When 300,000-500,000 of your closest friends, depending on who is doing the estimating, show up for a rally on the Washington Mall you would think it was somewhat newsworthy, no?  Of course it is, that’s why the New York Times published the story on page fifteen.  If you were walking by a newsstand and glanced at the front page, you wouldn’t have know that a half million of your fellow citizens got together with Glenn Beck to restore honor in America.  The front page would entice you with:

• Graft-Fighting Prosecutor Fired in Afghanistan
• For Obama, Steep Learning Curve as Chief in Time of War
• Upstarts Chip Away at Power of Feudal Pakistani Landlords
• Years Later, No Magic Bullet Against Alzheimer’s Disease
• In Hard Times, One New Ban (Double-Wide)

I guess our friends at the times couldn’t find any fabricated stories of someone shouting the “N-word” at Dr. Martin Luther King’s niece Alveda King, who was one of the featured speakers, to elevate the story to the front page.  Perhaps it would have been too embarrassing to mention on the front page that Al Sharpton’s counter-demonstration where “several hundred people packed a football field at Paul Laurance Dunbar High School to stage a rally commemorating Dr. King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.”  Yesterday, you would have thought both rallies were the same size with crowd estimates of several thousand for each.  Perhaps this shows the true value of racial politics today.  America is tired of the race baiting and the false charges.   President Obama was elected with hope and change to become the post-racial leader of the country.  It appears the country has moved on without his leadership.

In another piece in the Times two Progressive women pine for a “Palin of Our Own”, to win the hearts and minds of America.  The problem is America doesn’t want to listen to Janeane Garofalo or Joy Behar sneeringly spouting off about Sarah Palin.  As far as any women Progressive politicians, who is there other than Hillary Clinton and we’ve seen that act and passed on it.

In another piece titled “Party Down”, Marc Ambinder tells us about the anti-incumbent mood, “Unlike parties, which often recruit candidates who would appeal to the average voter in a general election, these activists care only about nominating the person who accurately represents their own views and frustrations.”  Appeal to the average voter?  The problem with the Republican Party in the past is that they have been listening to the main stream media reports about who the “average voter” is.  So they have elected so called “moderates” who get their clocks cleaned by real Progressives in the election.  The left snickered in their sleeves while growing the government into the bloated, ineffective, couch potato that it is.  It alarms those on the left that the Tea Party movement has changed all this and tone deaf incumbents are getting tossed left and right.  They have unmasked the average voter to be conservative and by measuring candidates against a conservative yardstick, they have struck a chord with the voters who have long felt ignored and disenfranchised.  Now those voters are energized and can’t wait to get to the polls.  Reason for panic on the left, indeed.

To say today’s “Restoring Honor” event in Washington will be historic is an understatement.  Gauging by the biased reporting on the news pages of the New York Times and the seething, sputtering outrage from Bob Herbert and Charles Blow on the Op-Ed pages should give you a pretty good indication of the focus this event will garner.

Kate Zernike opens her report, titled “Where Dr. King Stood, Tea Party Claims His Mantle”, saying it is the ultimate “thumb in the eye” to stand on the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech” in the place he stood and talk about restoring honor.  How dare he?  Isn’t that what racists said of Dr. King when he stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial with these words?

“Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.”

Ms. Zernike reminds us of the case of Shirley Sherrod, who was fired by the Obama administration when a videotape of her redemptive speech about how she first discriminated against a white farmer but later helped him was shown across the Internet.  She writes about video tape being heavily edited by failing to show how she mended her ways and helped that farmer.  But Ms. Zernike doesn’t finish the story where later in her speech Ms. Sherrod says that those who opposed Obama’s health care plan had racist motives because President Obama is black.  Ms. Sherrod’s redemption is far from complete.

She then says that the Tea Party’s talk of states’ rights raises the specter of Jim Crow and George Wallace.  But it was the federal government that passed and enforced the Fugitive Slave laws and it was independent states of the north, exercising their states’ rights, who supported the Underground Railroad and refused to actively assist returning slaves to the South.  So states’ rights cut both ways.

She concludes that, “Even if Tea Party members are right that any racist signs are those of mischief-makers, even if Glenn Beck had chosen any other Saturday to hold his rally, it would be hard to quiet the argument about the Tea Party and race.”  It’s hard to quiet the argument because those on the left keep falsely making it.  They cannot prove racism so they feel that by repeating often enough, they can make it stick.

I was at a street fair manning a booth for a Tea Party organization this spring.  An African-American teacher approached us tentatively to ask what we were about.  I asked her if she wanted the rumors or the truth and she opted for the truth.  I told her that we were a policy based organization focusing on accountable government, fiscal responsibility, limited federal government and following the Constitution.  She said she didn’t know any of that, she got e-mails from Moveon.org all the time and before leaving she signed our e-mail list.  When the truth reaches the ears of people over the screeching of the New York Times and the main stream media, it is generally well received.  The racial of mix of the Tea Party rallies will change over time when we can speak to the folks one on one without the lies of the left.

The Opionators

Bob Herbert begins his Op-Ed piece in a very open minded fashion, “America is better than Glenn Beck. For all of his celebrity, Mr. Beck is an ignorant, divisive, pathetic figure.”  Thank you for sharing that, Bob, but there’s no need to pull punches here.

“There is a great deal of hatred and bigotry in this country, but it does not define the country. The daily experience of most Americans is not a bitter experience and for all of our problems we are in a much better place on these matters than we were a half century ago.”

So why to you and your fellow travelers throw down the race card every time someone disagrees with a policy, if they are not of the same race?  Object to ObamaCare, that’s racism.  Object to the stimulus, racism.  Wanting Obama to fail to turn America into a socialist states, racism straight up.  Yes there is hatred and bigotry in this country, but it is primarily coming from the left.

Not to be outdone in the outrage department, Charles Blow titled his Op-Ed piece, “I Had a Nightmare.”  Mr. Blow said the following, “I find it curious that many of the same people who object so strenuously to the Islamic cultural center proposed for Lower Manhattan, many on the grounds that it is inappropriate and disrespectful, are virtually silent on the impropriety and disrespect inherent in Beck’s giving a speech on the anniversary of King’s address.”  This would be an excellent point, if he could point to 3,000 blacks that Glenn Beck has murdered in the name of restoring honor.  But Mr. Blow can make no such connection, so his analogy to the Ground Zero mosque falls flat.  Curious indeed.

After venting his spleen, Mr. Blow suggests we re-read Dr. King’s speech “and to recommit ourselves to the nobility of righteous pursuits.”  Let’s do that.

“But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice: In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.” –“I Have a Dream Speech”

How do the actions of the left, throwing down the race card at every turn, accusing everyone who disagrees with Barack Obama to have racism at the core of that disagreement comport with not “drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred”?  It arrogantly assumes that it is impossible not to see the glorious benefit of the government running every last aspect of our lives, therefore the only reason to disagree has to be racism.  With regard to violence, where do we see the violent demonstrations on the left or the right?  Breaking windows, looting, SEIU members beating down street vendors for selling anti-Obama buttons, etc. are all on the left.  When the police show up at rallies organized by the left they show up in riot gear, at Tea Party rallies the mounted police have to decide whether to let people pet their horses or not.

“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’” –“I Have a Dream Speech”

Didn’t America elect an African American President of the United States with 53% of the vote?  More than voted for Clinton either time, or Jimmy Carter?  Barack Obama wasn’t elected by minority votes alone.

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” –“I Have a Dream Speech”

Who more closely shares that dream, Glenn Beck, or those on the left who insist that forty years after Dr. Martin Luther King gave his speech that blacks can’t get into college or get a job without affirmative action; that black families have not been destroyed by government programs like welfare that drove fathers away; that government run schools that can’t graduate its students are far better for blacks than school vouchers that will let them escape those hellholes?  Dr. King’s speech says nothing about racial preferences.  Dr. King’s speech talks about color blindness.  Dr. King’s speech says give us an equal chance.  Glenn Beck believes that.  Those on the left do not.  It is those on the left who believe African Americans cannot compete without more government programs to help them.  Glenn Beck believe they can succeed if government gets out of their way and if the left stops the lies of dependency that hold them back.  It is the New York Times, Charles Blow, Bob Herbert who wrap themselves in racial division and then say, “Why can’t we come together?”  If you want us to come together, stop standing in the way.

In the August 23, 2010, New York Times, Paul Krugman decries that if we don’t let the Bush Tax cuts expire and thus have a massive tax increase in the midst of a weak Obama recovery, it will be so unfair, so evil… 

First let’s look at how twisted the logic of the left has become.  Mr. Krugman says, “These same politicians are eager to cut checks averaging $3 million each to the richest 120,000 people in the country.” Er, not really, Paul, unless the richest 120,000 people are stupid enough, with all their financial advisors, to have that much tax withheld from their incomes.  You see, Paul, the only reason the government would have to cut them checks is if they paid too much in taxes during the year, and since the current rates are already in place it is unlikely that they would change their behavior to suddenly have an extra $3 million sent to Washington.  Here’s the problem with your thinking, Paul.  It is not your money, it is not my money, it is not the government’s money to begin with.  It belongs to the people who have earned it.  It is the people to provide revenue to the government.  It is not the government who gives money to those who produce.  Got it?

Like most on the left Mr. Krugman always associates tax cuts with a loss of revenue and tax increases with a gain in revenue, and ignores how people change their behavior with regard to these changes.

As this chart shows, at the end of the Clinton administration and the dot.com bubble the economy fell into recession.  The Bush tax cuts were implemented in 2001 and they were across the board tax cuts, not just for the wealthy.  A second set of tax cuts came in 2003.  As you can see revenues started to fall before the tax cuts, but bounced back sharply after the cuts in 2001 and 2003.  But Mr. Krugman would have you believe that if you cut taxes, revenues fall and if you leave them along or increase them, revenues increase.  You can also see that Clinton’s tax increase in 1993, didn’t have much effect in changing the rate of revenue growth, but when the Republicans took over Congress in 1994 and instituted tax cuts in 1997 you can see the slope of the curve bend upwards and it is even steeper with the Bush tax cuts.  So in the absence of the 2001 recession, revenues collected increased with tax cuts, not tax increases.

Let’s look at who is paying what share of the taxes.  The follow chart shows what percentage of the tax burden was paid by what percentile of the income earners by Adjusted Gross Income.

So even as the Bush tax cuts reduced tax rates across the board, the “evil” rich still ended up carrying a larger share of the overall tax burden than they did before the cuts.  So just what is Mr. Krugman’s beef? 

I argue that were are nearing a dangerous threshold politically, where the majority of voters may soon find they pay no taxes and the minority pays all.  If that tipping point is reached, what is to prevent this majority from voting for massive tax increases that will only affect the minority?  All Americans should carry some share of the cost of government.  It should not be a free ride for some and a minority pays the tab. 

To further emphasize the fairness issue look at the following chart from the IRS in 2004.  The brown bars show the share of the income that the percentile on the vertical axis earns.  The blue bar shows the share of the total income tax bill they pay. 

The problem folks is spending.  As the first chart makes pretty clear, we have not been suffering from a revenue problem, we have been suffering from a spending problem.  This administration and their instigators, like Mr. Krugman, have been urging reckless spending upon reckless spending and even decrying that the administration has not spent nearly enough.  Krugman is sloppy in making his case and tries to convince his readers that we will be carrying buckets of money to the wealthy when the truth is that he wants to open the spigot wider from those who produce in this country to the profligate government who can then spend it on more turtle crossings in Florida, and to prop up the unions, and bankrupt states.  Stop spending, cut taxes, shrink the federal beast, and we will be in good shape in short order.

As many people have said, “I never got a job from a poor man.”  In looking back at my own career, I have worked for several companies that were started by entrepreneurs and who became wealthy. Do I care if they were wealthy?  No.  Do I wish they were taxed to the eyeballs?  No.   If they were, those are jobs I would probably wouldn’t have had.  Opportunity is what made America the country where people around the world fight to get into, not bashing the successful.  All who stive to come here want to become those wealthy successful people and give the same opportunity to their children.

Two disparate news items this weekend got me thinking.  The main stream media is all abuzz with Chelsea Clinton’s wedding, even to the point of throwing the term royalty around.  It is estimated that the wedding will cost $3-$5 million, although Sally Quinn of the Washington post puts the bill at closer to $1 million.  The comparison was then made to the cost of Jenna Bush’s wedding, a mere $100,000.  This became fodder for The Joy Behar Show.  Comedian Judy Gold leaped at the opportunity to take a shot at Bush, “Yeah, well, if he could have found a way for us to pay for Jenna`s wedding, he would have done that, okay, he likes to spend other people`s money.”  An interesting perspective on other people’s money that I will return to later.

The other news items was an article in The New York Times, by Bob Herbert titled “A Sin and a Shame,” lamenting that corporations are hording cash and not hiring people and it is all so unfair, in fact, sinful.  This is while this government is spending huge amounts of money that someone will have to pay back, massive new programs like ObamaCare that we are still uncovering what that will cost, and enormous tax increases about to kick in on January 1 when the Bush tax cuts expire.  Perhaps they are hording cash for a reason?  Perhaps they are not hiring because they don’t know what any new employees will cost under these new programs, or for that matter what their existing employees are going to cost?  Perhaps it is because the latest economic reports show GDP shrinking and if that continues why would you start hiring if your business is going to slow down with the rest of the economy?

We have two very divergent views of the economy today.  One view is held by those who actually work in the private economy and the other view is held by those in the ivory towers of government, which brings me back to the weddings.  I really don’t care what the Clintons or the Bushes spend on their daughter’s weddings.  It’s their money.  But perhaps it is instructive to look at where that money came from.

George Herbert Walker Bush, Jenna’s grandfather, was born into a successful family.  His father was a banker and a Senator.  But after getting out of the Army after WWII he went to Yale and upon graduation, moved away from that family and settled in Texas to start an oil company.  He went into private business and put his own money at risk.  What that means, to those who never took that chance, is you may be successful and make a lot of money, you may be successful and make a little money, you may fail and lose your money.  Chances are greater that you will lose than win, but that is the American Dream.  If you lose, you have to start over by trying to earn and save up what you lost to try again, if you have the guts and drive.  Bush succeeded in forming Bush-Overby and later with Zapata Petroleum.  He became President of Zapata for ten years and then Chairman for another two, before going into politics.  By then he was a millionaire in his own right.

George Walker Bush, Jenna’s dad, attended public school in Midland, Texas, where his parents had settled.  He went to private school after the family moved to Houston.  He later attended Yale University and became the only president to get an MBA which he did, from Harvard.  Like his father, he went into the oil business starting several independent oil exploration companies.  He later bought a stake in the Texas Rangers baseball team for $800,000 and was instrumental in building the team’s attendance.  He later sold his stake for $15 million.  Then he went into politics.

The two Bushes know risk, know about taking chances and became millionaires on their own before going into politics.  They also learned lessons about spending money and doing so prudently. 

Bill Clinton went into politics almost immediately after getting his law degree.  He was Attorney General and then Governor of Arkansas.  As governor he had a governor’s mansion.  He ran for president and upon winning traded in his governor’s mansion for the Executive Mansion, aka the White House.  He had been on the government payroll and living in government provided housing almost his entire working life.  The sweat of the people in who paid their taxes paid him.  After leaving office, Mr. Clinton was able to write books about his experience and make speeches commanding six figures a pop.  His wife did pretty much the same.  They lived off the people and ended up very rich.  They didn’t create a product or service, they didn’t create jobs, and they didn’t meet a payroll. 

I can hear the screams from the left right now, “What do you mean he didn’t create a job or meet a payroll?”  Try this test.  If Bill Clinton’s opponent was elected rather than Bill Clinton, would there still be a government payroll and government jobs?  If yes, Bill Clinton didn’t create them.  If either of the Bushes didn’t create their companies would there be jobs at those companies or payrolls?  No.

What about some other famous politicians who tell us what to do?  Let’s look at Al Gore.  Here is another individual that spent the bulk of his career in government.  He was a member of Congress, a United States Senator, Vice President and presidential candidate.  Today he is very rich.  It is said he may become the first “green billionaire”.  If he went into his current endeavors before a life in government, would the story be the same?  Or is it because of his name, reputation, and connections that he made at the public trough, that he is wallowing in riches, and telling the rest of us to reduce our carbon footprint while his mansions consume ten times the energy of his neighbors?

Charlie Rangel spent most of his life in government.  He rose through the ranks and now has a waterfront condominium in the Dominican Republic, writes the tax laws but does not observe them, and is a wealthy man.  Conservatives don’t believe in rent control or rent stabilized apartments, but Charlie does.  After all, how can poor and middle income people afford to live in places like Manhattan if greedy landlords have their way.  So Charlie Rangel who makes $174,000 per year, plus his chairmanship pay, has not one, not two, not three, but four rent controlled apartments.  Is he poor or middle class?  No, he is the political class.  He took three adjoining rent controlled apartments and had them joined together, while the fourth apartment served, illegally, as his campaign headquarters.  What about the poor and blue collar workers who could live in Manhattan if three of your four rent controlled apartments weren’t being horded by you?  Let them eat cake.

John Kerry is in the news for trying to avoid $500,000 in taxes on his new yacht.  Here is another individual who spent his entire working life in government.  He can tell the rest of us to pay more taxes while he garners favors spending our money. He is the richest man in the Senate but with prenuptial agreements with his wife he only lists personal assets of between $400,000 and $1.8 million and joint assets with his wife of $300,000 – $600,000.  So how does he buy a $7 million yacht?  I am not suggesting anything nefarious, it’s obvious his wife paid for it, but do you think he is in touch with someone trying to make a payroll in the private sector?  You pay taxes; John Kerry has advisors to figure out how to avoid them.

So those evil corporations started by those evil men like George Herbert Walker Bush and George Walker Bush, know the value of a dollar.  They know we are not out of the woods yet and so to protect the jobs that their companies still have they are not hiring but are building their rainy day funds.  Perhaps Bob Herbert should ask why his employer is shedding jobs left and right.  Perhaps this is his safe way of doing so, but on the other hand the New York Times is hardly hording cash.  Its circulation is crashing because people like Bob Herbert are so out of touch with the rest of America; no one wants to read his rants any longer.

So perhaps Bill Clinton spends millions on Chelsea’s wedding because he didn’t learn the value of a dollar.  He lived of the government for many years and then just held out a basket and it was miraculously filled with more money than he can count.  George Bush spent $100,000 on a wedding because he knows how hard it is to earn a dollar.  What we need is less of the political class telling us what to do, and then handing us the bill and more entrepreneurial Americans who risk their own money, watch it like hawks, create jobs and generate wealth that they then reinvest in America.

Best wishes to Chelsea and Marc.

It never ceases to amaze me how the political class thinks they are so much smarter than the rest of us.  They think they can write a 2,000 page law that will really “fix” things and don’t believe that all the intellectual horsepower in America can’t disassemble their work in a matter of days.  Today’s political class is too dumb to realize Thomas Paine was right and still is, “that government is best that governs least.”

This is from Fox Business News.  Goldman Sachs has figured out a way to get around the Volker Rule’s restrictions on trading that was just enacted in the Dodd-Frank Act. It is doing this by changing its “risk taking- traders into asset managers.”

The move is designed to exploit a loophole in the Volker Rule, part of the recently signed financial-reform legislation named after presidential economic adviser and former Federal Reserve chief Paul Volcker. The Volcker Rule is supposed to scale back on Wall Street risk taking by ending what’s known as proprietary trading, where firms use their own ideas and capital to make market bets.

But by having the traders work in asset management, where they will take market positions while dealing with clients, Goldman believes it can meet the rule’s mandates, avoid large-scale layoffs and preserve some of the same risk taking that has earned it enormous profits, people close to the firm say.

This is really about the arrogance of those who have been breathing the heady air of Washington, DC for too long.  From way up in those ivory towers they can’t see that among those on the ground are the most brilliant minds in the world and before one of their lofty laws tossed from the tower hits the ground, the huddled masses will turn it into mince meat.  Why does Medicare/Medicaid lose $60 – $100 billion a year to fraud?  Because for every beltway pinhead writing a regulatory rule, there are 100,000 people reading that same rule and finding all the ways to get around it and how to use the same rule to tie the government in knots so it can’t stop them.

Are they really that arrogant?  When asked that question John Kerry sniffed and said, “Let them pay taxes.”  He then cackled, stepped on to his 74 foot yacht Isabel and sailed off into the sunset, quaffing champagne as he went.

The Democrats like to point to the Clinton presidency as proof of their fiscal responsibility.  It was a period of strong growth, balanced budgets, and prosperity.  They then point to the Bush presidency, all eight years of it, and deride it for deficits, and ultimately a very severe financial crisis.  But it is worth taking a moment to recall that the federal government is made up of three co-equal branches of government with built in checks and balances.  The Congress is not subordinate to the president and it does not work for him.  It is an equal branch of government that checks and balances the power of the presidency.  For the purpose of this discussion, I will leave out the third branch, the judiciary.

Despite the famous 1992 Clinton campaign slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid,” the recession had already ended in March 1991.  When Clinton took office he had a Democratic Congress and he pushed through a massive tax increase in 1993 without a single Republican vote.  We know what happened to Congress in 1994, the Republicans took over for the first time in 40 years.  Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich tried to pass a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution, which was included in the Republicans’ Contract with America.  It passed in the House but failed by one vote in the Senate.  After losing this round, Gingrich met with the Republican leadership and put forth  the idea of acting as if the amendment had passed and just start submitting balanced budgets.  They succeeded in the last three years of the Clinton presidency to produce budget surpluses and decrease the national debt.  This included a tax cut by the Republican Congress in 1997, and the economy grew much stronger after the Republican takeover of Congress than under an all Democratic government.

In the 1996 election, the Democrats regained control of the Congress under Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.  Up until that point the economy had grown steadily under President Bush despite two wars.  With Bush in the White House and the Republicans in control of Congress we had tax cuts and seven years of economic growth.  In December of 2007  the economy went into recession, almost one year after the Democrats regained control.  Now with a Democrat in the White House, and the Democrats in control of Congress we are looking at massive growth in government, a whopping tax increase bearing down on us that will hit on January 1, 2011, and a growing debt that may eventually bankrupt us.

So what is all this talk about eight years of failed Republican policy?  Under Clinton and a Democrat Congress it was two years of a tax increase and modest growth.  Under Clinton and a Republican Congress it was six years of tax cuts, budget surpluses and strong economic growth.  Hmmm….same president, different parties controlling Congress.  Under Bush we had seven years of growth and tax cuts with a Republican Congress.  Under Bush and a Democratic Congress, recession, fiscal crisis.  Hmmm…same president, different parties controlling Congress.

But don’t expect honesty on the campaign trail from the Democrats.  It’s just not the Chicago way.

The NAACP was once a proud organization with a noble cause, to advance the lot of people of color.  Today it has abandoned those principles to become just another attack arm of the Democratic Party.  This week they released a resolution condemning racism within the Tea Party movement.

I have been to a number of Tea Party events with hundreds of thousands of peaceful orderly participants and racism was not evident, surprisingly so.  I say surprisingly because with any gathering of that magnitude to have a few fringe elements at either end of the spectrum would almost be expected.  So is it possible there are racist elements at any given event? Sure.  It is routine in the Tea Party?  It is so rare, you have to aggressively search to find it and when you do, what proof is there that they are really Tea Party members or supporters or just some wacko who walked into the crowd with a sign?

Let’s look at the Strategy

The left has tried vainly to paint the Tea Party as racist because that is the most toxic label that they have.  The racist label brings out the black electorate, polarizes  the progressives, mortifies the moderates, and makes conservatives cringe.  If they can make it stick it is very effective.  It is also overused and as such, it is losing its sting.  So how do you make it stick? 

One way is to follow what the NAACP is doing.  Pass a resolution condemning racism and demand the Tea Party repudiate racism in their ranks, which by the way is virtually non-existent.  If you can cow the Tea Party members to take the pledge, then the liberal/progressives  can plant racists at each rally with nasty signs, videotape them and then blame the Tea Party for failing to honor their pledge and thus “proving” racism is in the ranks of the Tea Party and it cannot be eradicated.  This is straight out of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals.

Let’s Look at the Facts

This is from the NAACP web site:

“Today, NAACP delegates passed a resolution to condemn extremist elements within the Tea Party, calling on Tea Party leaders to repudiate those in their ranks who use racist language in their signs and speeches.”

I was a marshal at the Tea Party rally in New York on April 15^th this year.  We were concerned about reports on the street that infiltrators with racist signs might show up to garner media attention, which to that point had been rather thin.  What were we to do?  We couldn’t take their signs away, we couldn’t touch them as they had as much of a right to be there as we did.  We came up with the idea that we would carry signs repudiating the person that our signs pointed to.  We would approach the person, politely, tell them that their sign did not comport with the values of the Tea Party and ask them to put the sign away or leave.  If they did not comply, we would surround them with our signs that said those views of that individual were not consistent with the Tea Party so that any media picking up their sign would see ours as well.  If things got aggressive we would call in the police that were on hand.  To my knowledge we never had to use our tactic as there were no racially offensive signs at the rally.  We did not need a resolution by the NAACP to develop our counter strategy.  It was part of our core beliefs, which puts the big lie to the NAACP’s resolution.

More from the NAACP web site:

“The resolution came after a year of high-profile media coverage of attendees of Tea Party marches using vial, antagonistic racial slurs & images. In March, respected members of the Congressional Black Caucus reported that racial epithets were hurled at them as they passed by a Washington, DC health care protest. Civil rights legend John Lewis was called the “n-word” in the incident while others in the crowd used ugly anti-gay slurs to describe Congressman Barney Frank, a long-time NAACP supporter and the nation’s first openly gay member of Congress.”

The first part of this passage was almost laughable.  High profile media coverage?  The lame stream media has been trying to bury the Tea Party by not covering them.  What main stream media coverage was there in Washington in September of 2009 where several hundred thousand Tea Partiers rallied?  It was dismissed as a couple of thousand.

Nancy Pelosi’s stunt to march through a crowd of Tea Party members to pass the Obamacare bill, did draw a lot of media attention and controversy.  Show us the money!  Andrew Breitbart put up $100,000 to anyone who could produce any video evidence that the things claimed in the above quote from the NAACP actually happened.  There were media cameras and microphones all over the place, hundreds if not thousands of people with cell phone cameras and miraculously not one of them captured what the NAACP claims happened as fact.  John Lewis was invited on several news programs to give his side of the story and he declined.  Mr. Breitbart is still waiting to write that check.  As Groucho Marx famously said, “Who are you going to believe, me or your own two eyes?”

NAACP President Ben Jealous had this comment.  “I give a 42-page speech. Half a page is focused on the tea party,” Jealous said. “We need the media to pay attention to the issues that are most important to this country” such as jobs, education, and crime.  Uh, what did you expect sir?  If you wanted the media to pay attention to the other 41 ½ pages of your speech, perhaps you should have dropped to bogus charge against the Tea Party.

I scoured the NAACP web site for any mention of the New Black Panther party and the case against them that was dropped by the Obama Justice Department.  The site lacks a search feature so it made it more of a challenge but I looked through the site’s blog and found nothing.  Now here is a case that is plainly caught on video tape and other video tape is found of King Samir Shabazz, spewing racial epithets and advocating murder of whites or “crackers” and their babies, but we hear nothing about this from the NAACP.

So, we have the NAACP issuing a resolution about alleged racism in the Tea Party for which they have no proof (there are some still pictures on their websites of people holding signs, but no reference to where the pictures were taken or who the sign holders were.  They could have just as easily been a plant to smear the Tea Party).  They ask the Tea Party to pledge to oppose racism, which I have demonstrated that opposing racist messages is standard operating procedure among the Tea Party, but they make no mention of the overt racism among their followers, where that racism is clearly on full display in living color with sound and includes not only racist sentiments but a call to actually murder whites.  This apparently is considered worthy discourse to the NAACP leadership.

I call upon all members of the NAACP who really believe there is no place for racism in America to cancel your membership in the NAACP and join the Tea Party.  We do not tolerate racist messages among our members.  We have many African Americans in prominent positions in the Tea Party and we would have more if you join us.  Our positions to end wasteful government spending and free up our economy will probably do more to advance you and your fellow NAACP members than fighting for the next government program.  The NAACP has run aground on the shoals of petty squabbles to help the Democratic Party.  It’s time to abandon ship and swim for shore.

The above opinions are my own.  I do not speak in an official capacity for the Tea Party.

Back on the campaign trail where he feels comfortable that he knows what he is doing, Barack Obama traveled to Las Vegas to stump for Harry Reid.  Harry Reid used to be a boxer and when he told Barack Obama this he said, “Barack, I wasn’t the fastest.  I wasn’t the hardest-hitting, but I knew how to take a punch.”  Based on all the legislation that has been passed since 2008 that an  overwhelming majority of the American people have opposed, makes one wonder if Harry Reid took a few punches too many.

Shortly after taking office and settling into his “bash business” mode Obama blasted businesses for their extravagant meetings held in places like Las Vegas.  Someone then whispered in the president’s ear that extravagant business meetings in Las Vegas were good for Las Vegas and Harry Reid. Oops.  And there you have the crux of the problem.

What, exactly, is government’s role to tell private companies how to spend their money?  What is the role of governments to say to a BP, “Give us the $20 billion, or we’ll take it from you,” as was attributed to Joe Biden, without first going to court?  What is the role of government to say to its citizens, you must buy this health care product or pay a fine?  Well in Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, it is probably all fine and dandy, but in America?

Barack, the standup comic, used the analogy that he and Harry Reid had mud on their shoes, were pushing hard to get the car back on the road, and were making progress little-by-little and when they finally got one wheel on the pavement the Republicans want to throw the car into reverse.  Really?  I would compare it more to conservatives telling everyone to get out of the car and help push, instead of waiting for Nancy Pelosi to come back from Dunkin Donuts with free food for all the overweight union bosses jammed in the car squawking that they didn’t do manual labor.  Their contract didn’t call for pushing cars out of ditches. 

So, while this car should have been out of this ditch and well down the road by now, Harry and Barry will try to convince us that what they’re doing is absolutely brilliant; it’s just that we are too stupid to see it.  After all, it took the greatest president in history, FDR, over eight years and a World War to get us out of the Great Depression, so relax we have another 6 ½ years to go.

Imagine what would have happened if the ever resilient American economy was allowed to work on its own without all the government intervention in the 1930s.  Perhaps the Depression would have been shorter like the recession of 1920-1921, and perhaps we would not have had World War II, and Fannie Mae, and a bankrupt Social Security, and a couple of generations later all of us swimming in debt.  It’s time the tow truck of the most powerful economy on the face of the earth to come along and be allowed to do its job.  Tell Harry and Barry to go sit down on that stump over there, and watch how it is really done.  “You’re making a mess of yourselves and embarrassing the rest us.”

Well the cat’s finally out of the bag and it’s been loosed by none other than President Obama himself.  Once again out on the stump where he is most comfortable and away from the Oval Office where decision making is required, the president is now taking a new tack, or it is an old one?  He is now saying how much worse things could have been if not for his stimulus program.  This is the standard progressive/statist line that we didn’t do enough… if only we spent more money our program would have worked.

But here’s the problem.  To get the $787 billion stimulus package passed the president said that if we did nothing, unemployment would rise to 9%, but if we passed his stimulus package it would go no higher than 8%.  Where is the unemployment rate?  It is at 9.7%.  So if things could have been worse if they did nothing, his economic team is totally clueless because they were the ones who put forth the 8% vs. 9% argument.  Now Obama is trying to tell us that if we did nothing, the unemployment rate could have been in the double digits.  Who says so?  Is this his own projection or is his economic team back at the Ouija board?  Is anyone from the economic team being fired?

Here is an alternate theory.  If the stimulus plan was not implemented and the president cut taxes by $787 billion instead and promised not to introduce any new government programs for two years, that the unemployment rate would be much lower.  How can I make such an outrageous claim?  Let’s look to history.  In 1920-1921 there was a steep recession where the unemployment rate hit 11.7%.  Back then, government didn’t saddle businesses with regulations and businesses were free to cut wages and make other adjustments without government meddling.  Within one year the unemployment rate fell to 6.7% and the following year it was down to 2.4%  Contrast that to the Great Depression where we had massive government intervention and massive government spending and the unemployment rate never fell below 14.7%.

Bringing Jobs Back to America

Another brilliant example of your government killing the economy comes from the company Bucyrus Erie.  They were bidding on a job in India to provide heavy equipment to help them mine coal for a power plant the Indians were building.  Bucyrus Erie went to the Export/Import bank, a government agency, to try to get a loan guarantee to finance the deal.  Because a coal plant would increase the carbon footprint of India, the Ex/Im bank turned down the request.  This didn’t stop the plant being built, it just meant that the heavy equipment was going to be provided by China or Russia instead of the USA.  There would be no effect on the carbon footprint, a big effect on jobs in the US.  At the same time, President Obama is on the stump talking about how hard he is working to bring jobs back to the US.  Really?  They must have read his speech over at the Ex/Im bank, because they are reconsidering Bucyrus Erie’s request.

More government is killing our economy.  Our economy is very tough and it is extremely hard to bring down, but the current administration is trying its best to do so.

I guess that getting a tingle running up his leg only lasted so long before he had to give himself another fix.  Since talking about all the successes of the current administration seemed like a hard sell, Mr. Matthews put together a hit piece on the Tea Parties and the right, or as he calls it, the “New Right.”

On his Hardball  program, Matthews “documentary” was titled “The Rise of the New Right.”  In it he tries to paint the Tea Party movement as a fringe group of racists, gun nuts, and generally a group waiting for a reason to break into violence. 

You would be hard pressed to find a more over the top cheerleader for Barack Obama than Chris Matthews.  Matthews took advantage of his position in the media to actively work to get Obama elected, and now he is crestfallen that General Electric, CBS, and Disney/ABC do not control the news like in the good old days.  He openly attacks Fox News and blames the Internet for allowing the Tea Party to do an end run around the main stream media and get their information out.  Matthews, like big government, is smarter than you.  He knows what “news” you need to hear, and will diligently work to keep what you don’t need to know from reaching your eyes and ears.

 The Tea Party that I know has some very basic principles:

1. Fiscal responsibility
2. Accountability
3. Transparency
4. Free market solutions

 Pretty radical stuff, eh?  In a Rasmussen poll taken earlier this month, 46% of voters say the Tea Party is good for America, while 31% disagree.  Matthews doesn’t tell you this and he makes sure his “documentary” doesn’t provide the information that would let you draw that conclusion.

He reports on the militia movement and specifically mentions the Hutaree militia that plotted to kill a policeman and then those who would attend his funeral.  While constantly tying the Tea Party, and the militia to the Republicans he doesn’t mention that the one person in the Hutaree militia whose political affiliation is known was a Democrat and he voted as such.  Not that there is any linkage between what party one belongs to and being a nut-case, but a fair reporter might mention that to give an honest representation of the story.

Matthews also makes several references to violence against Democrats after the health care vote.  He neglects to say that only one case of violence resulted in an arrest.  That was for an attack against Republican Eric Cantor’s office.  Any one can get a brick and write a note on it quoting one of the Founding Fathers, but until to catch who did it and find out who they really are, you don’t know if it is an extremist on the right, or a Saul Alinsky disciple on the left who wants to discredit the Tea Party people.

Matthews liberally, no pun intended, sprinkles through his story extremists on the right, going back to the 1930s, such as Father Coughlin, but nowhere does he mention extremists on the left.  There is no profile of Louis Farrakhan, Reverend Wright, the Democrats who fought against the Civil Rights Act, while a majority of Republicans supported it.  There is no mention of our government internment of thousands of American citizens of Japanese descent during World War II.

It’s getting closer to the mid-term elections and Matthews doesn’t like seeing everything he has bet his reputation on going down in flames.  So he takes out this “hail Mary” pass to try to turn the tide against the Tea Party and scare people into staying safe with the Democrats.  But this time, the main stream media is not in control.  They can’t craft the message and force feed it to the American public.  Broadcast news and many major newspapers are losing viewers and readership daily, because Toto has pulled the curtain back on the Great and Powerful Oz that was the main stream media and exposed it for what it is, a shill for the Progressive left.