On Saturday, standing on the state capitol steps in Madison, Wisconsin I saw history. I saw the first public, physical manifestation of the great struggle between the tea party movement and the public sector unions. At stake: the future freedom and prosperity of this country.

On one side of the debate, you have freedom loving Americans who are the taxpayers, the ones who fund our government and are the heart and soul of this great nation. On the other, those who would seek to ride on the backs of the taxpayers as they take this country down a path of statism.

This is the great fight right now: freedom vs. statism, and the ones of the front lines for freedom are the tea partiers. They have been, and are continuing to, answer the bell time and time again in this crucial time in American history. They’ve been mocked and reviled, questioned, but they are America’s best hope to turn this magnificent nation back to a path of freedom and prosperity and away from destructive statism.

What I saw in Madison on Saturday was amazing. Thursday morning, the American Majority staff in Wisconsin and some local tea party leaders, Meg Ellefson and Tim Dake, along with Dave Westlake, decided there should be a rally in support of Scott Walker and his Budget Repair Bill. In roughly 48 hours, it went from idea to reality, from a few people talking to 10,000 rallying on the steps of the capitol.

Within hours of announcing there would be a rally, I got a call that Andrew Breitbart was in.

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As socialists progressives gear up to take on the filibuster, again, Jim Hoft shares some important filibuster myths that you’ll likely see parroted by many in the media as they struggle to carry Harry Reid’s increasingly heavy water pail.

I spoke with Brian Darling, who is a Big Government contributor, after the event yesterday at Heritage Foundation. He later sent me his “List of Myths” that the democrat-media complex will try to push on the American public this week as they go for their power grab in the US Senate.
With his permission, I am posting those “myths” here.

Four Myths about the Filibuster

There are four myths that you will hear over and over again about the filibuster. Don’t believe the left when they claim that the filibuster is unconstitutional and was an accident of history. Furthermore don’t believe it when you hear that the Senate is not a continuing body and therefore the Senate can only change rules in the first day of a new Congress. The explicit words of the Constitution, the Senate’s written rules and the history of the Senate show that the filibuster was created by design, it is constitutional and the Senate is a continuous body.

Myth: The Filibuster is Unconstitutional. Senator Tom Udall (D-NM) argues that “When the authors of the Constitution believed a supermajority vote was necessary, they clearly said so. And while the Constitution states that we may determine our own rules, it makes no mention that it require a supermajority vote to do so. In addition, a longstanding common law principle, upheld in Supreme Court decisions, states that one legislature cannot bind its successors. To require a supermajority to change the rules, as is our current practice, is to allow a Senate rule to trump our U.S. Constitution and bind future Senates.”

Fact: The Filibuster is constitutional and efforts to restrict debate in the Senate may be unconstitutional. The Constitution empowers the House and Senate to establish rules of procedure. Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution states that “each house may determine the rule of its proceedings.” This provision in the Constitution empowers the Senate to make rules governing debate. The Senate in 1917 established the cloture rule requiring a 2/3rds vote of all Senators present and voting to shut down debate after years of not having a means to shut down debate. Senate Rule 22 today states “invoking cloture on a proposal to amend the Senate’s standing rules requires the support of two-thirds of the Senators present and voting.” The clear letter of the Senate’s rules mandate a supermajority vote to change the Senate’s rules.

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One year ago today, we launched BigGovernment.com. As you probably know, our first posts dealt with the video sting of ACORN, orchestrated by the new citizen journalists James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles. It had an impact.

It also marked a new chapter in on-line media. Most of the conservative on-line media are scorekeepers. The provide opinion, but don’t really move the ball forward. I know that sounds both hyperbolic and self-serving, but consider: after the second day of our video release the U.S. Senate voted to defund ACORN and the Census Bureau severed all ties with the embattled organization. All of this happened before either the Washington Post or New York Times had devoted a single column inch to the burgeoning scandal. I’ve been in Washington D.C. for 16 years. Nothing politically happened until one of those papers weighed in. Until last year. The game totally changed and, even today, neither the JournoList-supporting Post nor the hemorrhaging Times understands this. Newsweek is dead. USA Today is shedding staff as fast as it can while Time clings to life as something to glance at on an airplane and every other part of the legacy media retires to “background noise.”  Simply put, no one cares about them anymore.

There was a time that news organizations like the Post and the Times could set the national agenda. They were the arbiters of what was news and what was “important.” A wink from one of their reporters would set off a national debate. If they ignored a story, well, it went nowhere. They were the “casting couch” of all possible news. Those days are over.

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Capitol Confidential and Jim Hoft have done an excellent job laying out concerns with the potential “compromise” bill that comes out of Sen. Bob Corker’s negotiations with Chris Dodd.  But when it comes to the destructive provisions that could come out of a Dodd-Corker deal, they may have just scratched the surface.

In addition to the troubling new powers for a new nanny-state consumer agency and possibly the Federal Reserve added to the prospect of billions more in bailouts for reckless financial firm, the bill may also contain the sneaky  “proxy access” power grab for unions, radical environmentalists, and other groups on the Left. This rule, inspired by Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, is contained in Dodd’s “discussion draft” bill from late last year.

As I detailed in BigGovernment last week, “proxy access would federalize and override decades of state law governing the structure of corporations and force publicly-traded companies to put shareholders’ nominees for a board of directors on a company’s proxy ballot along with the firm’s own nominees for those positions.” Many shareholder groups that are pushing this are union pension funds, the radical Tides Foundation, and other progressive groups — from animal rights to anti-Israel — who place their own political agenda items at the expense of ordinary shareholders.

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Founding Bloggers is proud to present our latest short video, “Talking Tea,”  produced while on location in Nashville at the National Tea Party Convention. (WARNING: NSFW)

The convention attracted Tea Party organizers, activists, and supporters from around the country, as well as some of the more prolific bloggers on the subject of the Tea Party movement.

Founding Bloggers invited some of these top Tea Party bloggers to sit down with us to talk tea. They graciously agreed to spend some time with us, and “Talking Tea” is the 9 minute result.

Below is the full length clip; however, we have also broken out a couple shorter segments for your viewing convenience:

1) Breitbart On The Republican Establishment – (WARNING: NSFW)
2) Breitbart On Destroying CNN and NYT

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Sorry, that headline comes from an alternate universe where Media Matters isn’t a political hack tank devoted to defending Progressive Democrats at all costs.

It only took 6 hours for them to begin glossing over an audio interview Jim Hoft conducted with a retired teacher who had the misfortune of attending one of the GLSEN events associated with Fistgate.

The teacher, who wants to remain anonymous for obvious reasons, offers her opinion about the event, and Obama “safe schools czar” Kevin Jennings’ awareness of the overtly sexualized curriculum.

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Something curious happened during the summer of 2008. Democrats, led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi,
shut down the House and C-SPAN cameras with a resolution that passed by just one vote, smack in the middle of an energy crisis. Afterwards, Madame Speaker jetted off on a week-long book tour while gas prices soared.

The Republicans stood in the dark and refused to leave. A few officials, including John Culberson, took out their phones and began Twittering the action to America, this spawning the #dontgo movement. It was the first nudge to the hibernating conservative constituency who were excited about having something over which to be excited in their party. Netroots activists seethed at the realization that Democrats left America in limbo rather than vote against reducing energy costs and drilling stateside –  though the majority of the population approved of such. They rallied around the legislators that had the brass to stay and urged them to “Don’t go!”

Democrats shut down Republicans a second time promptly after the election by moving to bar them from amending legislation in the House.

Taxpayer fury over these offenses grew to a shriek in February when Rick Santelli delivered his famous diatribe on the floor of the Chicago exchange. The feelings of angry disenfranchisement felt by so many conservatives coalesced following Santelli’s speech. The first wave of tea parties came from this, the first national effort occurring on February 27th, 2008. I was at St. Louis’s very first tea party and stood across the mighty Mississippi on the Arch steps with a bunch of wide-eyed, virgin protesters who were just as shocked as I was to see the amount of people who had assembled.

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