In my recent post, “Is Revolution in the Air? If So, Let It Be an American Revolution,” I tried to articulate what makes us – American-minded patriots – different and uniquely equipped to respond to the growing mess around us that we did not create, nor give our consent. Since posting it, there have been other commentaries on the possibilities of a looming breakdown in our society. In fact, some mayors of American cities are already taking precautions in light of the hellish scenes coming out of London. The Philadelphia mayor has been in the news lashing out at black-youth “flash mobs” that are wreaking havoc in the city. We have tent cities popping up here and there throughout the country. First jobless and then homeless, these unfortunate souls have completely bottomed out in a land that is the most prosperous and promising in the entire world. When I think of their children, then mine, it’s more than I can bear. It is an ugly stain on the fabric of America.

These are terrible ingredients — a volatile mixture sitting dangerously close to open flames. There are those who wish to do nothing more than to fan these flames. “Destroying America will be the culmination of my life’s work.”~ George Soros. In their twisted view, in order to create a New America, the old one must be destroyed and erased. These are the veterans and decedents of the Radial Left from the 1960’s. Others are merely useful idiots in this plot who have fallen victim to the visions of utopia of a completed society of equals in every way imaginable: equal in squalor; equal in misery.

Defense cuts would allow the United States to tend to a few other priorities, which just might take Americans’ minds off the fact that their country is no longer No. 1. Perhaps the United States could focus on constructing a high-speed rail line or two, or maybe even finish the job on extending health care. After all, of the large economies that enjoyed a AAA rating from Standard & Poor’s last week, the United States ranked at the bottom of the list in terms of life expectancy, and it was the only country without universal health care. Perhaps America could also spend a little more on basic education; the United States was at the tail end of the AAA club when it came to believing basic scientific truths like evolution, and it scored lowest out of all those countries on international tests of students’ math skills. Charles Kenny, Foreign Policy Magazine

The rest are incompetent boobs with no direction, no solutions, and no sense of soul. They are equally dangerous. In over their heads nincompoops who think by defending the very programs and policies that promise to destroy our nation, they are being good stewards of government. That is to say nothing of the run-of-the-mill thieves and prostitutes who plunder our treasury for votes and comfortable seats in power.

There is an alternative to this, though.

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Lost in the blow-up between Representatives West and Wasserman Schultz is that only two days earlier, Allen West said something much more significant and more massively belligerent — about Barack Obama — something the left would prefer drowned out.

Must we “know the enemy” or is it enough for those elites in the know to go through their motions and machinations, while mushroom managing the Sovereign American People?  Apparently, most “conservative” members of Congress think it is just okay for us all to be kept in the dark and fed manure, at least those politicos who are not too fungous, themselves, to see.

Very exceptional is the former combat officer of Florida, who seems to think it important to give his superiors the actionable intelligence we need, in order to make our ultimate decisions — in measured doses, at least.  By last weekend, he even went as far as using a word with which most readers in Big Government are already familiar in the identification of Barack Obama: Marxist.

Gasp, choke, a milestone in Congressional honesty was reached.

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I don’t have much to say about the recent Arizona shootings by madman Jared Loughner, except this:

Many commentators almost as mad as Loughner have attempted to connect this lunatic’s actions to “inflammatory right-wing rhetoric.” I won’t go into here the long list of inflammatory left-wing rhetoric (and actions) that spill over into open violence. (Michelle Malkin has a good summary — with detailed proof — if you’re interested.)

Instead, I’ll make a suggestion.

If the Left wants to eliminate at a stroke the vast majority of heated, hated right-wing rhetoric there’s a very simple way to do that: give up.

Get out of the way. Stop advocating the violation of individual rights every day in every way. Stop trying to get legislation passed that steals private property for the purpose of funding your favorite social engineering goals. Stop extolling the alleged virtue of interpreting the U.S. Constitution in ways that further Progressive goals. End your advocacy of coercion through government.

Your cause is not noble, your methods are not virtuous, your philosophy is not just. Your ideas are more than mistaken; they’re immoral, impractical, and unconstitutional. Change your philosophy and change your behavior and ‘the Right’ will have no longer have an incentive to fight back against your support for squishy tyranny.

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With the setting of the sun this Wednesday night, Jews across the world will begin the observance of the Yomim Noraim (Days of Awe), a ten day period book-ended by the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. This year’s High Holiday period comes at an interesting time for America as the first night of Rosh Hashanah comes a mere fifty-four days before the United States goes to the polls to between two radically different directions, one which emphasizes personal responsibility, the other emphasizes a reliance on government. Only one of those directions is compatible with the true meaning of the High Holidays.

A blogger at the popular progressive blog Daily Kos has attempted to smear many Americans with a very wide brush of anti-Islamic bigotry, while at the same time espousing a decidedly bizarre progressive view of the worst terror attack in this nation’s history:

…a new CNN poll  that shows that 68% of the nation opposes the construction of the community center in Manhattan. The question asked was about a mosque which I find a little misleading, and it used the inflammatory “Ground Zero” name for the site of the Twin Towers,  but that is not really the point. This new data shows a couple of things that we know already to be true. First off, the majority when asked their opinion will almost always be against the rights of a minority. This is a particular hot issue because of the 9/11 attacks where carried out by Muslims, but it is to be expected even if that were not the case.

Muslims are only a small minority in the United States, with somewhere between 1.3 million and 7 million of our citizens being practitioners of this faith. This makes Muslims between .3% and 2.1% of the over all population. However world wide the followers of Islam are closer to 25% of the planetary population.

Given that they are such a small minority in this nation, it is odd that so many of our fellow citizens see them as such a threat. Yes, the 9/11 attacks were horrific, but they were more about optics than actual harm. The economy was already taking a hit before the Twin Towers fell.  The reaction of the nation to seeing two major buildings in New York fall on T.V. has boosted the attack out of proportion. While the loss of even a single life is to be condemned and the devastation these deaths caused the families of those killed, more than this number of teens are killed every year in car crashes. These are also tragic losses but we do not make the kind of high profile issue of it that the 9/11 attacks are.

It is this sort of disconnected, community-based reality that these elitists have fabricated for themselves that had led the majority of the nation to find these elitists not just out of touch, but dangerously out of step with the rest of the nation.

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With the government takeover of healthcare becoming law and our ever-increasing national debt weighing down on our children’s future, Washington’s agenda looks nothing like the American peoples agenda. It’s no wonder people all across America are continually asking the same question: why isn’t Washington listening to us?

I’ve had enough. Have you? Well, here’s a new outlet - www.AmericaSpeakingOut.com – to voice your ideas to change America. This is an outlet where these ideas will not fall on deaf ears. Together, we can create something new, something bold, and something to act as a check and balance to Washington’s out-of-touch agenda. And we can work to craft this agenda now, instead of waiting to let more bad policy go unchecked. The stakes are just too high to wait any longer. American families continue to struggle from job losses month after month, all while Congress continues to increase Washington spending, pile onto the debt, mettle with American free enterprise, and ignore national unemployment that hovers near ten percent.

Thankfully, millions of Americans are engaged and continue to offer ideas, even though the majority in Congress shuns the idea of listening to the people. As a Member of the minority in the House of Representatives, I’ve seen this firsthand. I held two healthcare town halls last summer, and about five thousand people showed up to overwhelmingly support saying no to the government takeover of healthcare. But, Washington did not listen to our voices, and the voices of countless other Americans. Instead, the backroom deals prevailed over the majority of America. Well, we can change that. That is why were trying something different.

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The Democrat majority isn’t listening, but House Republicans will. That’s why we’re launching America Speaking Out; an unprecedented initiative of engagement with the American people that will lead to a governing policy agenda for America. Through the use of cutting-edge technology, town hall meetings, and old-fashioned conversation, America Speaking Out will surely become one of the largest online conversations ever about how to get back to a smaller, smarter, more accountable government. This initiative will lead to vital communication with the American people about the serious challenges that they’re waiting for Congress to address.

Washington Democrats have been ramming their own one-sided agenda through Congress. And, throughout the past year, they have repeatedly gone behind closed doors and choked off opportunities for honest and transparent debate. But, my Republican colleagues and I are ready for an exchange of ideas that will restore the bonds of trust between Americans and their elected leaders.

We have to show the American people that we know what’s at stake this year. In the face of failed leadership by Congressional Democrats, House Republicans must produce a vision for a better America that will return our national government to the common sense and common values of everyday Americans. And we’re looking to the American people to help us.

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A must read in today’s New York Times: (it happens)

With the Senate’s passage of financial regulation, Congress and the White House have completed 16 months of activity that rival any other since the New Deal in scope or ambition. Like the Reagan Revolution or Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, the new progressive period has the makings of a generational shift in how Washington operates.

First came a stimulus bill that, while aimed mainly at ending a deep recession, also set out to remake the nation’s educational system and vastly expand scientific research. Then President Obama signed a health care bill that was the biggest expansion of the safety net in 40 years. And now Congress is in the final stages of a bill that would tighten Wall Street’s rules and probably shrink its profit margins.

If there is a theme to all this, it has been to try to lift economic growth while also reducing income inequality. Growth in the decade that just ended was the slowest in the post-World War II era, while inequality has been rising for most of the last 35 years.

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Both represent ideals we Americans hold dear. But they aren’t really the same thing and as we have seen in the still acrimonious national debate over the issue of health care and the government’s proper role in providing it, the two concepts come into stark relief.  Moreover, a tension between the meaning of freedom and the meaning of equality will be tested further as President Obama and his newly muscular acolytes in Congress, still intoxicated by the success of their battering-ram legislative strategy, begin to eye other opportunities to (as our president likes to remind us) transform America.  And make no mistake about it; the transformation “party” the president is hosting has only just begun. Think card check, think cap and trade, think compensation control, think regulatory expansion and think, REALLY THINK, about the greatest search in the history of America, through every nook and cranny of our economy, for new sources of tax revenue to pay for the transformation.

To us the word “freedom” embodies the individual right of free choice. The word equality encompasses the bedrock principle that every person should have the same rights to all the protections and rights granted under our Constitution.  Thus, the rallying cry of Patrick Henry, “give me liberty or give me death” exists side by side with the proposition best enunciated by Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech where he envisioned a world “where people would be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin.”   In other words, the concept of  “equality” defined as Dr. King stated it can, and should, live side by side with the concept of “liberty (an individual’s right to personal choice as enunciated by the famous remark of Patrick Henry. But with regard to the expansion of government into the private sector the two words can run into conflict.

Those of us who were, and are, appalled by last week’s heavy-handed spectacle of one-party rule mandating the biggest expansion of government in the lifetime of almost everyone reading this essay are alarmed about the ramifications of almost tyrannical rule by a ruling class seeking to expand government into the furthest reaches of what has always been within the domain of the private citizen’s personal choices. Our friends on the left say that we are on the wrong side of history, but it is they who occupy that space.  It is they, including our president and his party, who are racing full speed backwards to emulate societies with entitlement systems that threaten to hobble one nation after another. Think Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain, Great Britain, France, Ireland, Japan and on and on.  The governments and economies of Greece, Portugal, Italy and Spain are hanging on by their finger tips, more or less, counting on the healthier members of the EU (e.g. Germany) to bail them out although “not so fast” say the Germans.  We could go back into history a little further and romanticize the failed egalitarian dreams of the Soviet revolutionaries or, perhaps, Chairman Mao’s People’s Republic of China.  But the Soviet Union crashed nearly a generation ago and China abandoned Chairman Mao’s dream as soon as he died (and they have had nothing but robust economic growth to show for it).  So exactly who is on the wrong side of history here?

Make no mistake; the transformation that the left has in mind for America is nothing more than a grab for the redistribution of wealth.

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With this vote, the U.S. House has chosen big government over freedom; bureaucracy over people.

The American Conservative Union has opposed this bill from the start because of its massive cost and red tape. The more we learn and Americans learn about the devil in the details of this bill the more disgust among Americans will grow. Empowering IRS agents to determine if Americans have proper health care coverage is not health care reform. Raising taxes is not health care reform. Massive increases in government spending is not health care reform. Imposing fines on Americans who don’t toe the line with what the liberals want in their personal health care plans is not real health care reform.

History will indeed mark this moment – as some Americans become more dependent on government and government becomes more intrusive in the personal lives and financial decisions of its citizens. This is a moment when government growth took a giant leap toward swallowing up more and more of the hard earn money of Americans. This is a moment when common sense reform took a back seat to liberalism run amuck.

In responding to the Democrat’s claims that spending massive amounts of new money on a new government program would actually lower the deficit, the ACU notes that the Ways and Means Committee estimated Medicare would cost only $9 billion each year after 25 years but that on its 25th birthday Medicare spent $67 billion, or seven times the initial cost estimate. The pattern is consistent in federal spending and the massive health care bill’s cost will likely follow suit.

The American people are not stupid or naive.

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Yesterday was my son’s 9th birthday and for his present, the government jacked his future. As he sat in the floor and happily opened his gifts, Bart Stupak appeared on television and revealed that he’d sold his soul. The joy was sucked from the room, but my son didn’t notice – thank God for innocence. The faces of the adults in the room fell as Stupak held his presser, as Pelosi gained another YES vote for health control.

The scene was an eerie replay for me; eight-and-a-half years ago that same boy sat in his bouncy seat while cooing and kicking his legs as his father and I watched the twin towers crumble to dust on live television. The feeling was the same.

A lot of people ask why I and others do what we do.

The scene I just described is my answer.

Last night the Democrat party died as it drove a spear through the torso of the Constitution and passed legislation that the majority of Americans overwhelmingly opposed. Nancy Pelosi sauntered into the capitol surrounded by fellow socialists, carrying the gavel used in 1965 to pass the now-bankrupt Medicare.

All summer long Americans filled town halls, emailed, called, and faxed their lawmakers, and they were forsaken. They were called Nazis, racists, homophobes; they were threatened, beaten, and called stupid because they disagreed with the minority who feels that the government should run our lives. Our lawmakers unofficially stopped representing us last spring.

Last night, our legislators officially broke the contract with America that is the Constitution. Last night, they ceased to represent us. Last night, a new party was born; the malignant tumor that is the progressive caucus consumed the Democrat party from within and gave birth to the mainstream Socialist Party.

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Frances Fox Piven, honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, can arguably be considered the mother of ACORN.  At least, her ideas and theories set ACORN, and its parent, the National Welfare Rights Organization, onto a path of creating and manipulating crisis situations to further their agenda of a more equal “distribution of wealth” in America. In other words, socialism.

It’s a path, I believe, that runs contrary to our country’s original intent.  But Piven doesn’t think so.  In her book, “Challenging Authority,” she quoted both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.

What I found most bizarre was the apparent disconnect in Piven’s mind between individual rights and property rights, particularly the idea of acquiring as much wealth as one wishes without fear of government encroachment. It’s impossible to believe that Jefferson, Adams and the other founders – most of them very successful entrepreneurs – could have envisioned or approved of a massive national government that siphons property and economic rights from private citizens.

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Suddenly, all the condescending ‘tea-bagger’ jokes must not be quite so funny in liberal circles.  Serves them right.

Losing the seat formerly held by the champion of socialized medicine – in the bluest of states – apparently hasn’t phased the radical left.  SEIU president Andy Stern put the blame on the fact that Democrats in Washington, DC, who the union spent tens of millions of dollars electing, haven’t done enough to pass the progressive agenda.  From a SEIU statement:

“The reason Ted Kennedy’s seat is no longer controlled by a Democrat is clear: Washington’s inability to deliver the change voters demanded in November 2008. Make no mistake, political paralysis resulted in electoral failure,” Stern said.

“During the past year, Republicans refused to do anything but stand in the way of change and Democratic Senators took too long to do too little. And tonight, the Senate bears the consequences for its failure to act decisively but the American people are the ones left paying the price…

“The Senate may have squandered the trust the American people gave to Washington in 2008. But now, every member of Congress and the Administration must act with a renewed sense of purpose to show working families whose side they are on and deliver meaningful change to every American. This is not the time for timidity. It starts by passing health insurance reform and giving Pat [DeJong] and millions of people like her the security and peace of mind they deserve.”

Massachusetts voters stood at the borders of their state – and the polling places – with virtual pitch forks telling politicians, to paraphrase Johnny Paycheck, “take this agenda and shove it.”

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President Obama traveled to Boston to help stop the bleeding of Martha Coakley’s campaign from several self-inflicted wounds. There are many critiques of the speech, with some pundits saying Obama was flat, uninteresting, and full of the usual drive-by campaign rhetoric that we have all become able to recite ad nauseum.

As most of us are aware, Obama–without his teleprompter–rambles, is at times incoherent, and goes on and on to answer a yes or no question. He needs his teleprompter. It’s not like an addiction need, it’s more like ‘I really need my teleprompter, because I don’t want to say what you don’t want to hear’ type of issue.

Obama and his compliant press have tried to manufacture him as a centrist; however, that cover has been blown as of today.

What was stated in the Coakley cheerleading campaign speech in Boston, I don’t think Obama meant to say. He’s been off the campaign trail for so long, that he’s not on his game; I think the misstatement by Obama was a huge gaffe. At about 4:28 during the speech, Obama states:

“…you will carry on the best progressive, forward-looking values…”

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Now that global warming is being exposed as a gross manipulation of junk science, it is important to remember that this is not the first time in our nation’s history that the Progressive community has used junk science in order to force their social agenda on an unsuspecting population.

Back in the early 1900’s, up through World War Two, the progressive movements of America and Europe committed large scale genocide with their progressive Eugenic “science”. In fact the term genocide was coined to describe what the Progressive Eugenic movement did in this country and in Germany.

Not many people understand the crime these American Progressives committed, because public educators and other liberal professors just can’t wrap their rigid minds around the concept that the origins of their current religion are soaked in the blood of their own dark history.

The whole ugly truth about how American Progressives directly inspired Adolf Hitler and his Reich, is contained in a masterpiece of writing by Edwin Black, War Against The Weak.

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Earlier this week, ACORN founder Wade Rathke brought his traveling “everyone-is-against-us” road show to DC to promote his new book, Citizen Wealth. The book doesn’t contain surprises; a 200 page polemic laying out a stale progressive agenda for America. What was interesting though, was a rare glimpse from ACORN’s long-time Chief Organizer into the current scandal now overwhelming the organization. Rathke did not disappoint.

I should note that on a personal level Rathke is easy-going and downright charming. And having been around the political/policy block for decades, he’s mastered a tight control of messaging. A control that makes his successor, Bertha Lewis, sound like an amateur college activist by comparison. That said, his Q & A exchange was fascinating. (Video below from Founding Bloggers.)

But Rathke, for all his political prowess, does slip up. While extrapolating about why he and ACORN’s leadership made an executive decision not to disclose his brother’s nearly $1 million embezzlement, Rathke explains that they were afraid their opponents would “weaponize” the crime in order to destroy ACORN. He went on to suggest that the current turmoil engulfing ACORN justifies the decision to cover-up the embezzlement scandal for eight years. He clearly believes that the end (ACORN’s existence) justifies the means (a cover-up). Rathke still doesn’t appear to acknowledge his brother’s crime for what it was. He refers to his brother’s embezzlement as a “misappropriation” of funds. His moral calculus, while seemingly sincere, is disturbing. Other organizations that truly attempt to aid low-income families (without political agendas) should be alarmed.

Another item of interest came at the end of this interview clip. Rathke talked about the “subculture of organizing” and intimated that it was much different than the broader culture we inhabit. Taking a rare jab at ACORN, he noted that “There is a different culture,” a distinction he believes ACORN doesn’t fully appreciate. Different culture, indeed.

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