Declaring Our Independence, 2010

“Get up and fight, ya shivering junkyard!” The Cowardly Lion, The Wizard of Oz

When Tom Adkins, speaking at today’s Morristown Tea Party, exhorted the crowd to show our genuine anger and shout out that “We are the Tea Party!” I at least took him seriously. Because, Jesus Christ, goddammit, leapin’ lizards (!), I am angry.

My reward was frozen stares and sneers from some female neighbors in the crowd. My companions chided me for overreacting and I was properly put in my place. I was silenced – and castigated - by the majority. Nevertheless, I don’t take back a single, passionate word.

The crowd wasn’t as large as last year, as was to be expected. Some of the novelty has worn off. My friends and I were late because we’re musicians and we’d been in a parade that was luckily only a short distance away in a neighboring town.

But if the attitude of those quizzing, snooty females and my own friends are any indication, not to mention the ameliorating non-actions of moderate Republicans who wither at the notion of repealing Obamacare, they’ll be back.

Sometime in January, when they see their taxes skyrocket, when they find they now need a license to buy or sell a house, when they’re denied medical care they once could have gotten, and when there are no businesses left to employ them, they’ll be back.

The scramble will be something like the scene out of 1972’s The Poseidon Adventure where the passengers refuse to follow the Rev. Scott up the Christmas tree until the ship starts exploding and the water begins pouring into the ballroom.

Tomorrow, a New York Times columnist is expected to predict the demise of the Tea Parties. If Tea Partiers adopt a lukewarm attitude instead of a boiling tea kettle, we will soon be iced tea, frozen into a socialist economic nightmare.

Apparently, they don’t get it, or the crisis hasn’t quite reached its peak. Every one of Obama’s reforms have been passed, in spite of polls to the contrary. They’ve got the power and they intend to use it. It’s always the way, just before war breaks out.

Only a few daring voices are willing to shout out that we’re in trouble and we’d better start getting really mad, really soon, and they get stared down by feckless Mrs. Grundies. Let us be angry, but let us be fashionably angry.

Adkins made reference to tin foil hats. There weren’t as many signs as there have been at previous rallies and no funny hats, except my own. My tricorn is no mere decoration. Well, not exactly. It was part of my junior year high school band uniform. The year was 1976 and we were celebrating the Bicentennial.

That was the year some of my classmates and I rebelled against a communist teacher who decided to hijack our U.S. History course and teach us the glories of communism instead. We vowed to fail his class, take the F, rather than submit to his teachings.

He took the fight out of two of the five, but the rest of us went on to a glorious failure. I consider my tricorn hat a symbol of that victory and I defy anyone to knock it off or otherwise “shame” me into not wearing. They can laugh at it, not knowing the story. But I wear it with pride.

Part of today’s festivities included a reading of the Declaration of Independence. I’m sorry to report that some party goers, albeit very elderly ones, chose that moment to leave. They’d been there since the beginning – 11 a.m. – and it was getting hot.

One thing I love is how our elders bring their lawn chairs to the event. They, at least, are in it for the long haul. It’s a lucky thing the Morristown Green is a tree-lined, shady spot, with some sunny spots. The eldsters camped out around the trees.

In listening to the reading – the Declaration is a long work and it took three readers to accomplish the task – I noticed some parallels to today’s political environment.

Among the charges against King George III listed in the Declaration:

• He has made judges dependent on his will alone

• He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance

• He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution and unacknowledged by our laws

• Imposing taxes on us without our consent

• For suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases.

• He has excited domestic insurrection amongst us and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers

“Prudence, indeed, will dictate that government long established should not be changed for light and transient causes” – though the socialists certainly don’t take their transformation of our government lightly.

Here's more:  “Experience hath shewn that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed.” Mrs. Grundy, take note.

There’s still time this weekend to listen again to a reading of the Declaration of Independence. There should be a reading at Washington’s Headquarters in Morristown, N.J., tomorrow. Read it, listen to a reading, and don’t just pack up your lawn chairs and decide it’s time to go home because you think you already know the Declaration.

Goddammit, Christ Almighty, Leapin Lizards (!) – it’s what the Fourth of July is all about – the signing of the Declaration of Independence!

It's Tea Party Time!

Get your home-made signs ready, your historic hats, if you have one, your American flags, and your patriotism: it’s the Fourth of July weekend and the Tea Parties are getting ready to rock n’rally!

The Morristown Tea Party will take place on the Morristown Green from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., with a fantastic line-up of speakers, music, and activities for the kids. If you don’t live in or won’t be near the Morristown (N.J.) area, google a tea party near you.

It’s time to remind our politicians and the socialist-bent media (after reading F.A. Hayek’s book, Road to Serfdom, I may never refer to them as Liberals again) that we are an independent nation with our own voices.

It’s time to let them know how much we love our freedom and value our liberty, and keep on letting them know it. Don’t be afraid to show them your signs. While Morristown has some great speakers lined up, who help to focus the crowd’s attention, this is also about the Silent Majority making their own voices heard, too, and there’s no better way to do it than with your home-made signs.

It’s not only the socialists who are worried about us Tea Partiers, but those in the political machines of every ilk. Somehow, they’ve gotten the idea that they’re in charge. Our job is to disabuse them of this false notion.

We’re the bosses, the Tea Party bosses (though we’re not a political party but rather a citizen’s movement), we’re the voters, we’re the tax payers.

We’re the People!

Liberty Enlightening the World

The Statue of Liberty’s official title is “Liberty Enlightening the World.” The statue was a gift from the people of France to the people of the United States, commemorating the signing of the Declaration of Independence (which Elena Kagan seems not to recognize as a legal document), as noted in the inscription on the tablet she holds.

Frenchman Edouard Rene Lefebvre de Laboulaye, a jurist and law professor, was a critic of Napoleon III and his Second Empire. In 1865, Laboulaye and his “liberal” friends – that is, liberal in the classical tradition of believing in liberty - mourned the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.

Laboulaye suggested that a statue should be erected, the work of both France and the United States, to memorialize the great president. The French people sent a gift to his widow, a gold medal inscribed with the words: “Lincoln, man of honor, abolished slavery, restored the Union, and saved the Republic, without veiling the statue of Liberty.” [p. 21-22, Liberty: The Statue and the American Dream, Leslie Allen, 1985]

One of the guests at Laboulaye’s party that evening was sculptor Auguste Bartholdi. He had envisioned a grand, towering, torch-bearing female figure which would serve as a lighthouse, one to rival the Colossus of Rhodes. Origianlly, the statue was intended for the Suez Canal in Egypt. However, this project was never realized.

He would later claim that his statue for New York Harbor, Liberty Enlightening the World, had nothing to do with this earlier project. Bartholdi served as an officer in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 (Northern German, Poland, Latvia, Bavaria). The war ended Napoleon’s rule. Germany, the victor, was able to claim Alsace, a small section of eastern France.

America’s support of Prussia in its resistance to Napoleon gained admirers among the French liberals and Bartholdi made it his business to visit America – “an adorable woman chewing tobacco,” he described the country in a letter to his mother. Upon entering New York Harbor, he immediately spotted the venue for his project – Bedloe’s Island.

He’d found the site, but finding the money for the project, which began in 1875, would not be so easy. Money flowed in from French aristocrats for the project at parties throughout Paris. Contributions came in from 181 French towns and 100,000 subscribers.

Congress authorized acceptance of the statue, but it voted for funds only for the purchase of the island and the statue’s maintenance. She still had no pedestal. In spite of that, Bartholdi shipped the statue in pieces to New York in 1885, having presented the monument to the American ambassador to Paris the year before.

The statue languished until newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer established a pedestal fund, advertising it in his newspaper, the New York World. The pedestal was short $100,000 (a Congressional bill for the $100,000 died in committee) and Americans seemed satisfied to leave the job to millionaires. But Pulitzer, through his editorials, convinced Americans that the statue was for all of them. It was a statue from the French people to the American people, he wrote, not from French millionaires to American millionaires. School children and common workers sent in their donations.

In 1883, poet Emma Lazarus had composed a poem, “The New Colossus”, for an exhibition to raise funds for the pedestal. Her parents were refugees from the anti-Semitic riots in Russia. However, immigration was a controversial topic at the time of the statue’s unveiling and her poem was not mentioned during the ceremonies.  Only in 1903, thanks to an admiring philanthropist, was a plaque bearing the poem hung inside the pedestal. The poem only began to be recognized in the late 1930s as part of the statue’s legacy.

Thousands of immigrants – the “wretched refuse of the teeming shores” of Europe, a line which Obama omitted, did welcome the sight of the statue and the Liberty she represented. In those days, freedom was the opportunity to work for oneself and family, keep what one earned, and prosper. Vagrancy was a notion uncongenial to the work ethic of the immigrants arriving in the late 19th century.

New arrivals were not simply allowed to disembark at Clinton Castle (the disembarkment point on lower Manhattan before Ellis Island was developed). Immigrants had to prove they could speak English, had a sponsor, a place to live, gainful employment, and no diseases. Those failing these requirements were placed back on their ships and returned to their original destination.

The statue was made of 179,220 pounds of copper, not bronze or gold, and was originally golden in color before weather and age tinted her the familiar sea green she is now (copper carbonate or verdigris). The material made her less forbidding (she was modeled after both Bartholdi’s mother and his sweetheart) and more accessible in the eyes of working class immigrants beholding her for the first time.

Generations of immigrants have flocked to the sides of arriving boats to catch a glimpse of her and the hope of freedom she offers. Despite objections to Lazarus’ poem, the Statue of Liberty is a symbol of freedom from oppression and the poverty that it engenders.

She has not withstood the test of time and politics to invite swindlers and freeloaders to pick the pockets of previous generations whose hard work and love of freedom made this country great. 

Obama would do well to remember that she is made of copper, not bronze or gold, though consumption of copper has made it a rare and highly-valued metal with only a 25-60 year reserve left (though it can be recycled), a metal that serves as the underpinnings of our country’s infrastructure (and the American penny, the very pennies that helped build her foundation), a metal that thieves scruple not to steal at every opportunity in the form of wiring and piping.

For Obama to hold open the “golden” door to immigrants who come to America only to plunder her resources and take advantage of her at-present liberal, welfare-state politics, and to use the Statue of Liberty as his prop for his immigration program, is the same as stripping the Statue down merely for the value her copper skin could bring on the market.

At the unveiling ceremony in October 1886, President Grover Cleveland said, “We will not forget that Liberty has made here her home nor shall her chosen altar be neglected. Willing votaries [devotees] will constantly keep alive its fires and these shall gleam upon the shores of our sister republic in the East [France]. Reflected thence and joined with anwering rays, a stream of light shall pierce the darkness of ignorance and man’s oppression until Liberty enlightens the world.”

[The author apologizes for the earlier typos and mistakes - that's what happens when you burn the midnight oil!]

Where in the World is Eric Holder?

“We wanted him and now we’ve got him – and all the baggage that goes with him.” Executive Decision

It’s kind of like asking, “Where’s Waldo?” Where is Eric Holder? Why isn’t he in Arizona, securing our borders from illegal immigrants? Or in Washington, questioning Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan?

Or maybe he should be overseeing the Blagjovich trial? Or investigating the Russian spy ring? Or Al Gore’s sexual misconduct in Spokane, Wash.?

But no. According the U.K. Telegraph, Holder is in Kabul, Afghanistan for a conference improving law enforcement ties and battling corruption. Lawyers with the Justice Department have been posted in Kabul to train Afghan prosecutors and police that investigate drugs and narcotics-related offences, such as corruption and money laundering, the statement read.

US Federal Bureau of Investigations agents in Afghanistan "support counterterrorism efforts and intelligence gathering as well as Afghanistan's Major Crimes Task Force, which focuses on anti-kidnapping, anti-corruption, and other organized crime."

Meanwhile, Mexican drug mules are hee-hawing all over the place as they flit back and forth across our southern border with illegal drugs. As soon as he returns, Obama is going to have Holder sue the state of Arizona for upholding the country’s illegal immigration laws.

Who are they kidding? What’s this guy really doing in Afghanistan? Maybe they’re worried that bounty hunter guy who has vowed to capture Osama Bin Laden will actually succeed and make fools of them all.

Goodness. What would they do if they actually captured Bin Laden? Alive? They’d have to put him on trial. But where? Where would they incarcerate him until they figured that out? They still don’t know where to try his lieutenant, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. What are they going to do with the Big O himself?

This bounty hunter is on the loose. Pakistan kicked him out, but he didn’t actually commit any crime, so he’s free to return to the hunt. It would be a public relations disaster, not to mention create an international incident if the bounty hunter actually brought Osama back to the United States for justice.

Holder must be over there in Afghanistan assuring the locals that their Muslim hero is safe, vowing that the Bounty Hunter will never be permitted to set foot in any Middle Eastern country again.

Bribing corrupt Afghani and Pakistani officials is more economical, practical, and less embarrassing to than paying a $50 million bounty to this independent hunter to bring back someone the government doesn’t really want to capture.

The problem with Afghanistan is it just doesn’t have a criminal justice system to handle Bin Laden. If we could just set them up with one, they could have all the glory of capturing, trying, and imprisoning Osama Bin Laden, and save us the trouble.

There are too many Americans who still remember 9/11, are scandalized over the proposed World Trade Center Mosque (named for the Muslim-conquered city of Cordoba), and would love to see a public execution of KSM and Bin Laden – together.

No one wants the trial in New York City, but probably no one would mind seeing them swing from some appropriate yard arm, say from the Brooklyn Bridge or the GW or just from a scaffold at Ground Zero.

Such fantasies are way too dangerous politically, however. So Holder has had to get himself over to Afghanistan to head things off at the Kyber Pass, make peace with the Muslim world, a make certain Osama Bin Laden is never, ever brought to justice in the United States of Ame

Ugly Rumors

A chain e-mail has been making the rounds since 2007 that the United Kingdom has banned teaching about the Holocaust in order to ameliorate the sensitivities of its Muslim population.

The United Kingdom’s Department of Education has worked hard to dispel this urban myth, stating that the Holocaust is an optional selection in its secondary school offerings. One history department in a northern city avoided selecting the Holocaust as a topic for GCSE coursework for fear of confronting anti-Semitic sentiment and Holocaust denial among some Muslim students.

That’s one school out of 4,500 in England. One too many, but not an epidemic, either. I received the e-mail from a cousin and sent it on, not realizing how old this urban legend was.

If I seem to have “taken the bait” too easily, there’s good reason. I’ve met Holocaust deniers, in the flesh. They’re quite vocal and have been around a long time, since even before the end of the war, according to my father’s accounts.

Military personnel had heard rumors but weren’t sure whether to believe them until they actually came to the gates of one of the concentration camps and saw the horror for themselves. Gen. Eisenhower gave orders that the carnage be photographed and that the prisoners be interviewed, lest anyone attempt to rewrite history.

When I was a little girl, my parents brought me to an adult party. The guest of honor was a concentration camp survivor. An elderly-looking man, his haunted eyes burned with the truth. There was no doubting his story or the number printed on his arm.

Our neighborhood was a German-American enclave, second-generation Americans who’d become politicized during the war. One of them approached the survivor and accused him of making up stories to frighten little children like me.

He declared that the Holocaust had never happened, that the Jews invented the myth to explain away German’s financial ruin between World War I and World War II. Or something like that. Quite an argument broke out, with people shouting at one another, while the hostess, in her beribboned apron, served hors d’oeuvres.

My father ordered my mother to get our coats – we were leaving. The old man stomped out ahead of us, escorted by the Dutch immigrant couple who had brought him. The woman had worked for the Dutch resistance. Her family had harbored two Jews during the War.

Who was I going to believe? My father? My mother? Our Dutch friends? The man with the tattooed arm? Or some pot-bellied Neanderthal who embraced the national socialism of Hitler’s Germany?

I believe the Holocaust happened. I also believe there are Holocaust deniers who would try to expunge this history from school curriculums. Their Liberal communist counterparts have done a credible job of rewriting American history. I can well believe that there are factions who would attempt to rewrite the history of World War II. Our own president wants to throw out the U.S. Constitution and make up the rules as we go along. Guess that makes him a Constitution Denier.

This e-mail may have been a hoax, or at least an overreaction to a single incident. But there’s nothing wrong with putting revisionists on notice that we won’t tolerate any further deviations from history and the truth.

One such deviation is being constructed near the World Trade Center. Another revision of history. A columnist in the Washington Times recently pointed out how the Muslims make a point of constructing mosques over religious and even secular sites that they have “conquered”.

One only has to look at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem or look at the archived footage of Muslim’s destroying Buddhist statues in Afghanistan to know the truth.

It’s a history they cannot deny, no matter how hard they try.

Burn the Constitution!

In the 1970s, feminists exhorted women to burn their brassieres. They even had Burn-the-Bra bonfires. Today, it seems they want us to throw the U.S. Constitution on the bonfire, a document they consider as confining, restrictive, and uncomfortable as that venerable woman’s undergarment.

Although we’ve had female justices on the Supreme Court for years, current Supreme Court judge nominee Elena Kagan, a veritable shoe-in for the position, seems poised to lead us to the Constitutional bonfire.

She is reputed to have stated, echoing the words of her mentor, Thurgood Marshall, “…the Constitution, as originally drafted and conceived was defective. The Constitution today…contains a great deal to be proud of. But the credit does not belong to the Framers. It belongs to those (like Marshall) who refused to acquiesce to ‘outdated’ notions of liberty, justice, and equality.”

Conservative pundits have also accused her of being in favor of banning, or even burning, books, in regard to the campaign finance reform law, where a book advocates a certain political party candidate.

Her defenders say that the opinion came not from Kagan but from Deputy Solicitor General Malcolm Stewart. He presided over Citizens United v. FEC, a Supreme Court case dealing with the constitutionality of the Federal Elections Commission's decision that Citizens United could not air a movie advocating against Hillary Clinton's presidential candidacy if that movie was paid for by federal funds.

On March 24, 2009 -- after the Senate confirmed Kagan -- the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case. Stewart stated during the trial that, in addition to a movie, the federal government could “prohibit the publication of [a] book using the corporate treasury funds” if that book ended by saying “Vote for X.”

In rearguing the case, Kagan asserted that the federal government would not have much of a case – at least not through campaign finance law – for banning books. Any corporation challenging such a ruling would likely win and the book banning would be overturned.

She referred to it as a “good as-applied challenge” to the law. “Nobody in Congress,”

Kagan stated, “ nobody in the administrative apparatus has ever suggested that books pose any kind of corruption problem.” Except for the U.S. Constitution. One book publishers places a warning card insert in the folds of its version of the Constitution.

Liberal feminist adherents of Kagan are relying on the alleged sexism of the original U.S. Constitution to defend the changes they wish to make to it. (Except that you can’t “change” the Constitution –erase whatever offends your modern sensibilities - you can only amend it.) However, while it’s true that women and blacks did not have the right to vote in 1787 – blacks were still in bondage – the Constitution makes no actual stricture for or against their right to vote until the 14th Amendment, which then refers to the sex and age of voters. Otherwise, the document relies on the word “persons” to describe citizen voters.

They would cite legislative activism as the basis for the 13th, 14th, 15th, and 19th Amendments to the Constitution. Five years after The Civil War, the Reconstruction Amendments were adopted. It took women awhile longer. The 19th Amendment was not ratified until 1919.

Arguments against women’s suffrage were that there should only be one vote per household (the husband’s), that women weren’t sufficiently educated or intelligent enough to understand politics, that they could be “manipulated” and that they simply weren’t interested in politics, that it was a “man’s” game.

Likely, the last was, and still is, the truest. Up until the Tea Parties at least, most women didn’t pay much attention to politics, unless there was some soft issue in the public forum – the environment, social justice, the poor and needy. Liberal feminists, disdainful of anything male, flocked to the call.

Conservative women shrugged and went back to doing the dishes. My ex sister-in-law, back in the 1980s, didn’t realize Ronald Reagan was the president of the United States. She sounded like the character from Back to the Future: “Ronald Reagan? The actor?!”

Thanks to World War II, the ranks of men were sufficiently diminished that women outnumbered men in the United States. Newly-empowered, they lapped up the writings of authors like Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique).

Equal pay and opportunities (not a bad thing – it was something my mother fought for, and won, back in the 1940s) gave them a new-found financial standing. They no longer had to depend upon a husband’s income. A good thing, particularly if you were widowed. In fact, they didn’t need a husband at all. Marriages began to founder. Some women didn’t marry at all. They had found “freedom” in the Sexual Revolution.

They could have it all. Careers, kids, husband-less lives. When women agitated for voting rights, is this what they were voting for? The Feminists started running into trouble, though, when it came to child-raising.

Yeah, being able to go to work was a great thing, bringing in money. The husbands certainly didn’t mind the extra cash. But who was going to look after the kids? The duty was devolved to put-upon grandparents and other relatives, dubious daycare centers, and the public school system.

The Latch Key Generation was thus born. They started bossing their parents around about everything from rain forests in South America to green energy cars. Finally, the Moms had enough and started asking themselves, “What the heck is going on here? Where are they getting all this stuff?”

Still, Conservative housewives tended to leave the political battles to their husbands (who’d thrown up their hands). Then came the Tea Parties. There were only a handful of women, but they were listening. The Tea Party was supposed to be about overweaning taxes.

But the Mothers of America wanted to know what was going on with their kids’ education. Their husbands generally did the taxes. But it was up to Mom to start checking the homework. And the Constitution.

Already, mothers are feeling the overreach of the bureaucratic federal government. They can’t bring cupcakes to school, give their children whole milk, white bread, or peanut butter. French fries are out. So is soda (frankly, my mother wouldn’t let us near the stuff – but that was the United States of Mom, not the United States of America, making that decision).

What can American mothers expect from a liberal nominee like Kagan except that she will gleefully legislate from the bench? Liberal pundits, ever mindful of those boiling tea kettles, that she’s actually a fairly moderate choice, albeit with no experience, like her boss, Obama.

Untested though she is, she has pronounced her opinion that the Constitution is a living, malleable document that can be molded to suit the political fortunes of the times, rather than a concrete, dependable set of laws. What house can stand solidly upon such a weak legal foundation, where enemies may remove the bricks that support the house and bring it tumbling down?

Women – mothers – may or may not understand the vagaries of political football. But they understand house and home, security and their children’s future all too well. Reading and interpreting the Constitution with these in mind, they have an adept and discerning understanding of the founding document of our nation.

The Framers were thinking of them when they wrote it, even if voting rights weren’t yet established within its framework. Did they know back in 1787 that it would be destroyed by woman’s hand, who clamored for their rights within it in 1919?

But those were Liberal women who brought about the right to destroy the very Constitution that eventually guaranteed their rights as Americans. Conservative women must rise to the challenge, and for their children’s sake, protect and preserve the U.S. Constitution as the Founding Fathers originally framed it.

Read My Tee Shirt

I bought three tee shirts – and a collection of buttons – from the Morristown Tea Party. One is a bright red number touting the First Amendment in front and declaring that the “Silent Majority” is Silent No More on the back.

While on the check-out line, a woman approached me to tell me she admired my tee shirt. She remembered the “Silent Majority” slogan. She considered herself a member of the Silent Majority.

I immediately went into campaign mode, touting the local tea party, which she said she had attended. Grateful for the opportunity to speak up, I launched into a speech about the importance of average Americans ending their silence.

But she quickly shushed me. She said she just wanted to tell me she admired my tee shirt. Not breach supermarket etiquette by getting onto my soap box. I shrugged and let her go on her way. My bright red tee shirt, after all, spoke volumes.

But doggone it, being quiet is just what we shouldn’t be doing. We should be getting up on our soapboxes and denouncing the wholesale overthrow of our federated republic. People don’t want to get involved, though, and that’s just what’s facilitating this totalitarian takeover of the United States of America.

People forget where we came from, if they ever learned about it. They don’t know about the oppressive European socialist and communist governments where there was no free speech, no organized elections, no free enterprise. They’ve never been forced to pledge allegiance to a dictator, as they have in Cuba.

Slowly, our media has convinced them how much trouble government really is (which is no lie) and how we should leave it to the “professionals.” Look at how corrupt politicians are, how untrustworthy, how dishonest. The little people can do nothing about such corruption. Vote one out, and another takes their place.

Best to do away with the whole system. The corrupt politicians, the corrupt bureaucrats, the corrupt businesses getting rich on our hard work and taxes. Get rid of the U.S. Constitution; it’s just getting in the way.

One, giant centralized government will solve all our problems. Big government will make things so much easier. You won’t even need to go out and vote – which, let’s face, is a huge nuisance and waste of time – because everyone will be on the same page.

The whiners, the complainers, the cranks – the Tea Partiers – will be silenced. You won’t have to hear from them anymore. The government will run like a well-oiled machine. A green machine, environmentally friendly, that will take of you, birth to earth.

Isn’t that a lot easier than trying to do things yourself? You hire someone to clean your house, don’t you? You take your car to a mechanic? You buy your own clothes; you don’t sit there slaving away over a sewing machine. That’s crazy.

Well, government is the same way. Let’s get rid of all these middle-men politicians who are just lying to you. Big government will set all the rules and you’ll follow them. What could be simpler? You don’t like a law? Well, don’t worry about it. The sun will rise tomorrow, in spite of whatever it is you. Get over it.

As long as you have a job, food to eat, and place to live – all of which B.G, will provide – what do you care who’s in charge? Don’t let someone talk you into wearing some bright red tee shirt that says “Silent No More”. That was Richard Nixon, “Tricky Dicky”, a big crook who said it, anyway.

Don’t hold up those silly signs. Even Glenn Beck is telling you not to hold up those home-made signs, for gosh sakes. Don’t read all those books on American history, economics, and constitutional law.

Don’t rock the boat. Don’t make fools of yourselves. Don’t take a stand. Don’t make spectacles of yourselves. Mind your own business.  Don't stick your necks out.  Just pay for your groceries and go on home.

America just isn’t worth the trouble.