CONTACT: Levi Russell at (509) 979-6615 or Levi@FrontLineStrat.com 

“JOE THE PLUMBER” TO JOIN 

“SHOWDOWN IN SEARCHLIGHT” THIS MARCH 27TH 

Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, better known as “Joe The Plumber,” is the latest speaker to be confirmed for the “Showdown in Searchlight” event that kicks off the Tea Party Express III: Just Vote Them Out tour (website: www.TeaPartyExpress.org). 

Wurzelbacher joins the following confirmed speakers at this major event:  

• 2008 Republican Vice Presidential nominee, Sarah Palin
• 2008 Libertarian Vice Presidential nominee, Wayne Allyn Root
• Nationally syndicated radio talk show host, Roger Hedgecock
• Saturday Night Live alumnus, Victoria Jackson
• Conservative media icon, Andrea Shea King 
• Conservative Columnist & Commentator, Andrew Breitbart

The “Showdown in Searchlight” tea party rally takes place at “High Noon” on Saturday, March 27th in Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s tiny hometown of Searchlight, NV (population: 700) in the southern Nevada desert. 

Wurzelbacher made the following comment about his participation in this huge effort: 

“It wasn’t just the Republican and Democrat parties that failed our country.  We The People failed by not holding our elected officials accountable when they took us down the road of massive deficits, big government and a loss of our liberties. 

“It’s time for American’s to stand up and become their own lobbyists and I am happy to join the Tea Party Express as one of many ways I am active in helping to fight to take our country back.”  

Wurzelbacher gained international notoriety when he questioned then-candidate, Barack Obama, about his economic plan during the 2008 presidential campaign.  Obama’s “spread the wealth” response panicked conservatives who thought the comment reaked of a socialist attitude. 

Since becoming an iconic figure in the 2008 presidential election, Wurzelbacher wrote the book, “Fighting for the American Dream” and has been one of the most high-profile supporters of, and participants in, the tea party movement.  Wurzelbacher has spoken at tea party rallies across the nation including Tea Party Express events previously held in Brighton, Michigan; Cheyenne, Wyoming; Fort Collins, Colorado; and Denver, Colorado. 

Joe will also be speaking at 4 additional Tea Party Express rallies on this current tour including events in Arizona and Wisconsin. 

Tea Party Express III: Just Vote Them Out national tour kicks off March 27th in Searchlight, NV with 42 tea party rallies across the nation, ending in Washington, D.C. for the Tax Day Tea Party on April 15th. 

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Media organizations wishing to embed a reporter on the Tea Party Express national tour, or those seeking more information about the “Tea Party Express” or to schedule an interview with a representative, should contact Levi Russell at (509) 979-6615 or via email at: Levi@FrontLineStrat.com

So, what is it all, anyway? To answer that I chatted with Glenn Reynolds and we talked about all things Tea Party. Coming down from the stomach flu as he was, we still had a lively talk.

I asked Glenn what sort of future he saw for the tea parties and he said that he was an early booster of the movement even when folks like Roger Simon thought it was all a flash in the pan and would go nowhere. “I think it is the most genuine outbreak of popular grassroots political activism in my lifetime,” Reynolds said, “and so that’s a pretty big deal and I think it’s coming to a crucial time for the country as well.”

Reynolds told me that PJTV wanted to cover the Tea Party movement because the Old Media was doing its best to ignore the whole thing. He praised PJTV as being one of the few to “put eyes on what is the biggest thing politically that’s been going on” in the nation.

One of my worries about the Tea Party movement is that it just might suffer from being too widely diffused. I asked Glenn if he thought it might suffer from not having a few central figures that can be focused upon.

Reynolds:The thing I’ve learned from the internet is that you can accomplish a huge amount with searches of popular entries and you can get more from the Internet in a period of a few weeks to a few months with people who just sort of drop whatever they’re doing and get involved than you can do in years or decades of professional organization, but I’ve also learned if you want somebody to stick on something and keep plugging, it helps to have somebody who’s paid to deliver it. And that obviously is something you won’t going to have in a grassroots organization very much.

Keeping with the question of long-term effectiveness, I asked Reynolds how long he felt the movement would remain potent?

Reynolds:I think that it’s going to last through the next election and probably through the election after and what’s going to happen after that is, you know, a lot of the grassroots enthusiasm will fade but it’s going fade and some people just find something else to do which maybe political or not. And on the other side of it, it’s going – people are going to leave the Tea Party movement and they’re going to run for office themselves, become cabinets themselves, become precinct chairman or county chairman or members of the state or national party committees and things like that. And you know, that’s what normally happens with grassroots movement if they’re successful which is that they become part of the mainstream.

But what of the supposed extremists in the Tea Party movement, I asked. Won’t that just introduce the wackos, as the left and the Old Media claims?

Reynolds: The New Left took the Democrats further away from the mainstream of the American public, its true. But I think the Tea Party is moving the Republicans more in line with the mainstream to the American Public, so it more likely to have productive effects.

There is no political movement that doesn’t fringes, but compared to the new Black Panther Party which is getting kissy face from Eric Holder, compared with Bill Ayers, compared with Bernadine Dohrn, compared with Van Jones these are people at the core of the administration Democratic party today, the Tea Party has got no fringe at all.

I pointed out that the Old Media focuses on what they portray as the Tea Party extremists, but it ignores all the extremists always in attendance at the left’s protests. There are actual communists, anarchists, radical abortionists, even animal rights and enviro terrorists but you never see these whack-jobs in the news.

Reynolds: Well, when we had the anti-war protest in 2003, 2004 with the almost sole exception of David Korn at the nation, nobody was willing to point out that those movements were organized by people who are literally, not pejoratively, literally communists. David Korn was we talked about Answer and the Workers World Party and the people who are providing the organizational infrastructure for those big marches on Washington and he wrote about in the nation and in L.A. weekly but places like Washington Post and the New York Times pretended that these are just ordinary mom-and-pop types of middle America coming down. When they don’t give that kind of a treatment to the Tea Party, but that is because they are fundamentally dishonest in their reporting.

I brought up another one of my worries for the candidates that try to rely on Tea Party groups and that is money. The sad fact is that politics means spending money. I asked Glenn if he thought that the Tea Party groups could raise the money necessary to help a candidate they are supporting win an election?

Reynolds: There are three angles to the money front. Angle number one is that in many ways Tea Party activism is the substitute for cash that is to say you don’t have to pay people to go out and do yourself because Tea Party people will do it for free.

I read over 6000 people traveled in from out of state to work as volunteers for Scott Brown and you know, and so that’s as good as money and indeed a lot of the publicity, a lot of the support of the Tea Party people produce is far more valuable than paid political ads.

The second thing is that yes they do raise money as you’ve seen, for example, in the Scott Brown money bombs and for that matter with some of the other fundraising efforts.

The third part is that the real impact of the Tea Party rule on money has in some sense been a dog who didn’t bark which is say since 2005, 2006 Republicans have had a hard time raising money from the grassroots. And those are, I think, the same Tea Party people who decided to quit giving to the Republican Party when they felt it wasn’t living up to it’s principles.

My next question was about candidates claiming to be “the Tea Party candidate.” I think it is a mistake for a candidate to claim this mantle because there are so many groups, no national organization, and therefore it is a bit disingenuous for a candidate to say “I am the Tea Party candidate.” Plus it seems that this could actually work cross-ways and make Tea Party groups mad at the candidate that makes the claim without really having the solid support to back it up.

Reynolds: Well, the problem with that is there is no Tea Party to give you the nomination. The Tea Party is a movement it’s not party. If you support Tea Party principles and Tea Party people back here, then you are Tea Party candidate but you can’t become one by calling yourself one and I suspect people really pretty good at spotting the phony.

Well, it was a very good interview and I was glad Mr. Reynolds took the time with me. I asked him if he had anything to close with about PJTV Tea Party TV and here is what he said…

Reynolds: I think the Tea Party is going to be fun. Dana Loesch has come on board to Spearhead and she’s terrific for a number of reasons, one is she’s just terrific. She’s a really smart, savvy person. She’s very good on radio and TV, and you know does a fair amount of it. I mean she was one of the real movers and shakers in the St. Louis Tea Party movement which is one of the more successful Tea Party movements around the country. So she’s really a great person to have involved and the goal is going to be to really get out there and put the spotlight on people who are actually doing stuff. You know, the stars of Tea Party TV will be the Tea Party activists who are out there doing things and that something I’ve done to some degree to my own show on PJTV and will continue to do. But Tea Party TV is just a way of throwing more focus on that and more organized in the same way.

So, once again, thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the time. Please do check out Tea Party TV, folks.

1)  Rielle Is Not a Lonely Hunter:  Rielle Hunter,   paramour of the erstwhile senator and pretentious presidential hopeful, John Edwards, has finally come clean.  Well, as clean as she could.

In an interview for GQ, Hunter, mother of Edwards’ love child, 2 year old Quinn Frances, fesses up on her relationship with Edwards which she believes hasn’t ended.  Rather, it’s entered a new phase.   

Somehow, she also believes she was not the “other woman” in the long-term affair and concludes that “I’m not a predator, I’m not a gold digger, I’m not the stalker.  I didn’t have any power in that way in our relationship.  He held all the power.”  He may have had “the power” but this non-gold digger collected a ton of money from Edwards’ surrogates.

Hunter, who also posed for scantily-clad pictures for GQ, manages to rip Mrs. Elizabeth Edwards as a controlling and domineering harridan at the same time she professes a deep empathy for the woman because of her terminal cancer. 

Another reason she feels she didn’t steal John from Elizabeth was because, Rielle says, their marriage was long over before she met Edwards in a hotel bar, and hopped into bed with him that same night.

As for John, he’s just a yummy guy who she describes in born again terms, re-born as a result their sleazey affair and now “living a life of truth,” freed from Elizabeth’s shackles and abuse: http://bit.ly/coQvx2

Edwards should draw consolation from that truth if he ends up in federal prison for misuse of campaign funds by paying Ms. Hunter hush money.

2)  Gays Upset with Admirals and Generals:  Homosexuals yearning for a life in the military cleaning latrines, sitting butt-to-butt with heteros in mess halls, and shooting those big guns were heartened by recent statements by Sen. Joe Lieberman   calling for repeal of Bill Clinton’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) 1993 policy on gays in the military.

Then, along came some 1164 retired admirals and generals–including 51 four stars–who added their voices and signatures to a statement calling for retention of DADT, believing it should remain illegal for gays and bi-sexuals to serve openly.

Not to be outdone, a pro-homosexual-in-the-military groups, Servicemembers United, attacked the statement, not because of its content but because “some of the officers who signed the statement were involved in controversies and that most of them are older.”

Well, gosh, a lot of retired people are “older.”  That’s the principal reason most retired.  It doesn’t mean they’re any more addled than the average homosexual.

This ageism, this imputed discrimination by gays against their elders isn’t much different from discrimination against homosexuals because they’re gay.

Servicemembers United went even further along that ageism path by suggesting that any number of statement-signers were already dead (from old age) and based its whole argument on an unsubstantiated PBS report. 

Even so, what’s the point of contending the signatures were invalid even if the signers had died the moment after they affixed their john hancocks opposing gays in the military?

Those 1164 admirals and generals, old or not, now dead or not, were merely concurring with the opinions of top officers from 4 of the 5 branches of the military: http://bit.ly/cSFjei

The Center for Military Readiness (CMR), which issued the statement and gathered the 1,164 signatures, said that the homosexual group’s claims were faulty: http://bit.ly/agUNOJ 

I would agree, faulty and ageistically discriminatory.

3)  Scott Roeder Was Railroaded:  Roeder   was the man who shot to death late-term abortionist Dr. George Tiller on May 31st, 2008 in his Wichita, Kansas church and freely admitted his horrendous act.

A commenter submitted this legalistic link, http://rasmusen.org/special/roeder/, which clearly demonstrates that Roeder may have been found guilty as charged but his case is hardly over.

It’s difficult to defend or to speak in favor of a confessed and convicted murderer unless one appreciates the circumstances of that confession and conviction.  In brief, a strong case can be made for the justifiability of the killing as well as for the inequity of the killer’s January trial and conviction.

The presiding judge virtually overruled the defense that Roeder’s court-appointed attorneys tried to present. 

He refused to admit into evidence exculpatory material, denied the defendant the right to testify as to his rationale for executing Dr. Tiller, and threw out the voluntary manslaughter defense the day before the trial ended. 

Roeder’s reasoning was basically that he committed the crime to save the lives of untold additional pre-born babies at his busy Wichita clinic.  His attorneys planned to use the common law justification of “necessity,” which was disallowed.

Even allowing for the paucity of his defense, for the jury to deliberate only 37 minutes in a first degree murder case was unseemly and testimony to the fact of that judge-enforced minimalist defense.

Due to the absence of any aggravating circumstance, under Kansas law, Scott Roeder could not be sentenced to death and accordingly was sentenced to a mandatory life in prison.

His supporters and attorneys indicated that the conviction would be appealed.   

If we can keep them from securing the 216 votes necessary for passage, we will put the final nail in the coffin of this Administration’s and Congress’ ill-conceived healthcare “reform” plan.

That’s why, before you do anything else today, I urge you in the strongest terms possible to tell your U.S. Representative to oppose the Obama/Pelosi/Reid government takeover of healthcare!

Jeff, you must let your Representative know that you will hold him or her accountable for providing one of the pivotal votes that tips the scale in favor of socialized medicine in America.

The House will be voting on the healthcare bill that passed the Senate last December.  That bill is chock-full of sweetheart deals, including:  the “Cornhusker Kickback,” which rewarded Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) for his “yes” vote by having federal taxpayers pick up the tab for the bill’s mandated Medicaid expansion in Nebraska; the “Louisiana Purchase,” which bought Sen. Mary Landrieu’s (D-La.) favorable vote with $100 million in federal money for her home state; and the union exemption from $60 billion in taxes on “Cadillac” healthcare plans, which secured the support of Big Labor.

This healthcare bill would cost a minimum of $1 trillion over the next decade at a time when our national debt has already reached $12.6 trillion and is expected to nearly double by 2019. 

What’s more, the President claims his healthcare “reform” will reduce the budget deficit, but when you take away all the fiscal smoke and mirrors from the Senate bill, it actually increases the deficit by $460 billion over 10 years.

The Obama/Pelosi/Reid government takeover of healthcare would impose massive new taxes and burdensome mandates on individuals and small businesses as our economy continues to struggle and unemployment remains near double digits.  This healthcare bill inserts government between patients and their doctors in numerous intrusive ways and would cause millions of Americans to lose the employer-provided insurance they have today and pay even higher health insurance premiums.

And if all of that isn’t bad enough, this so-called healthcare “reform” would cut $450 billion from Medicare, endangering the quality and increasing the costs of healthcare for seniors, while expanding Medicaid to cover an additional 15 million people.

Make no mistake, Jeff.  You may have heard that the Senate bill does not contain a “public option,” but the increase in Medicaid enrollment under this bill, the millions of Americans who would lose their employer-provided insurance, and the new mandate requiring that all Americans have healthcare coverage will ultimately lead to a single-payer, socialized healthcare system in this country!

Passing the Senate bill in the House is the first step of two-part process, including the filibuster-proof “reconciliation” plan, that the White House and Democratic leaders have crafted to force their wildly unpopular vision of healthcare “reform” on Americans.  If we can keep the Senate bill from passing the House, it will truly be the Waterloo for the Obama/Pelosi/Reid government takeover of healthcare.

Please tell your Representative today to vote AGAINST this healthcare bill that will bankrupt our country and erode our freedoms.

Sincerely,

Thomas A. Schatz
President

FaxDC.com wants to send this urgent and personalized Blast Fax message to all 535 members of the House and Senate for YOU.

Alert: ( The Wall Street Journal) Are there enough votes in the House to pass the Senate’s health-care bill? As of today, it’s clear there aren’t. House Democratic leaders have brushed aside White House calls to bring the bill forward by March 18, when President Barack Obama heads to Asia. Nevertheless, analysts close to the Democratic leadership tell me they’re confident the leadership will find some way to squeeze out the 216 votes needed for a majority.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi has indeed shown mastery at amassing majorities. But it’s hard to see how she’ll do so on this one. The arithmetic as I see it doesn’t add up.

The House passed its version of the health bill in November by 220-215. Of those 220, one was a Republican who now is a no. One Democrat who voted yes has died, two Democrats who voted yes have resigned, and one Democrat who voted no has resigned as well. So if everyone but the Republican votes the way they did four months ago, the score would be 216-215.

But not everyone is ready to vote that way. The House bill included an amendment prohibiting funding of abortions sponsored by Michigan Democrat Bart Stupak. The Senate bill did not. Mr. Stupak says he and 10 to 12 other members won’t vote for the Senate bill for that reason. Others have said the same, including Minnesota’s James Oberstar, chairman of the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, and Dan Lipinski, a product of the Chicago Democratic machine.

Mrs. Pelosi may have some votes in reserve—members who would have voted yes if she needed them in November and would do so again. But we can be pretty sure she doesn’t have more than 10, or she wouldn’t have allowed the Stupak amendment to come forward at the last minute the first time. She also might get one or two votes from members who voted no and later announced they were retiring.

But that’s not enough—and there are other complications. Voting for the Senate bill means voting for the Cornhusker kickback and the Louisiana purchase—the price Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid paid for the votes of Ben Nelson and Mary Landrieu. It’s not hard to imagine the ads Republicans could run attacking House members for sending money to Nebraska and Louisiana but not their home states.

To be sure, Democratic leaders say they want to repair the Senate bill by subsequent legislation that could be passed with 51 votes in the Senate under the reconciliation process. But they have yet to produce such a bill. It can’t include the Stupak amendment, which experts say doesn’t qualify for the reconciliation process. And there’s no way they can credibly promise the Senate will pass it. Senate rules allow many forms of obstruction. The reconciliation process is littered with traps.

There is also the House’s historic lack of trust in the Senate, which is on display by Democrats who voted yes in November. “No, I don’t trust the U.S. Senate,” Wisconsin’s Steve Kagen told WLUK-TV in Green Bay, this week. New York’s Dan Maffei was quoted in the Syracuse Post-Standard on Monday that “I will trust the president, but I will not trust the Senate.”

“I am not inclined to support the Senate version,” Nevada’s Shelley Berkley told the New York Times last week. “I would like something more than a promise. The Senate cannot promise its way out of a paper bag.” Her district voted 64% for Barack Obama.

Other Democrats who voted yes seem to be wavering. “I don’t think reconciliation is a good idea,” Indiana’s Baron Hill was quoted recently in Bloomberg News. New York’s Michael Arcuri says he’s a no for now. “There would have to be some dramatic changes in it for me to change my position,” he recently told the Utica Observer-Dispatch.

“I think we can do better,” California’s Dennis Cardoza told the New York Times last week. “If the Senate bill is not fixed, that”—voting no—”is not a flip-flop,” Nevada’s Dina Titus told the Las Vegas Review-Journal last week. “I see that as standing by your convictions.” Most of these members represent districts which went Republican some time in the past decade—and could easily do so again if national polls are an indicator.

There’s a more fundamental problem for the Democratic leadership: Their majority is not as strong as their 253-178 margin suggests.

A Democratic House majority tends to have fewer members with safe seats than a Republican majority. Consider that in 2005 Speaker Dennis Hastert had 214 Republican members elected in districts Mr. Bush carried, just four seats short of a majority. Today Speaker Nancy Pelosi has 208 Democratic members elected in districts Mr. Obama carried, eight seats short of a majority.

The Democratic bedrock is actually slightly smaller than the Republican bedrock was four years ago, even though the Democrats have 31 more members. That’s partly because of Republican gerrymandering earlier in the decade, but it’s more because Democratic voters tend to be bunched in relatively few districts. Mr. Obama carried 28 districts with 80% or more; John McCain didn’t reach that percentage in any district.

A lot of Democrats—most Black Caucus members and many “gentry liberals” (to use urban scholar Joel Kotkin’s term) like Mrs. Pelosi—are elected in overwhelmingly Democratic districts. This means there aren’t that many faithful Democratic voters to spread around to other seats.

As a result, more than 40 House Democrats represent districts which John McCain carried. Most voted no in November and would presumably be hurt by switching to yes now. Moreover, Mr. Obama’s job approval now hovers around 48%, five points lower than his winning percentage in 2008. His approval on health care is even lower.

Another 32 House Democrats represent districts where Mr. Obama won between 50% and 54% of the vote, and where his approval is likely to be running under 50% now. That leaves just 176 House Democrats from districts where Mr. Obama’s approval rating is not, to borrow a real-estate term, under water. That’s 40 votes less than the 216 needed.

“If there is a path to 216 votes, I am confident the Speaker will find it,” writes Bush White House legislative strategy analyst Keith Hennessey on his blog. “She has a remarkable ability to bend her colleagues to her will.” True, but perhaps that ability has led Democrats in the White House and on Capitol Hill to embark on what will be remembered as a mission impossible.

Mrs. Pelosi, whom I have known for almost 30 years, may turn out to be even shrewder than I think. But she may be facing a moment as flummoxing as the one when Democratic Speaker Thomas Foley lost the vote on the rule to consider the crime and gun control bill in August 1994, or when Republican Speaker Dennis Hastert saw the Mark Foley scandal explode on the last day of the session in September 2006. Both were moments when highly competent and dedicated House speakers saw their majorities shattered beyond repair.

That moment, if it comes, will occur some time between now and the Easter recess. The Democrats’ struggle to get 216 votes is high stakes poker.

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The Tea (Taxed Enough Already) movement has been defined as populist, conservative, and libertarian in tone. It is a movement diverse in leadership and organization but united in its defense of liberty and the constitution. Its members are technologically savvy and able to mobilize in a moments notice. It is anti-elitist, anti-big government, and anti-big business. It is a revulsion and revolt against perceived corruption and politics as usual. And it the most recent public face of the Liberty Movement that resides on the right side of the ideological spectrum.

It is the winning combination of the common sense principles of less government, fiscal responsibility, lower taxes, state’s rights, and strong national security that is uniting the Tea Party into an effective force to be reckoned with. The mad as hell Teaparticans are the modern-day serfs smashing down the castle gate in an attempt to overthrow their feudal overlords. It is a popular uprising against the political establishment.

The members of the Tea Party first came to national attention when they crashed townhall meetings and held spontaneous rallies and protests around the nation. Couched in terms like “the second Revolution” and “the uprising,” while touting the imagery of the American Revolution, the Tea Party movement is really just a vast amalgamation of factions and independent groups acting outside the old party establishments and organized everywhere from facebook to the fellowship hall in the basement of the church on the corner. But they are mad as hell, and history shows that righteous indignation and the howling mob can definitely threaten entrenched interests and the ruling elite. Whether that energy and drive can be wielded effectively and wisely still remains to be seen.

Those who jeered and poked fun at the 9-12 and Tea party groups just a few months ago now greatly worry about these shock troops of an aroused and angry conservative movement that has dedicated itself to practicing “guerilla conservatism” and challenge the progressive ideology that seeks to regulate, tax, and control nearly every aspect of your daily life. The fainting, worshipful Obamanite crowds of a year ago have been replaced in the street by those who have had enough of a government, and governing party, that is out of control.

With their sea of signs and Revolutionary War flags this particular face of the larger Liberty Movement descended onto Washington D.C. in the hundreds of thousands this past summer (the Million Mob March). It was the announcement to a corrupt establishment that a movement, not a party, was here to contest the agenda, power, and business as usual of the entrenched rich and corrupt that infest both Wall Street and Capitol Hill. It is a movement equally disgusted with corporate bail outs and the socialization of medicine. And in many ways it is not just the Right against the Left, but the little guy against the big guy, the average American against the elite, and the lover of liberty against those who seek to replace it with authoritarian regulation.

The real influence of the Tea Party movement, despite all the media coverage, is yet to be seen. There is a major and nation wide effort to prepare to mount a conservative takeover of the Republican primary and caucus process. Few show up to these important but often neglected grassroots meetings and the fired up and angry rank and file are not just here to oppose the Democratic Party but to make serious inroads into the Republican Party. A third political party is not seen as a viable option at this particular point in time but the takeover of one of the existing ones is seen as possible.

The country club elite and RINO (Republicans In Name Only) who have held sway in the GOP and controlled much of the party apparatus and candidate selection process has no idea how to harness, control, or otherwise exert much pressure on this grassroots uprising against politics as usual. The conservative resurgence is happening despite the GOP, not because of it. Hopefully a rising tide will lift all boats. It was not the conservative movement that lost in November but perceived Bush Republicanism with its poor prosecution of two wars and own policies of big government and big spending. And the Republican presidential nominee was no conservative but in fact the embodiment of traditional party politics and seen as the poster boy of those who sacrifice principle for the sake of expediency and political power.

It will be interesting to see if the momentum fueled by the Tea Party has already peaked or if we are seeing the birth of a long-standing, broad-based, and truly influential phenomenon in the American political process or just a short-lived outburst of frustration with Barack Obama.

The 9-12 Project and Tea Party groups are still in their political infancy but have shown they do have some staying power, the ability to raise millions of dollars to target specific races, and now the attention of both political parties. Not bad for just some ordinary citizens using the internet to organize some rallies and “crash” some townhall meetings on health care. Good for them. I’m glad someone, anyone, is standing up and saying the kind of things that need to be said. One can continue to wallow in ignorance and blind faith in the agenda of the government or one can boldly stand in opposition and declare such things unacceptable for a free people.

There have been complaints that the members of the Tea Party movement are mostly white. Does it matter? Is perceived “diversity” now the only benchmark by which we measure legitimacy of a cause? The movement is an uprising of the ignored middle class. They are the ones who have the most to lose under Obama. All races are welcome in the Liberty movement. You just have to be willing to detach yourself from the teat of government handouts and dependency to be a member.

If anything, the Tea Party rebellion is more about class, not race. In the Great Recession it was the middle class that took a huge hit with severe job losses and foreclosures in the millions. The middle class is the heart and soul of the nation and when it feels ignored and betrayed it will strike out at those who it sees as having abandoned it. It is they who are feeling the greatest effects of both the recession and government policies. The rich will always be rich, and the poor will be poor, (but not too much poorer due to the wide social safety net we have constructed), but it is the middle class who have watched big government bail out big business with their money even as they lost their jobs, their savings, their retirement, and their homes. At the same time they see a massive grab for power by a government who sees them as little more than someone to be taxed and controlled. And occupying the oval office is the most leftist and radical president to every hold the office. It is upon such fertile ground that the message of the Tea Party and 9-12 groups has fallen with amazing results. Their anger at Washington, big business, and big government has provided a third force in politics, at least for the time being, that scares the Left and challenges the political class and politics as usual.

Stunned by the virtual overnight mobilization and organization of an angry, high-tech, middle class, right-wing uprising against Obama’s rapid march towards European socialism, the Left has crashed from its hopey-changey high to find itself faced with some serious problems. Progressivism is an ideology of continual movement and motion. It is protest speeches and gatherings, lesbian brown bag lunches, and marches about “the struggle” for (insert favorite pet cause here – no blood for oil, civil rights, gay rights, animal rights, gender equality, nuclear disarmament, saving the polar bears etc). With the pinnacle finally reached by what they saw as the election of one of their own they seemed to have finally collapsed from exhaustion as they declared a paradigm shift, the exile of anyone to the right of Hillary to wander in the political wilderness for a generation, and the much heralded thousand-year reign of He who would slow the rising of the oceans.
They seemed to have passed the mantle of energy, rebellion against the status quo, and anti-establishment anger to the peasants who had been toiling in the fields and serving as the backbone of the state even while the agitators agitated and the community organizers organized. The Tea Party types have emerged from their “exile” in the political wilderness with a righteous indignation that has frightened the ruling classes and shaken the corrupt cabal that controls the capitol. Armed with tweets and facebook, pitchfork and torch, they are the most visible image of the uprising of the Right against those who would force us down the road to serfdom.

Latecomers, politicians, and opportunists attempt to glob onto any movement but that doesn’t diminish the validity of their anger, the righteousness of their outrage, or the power of their principles. The Tea Party movement is now a vast amalgamation of political novices and virgin activists working side by side with professional opinion setters and grizzled conservative veterans of the culture wars. The question really is whether or not it is all “too little, too late” or a popular outrage and uprising that is “just in nick of time.” That answer is not yet known and remains to be seen.

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Alert: ( WorldNetDaily) At least 36 state legislatures are considering legislation that would allow citizens to opt out of a key component of President Obama’s health-care “reform” — an “individual mandate” requiring that all Americans have health insurance.

Both the House and Senate health-care bills require Americans to purchase health insurance or pay a penalty. The House bill establishes a fine based on percentage of a person’s income, while the Senate version creates a penalty as a flat fee or percentage of income, whichever is higher. Those refusing to get insurance could be found guilty of a misdemeanor crime, punishable by another fine or even jail time.

“The president’s proposal adopts the Senate approach but lowers the flat dollar assessments, and raises the percent of income assessment that individuals pay if they choose not to become insured,” a White House plan released in February states.

States rejecting ‘individual mandate’

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, formal resolutions or bills have been filed in opposition to the individual mandate in Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

Also, as of March 4, Virginia became the first state to enact a new statute section titled, “Health insurance coverage not required.” In Arizona, voters will cast ballots on a constitutional amendment in November 2010 that would “preserve the freedom of all residents of the state to provide for their own health care.”

Lawmakers suggest approval of the legislation may spark a legal battle over states’ rights versus the federal government’s reach of power. The Boston Globe reported the measures could set the stage for “one of the greatest tests of federal power over the states since the civil rights era.”

“The administration is trying to shift from a government by social compact, agreement between elected officials and citizens, to a government where the leaders tell the subjects what to do,” Virginia Delegate Bob Marshall, chief sponsor of the measure in his state, told the Globe. “That is not what the American Revolution was about.”

The American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, has sparked nationwide interest with its model “Freedom of Choice in Health Care Act: How Your State Can Block Single-Payer and Protect Patients’ Rights.” ALEC warns that forcing patients to enroll in one-size-fits-all plans would cause massive increases in spending and force policymakers to ration care as a cost-containment measure.

Is mandatory insurance constitutional?

Minnesota State Rep. Tom Emmer told the New York Times in September 2009 that lawmakers in his state have proposed a state constitutional amendment to protect citizens from government interference in their private health decisions.

“All I’m trying to do is protect the individual’s right to make health-care decisions,” Emmer said. “I just don’t want the government getting between my decisions with my doctors.”

He said an amendment wouldn’t prohibit anyone from participating in a federal health program. It would simply prevent them from being forced to enroll.

“[T]ell me where in the U.S. Constitution it says the federal government has the right to provide health care,” Emmer said. “This is the essence of the debate.”

During the Democratic presidential primary, Obama took a jab at Hillary Clinton over the individual mandate.

“The main difference between my plan and Sen. Clinton’s plan,” he said, “is that she’d require the government to force you to buy health insurance and she said she’d ‘go after’ your wages if you don’t.”

According to the Congressional Budget Office, or CBO, the federal government has never mandated that Americans purchase any good or service. In 1994, the CBO studied the individual mandate in Clinton’s universal health-care plan and found that it was an unprecedented requirement.

“A mandate requiring all individuals to purchase health insurance would be an unprecedented form of federal action,” the CBO report stated. “The government has never required people to buy any good or service as a condition of lawful residence in the United States. An individual mandate would have two features that, in combination, would make it unique. First, it would impose a duty on individuals as members of society. Second, it would require people to purchase a specific service that would be heavily regulated by the federal government.”

Opponents say the individual mandate is unconstitutional because the Constitution doesn’t grant the federal government power to fine citizens for refusing to purchase goods and services. Ken Klukowski, senior legal analyst with the American Civil Rights Union, explained in a Politico commentary why there is no constitutional basis for the individual mandate.

“People who decline coverage are not receiving federal money, so that mandate can’t fall under the spending part of the Tax and Spending Clause,” he wrote.

Article I of the Constitution authorizes excise and capitation taxes, and the 16th Amendment created the income tax. However, Klukowski contends that government health insurance cannot be considered an excise, capitation or income tax.

“It can’t be an excise tax because that’s a surcharge on a purchase, and here people are not buying anything,” he explained. “It can’t be a capitation (or ‘direct’) tax because that is a tax on every person in a state and must be equal for every person in the state; this would be a levy that some people would pay and others would not. And it can’t be an income tax because that must be based on personal income, not purchase decisions.”

He added, “All that’s left is the Commerce Clause. And the people who declined to purchase government-mandated insurance would not be engaging in commercial activity, so there’s no interstate commerce. That, in fact, is the government’s problem with them: Those people refuse to take the money or play the game.”

Likewise, the Congressional Research Service recently reported that determining whether an individual mandate is constitutional under the Commerce Clause “is perhaps the most challenging question posed by such a proposal, as it is a novel issue whether Congress may use this clause to require an individual to purchase a good or service.”

Klukowski wrote that if Obama wants a plan that forces Americans to purchase insurance, he will need to “persuade the nation to adopt a constitutional amendment creating a right to health care.”

He added, “You might have better odds of getting struck by lightning.”

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and outspoken critic of the individual mandate, told CNS News that if Congress can force Americans to buy health care, or mandate the purchase of anything, “we’ve lost our freedoms, and that means the federal government can do anything it wants to do to us.”

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ANDREW BREITBART JOINS

“SHOWDOWN IN SEARCHLIGHT” THIS MARCH 27TH

Conservative firebrand, commentator and columnist, Andrew Breitbart, has announced he will be joining the “Showdown in Searchlight” tea party rally that kicks off the Tea Party Express III: Just Vote Them Out national tour.

The “Showdown in Searchlight” tea party rally takes place at “High Noon” on Saturday, March 27th in Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s tiny hometown of Searchlight, NV (population: 700) in the southern Nevada desert.

Joining Breitbart in Searchlight will be Gov. Sarah Palin, Joe The Plumber, Saturday Night Live’s Victoria Jackson, nationally syndicated radio talk show host, Roger Hedgecock, and many more.

Breitbart made the following comment about his participation in this huge effort:

“The Tea Party movement is nothing short of the beginning of the battle to save the soul of America. The “teabaggers” I’ve met all understand that now is a critical time, and that there are well-funded political and media foes set to try to destroy the movement. I am proud to bring my New Media arsenal to this long-awaited war. — Andrew Breitbart

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Media organizations wishing to embed a reporter on the Tea Party Express national tour, or those seeking more information about the “Tea Party Express” or to schedule an interview with a representative, should contact Levi Russell at (509) 979-6615 or via email at:
Levi@FrontLineStrat.com