I detected one small problem. Like many on the right, I found myself wondering where Clinton was while his immediate successor was hung in effigy, depicted with a Hitler mustache, and even became the subject of a movie about his (fictional, thank God) assassination, to name just a few things I can recall offhand.

I will let Mona Charen, Noemie Emery and Rick Moran explain further.

I have a suggestion for the former president. If he’s really so concerned about the tone of political discourse, he needs to realize that civility is a two-way street. He should tell his fellow Democrats and those who support President Obama’s policies to stop demonizing the Tea Partiers and other dissenters as racists, terrorists, haters, “teabaggers”, or anything else, and instead to address their ideas. If there is a right to dissent without being unfairly maligned, it did not step down with the second President Bush.

The Stupid Stupak 11 have put in their requests for pork. Yeah, I know, calling this type of spending “pork” is indeed an insult – to pigs, that is.

Senator Max Baucus lets slip out one of the reasons for Obamacare. (From Kyle Olson at Big Government)

Who are among the industries worried about new costs coming from Obamacare? Would you believe ski resorts? (From Michelle Malkin)

Could this be called “Son of Obamacare”? A new proposal would require health insurers get permission from government regulators in order to increase their premiums. Note to congress: History tells us that price controls have never worked. (From John Griffing in American Thinker)

In another new proposal, the Obama administration has announced a plan to give $600 million in housing aid to five states slammed by the housing bust. Columnist Dean Baker, in the Guardian, says that the plan won’t work, because those who have been running American economic policy still don’t understand the housing bubble.

After all that flack Dubya took for allegedly alienating our allies, it seems like Barry has done exactly that sort of thing, at least when it comes to Great Britain. (From John Hawkins at Rightwing News)

More from the “shoe on the other foot” department: Isn’t it interesting how some on the left and in the media (if you’ll forgive the redundancy) seem so worried that the right might get violent, but have already forgotten the violence that in fact did come from their own side of the aisle? (From Newsbusters)

Speaking of political violence, a Philadelphia man has been charged with threatening to kill House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA).

Can you recognize landmarks from above? Here’s your chance to Guess The Spot.

Loggers in Oregon have found the wreckage of a Curtiss SB2C Helldiver. Its kind was the Navy’s main attack and bombing plane in World War II.

I might have to re-watch a few James Bond movies to see if Agent 007 ever had one of these contraptions. (But don’t try this in real life, or you’ll get in trouble.)

To wrap it up, I will acknowledge that sometimes a policeman’s job really can get ruff, er, um, rough. (From Viral Footage)

As for me, let me issue a mea culpa. Like many on the right, I had thought that Representative Bart Stupak (D-Mich) was a genuine pro-life Democrat. I even refered to him by that term in a previous post. But his behavior has shown otherwise. I really had no reason to place any trust in him. He actually fought against the inclusion of language that he himself had written that would have banned the federal funding of abortions, and instead agreed to vote for the bill in exchange for an executive order banning taxpayer funding of abortions, which would come from the most pro-abortion president in American history. He also brought home $726,409 for three airports in his district, a pretty small amount as far as federal spending goes. His colleague Trent Franks (R-Ariz) thinks that Stupak succumbed to “too much pressure from his party”, but in hindsight, his holdout seems to be about a little bit of pork, instead of any principled opposition to the federal government forcing taxpayers to fund abortions. But then, Stupak’s wouldn’t be the only back-room deal for an Obamacare vote.

Stupak’s fellow Michiganders weigh in. John Conyers (D) says that Obamacare is constitutional because of the “good and welfare” clause. Too bad that such a clause does not exist. Rep. John Dingle (D) lets slip one of the purposes of Obamacare.

LifeNews.Com reports pro-life groups decrying the Obama/Stupak deal.

The American Spectator details some of the effects of Obamacare, including “close to 100 new government bureaucracies, boards, commissions and programs with the power together to tell doctors and hospitals what health care they can and should provide”.

On Sunday, Obama said that the bill was for the people and against special interests. The money trail says otherwise.

Some people will be exempt from the requirements of Obamacare, including these people and possibly these people. Everyone else, on the other hand, unless something unforeseen happens, will soon have to prepare for the upcoming BOHICA, which stands for “bend over, here it comes again.”

We need more than feel-good Tea Parties. Do not get me wrong; the Tea Parties are great for networking and for physically demonstrating our numbers and wrath to the existing officeholders. The April 15, 2008 Tea Parties affected Obama and his minions. They first tried to ignore them. After the Tea Parties received media coverage, Obama and those who write his teleprompter scripts started to bad-mouth them. Obama’s friends in the mainstream media ridiculed the Tea Partiers. But, we need more than rallies and choir-preaching on internet blogs and web sites. Let’s face it – no Tea Party on April 15, 2008, had the numbers that Obama had at many of his rallies. Not one of those Tea Parties would have even filled up half of a Major League ball park. Those are the facts. With Twitter and Facebook, etc., those numbers increased, as we saw on 9.12.2009 in Washington, DC and around the country. But, here’s the bottom line: unless those Tea Parties translate into election victories in 2010, they are worthless.

A pretty good way to take back our country. Lets takeover the GOP and turn it into the Party of Jefferson, with the irony that the GOP inherited the reigns from the party of Adams and Hamilton. I’m going to explore this some more. Perhaps you should as well…

“The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground.” – Thomas Jefferson

That’s right. After much reading, studying, thought, deliberation and careful consideration, I have decided that it is time for me to become more active in politics. No. I’m not ready to run for office, nor do I consider myself to the consummate politician, as I speak my mind too much and I don’t have enough pragmatic bones in my body.

However, I believe that I can help be part of a movement to retake this country from the progressives, of both major political parties, as they try to institute even more nanny state controls and continue to put the final nails in the coffin of our Constitutional system of government.

Just as our Founders believed that government closet to the people would be the most accountable to the people, we must start taking back our local governments and start breaking our fellow citizens of the “What can government do for me” mentality that has come to dominate our politics.

Just as the quote attributed to Andrew Tytler says:

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.

We’ve got now two political parties that have figured out that to get votes, one has to dole out “largesse from the public treasury”, though it seems that the parties only disagree with the level of redistribution. The “Compassionate Conservatism” of the George W. Bush did little more than expand the role and level of government, with the Medicare Part D and the No Child Left Behind act. The role of the Obama Administration and its attempts to “fix and right” the economy is even more blatant of an usurpation of the federal government, and its further transition into a central government, with the sovereign states even more regulated to mere provinces.

This mentality, and the argument for it, must be broken, lest we continue to allow the nanny statists to continue to dumb the American populace down, convince them that some bureaucrat knows whats best for them thousands of miles away, and that all they have to do is exchange a little freedom here and there for the illusion of government security. Smoke and mirrors as the bandits pick the pockets of the people.

So enough of my diatribe, what am I planning to do? Well, I’m going to get active in our local politics. The Democrat Party headquarters here in my town has pictures of Barack Obama all over the place. Not sure if the Party of Jefferson is open to less government in a limited role anymore. The local GOP chairman seems to be open to talking to me, and I’m going to pick his brain on how open he is to changing the GOP into the party of limited government. And if I can, I plan to help and support local candidates who believe in classical liberal philosophies of freedom, liberty, and limited government, especially as originally laid out by our Founders. If it were ever to come down for me to run for office, I wouldn’t be against it, but that is not my goal nor do I have any delusions of grandeur.

But I’m becoming energized as I read more and more about how our Founders originally planned our country, and as I read more and more about how we’ve allowed the poisonous talk of “its for the people” and “we’re doing this for the general welfare of all”, that has taken us down the road towards less freedom, liberty and a growing and ever more powerful nanny state.

At first, I thought I would just simply sign off the GOP, move towards the Libertarians or perhaps even a new third party created out of the Tea Party movement itself. Then I thought about how that would divide the GOP and ensure more (social-)Democrats would be elected. Much easier to takeover the GOP, kick out those progressives who want to grow the state and make government the answer to all life’s ills, and start persuading Americans that stealing from each others pockets the fruits on another’s labor is not going to guarantee their own freedoms.

Glenn Reynolds has a piece today in the Examiner talking about this:

A year ago, the Tea Party movement didn’t exist. Today, it is arguably the most popular political entity in America. The movement is already more popular than the Republican or Democratic parties, according to a recent NBC / WSJ poll .

Even in blue-state California, three in 10 voters identify with the Tea Party movement.

And, of course, Scott Brown’s come-from-behind blowout in Massachusetts occurred in no small part because of money and volunteers from the Tea Party movement around the nation.

This is heady stuff — and, for people in the political establishment, both Republicans and Democrats, it’s worrying stuff. If political movements can bubble up from below, and self-organize via the Internet, what will happen to the political class?

Here we have an example in Cincinnati:

A year ago, when the Tea Party movement first stirred to life, it had to shout to be noticed, with big public rallies that drew thousands of conservatives to places like Fountain Square and VOA Park in West Chester – citizens angry about government bailouts, billions of tax dollars for economic stimulus and political parties that didn’t seem to be listening.

Now, though, the speech-making over loudspeakers to angry throngs seems to have given way to a much quieter form of protest – one in which Tea Party activists, here and across the country, are trying to either take over or gain a foothold in the political parties from the ground up.

They are doing it here by the hundreds by filing as candidates in the May 4 primary election for the office of precinct executive, the lowest rung of the political party structure.

“It’s the place where you can have the most impact,” said Mike Wilson, the founder of the Cincinnati Tea Party. “It’s one thing to talk to the party leaders about change. It’s another thing to actually be the party leadership and make the change from within.”

It is a strategy that has worked elsewhere – Tea Party activists essentially took over the Nevada Republican Party earlier this month; and, in Florida, they were successful in forcing out a state party chairman who was seen as too centrist.

Here is another in Illinois:

A crucial test will come in Tuesday’s Illinois primary, where political newcomer Adam Andrzejewski has gotten a surge of support, with a Tea Party event yesterday in Chicago where the temperature was 7 degrees:

If we can’t change the direction of this country through its political system, get us back to a limited federal government constrained by the U.S. Constitution, where the sovereign states who created said government can get back to dealing with the problems their citizens face without federal interference (and massive deficit spending/printing of money), then I fear a further eroding of freedoms and an eventual collapse. The last American revolution in 1861-1865 fundamentally changed this country, and cost alot of lives in the process. I would much rather desire NOT to see such a thing happen again…

I am resolved that I must do my part and not be a spectator at watching my children’s future be pissed away into the wind by greedy and corrupt politicians and bureaucrats….