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Tea-Bagging Day is TODAY - April 15th!

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Bianca
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« Reply #105 on: April 21, 2009, 10:48:16 am »











                         Media Struggle to Understand Non-Violent Non-Smelly Protesters






by Lorie Byrd
TOWNHALL.COM
April 21, 2009

  The Tax Day Tea Parties inspired and energized conservatives across the country last week, but the response to the events from the media and Democrat partisans was perhaps the most interesting thing to watch.

When people turned out all over the country in the thousands to attend tea parties, Obama followers, especially those in the media, were shocked and bewildered, and it showed. The obvious explanation -- that many average, everyday Americans were not thrilled with the "change" they were getting from the new administration -- was not something those in the media or Obama supporters were willing to accept.

Instead we heard about how the estimated 500,000 or more people attending the 800 or so tea parties did not attend of their own free will as grass roots activists. One explanation from critics was that the protests were from "fake" grassroots. We were to believe those people didn't take time off from work and show up in the rain on their own. No. Fox News did it all. Fox somehow has enough control over those people to cause them, against their otherwise free will, to go to the trouble to interrupt their normal activities, make signs, pack up the kids and their diaper bags and strollers, travel to their nearest tea party site, find a parking space, walk to the protest area and raise their signs and their voices.

Most reporters evidently had trouble reading the signs being held up at the protests because they told their viewers the focus of the tea parties was on paying taxes. Some of the reporters even went so far as to point out to protesters that they should not be unhappy with their taxes because the new president was giving them tax cuts. If they had read the signs, they would have known that was not the point of the protests.

There were some protesters complaining that Obama nominees had evaded taxes, while average citizens paid theirs, but the focus was not so much on the amount of taxes paid, but rather how they were being spent in a reckless, foolish fashion and at an unprecedented rate, tripling the deficit with thousands of earmarks and tons of pork. Tea party protesters held signs railing against politicians who signed onto a huge spending bill they didn't bother to read and that they rushed to be voted on before anyone else had time to read it either. They also complained that the enormous debt being passed on to their children and grandchildren would result in an oppressive tax burden future generations would be forced to manage.

Tea party protesters also complained about the government taking over private enterprise -- determining the salaries of privately employed individuals, demanding resignations from US executives and even getting into the business of guaranteeing automobile warranties.

All those in the media had to do was read a few of the signs to "get it." The complaints were pretty straight forward: Stop the spending. Get out of our business. Let us keep more of the money we make. Stop the bailouts. For some reason such common sense concerns were beyond the comprehension of most of those reporting on the events.

In addition to reporters of the tea party story claiming the events were not grass roots because they were organized by Fox News, and most of the reporters not correctly reporting the subject of the protests, a few television journalists and pseudo-journalists, felt the need to disparage the protesters with nasty jokes about "teabagging," a reference to a slang term for a particular sex act.
« Last Edit: April 21, 2009, 10:52:10 am by Bianca » Report Spam   Logged

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Bianca
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« Reply #106 on: April 21, 2009, 10:50:01 am »










Since so many in the media missed the point of the tea party protests, or intentionally misled their viewers and readers about them, or (like the New York Times) tried to pretend they didn't take place, I'll explain what they meant and what we should have learned from them.

The tea party protests showed that there are many people across the country (in all 50 states) that are not satisfied with the kind of "change" the election of the Obama administration brought them. We learned that liberals only believe exercising freedom of speech and questioning the government is patriotic when it is done to protest a Republican president.

We learned that when liberal unions bus people to protests and when some liberal groups even pay people to protest, the media does not deem that influence worth reporting. But if a cable news channel decides to cover (and promotes that they will cover) a protest with hundreds of thousands of participants taking place in all 50 states that should be reported as evidence the people were not protesting of their own accord.

We learned that followers of the new administration, including those in the media, do not know what to think of the tea parties, but they understand enough to know they are something for liberals to fear. In their so-called reporting of the events the media provided irrefutable evidence of extreme bias. If there is any doubt, all one has to do is look at how the coverage of the tea party protests compares to coverage of Cindy Sheehan and the Code Pink anti-war protests.

Maybe conservative protesters learned they should have engaged in violence, made a big mess and showered less. That formula seems to draw great media coverage for liberal protests. Or maybe they learned to just keep plugging away and that eventually word will get out, as it is now, slowly but surely. Fox News is not only the number one cable channel, but it recently drew bigger numbers than its competitors, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC and Headline News combined. The New York Times and many of the other major daily newspapers that gave the protests little or no coverage, are suffering and may not survive much longer in their current forms.

The news organizations and individual reporters who worked hardest to ignore or disparage the tea party protesters might be in for a harsh backlash. Instead of discouraging the protesters, the shabby treatment only confirmed what they already knew about media bias and in the process the liberal media showed that bias clearly enough for even those who pay just passing attention to politics to see. I suspect it also made most of the protesters even more determined to spread their message by any means available to them.

If the Tea Party Movement continues to grow beyond the recent protests, expect more confusion from those attempting to report it. Except for some pro-life protests, I don't recall any time conservatives have felt a need to take their grievances "to the street" on such a wide scale. This one might take quite a bit longer for those in the media to understand.
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Bianca
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« Reply #107 on: April 24, 2009, 08:34:59 am »










                                            The Case for a Federalism Amendment



                                How the Tea Partiers can make Washington pay attention






By RANDY E. BARNETT
WSJ
April 23, 2009

In response to an unprecedented expansion of federal power, citizens have held hundreds of
"tea party" rallies around the country, and various states are considering "sovereignty resolutions" invoking the Constitution's Ninth and Tenth Amendments.

For example, Michigan's proposal urges "the federal government to halt its practice of imposing mandates upon the states for purposes not enumerated by the Constitution of the United States."

While well-intentioned, such symbolic resolutions are not likely to have the slightest impact on the federal courts, which long ago adopted a virtually unlimited construction of Congressional power. But state legislatures have a real power under the Constitution by which to resist the growth of federal power: They can petition Congress for a convention to propose amendments to the Constitution.

Article V provides that, "on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states," Congress "shall call a convention for proposing amendments." Before becoming law, any amendments produced by such a convention would then need to be ratified by three-quarters of the states.

An amendments convention is feared because its scope cannot be limited in advance. The convention convened by Congress to propose amendments to the Articles of Confederation produced instead the entirely different Constitution under which we now live. Yet it is precisely the fear of a runaway convention that states can exploit to bring Congress to heel.

Here's how: State legislatures can petition Congress for a convention to propose a specific amendment. Congress can then avert a convention by proposing this amendment to the states, before the number of petitions reaches two-thirds. It was the looming threat of state petitions calling for a convention to provide for the direct election of U.S. senators that induced a reluctant Congress to propose the 17th Amendment, which did just that.

What sort of language would restore a healthy balance between federal and state power while protecting the liberties of the people?

One simple proposal would be to repeal the 16th Amendment enacted in 1913 that authorized a federal income tax. This single change would strike at the heart of unlimited federal power and end the costly and intrusive tax code. Congress could then replace the income tax with a "uniform" national sales or "excise" tax (as stated in Article I, section  that would be paid by everyone residing in the country as they consumed, and would automatically render savings and capital appreciation free of tax. There is precedent for repealing an amendment. In 1933, the 21st Amendment repealed the 18th Amendment that had empowered Congress to prohibit the sale of alcohol.

Alternatively, to restore balance between federal and state power and better protect individual liberty, the repeal of the income tax amendment could be folded into a new "Federalism Amendment" like this:




Section 1: Congress shall have power to regulate or prohibit any activity between one state and another, or with foreign nations, provided that no regulation or prohibition shall infringe any enumerated or unenumerated right, privilege or immunity recognized by this Constitution.

Section 2: Nothing in this article, or the eighth section of article I, shall be construed to authorize Congress to regulate or prohibit any activity that takes place wholly within a single state, regardless of its effects outside the state or whether it employs instrumentalities therefrom; but Congress may define and punish offenses constituting acts of war or violent insurrection against the United States.

Section 3: The power of Congress to appropriate any funds shall be limited to carrying into execution the powers enumerated by this Constitution and vested in the government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof; or to satisfy any current obligation of the United States to any person living at the time of the ratification of this article.

Section 4: The 16th article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed, effective five years from the date of the ratification of this article.

Section 5: The judicial power of the United States to enforce this article includes but is not limited to the power to nullify any prohibition or unreasonable regulation of a rightful exercise of liberty. The words of this article, and any other provision of this Constitution, shall be interpreted according to their public meaning at the time of their enactment.



Except for its expansion of Congressional power in Section 1, this proposed amendment is entirely consistent with the original meaning of the Constitution. It merely clarifies the boundary between federal and state powers, and reaffirms the power of courts to police this boundary and protect individual liberty.

Section 1 of the Federalism Amendment expands the power of Congress to include any interstate activity not contained in the original meaning of the Commerce Clause. Interstate pollution, for example, is not "commerce . . . among the several states," but is exactly the type of interstate problem that the Framers sought to specify in their list of delegated powers. This section also makes explicit that any restriction of an enumerated or unenumerated liberty of the people must be justified.

Section 2 then allows state policy experimentation by prohibiting Congress from regulating any activity that takes place wholly within a state. States, of course, retain their police power to regulate or prohibit such activity subject to the constraints imposed on them, for example, by Article I or the 14th Amendment. And a state is free to enter into compacts with other states to coordinate regulation and enforcement, subject to approval by Congress as required by Article I.

Section 3 adopts James Madison's reading of the taxing and borrowing powers of Article I to limit federal spending to that which is incident to an enumerated power. It explicitly allows Congress to honor its outstanding financial commitments to living persons, such its promise to make Social Security payments. Section 4 eliminates the federal income tax, after five years, in favor of a national sales or excise tax.

Finally, Section 5 authorizes judges to keep Congress within its limits by examining laws restricting the rightful exercise of liberty to ensure that they are a necessary and proper means to implement an enumerated power. This section also requires that the Constitution be interpreted according to its original meaning at the time of its enactment. But by expanding the powers of Congress to include regulating all interstate activity, the Amendment greatly relieves the political pressure on courts to adopt a strained reading of Congress's enumerated powers.



Could such a Federalism Amendment actually be adopted? Stranger things have happened -- including the adoption of each of the existing amendments. States have nothing to lose and everything to gain by making this Federalism Amendment the focus of their resistance to the shrinking of their reserved powers and infringements upon the rights retained by the people. And this Federalism Amendment would provide tea-party enthusiasts and other concerned Americans with a concrete and practical proposal by which we can restore our lost Constitution.





Mr. Barnett is a professor of constitutional law at Georgetown University and the author of

"Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty"
(Princeton, 2005).

 

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A17
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Jenna Bluehut
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« Reply #108 on: April 27, 2009, 01:37:49 pm »

Tea Party Protester Arrested For Threatening Mass Murder On Twitter



An Oklahoma man was arrested by FBI agents earlier this month for posting a series of messages on his Twitter account threatening to use a tax day Tea Party protest to commit politically-motivated mass murder.

"The WAR wWIL start on the stepes of the Oklahoma State Capitol. I will cast the first stone. In the meantime, I await the police," wrote Daniel Knight Hayden, 52, according to messages included in the FBI affidavit (posted below).

Another Twitter post began "START THE KILLING NOW!" Yet another: "Send the cops around. I will cut their heads off the heads and throw the[m] on the State Capitol steps," he wrote in one message.

Hayden was arrested for transmitting threats to kill or injure people using interstate communication tools over the internet. The AP reports that it isn't clear whether he's been charged.

Special agent Michael S. Puskas said that Hayden posted threats under the Internet name "CitizenQuasar." Puskas says agents also found a MySpace account using the name "Citizen Quasar" and on Blogger.com an online diary using the name "Quasar."

Wired.com's Threat Level reports that it "appears to be [the] first criminal prosecution to stem from posts on the microblogging site."

Hayden was arraigned on the 16th, and ordered released to a halfway house pending trial -- a move that suggests the magistrate judge does not consider him a genuine threat. Hayden's attorney declined to comment. California-based Twitter did not respond to an inquiry by Threat Level.
Here are Hayden's tweets, via the FBI affidavit:

7:59 p.m. "The WAR wWIL start on the stepes of the Oklahoma State Capitol. I will cast the first stone. In the meantime, I await the police."

8:01 p.m. "START THE KILLING NOW! I am wiling to be the FIRST DEATH! I Await the police. They will kill me in my home."

8:06 p.m. "After I am killed on the Capitol Steps like REAL man, the rest of you will REMEMBER ME!!!"

8:17 p.m. "I really don' give a **** anymore. Send the cops around. I will cut their heads off the heads and throw the on the State Capitol steps."

Become a fan of HuffPost Politics on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter.

The FBI affidavit:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/26/tea-party-twitter-arrest_n_191527.html
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Robert0326
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« Reply #109 on: April 27, 2009, 03:30:31 pm »

Wow! Shocked What kind of moron puts crap like that where it's certain that he would be caught.  Or perhaps he was trying to become a martyr for a ridiculous cause.
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Keira Kensington
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« Reply #110 on: April 28, 2009, 07:09:26 am »

It seems like a mostly anti-Obama rally by disappointed Republicans!
You note they didn't have any complaints about their taxes when Bush was in there, and they are actually paying less now.
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