On September 12, 2009, grassroots activists from coast to coast flooded the streets of Washington D.C., making history in protest of a wasteful and oversized government.

This year, FreedomWorks and our fiscally conservative allies will assemble once again on September 12th to renew our commitment to a constitutionally limited government, and to remind Washington in one, strong, united voice that we will “Remember in November.”

We’re happy to announce that we will be welcoming Andrew Brietbart to the stage on the West Lawn of the Capitol as part of this year’s event. Andrew will be joining Erick Erickson, Deneen Borelli, Rep. Mike Pence, and many other leaders in the liberty movement to speak out against the out of control spending and the growing size of government. All of the details are listed on our website.

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In our new book, Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey and I discuss the fundamental problems with assuming that public officials have our best interests at heart.

Excerpt from Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto:

The Tea Party movement adds a welcome addition to the fundamental debate over the size and scope of government: grassroots activists armed with the intellectual arguments they need to make a difference in political debates, not just scholarly discussions. What is happening is a dramatic increase in the physical infrastructure and on-the-ground personal politicking that can turn ideas into action. The new generation of limited government scholars, and the internet, provides an even wider audience for good ideas. But unlike earlier generations, the new generation as the muscle to make things happen in the political arena.

While standing for the right ideas and values is vitally important, it is naive to think that politicians will do the right thing simply because a proposed polict will benefit the general citizenry, creating the conditions for economic opportunity and individual prosperity for all. That’s simply not how things work.If there was doubt about the proposition before, today it is painfully obvious that politicians in power often act in their own self-interest at the expense of the “public interest”.

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We have sought to call out haters and those that would cynically use race and the other political cards from the Democrats’ stacked deck because it is destructive our social fabric.  These phony charges create real hate, and do real damage to the cause of a civil, tolerant and colorblind society.

From day one, the good men and women who have risen up in peaceful dissent against the big government policies of the Democrats in power have been subjected to the worst kinds of ridicule, name-calling and downright hate.

DC Douglas is simply repeating the Liberal/Democrat talking points when he levels the false charges against “teabaggers” and FreedomWorks.

He says “If you have ire about this, focus it on FreedomWorks.”  That’s exactly what the Democrats and their friends on the left did.  The resulting emails and voicemails prove the point about the real damage caused by the Democrats tactics. (Warning: extremely offensive content.)

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FreedomWorks staff and volunteers have suffered through bomb threats, endless hostile abuse from union patch-through calls laced with profanity, death threats, the N-word directed at an African-American employee, and a host of full-frontal creeps.  You can find many of these documented here and here.

Many of these orchestrated attacks were launched in the days leading up to our September 12th Taxpayer March on Washington.  Where was the moral outrage when we received a bomb threat on September 11^th?  “There’s a f***ing bomb in your building, bitch,” the caller said.  Then, did the media write stories about how the Democrats and their hard left adjuncts had gone too far with their threats, their hate, their racism?

We need to draw a line in the sand. Across this line you do not cross! Let’s all agree to hold the individuals acting badly personally responsible for their actions.  As far as I can tell, the bad actors are likely phony infiltrators from tea party crasher groups.

We are a grassroots movement made up of people who believe in individual freedom and individual responsibility.  Racism and hate are inherently collectivist ideas.  As individualists we judge people as individuals, based on the content of their character, not the color of their skin.

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Why would the voice of Geico Insurance (“Save $50 dollars or more…”) attack the staff and followers of FreedomWorks as “mentally retarded?”  Does he really think that the good men and women who make up the tea party movement – mothers and daughters, grandparents and grandchildren – are all potential murderers that will inevitably “actually kill someone?”

Better yet, how many of these “mentally retarded” killers opted to save $50 dollars or more on their car insurance.

Last week, the FreedomWorks press department received a voicemail from a man identifying himself as Lance Baxter. This is what Lance has to say:

Click to Listen: Lance Baxter’s Voicemail

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The Left is escalating their attacks against Republicans, conservatives and the Tea Party movement. The movement that the Left and the media have laughed off for over a year now as a radical fringe of racists, bigots, homophobes, and domestic terrorists has come to pose a serious threat to the entitlement establishment and to the agenda that the Democrats promised their base. Now, they’re lashing out. They’re fabricating stories which are later disavowed. There is talk of infiltrating upcoming events. Attacks on organizations and individuals have increased.

To provide an example, the FreedomWorks office recently received this postcard in the mail (offensive language):

The return address listed Kim Hendren. Kim Hendren is a Republican in the Arkansas state legislature who is running for US Senate in 2010. To state the obvious, it would bring stupid to a new level to send something like this on an open postcard and list your name and address – especially if you were running for office. After we received a second installment of the hate-filled postcards, the FreedomWorks staff did some digging. We contacted Kim Hernden’s office and questioned him about it, and he filled us in on the smear campaigns against him. He’s been on the receiving end of relentless political attacks throughout his campaign, and was honestly not surprised that someone had taken to writing hate-speech in his name.

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Despite what Congress and the current administration would have the people believe, the inconvenient truth is that fiscal conservatives are the dead center of American politics. Amidst accusations of extremism, Americans are responding to a message of limited government, fiscal responsibility, and less taxation. In a recent interview, FreedomWorks chairman Dick Armey said this:

“This is the broad center of American politics. Look at the polling data, Right now, the Tea Party polls higher than the Republicans and the Democrats, and it is becoming increasingly clear to the electorate out there and they’re expressing their understanding… we have a Democrat majority in Congress and a President that’s on the liberal fringe, and we are in the center.”

Despite differing messages on various social agendas and battles over the role of government in our everyday lives, most Americans understand the necessity of fiscal responsibility – which is even more apparent in the midst of a struggling economy. As the government battles “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” and takes on country-altering legislation in the form of Cap and Trade and the Health Care reform bill, unemployment sky rockets and Congress raises the debt ceiling yet again.

Americans are concerned with jobs. They are concerned with Federal spending. The President’s State of the Union proposal to place a spending freeze on an already swollen base line is not convincing them – only 9% believe that it will reduce the deficit significantly.

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The American people were promised transparency under Democratic Party rule.  President Obama told the American people no less than eight times that legislative deliberations would be aired on C-SPAN, not behind closed doors. The call for reform and transparency became a rallying cry for the Obama campaign.

This process that produced the House and Senate health care legislation has been anything but transparent.

But what can be expected when the conversation starts with back door deals between the White House and both Big Health Insurance and Big Pharmaceuticals?  The health insurance industry received from Democrats, in exchange for their complicity and financial support, legislation that forces all Americans to buy their product regardless of want, need or ability to pay.  Talk about a massive transfer of wealth from younger, healthier, poorer individuals to an older, less healthy, more wealthy population.  PhRMA demanded that Obama keep certain things kept out of the health care bill in exchange for spending $150 million to support Democratic health care reform legislation.  Specifically:

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If there were a Death Panel empowered by legislative fiat to determine the political viability of legislative agendas in Washington, D.C., it would declare ObamaCare all but dead, not worth any further time and expense incurred by the American people.  “Do Not Resuscitate,” the tribunal would vote, citing the best comparative effectiveness research in its non-negotiable determination.

Unfortunately, that merciful committee does not exist, so we have been subjected to yet another clarifying speech from President Obama on his proposed hostile government takeover of our health care.  In just a few weeks, we have gone from “health care reform” to “insurance reform,” and now “health security.”  Is it just me, or does this White House simply repackage the very same bad ideas with more carefully chosen new words, confusing rhetorical elegance for good policy?  Ok, maybe less rhetorically elegant than once believed.

Regardless, the timing of last night’s hastily arranged speech before a joint session of Congress was weird.  Such special sessions are themselves weird, exceedingly rare forums usually reserved for dramatic effect, like when Presidents declare war.  The glaring exception, it seems, was Bill Clinton’s ill-fated, pen-wagging veto threat to Congress if they failed to pass his (Hillary’s) health care plan.  So why did Obama do it?  Why now?  According to USA Today before his speech, “the ever more noisy opposition to his health care objectives has had one result: It prompted Obama’s decision to address a joint session of Congress on Wednesday in an effort to regain momentum on the issue.”

So the President wants to have another argument with the voters. He already has ridiculed publicly citizens who have the audacity to disagree, like the lady who asked him to keep government out of her Medicare. (Maybe she was referring to his proposed $500 billion in cuts from a system that is already $46 trillion in the red, to fund another government-run health care system for new populations?)

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