May the city of New Orleans subject local tour guides to hundreds of dollars in fines and five months in jail for engaging in unauthorized talking?

This is the question the Institute for Justice (IJ) seeks to answer in a federal lawsuit filed on December 13 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana.  Four New Orleans tour guides are joining forces with IJ to strike down New Orleans’ tour guide licensing scheme as a violation of their fundamental constitutional rights:

According to First Amendment expert Matt Miller of the Institute for Justice, seen the above video:

The government cannot be in the business of deciding who may speak and who may not.  The Constitution protects your right to communicate for a living, whether you are a journalist, a musician or a tour guide.

New Orleans requires every tour guide to pass a history exam, undergo a drug test and pass an FBI criminal background check every two years merely for speaking.  People who give tours without a license face fines up to $300 per occurrence and five months in jail.

City officials are currently breaking up tours led by guides that don’t have the government’s permission.

Four New Orleans tour guides—Candance Kagan, Mary LaCoste, Joycelyn Cole and Annette Watt—joined Miller in filing the lawsuit because they believe the First Amendment protects their right to communicate for a living.

Consider Candance Kagan.

Candice is a New Orleans native and tour guide who survived Hurricane Katrina.   She said, “I’m being knocked out of business again, this time by the city I love.”

The lawsuit is part of a larger, national effort to protect the rights of individuals that speak for a living.  IJ challenged tour-guide licensing schemes in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. Importantly, these lawsuits will help secure the free speech of people nationwide who speak for a living, including newspaper reporters and stand-up comedians as well as tour guides.

What do you think?   Should Candance need to get the government’s permission, take a drug test and undergo FBI scrutiny before she can give tours of the city she loves?

Please share your thoughts on our facebook page.

On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Ben Smilowitz to discuss disaster relief in Haiti, and the need for greater oversight of disaster relief organizations.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

One Year Report On Transparency of Relief Groups Responding to 2010 Haiti Earthquake
The importance of disaster relief NGO transparency
Disaster Accountability Project releases report on transparency of relief organizations responding to the 2010 Haiti earthquake
Fraud plagues global health fund backed by Bono, others

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Before Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans in 2005, Orleans Parish public schools were failing miserably. After the storm shut down the public school system completely, there was little reason to be optimistic.

But then something amazing happened.

The state of Louisiana took control over most of the schools in the district and has been chartering those schools ever since. This fall, more than 70 percent of the students in New Orleans will attend charter schools. (Check out reason.tv’s Katrina’s Silver Lining to learn more about the New Orleans charter school revolution.)

And then in 2008, Louisiana enacted the Student Scholarship for Educational Excellence Program, a pilot voucher program designed to allow students in failing schools to attend private schools in the area.

The result: more competition and more choices for parents.

This spring, Reason.tv went to New Orleans and spoke with Shree Medlock of the Black Alliance for Educational Options and folks at the Conquering Word Christian Academy to learn more about the city’s new voucher program.

Approximately 6.20 minutes. Produced by Paul Feine; shot by Alex Manning and Dan Hayes; edited by Alex Manning.

Go to reason.tv for HD, iPod, and audio versions of this and all our videos and subscribe to Reason.tv’s YouTube Channel to receive automatic notification when new material goes live.

Some women and men love to posture, talk, debate, and negotiate. Temperamentally, they are suited for a legislative role. It is said – only partly in jest– that, in Washington, DC, the most dangerous space to occupy is that which lies between a United States Senator and a microphone.

Other women and men – think of Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, Indira Ghandi, Golda Meir, and Ronald Reagan – were born to take charge. When Harry Truman put a sign on his desk, reading, “The buck stops here,” he knew what he was talking about. As Alexander Hamilton observed in The Federalist, it is vital that we have in our Constitution a unitary executive because, in human affairs, emergencies are commonplace; secrecy, vigor, and dispatch are often requisite; and, in such circumstances, there has to be someone in high office able, willing, and even eager to take responsibility for the conduct of affairs.

Americans have an instinctive understanding of what is at stake. Ordinarily, they choose as Presidents men with executive experience – men with a track record in directing affairs that can be judged. George Washington, Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Ulysses S. Grant, and Dwight D. Eisenhower had been prominent generals before they were elected Presidents, and Rutherford B. Hayes, James A. Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, and Theodore Roosevelt had also demonstrated an aptitude for leadership in war.

John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Van Buren, the younger Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Richard Nixon, and George H. W. Bush had held the vice-presidency. Jefferson and Van Buren had also been Secretary of State, and the same can be said for James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, and James Buchanan. Monroe had also been Secretary of War, and this was true was well for William Howard Taft. Herbert Hoover had managed relief efforts in Europe early in and after World War I; he had served as Food Administrator within the United States after we entered that war; and, from 1921 to 1928, he served as Secretary of Commerce.

Many of the others elected to the presidency had previously held gubernatorial office.

This was true for Jefferson, Monroe, Van Buren, the younger Roosevelt, and, if one counts his service as governor of the Philippines, for Taft as well. It applies also to James K. Polk, Rutherford B. Hayes, Grover Cleveland, William McKinley, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, William Jefferson Clinton, and George H. Bush.

The only men ever elected to the presidency who had no executive experience of any sort were Franklin Pierce, Warren G. Harding, John F. Kennedy, and the hapless incumbent we have today.

No one – not even, in retrospect, his own political party – thought that Pierce did a decent job. It was during his administration (1853-1857) that the Union began to come apart. Harding is best remembered for the scandals that beset his short-lived administration (1921-1923). And although, thanks to the slavish devotion of his acolytes in the media and in the academy, JFK is in some circles revered, his actual performance in office prior to October, 1962 was deplorable. As Donald Kagan pointed out on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the construction of the Berlin Wall Kennedy was so weak, so irresolute and indecisive, so feckless in his dealings with the Soviet Union that his conduct encouraged Nikita Khrushchev to think that he could get away with introducing missiles tipped with nuclear warheads into Castro’s Cuba and brought us thereby to the brink of nuclear war.

Executive experience does not guarantee wisdom and competence in office. Pierce, Harding, and Kennedy were by no means the only elected Presidents to fall short. But, as the American people generally appreciate, the lack of executive experience is a good indicator of fecklessness to come.

Witness Barack Obama. Leave aside his first year in office. As I pointed out in posts entitled “Barack Obama and the Exhausted Presidency” and “Obama’s First Year,” from the outset, he conducted himself in an irresponsible fashion that is highly unpresidential.

He forgot that, in the larger world, the President represents his country. Out of personal pique, he persistently insulted our friends abroad, displaying disdain for Gordon Brown, stiffing Nicholas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel, treating Benyamin Netanyahu with open contempt, and turning his back on the people of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Iran. At the same time, he embraced Hugo Chavez, sucked up to Vladimir Putin, and kowtowed to the rulers of Saudi Arabia and China – all to no avail.

With regard to domestic affairs, he seems not to have recognized that, under our Constitution, it is the President of the United States who represents the national interest; that Congressmen more often than not cater to particular interests; that, if legislation is left to the latter, principle tends to give way to patronage; and that the result can be a profound embarrassment. And so he stood idly by while Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and the like drafted legislation – a so-called “stimulus bill” and healthcare reform, each more than a thousand pages in length, each embodying a multitude of corrupt bargains, each threatening to bankrupt the country. And, like a political hack, faithful to his party to the bitter end, he promoted and signed their handiwork.

All of this was obvious long ago, and it was evident as well that, if there were a real crisis, he would check out. This is what he did when Major Nidal Malik Hassan gunned down thirteen Americans at Fort Hood. This is what he did when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab nearly brought down a jetliner at Christmas time. And this is what he did when Faisal Shahzad was found to have planted a bomb in Times Square. All three cases revealed an egregious failure of our intelligence apparatus. In all three cases, the danger had its source in developments within Islam And, in the face of all of this, the President of the United States signaled that he could hardly bear to take a few minutes off from his vacation at the beach in Hawaii, cancel a party or two, or give up his golf game to acknowledge and address the failures of his administration, and at no time has he been willing to level with us about the source of our peril.

Maureen Dowd and those who think that politics is about play-acting – here is her latest column on this theme – lament that, like Spock in Star Trek, No-Drama Obama is simply incapable of displaying any sense of urgency. The real problem is much more serious, for our well-being is to a considerable degree in this man’s hands, and, when things go wrong, he seems not to feel any sense of urgency at all.

The oil spill that began in the Gulf of Mexico on 20 April is the latest example. Some say that President Obama is no more responsible for the spill than President Bush was for Hurricane Katrina. This claim is, in fact, untrue. Bush had nothing to do with Katrina. Barack Obama, as President, was responsible for insuring that the regulatory agencies overseeing the drilling operations did their job properly. While campaigning for the presidency, he charged that the Bush administration had, in effect, allowed the oil industry to regulate itself, and he promised that, if he were elected, he would set things right. During that campaign, he took a wad of cash from folks at BP (more than they had ever given any other candidate); and, when the time came to reform the Minerals Management Service, as Tim Dickinson has shown in fine detail in the latest issue of Rolling Stone, the new administration’s appointees did nothing of the sort.

Nor was the Obama administration quick off the mark in doing what could be done to contain the spill. Instead, while the govenors in the Gulf states clamored for action, the President played golf and partied and the bureaucracy dithered, delaying by weeks efforts to prevent the oil from coming ashore, from fouling beaches, and killing wildlife. Nearly two months have passed since the accident on the Deepwater Horizon, and to date President Obama has issued no waiver to the Jones Act, which stands in the way of foreign ships with foreign crews helping to contain and suck up the spill.

The environmentalists are reportedly giving the Obama adminstration a pass. By now, they are reliable partisans, and they have their eye on cap-and-trade. The people of Louisiana are much less happy. They recognize the deepwater drilling moratorium imposed by the Obama administration for what it is – a ploy designed to persuade those not in the know that something decisive is being done – and, according to the left-liberal outfit Public Policy Polling, more than three-quarters of the voters in that state still favor offshore drilling. Moreover, half of the voters polled “think George W. Bush did a better job with Katrina than Obama’s done dealing with the spill,” 31% of self-described Democrats agree, and only 35% of those polled give Obama higher marks.

Only one politician has gained ground in the course of this crisis, and that is Bobby Jindal, the Governor of Louisiana. The poll recently taken shows that “63% of voters approve of the job he’s doing,” which is the highest approval rating that Public Policy Polling “has found for any Senator or Governor so far in 2010. There’s an even higher level of support, at 65%, for how he’s handled the aftermath of the spill.” Jindal is evidently a man of executive temperament. He is not better placed to deal with the spill than is Barack Obama, but he has done as much to keep it off the beaches and out of the swamplands of southern Louisiana as lay within his power.

As the reports make abundantly clear, Barack Obama did not help himself at all with the speech he gave on Monday night from the Oval Office. As our President plays golf, parties, and pauses from time to time to bloviate and pose for photo-ops, his popularity steadily sinks under the weight of his evident indifference to our security and well-being.

It is high time that Republicans start asking the obvious question: who, in their number, is best prepared to do what this presidential incumbent has no desire to bother with: to take what the authors of The Federalist called responsibility. Governor Jindal may not be at the very top of the list of possible presidential contenders, but he is certainly high on it.

Did you know that a courageous former radical helped to avert a planned left-wing terrorist attack at the 2008 Republican National Convention that might have killed who knows how many Americans?

Neither did I until recently.

That’s because if you disrupt a terrorist attack on Americans by Islamic fundamentalists as Northwest Flight 253 passenger Jasper Schuringa did on Christmas Day, you’re a hero; however, if you take the initiative to undermine a terrorist attack on Americans by supposedly well intentioned left-wing fundamentalists, you might as well be a terrorist yourself.

Brandon Darby, who in recent years also refused leftists’ invitations to get involved in Venezuelan communist subversion here in America and in anti-Israeli terrorism in Palestine, learned this unpalatable truth the hard way.

The Left-Wing Plot to Kill Republicans

After years of in-your-face protests, confrontational tactics and working with America-haters, Darby eventually experienced a political epiphany. He rejected the radical Left and its culture of political violence. He came to realize that America, for all its faults, wasn’t such a bad place after all.

“I felt I had a duty to atone after badmouthing my country for so many years,” Darby told me in an interview. “I love my country.”

But Darby didn’t always love his country.

Darby previously considered himself a revolutionary. His charisma and militant anti-Americanism made the intense Texan a larger-than-life figure among leftist activists in the South.

He openly called for the overthrow of the U.S. government, which he considered too corrupt and oppressive to be reformed. He expressed his hatred of police as guardians of the status quo. He consorted with eco-terrorist tree-spikers, radical feminists and black nationalists.

He was approached to rob an armored car and asked to commit arson to fight gentrification. He mouthed politically correct slogans and platitudes about the Bush administration. Government didn’t care about people, and in his eyes, the much-maligned response to Hurricane Katrina proved it.

But around the same time, the former radical community organizer was turning away from radicalism, and at tremendous personal risk, he undermined a leftwing terrorist plot to attack the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn. If he hadn’t taken action, Americans exercising their free speech rights and police officers might have been killed.

Without informing his fellow anarchists, Darby offered his assistance to the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force and, at the FBI’s request, infiltrated a leftwing group known as the Austin Affinity Group. The outfit had joined with a larger coalition of progressive organizations that facetiously called itself the “RNC Welcoming Committee.” The committee hoped to lay siege to the GOP convention that nominated the presidential ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin.

The FBI sent Darby to meet with anarchists who were developing their plan at a bookstore in Austin.

“It was a group of people whose explicit purpose was to organize a group of ‘black bloc’ anarchists to shut the Republican convention down by any means necessary,” he explained. “They showed videos of people throwing Molotov cocktails, and they were giving people ideas.”

The two 20-something plotters on whom Darby informed, David Guy McKay and Bradley Neil Crowder, had made homemade riot shields and were ready to use them in St. Paul to help demonstrators block streets near the Xcel Energy Center in order to prevent GOP delegates from participating in the convention. The shields were discovered and confiscated.

But McKay and Crowder were undeterred by this setback. Together they manufactured instruments of death calculated to inflict maximum pain and bodily harm on people whose political views they disagreed with.

During a search of a residence, police found gas masks, slingshots, helmets, knee pads and eight Molotov cocktails consisting of bottles filled with gasoline with attached wicks made from tampons.

“They mixed gasoline with oil so it would stick to clothing and skin and burn longer,” Darby told me.

Thanks to Darby’s cooperation with the FBI, the two anarchist would-be bomb throwers are now languishing in prison. McKay entered a “guilty” plea and was sentenced in May 2009 to 48 months in prison plus three years of supervised release for possession of an unregistered “firearm,” illegal manufacture of a firearm and possession of a firearm with no serial number. A week before, Crowder cut a deal with prosecutors and was sentenced to 24 months in prison for possession of an unregistered firearm.

McKay received the stiffer sentence in part because he fabricated a tall tale about Darby’s involvement in the plot.

During sentencing, U.S. District Judge Michael Davis went out of his way to make a specific legal finding that McKay obstructed justice by falsely accusing Darby of inducing him to manufacture the incendiary devices.

Davis told McKay he crossed the line between peaceful dissent and violent protest. “You were leading the charge. You and Crowder were coming up here [to Minnesota] to do anarchy against the system.”

But now the story takes a strange turn.

After Darby, who until the end of 2008 had been a confidential FBI informant, revealed that he had worked with authorities to pre-empt the violent conspiracy, he became the subject of a campaign of vilification by the Left.

Google Darby’s name and the words “snitch” and “rat” appear. Cyber-squatters appropriated his name and created a hateful Web site to defame him.

The floodgates of abuse burst open after Darby acknowledged in an open letter posted at an alternative news Web site that not only had he worked with the FBI, but he also “strongly” stood behind his decision to do so.

The irretrievably liberal New York Times ignored his heroism. A Jan. 5, 2009, article focused not on Darby’s lifesaving intervention but on the feelings of “betrayal” his former allies in left-wing anarchist circles were experiencing.

The paper showed how shocked and appalled Scott Crow, who with Darby co-founded the Common Ground Relief agency in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, was after learning about Darby’s cooperation with the FBI.

“I put it all on the line to defend him when accusations first came out,” Crow said. “Brandon Darby is somebody I had entrusted with my life in New Orleans, and now I feel endangered by him.” Why someone who presumably hadn’t committed a crime would feel “endangered” by knowing an FBI informant is unclear.

ACORN founder Wade Rathke (shown at left in above photo), who worked as a professional agitator for the violent Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960s, would have preferred that Republican delegates be incinerated.

He denounced Darby for working with the authorities to disrupt the domestic terrorists. “It seemed so, how should I say it, ’60s?”

It’s “one thing to disagree, but it’s a whole different thing to rat on folks,” Rathke wrote on his blog.

This response to ideological apostasy is not altogether surprising. Leftists who abandon their faith are demonized by their former co-religionists. Relentless attacks on Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore and former radical David Horowitz continue to the present day, decades after they moved rightward.

Right-Wing Violence Bad, Left-Wing Violence Good?

Compare the treatment of Darby at the hands of the Left to the respectful— often groveling—treatment afforded ObamaCare architect Robert Creamer.

A HuffingtonPost.com contributor and husband of shrill socialist Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., Creamer served prison time for kiting checks and failing to pay withholding taxes for his leftist nonprofit, Illinois Public Action Fund. Just like his liberal friends in Congress and the Obama administration, he refused to roll back spending and instead created a modified Ponzi scheme in order to continue drawing his full $100,000 salary.

This crusader for social justice and political consultant to Democratic Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and impeached Democratic Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich even whined at his 2006 sentencing that he received a five-month period of incarceration, well below the 30 to 37 months called for in federal sentencing guidelines. The media failed to call him on it.

Convicted cop-killing activists Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abu-Jamal are legends on the Left. Black Panther Abu-Jamal in particular enjoys a cult following among radicals even though no serious person—including Abu-Jamal himself, who failed to claim to be innocent at his trial—contests that in 1981 he shot and killed Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner in cold blood.

Creamer, Peltier and Abu-Jamal are all heroes to the Left no matter what they did, and to some precisely because of what they did.

This is because on the Left there is a presumption of good intentions even by fellow-traveling terrorists. As left-wing talk radio host Thom Hartmann told me last year: “My left-wing crazies are better than your right-wing crazies.”

Hartmann explained:

“Your right-wing crazies are incited to violence based on fear and hate of people because of whom they are, because they’re gay, because they’re Catholic, because they’re Jewish, because they’re black, because they’re Hispanic. And our left-wing crazies are incited to violence because they’re trying to create a better world. They’re trying to save the environment in the case of the eco-terrorists. They’re trying to end the Vietnam War in the case of the Weather Underground. They’re trying to bring about civil rights in the case of the Symbionese Liberation Army and some of the other black terrorist groups that were operating in the 1970s” (emphasis added).

To the Left, violent acts aimed at desirable ends are worthy of praise, especially if aimed at the other side.

Internationally known Marxist author Naomi Klein has praised the riots that took place during the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle and openly called for violence at the 2004 Republican convention, urging protesters to bring the Iraq War to the streets of New York City. The Canadian writer wasn’t ostracized by the Left after her outrageous statement; if anything, her public stature has only grown since 2004.

If right-wing terrorists plotted to attack a Democratic National Convention, whoever foiled the conspiracy would be immortalized in film, literature and song as a savior of democracy.

“If you flip the equation around and it had been a group of conservatives threatening to use force to prevent those on the Left from meeting, everyone would expect the government to infiltrate them and they would also expect the FBI to stop them and charge them with crimes,” Darby said.

“But when it’s leftists that organize to prevent Republicans from being able to meet, then all of a sudden it’s considered government oppression. There’s something wrong with that, and no one points that out, and it’s really offensive and damaging to our system.”

Social justice-oriented terrorism isn’t ugly and anti-American, according to the nation’s entertainment-media complex; it’s downright praiseworthy and hip. So it should come as no surprise that Crowder and McKay are in the process of being rehabilitated by the Left.

Early on, the duo became a cause célèbre for the Left, dubbed the Texas 2. Now documentary filmmakers are currently making a movie about them called—you guessed it—“Better This World.” The documentary, which is reportedly in the post-production phase, received an HBO Documentary Films Fellowship.

No doubt there will be more praise heaped on them as they ascend to the Left’s pantheon of social justice champions, joining Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn and the Unabomber.

The Journal Away From Radicalism

But no one is singing the praises of Darby, a genuine American hero.

Born in Pasadena, Texas, in 1976, Darby’s efforts in post-Katrina New Orleans were highlighted favorably in the media, most notably in a Jonathan Demme documentary that was shown on the “Tavis Smiley Show” on PBS.

When Darby learned people were suffering in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, he moved there, defying police orders not to enter the stricken city. With $50, he co-founded Common Ground in the home of Malik Rahim, a veteran community organizer and former Black Panther who did prison time for armed robbery.

“When we started, everyone in the city was armed, everyone was scared, and there was a complete lack of law enforcement,” said Darby. “The few roving bands of law enforcement that were present didn’t like us very much because of the fact that we were involved with people like Malik Rahim, who to this day continues to advocate for those who have attacked law enforcement personnel.”

“We were young, we were caught up in the fervor of helping others and fighting injustice, and at that time, we couldn’t see why people like law enforcement didn’t like Malik,” Darby said.

Common Ground was no mere relief agency. It was a group of far-Left revolutionaries who viewed their work as an extension of their politics.

In a promotional video, Rahim thunders to volunteers: “You are showing this government that the people, that the people in this country do care for peace and justice and that we will stand for peace and justice and that we will do what it takes to restore peace and justice back to America.”

When Common Ground was threatened, the radical Left mobilized to defend it. Police were “freaked out because there were all these Black Panthers who’d had shootouts with the police years ago, and they’re in this house and they refused to leave, so it turned into this really stressful ordeal,” Darby explained.

Despite many obstacles, Common Ground quickly became a successful nonprofit group that helped alleviate the suffering of poor people in the devastated city, especially in the hard-hit 9th Ward.

Supported by donations that flowed in from across the country, in its first three years 22,000 volunteers worked for Common Ground. A magnet for outraged radicals ranging from garden variety collectivists to militant vegans to pagan lesbians, the group gutted flood damaged houses without bothering to obtain permits and provided free health care and meals.

The group was profiled by ABC’s “Nightline,” and the media treated Darby as a savior. With its contributions to the city, the group began to wield political influence, Darby said. Even its initial detractors begrudgingly admitted Common Ground’s positive impact on the Crescent City.

Over time, a lot of the things Darby experienced with Common Ground led him to question his political beliefs, and these experiences offer a window into what happens when the radical Left takes over an area.

In bed with real-estate developers, New Orleans wanted to use eminent domain to condemn many vacant flood damaged houses. According to Darby, many anarchists refused to join his fight to protect the property rights of homeowners, because they didn’t believe in private property.

“I just started putting the call out, and all these libertarians, Republicans and Democrats, started showing up. And what we would do was any time there were bulldozers we would just get in front of them and wouldn’t let them work,” he said.

“We had our lawyers file lawsuits, and so next thing you know, they backed away from it. And they started to work with us to identify where the residents were, and we’d ask the residents if they wanted their place demolished or not.”

Darby defied the politically correct “consensus” method of group decision making and riled feathers by daring to tell aimless volunteers what to do. After vegan volunteers took over the Common Ground kitchen and tried to inflict their dietary preferences on the poor, it occurred to Darby that the leftist-anarchist approach with its aversion to hierarchy would never work in the real world.

“Like most people driven by a strong dogma, the majority of the people who took over were from Berkeley, and they came in under the guise of helping,” he said.

“They tried to use the experience to ‘correct’ the culture and lifestyle of the working-class poor. They tried to use the black residents of New Orleans as lab rats and guinea pigs, and I didn’t like that at all—and the residents didn’t like it either.”

For example, some of the activists tried to organize the residents into “collectives,” and another group of gay activists took over part of a church that had donated its space to help relief efforts. “We were helping to rebuild the church, but then some radicals took over and started using over half the space and designated it as a ‘queer safe place,’” Darby said.

This infuriated the church leadership who were already uncomfortable with being associated with so many radical activists.

“It’s not about you coming here and creating your utopia,” Darby explained.

“It’s about helping these residents and making them feel comfortable. The radicals wanted to make residents sit through political orientations in order to get fed. I objected and that got me called a dictator.”

Common Ground leaders continued to insist on indoctrinating young volunteers and on continuing with in-your-face protest tactics, which lost their usefulness after the group became well established and had connections with people in the city, Darby said.

“The people making decisions for the city about how aid was distributed and about where FEMA work crews and search-and-rescue crews operated, developed relationships with us,” he explained. “They were completely open to hear our perspective and wanted us to participate in what decisions were made, but unfortunately many of the other community organizers were stuck in a fight-the-power dogma, which ultimately hindered their ability to serve those in need. There was no official of local government there that we couldn’t call on their cell phone and set up a dinner meeting with or enjoy a cup of coffee with.”

After initially having rocky relations with the New Orleans Police and other local authority figures, Darby came to realize that, in the hurricane-ravaged city, relief volunteers and the authorities were on the same side—both sides wanted to help people.

Darby’s “eureka” moment came as he began to accept the idea that not everyone in government was a villain.

He credits Maj. John Bryson of the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) with helping him to stop viewing everyone in government as the enemy.

Bryson (pictured above), who, in the wake of Katrina, was the NOPD’s 5th District commander, an area that encompassed the especially hard-hit Lower 9th Ward, observed Darby’s transformation over time.

When Bryson first met Darby, he was “so up in my face it was unbelievable,” Bryson told me. “Radical” was too weak a word to describe Darby, Bryson said.

When the two first met, Darby promised that his fellow activists would be videotaping police and that they wouldn’t hesitate to report anything they didn’t like to the media. Bryson helped to improve the relationship by giving Darby his cell phone number and told him to contact him directly if police officers misbehaved.

Bryson offered to help Darby but cautioned him that “if we find that you are not here to help our citizens, then we’re going to have a problem,” Bryson explained, “and that was our agreement.”

Over time, the two, who had been filled with mutual distrust and hostility, began to get along, even to like each other as friends.

Bryson watched Common Ground—which, in the immediate aftermath of Katrina, he said, had more people on the ground than the federal government—begin to flourish. The group opened shelters for women, families and children, offering services to locals that governments at the time were unable to provide.

As relations with the police improved dramatically, Darby confessed to Bryson that he had never had this kind of positive relationship with any kind of law enforcement personnel. The feeling was mutual.

Bryson praised Darby for cooperating with the FBI:

“Everybody [on the Left] hates Brandon because he did the right thing for the right reasons. Anytime anyone in this country, in this state, in this city, or even in this world is going to do some horrible things to innocent people, if a good man does not stand up, or a good woman for that matter, then we’re in trouble. And Brandon stood up and did the right thing. He stole my heart as he said, ‘I thought about you and how well you worked with us, and I couldn’t see innocent people getting hurt.’”

Plots Abroad

Although Darby’s positive experiences with New Orleans police had forced him to begin questioning his anarchist beliefs, a trip to Marxist Venezuela helped to kill off his remaining radical impulses.

The trip came as the U.S. government was taking a beating in the media for its post-Katrina relief efforts. At the time, Venezuela’s communist strongman, Hugo Chavez, began trying to embarrass the Bush administration by offering aid to the Katrina-hit Gulf Coast.

Chavez had already been running what political scientists call a “public diplomacy” campaign in the U.S. to help bolster American support for his regime. The propaganda effort consisted of funneling discounted home heating oil to former U.S. Rep. Joe Kennedy’s, D-Mass., nonprofit group, Citizens Energy Corp. The nonprofit then distributed the oil to poor people, and Kennedy (pictured above behind lectern) went on TV to berate the Bush administration, which he said “cut fuel assistance.” Kennedy boosted his benefactor, boasting in a commercial that “CITGO, owned by the Venezuelan people,” had helped poor Americans while their own government stood idly by.

Darby traveled to Caracas in 2006 as part of a Common Ground delegation to the Chavez government to seek funding to keep Common Ground afloat.

“I had this idea of having ‘Chavez trailers’ for displaced residents to live in. This would embarrass FEMA into supplying trailers,” he said.

Darby said he didn’t realize when he came up with the concept that using money from abroad to influence the U.S. government might be illegal, but Chavez government officials he met with insisted it would violate U.S. law.

“They told me I would get in trouble, and they wanted to work out a way to make the project happen,” he said.

In the month he was there, Venezuelan officials introduced him to executives of PDVSA, the government-owned oil company that owns CITGO, which operates a chain of gas stations in the U.S. They pressured Darby to journey to neighboring Colombia to meet with a group aligned with the narco-terror organization FARC and to visit another revolutionary group in Maracaibo, Venezuela.

According to Darby, Chavez wanted to create a terrorist network in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina. This is the same Chavez who blamed the recent earthquake in Haiti on the United States and who called President George W. Bush “the Devil” during a United Nations speech, so some might find his efforts at subversive activities in the United States hard to take seriously. However, it’s important to remember that Chavez has close ties to Iran and Cuba and allows terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah to operate offices in Caracas.

(Long before he learned of the RNC plot, Darby reached out to the FBI to undermine terrorism. A longtime Texas friend, the late Riad Hamad [pictured above], had tried to hijack Darby’s plan to provide medical assistance in war-torn parts of the world. Darby wanted to create a group called Critical Response that would have sent medics into war zones to help civilians caught in the crossfire in places such as Lebanon and Darfur. Hamad, founder of the much-investigated Palestinian Children’s Welfare Fund, told him he wanted to send medics to Israel and put explosives on motorcycles and boobytrap ambulances in order to kill Jews. Hamad also hatched an elaborate plan to funnel money to Hamas and Hezbollah. Around the same time, Darby viewed a very graphic Israeli first responders’ training video. “At the time I was conflicted about what to do, but seeing the dead bodies of Israeli children in that tape made the so-called Palestinian activists’ chant ‘no justice, no peace,’ take on a whole new meaning. I decided the only ethical thing to do was to tell law enforcement what I knew.”)

To Darby’s astonishment, during his stay in Caracas, senior officials in the Chavez government and in PDVSA told him they wanted him to create a revolutionary army of guerrillas in the swamps of Louisiana.

“At the very last meeting they ramped up the pressure,” Darby said. They taunted him, saying, “What? You’re not a revolutionary?”

Despite intense pressure from his Venezuelan hosts, he refused. This was the last straw for him.

“I realized I didn’t like Venezuela, the authoritarianism of it, and I started to realize how brilliant and miraculous the American system of checks and balances was,” Darby said. “There was still something brilliant about the fact that this nation had institutionalized a system of checks and balances that has been working since this nation was founded. I realized just how hard a task that is.”

Common Ground, divided by radical factions with harebrained ideas constantly warring with each other, was a living example of left-wing radicalism in action.

“When I would leave Common Ground for a few days I would be worried that a power vacuum could develop and factions could displace me while I was away, and that’s just the way things are in places like Venezuela,” he said. “It is actually absurd to want the United States government to go away, and that’s when it really hit me that my ideas were wrong.”

Darby said he’s still proud of his Common Ground experience on the whole. “I’m proud of helping people, but I’m ashamed of what I used to believe,” Darby admitted.

“Thankfully, I had the honor of serving my country by working undercover with the FBI and participating in efforts to protect the safety and civil rights of others.”

(This article appears in the current issue of Townhall magazine and is posted here with the magazine’s permission.)

Many have simply tried to dismiss the phenomena as the ranting of a relatively small number of angry right-wing zealots. They are dead wrong but one gets the feeling the political class finds this easy dismissal far more comforting than the unsettling truths driving angry and vocal dissatisfaction by people from across the political spectrum.

“Real people” like me resonate in politics right now because of the growing chasm between what the political elites of both parties see as the best course for the nation—and for themselves– and the hopes and fears of the average American man and woman. In China that difference might mean very little to government as we saw in Tiananmen Square but, according to the Founding Fathers, such a division should not even exist here in the United States.

Those who are passionately protesting at Tea Parties and making themselves felt at the polls have rightly detected more than a hint of contempt for the average citizen. If everything were going well such elitist arrogance might be accepted, as it has been in the past. But things are not going well for our nation and more and more people are challenging the performance, ideas and motivations of those who hold themselves out as smarter and better than the rest of us.

Can a plumber or carpenter, housewife or truck driver (clutching their bibles and guns as Mr. Obama once sneered) have anything much to add to the public policies developed at the seats of government and financial power? To those of us “out here” the righteously indignant answer is “yes”–and not a moment too soon.

To understand the Tea Party perspective, political elites will have to come to understand that they are seen as having failed us. Whether it’s “Brownie’s” “great job” after Hurricane Katrina or the recent “system worked” remarks by Janet Napolitano or the tax problems of various government leaders (including the chairman of the House committee writing tax laws), we feel betrayed. This judgment is actually directed at politicians on both the right and the left. The arrogant and often contemptuous “smart guys” have saddled us with failure after failure and now seem bewildered that people are so angry.

Have political insiders given us a Social Security and Medicare system with more than $100 trillion in unfunded liabilities? Yes. Did the “successful” job stimulus program really end up costing more than $200,000 per low level job? Yes. Did we get help with usurious mortgage and credit card rates and life wrecking job losses caused, in truth, by bad government? No. Does the public education system really produce 50% and higher drop out rates in almost every major city? Yes. Does the unfathomable income tax system really cost us more than $300 billion a year in tax preparation expenses? Yes. Has spending billions of dollars to confiscate blue-haired ladies’ knitting needles and millions of pocket knives and lighters stopped terrorist bombers? No. And to many of us, the answer to everything is not shifting more of the fruits of our labors to the 40% of the population who pay no income taxes at all.

If all politics is really local, consider Washington D.C.’s abysmal public education record. The political clout of teacher’s unions saw the school choice program there dismantled last year even though it was working very well and wildly popular with poor African-American parents desperate for something better for their children. Their views were summarily ignored and then trampled on by both the White House and Congress because of the political advantage to politicians willing to ignore the fate of these children.

Are we angry? Yes. Because even worse than being routinely ignored by our leaders is the growing certainty that policy decisions that are bad for citizens and the nation often work out to the advantage of those inside government and those close to government. If you doubt this or wonder why there is such grassroots fervor for the FairTax, for example, take another hard look at the tax code’s 67,500 pages of regulations, the “royal treatment” of Congressional tax committee members and staff and the billions spent on special interest tax lobbying every year.

The Tea Party movement will grow larger and larger and will resist being taken over by insiders who see potential for their party or candidates until the distance between what average Americans feel and what political leaders do in pure self-interest has been closed. To understand the anger in the Tea Parties one has to understand that many Americans still expect our government to act in the public, instead of private or political interest.

Military officials bought thousands of dollars worth of alcohol, food and other amenities for congressional overseas junkets

Delaware airport that “hardly ever sees a paying passenger” has received $12.3 million from the federal Airport Improvement Program for a runway construction project

Tennessee library pays for Rock Band video game session and Monday Night Football with a $5,000 federal Community Building Through Video Games in Libraries grant

Nearly five years after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, Louisiana still looking for ways to spend one-third of the $13.4 billion leftover from the funds provided by the federal government for recovery efforts

Defense appropriations bill signed by President Obama contained 97 pages listing nearly 1,000 congressional earmarks costing billions of dollars