The way our moonbat rulers lie, you would think they had no idea that video can be preserved from one day to the next. Here’s the Moonbat Messiah, formerly known as the Senator From ACORN, stating flatly that his only involvement with that shockingly corrupt voter fraud outfit was representing them regarding implementation of the Motor Voter Act:
One of Barack Obama’s first big “community organizer” jobs involved ACORN in 1992. He worked along side ACORN before he became an elected official. Obama also trained ACORN employees. He represented ACORN in court. Obama worked with and protested with ACORN. His campaign donated $800,000 to ACORN in 2008 for voter registration efforts. … In 2009 Obama promoted a top ACORN operative, Patrick Gaspard, who’s organization was fined $775,000 for election violations, to a top post in the White House. Gespard is helping shape domestic policy today.
Obama Acorn
We have a habitual liar in the White House. We have a proven radical in control of this country. Is anyone going to do anything about it? Probably not.
A new book about the Tea Party movement — and a movement it really is — will soon be hitting the shelves. “A New American Tea Party” penned by John M. O’Hara, one of the many folks that helped bring us some of those protests in early 2009, is a book that hopes that the reader will come away understanding and appreciating the Tea Party movement as a truly grassroots happening, a spontaneous outpouring of interest backed by true red, white and blue American ideals.
Author O’Hara, himself an early Tea Party organizer in Washington D.C. and the Chicago area, answers several questions with the book: what sparked the Tea Parties; is the name “Tea Party” itself a proper sobriquet; what do they mean; what does the future hold; and how do you make more?
The first thing one might notice is that O’Hara writes in a crisp, conversational style with short subchapters. This makes it ideal for reading bits at a time. This is not a dense treatment and I think his style makes the book very accessible to people of all ages — without talking down to the young or dumbing it down for the more advanced reader.
Now, one of the main messages about what the Tea Party movement “is” that O’Hara wants to hammer home is that it is not a revolution, but a counterrevolution (his italics). O’Hara says that Tea Party goers intend to reclaim American principles and that their activism is a reaction to the anti-American principles of the left and the big government types that themselves spawned the alarmed activism of Tea Partiers. I think that is obviously right.
Unlike its enemies that tried to spin the birth of the movement into some nefarious, top-down creation, the Tea Parties were a reaction to the wild overreach of leftist, anti-American, anti-capitalist, ideas. There simply was no secret back room meeting in the bowels of Fox News or Republican Party Headquarters. In fact, the political and media establishments were both taken unawares by the movement and to this day aren’t sure how to react to it or how to take advantage of it.
O’Hara does a fantastic job of describing the chaos that reigned during the early birth of the movement and he successfully dispels the claim made by the left that the movement is “Astroturf,” or was created by leaders from the top. Why am I so sure he has this all exactly right? Because I was there.
After his original Tea Party event in D.C., O’Hara joined the effort in Chicago then being organized by Eric Odom based on the success of his taxdayteaparty.com website. I’ve known Mr. Odom since his 2007 Arizona-based Conservative Leadership Conference of which I was a part as a speaker and volunteer for the event. Amusingly, neither Odom nor I can remember how we two got hooked up but as I’ve been an Internet writer since before the Towers fell in 2001 and as I’ve been at this even before anyone ever heard of a blog it was a natural that we ended up working together I suppose.
So, I was there the whole time the Chicago Tea Party was being organized. I can attest to the facts in O’Hara’s account. I was also present at the Chicago Tea Party itself and submitted a video report of the event that very day. It most certainly was like herding cats and it was definitely not led from some highly placed politicos. Since the event I’ve sat in on several of Odom’s organizational conference calls and sat with him on a panel or two and his constant refrain is, “if some powerful people ran my Tea Party, I’d like to know who to send the bills to.”
For sure this was as grassrootie as a grassroots movement could possibly be.
Since O’Hara stresses that what we have here is a movement led from below, not above, I foresee a danger to its ultimate success. Granted this absolutely is a grassroots movement and needs no national leader per se. That is, there doesn’t need to be any leader that takes over the Tea Party movement itself for his own advancement. But, as I’ve argued, to insist, as some have, that the Tea Party goers don’t need any leaders at all is absurd. (see here and here)
O’Hara talks of the legacy of Reagan, but I’d like to point to one aspect of Reagan’s success that no one has pointed out when discussing the Tea Parties. This discussion can take the form of a question: Did Reagan create the conservative movement? The answer is “no.” What he did was take the intellectual underpinnings provided by your Irving Kristols, William F. Buckleys, and Russell Kirks, et al, meld them with the excited activism of the newly born religious right and fit them into the existing frame work of the Goldwater machine. He then brought them all to victory on a national level.
But notice that he was a leader? Notice that he didn’t have to have created it all, but only had to draw all the strings together into a strong rope of conservative voters. In so doing he gave the movement focus and a winning team to join. He gave them something tangible to which to belong.
My fear is that if we keep going forward and no new leaders come forward to accept the Tea Party mantle, or at least accept the Tea Party mien, we will find that the enthusiasm of the Tea Party movement will dissipate and go away all to no ultimate success. After all, how many will keep their nose to the grindstone if it doesn’t seem as if politics is going their way? More likely they will quit in disgust and we will lose the energy of this moment to missed opportunities.
It’s all fine and good to revel in the fact that this is a grass roots movement, but success oriented conservatives won’t stick with it long unless some goals are reached. So, I think we do need leaders to come forward and soon, not necessarily to take over the Tea Parties themselves, but to accept our ideals and bring them to a local and national stage.
One of the things that O’Hara does well here is to detail the perfect storm of leftism that beset the country between the last year of Bush’s term and the onslaught of the “age of Obama.” In fact, most of this book is just that, a history of the leftist attacks on America that spawned the counter revolution that is the Tea Parties. It is quite stunning, indeed, to see all in one place how bold the left has been in launching this leftist assault on America. Only moments after Obama took office the left quickly started rolling an avalanche of doctrinaire, communist styled policy ideas that frightened much of the country.
From self-serving financial finagling to fascist attempts to control the public debate through a threatened revival of the fairness doctrine, O’Hara details every manner of extreme left-wing trial balloon floated by Obamaists prior to the Tea Party movement hitting the streets. This avalanche of leftist policy ideas floated by Obama and his followers serves as a reason why conservatives and libertarians were alarmed enough to take to the streets, protest sign in hand. And given the fact that parading about the streets like nuts with signs and costumes is so against the average conservative’s personality, it took this perfect storm of anti-American leftism to get Tea Party goers off their duffs and onto the picket line.
O’Hara wraps up the book with some good rules of thumb on how to organize, rules that should help the nascent Tea Partiers of the future who start out without the benefit of being steeped in the art of the protest with training by such radical groups as ACORN or the SEIU. The left has had decades of experience in protesting, the right but little and these tips are timely and helpful.
One thing is sure, there has never been in American history such a grassroots outpouring of interest in things political as this. There has never been a political happening as spontaneous, as leaderless, and as immediate as the Tea Party movement. Without a doubt this could never have happened in any other era of history. Why is that? The Internet. Without the Internet, without that way of communicating not controlled by some existing, aged infrastructure, one not controlled by a party or media corporation, such a gathering could not have happened in the manner that it did.
And maybe, just maybe, because of the Internet we don’t need the same sort of strong national leaders that we once did? Maybe my worry that we are missing such leaders is unfounded? What ever the future holds, O’Hara’s tale of the Tea Party movement is worth reading and is the best source of “hope and change” I’ve seen since Obama won office.
I recommend “A New American Tea Party.” It is well worth the read for a history of the Tea Party movement and the era that spawned them as well as for a primer on how to make more or the former and less of the later.
Having arrogantly ignored the will of the American people repeatedly while running up massive deficits, sinking $trillions into cronies’ pockets and pork barrel boondoggles, and now seizing the healthcare industry by the throat in their ham-like fists, Democrats might seem to have no interest in winning future elections. But they have a plan, which can be summed up in a single word: cheat.
Sen. Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat, and Rep. Barney Frank, Massachusetts Democrat, have plans to ram through legislation that will produce universal voter registration. No matter what they claim, the rule changes will make it possible for illegal aliens to register to vote and for others to register multiple times.
The proposal is to register everyone on every welfare list, everyone getting unemployment insurance, everyone with a driver’s license, everyone who has had run-ins with the legal system, everyone owning any property — basically everyone on every list the government keeps. People will be registered to vote whether or not they want to be registered. If individuals are on any public record, they will be automatically registered.
Obviously a lot of illegal aliens have driver’s licenses, and many get other government benefits. Quite a few have rap sheets. People’s names and other identification information are frequently recorded differently across these different lists, which means that one could be registered a separate time for every slight variation in how their personal information is kept on file.
The legislation is also expected to give felons the right to vote. Why Democrats insist on letting someone who has raped multiple women vote on social policy is beyond us. According to Democrats, robbers who have preyed on helpless victims — and even murderers — have the judgment to tell us how law enforcement should be run in this country.
The same moral depravity that leads people to commit felonies makes them overwhelmingly likely to vote for Democrats. As noted earlier, this avenue of harvesting votes is also being aggressively pursued by the liberals running our courts.
As if proof were needed that the objective is to encourage vote fraud:
For years, Democrats have fought against requiring photo IDs at polling places. The practice, which is simply a way to make sure voters are who they say they are, is used in about 100 other countries. Mexico, for example, has cracked down on voter fraud and is strict about requiring photo identification to vote. If Democrats have their way, it will be easier for Mexicans to vote in America than in their own country.
It speaks volumes about Democratic unpopularity that they have to look to criminals and illegal aliens to try to shore up their voting base.
On another front, you can expect amnesty for illegal aliens to be shoved through soon with the same insolent disregard for the will of American citizens that has characterized the healthcare power grab. The result will be millions of Third World immigrants pouring across the deliberately undefended border in search of a handout to form a permanent underclass that our current rulers hope will overwhelm those of us who still create wealth, rather than wait for the government to confiscate it from its rightful owners on our behalf.
Fellow-blogger and contributor to my blog, Jim Simpson, revealed an astonishing piece of legislation soon to be announced by Chucky and Barney (Senator Chuck Schumer and Rep. Barney Frank). In an article in The Examiner, Jim asked why Democrats continue to persist in “ramming unpopular and destructive legislation down our collective throats,” thereby committing certain political suicide. John Fund has the answer. Beware – Voter Fraud Alert.
John Fund
The Democrats have a plan. The short story is told in the video, with John Fund of the Wall Street Journal explaining that the plan is…to quietly, and very soon, like now…this month, propose Universal Voter Registration – which means that your state’s election laws are trashed:
In January, Chuck Schumer and Barney Frank will propose universal voter registration. What is universal voter registration? It means all of the state laws on elections will be overridden by a federal mandate. The feds will tell the states: ’take everyone on every list of welfare recipients that you have, take everyone on every list of unemployed you have, take everyone on every list of property owners, take everyone on every list of driver’s license holders and register them to vote regardless of whether they want to be…’
So right now you are distracted by your youngest child, who will not stay in bed and needs a drink of water, although it is far past his bedtime, and the above doesn’t seem so terrible. The video takes just a few minutes. Don’t miss it. This is getting ready to happen.
Listen, after Fund explains Chucky and Barney’s plan… as someone in the background says…”and they’ll vote them.”
Fund says the day the bill is proposed, and the day it hits the House[fan], will probably be less than two weeks.
Simpson says:
Leftist groups are already arguing that universal voter registration will solve all the problems with our voting system. But the left created most of these problems. The radical leftist Nation magazine, for example, absolutely loves the idea of universal voter registration. This is the same magazine, however, that advanced Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven’s Manufactured Crisis strategy. The Cloward/Piven strategy was designed to undermine government institutions by overwhelming them with impossible demands for services. Cloward and Piven focused on welfare, housing and voting as the main targets of this strategy, and the radical group ACORN was specifically created for the purpose of executing it.
Over at the American Thinker, Jay Schalin has another example of the radical leftist agenda that Obama is trying to pull over on the American people. This time we see it in the extremist agenda for education that Obama is trying to implement by revitalizing the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI), a panel that Congress shut down in 2008 because it had become “too politicized.”
The NACIQI is charged with advising the Sec. of Education on “matters related to accreditation and to the eligibility and certification process for institutions of higher education.” According to the government website the NACIQI will be a reconstituted on Jan. 31 2009.
As Schalin reports, the people that Obama Ed Sec Arne Duncan has appointed to the new NACIQI panel seem to be one extremist after the next. Duncan is attempting to put on this official board racemongers, ACORN activists, and one who is associated with a member of the Black Panthers.
Sadly, it is clear that every one of the six appointees are hardcore racebaiters interested in pushing a leftist race-based agenda on American education. Several of them were involved in the landmark legal case that upheld the University of Michigan law school’s race-based admissions policy (Grutter v. Bollinger), one was a member of the Clinton Administration and involved in cases of “racial discrimination,” one belongs to a radical Hispanic activist group the LULAC, and another is involved with black power groups. Go on over to Jay Schalin’s piece and see all the details of the history of these six appointees.
In any case, what is clear here is that Obama and Duncan are trying to place some extreme racists on this board in order to push its recommendations toward support of a hard-left, racebaiting agenda.
This from the same Arne Duncan that was touted by Obama as some savior of the Chicago Public Schools when the truth is that his record is far less amazing. In fact, a recent Washington Post piece reported that, “gains on state test scores were inflated when Illinois relaxed passing standards and that too many students still drop out of high school or graduate unprepared for college.”
A new book about the Tea Party movement — and a movement it really is — will soon be hitting the shelves. “
