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Everyone in politics seems to be talking about the Tea Parties. Some want to know what the Tea Parties’ positions are, who they support and most of all, how we harness their power? I participated in my first Tea Party on December 16th 2007. This was the start of the tea party movement. Before this time, I never heard of the Tea Parties, but we made National news that day by raising over 6 million dollars for a candidate, to that point in to time the most money ever raised for a candidate in a single day. After that, Fox News’ Glenn Beck jumped on the band wagon, and most people thought it was Glenn Beck’s idea. He preaches “Don’t let those Republicans takeover.”

What everyone fails to see is — FREEDOM IS POPULAR! When you are in a true freedom movement, you will see people from all walks of life — plumbers, bankers, school teachers, garbage collectors, small business owners, college students, etc. Once you try to control any Freedom Movement, it will die. Sure you may be able to get people together, but when you try to control them by telling people how to think and what to say; you lose the power that comes from ones heart, the drive, the passion. Basically, your “Tea Party” will die on the vine. However, other Tea Parties will flourish with ideas and solutions. They will come together on their own terms, and support common ideas and goals. Each person will have something to offer, and it’s the spontaneous efforts of the People that make them so powerful.

One common thread throughout every Tea Party I’ve attended is a demand for our elected leaders to follow the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Our Government is broken, and the only way to fix it is for a new group of leaders to rise to the top and to rebuild a set of principals, set in a foundation of stone — obey the Constitution of their state and follow the US Constitution and Bill of Rights, with no Excuses! If we followed the Constitution we could fix all that ails us. We would have balanced budgets, personal responsibility, secure borders, strong national security, a sound monetary system and with smaller government, we could keep the fruits of our labor!

We need to get as passionate with our Constitution as we get for American Idol, and football! We need to wake up to the fact we are not a democracy! We are a republic! Nowhere in the founding documents does it even mention the word democracy. The difference is, in a democracy, 51% of the people can take away the rights or property of 49% of the people. In a republic, 99% of the people cannot take away the rights or property of 1% of the people. Just because you want or need something, doesn’t mean you have the right to it.

We have consistently eroded over time personal responsibility to the point it’s government’s job to take from those who produce and give it to those who won’t. Our entitlement system cannot be sustained! It’s like a two-year-old talking to his parents — ”Give me Free Healthcare”, “Give me Free Education”, “Give me Free Food”, “Give me Free Money to live on”, “Give me Free Housing”…Give me, Give me, Give me. Frankly I’m sick of it. It’s NOT government’s Job to take care of us! The government has no money until they take it from one of us by force. I will work hard to expose welfare fraud and work to revamp that whole system. The “General Welfare” in the Constitution didn’t mean a life style, it meant to provide for all equally. “National Security” is an example of “General Welfare” for all Americans.

With the rate of the federal government growing out of control and trying to force its agendas on the states, as if the federal government is our master, it’s time to remind the federal government that the people created local government, then created state government and then the states created the federal government! The federal government must answer to the states – not the other way around. As your state representative, I will fight hard against the overreaching federal government, by enforcing our 10th amendment to protect us from dangerous programs such as REAL ID, over-reaching gun laws (What part of “shall not be infringed” do they Not understand?), and the federal government’s dictation on how to run our schools etc. If Washington won’t listen to us, voters, it’s time we put our foot down and exercise our 10th amendment to make them listen to the states.

Nullification may be necessary to stop any law that comes from the continually overreaching federal government. The federal government is out of control passing laws that are unconstitutional, and the states have the right to declare null and void any federal law that they deem unconstitutional. Nullification is known as extreme states’ rights, the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions declared (1799) nullification to be the rightful remedy by the states for all unauthorized acts done under the pretext of the Constitution. This gives the states the power to resist any unconstitutional laws without seceding from the union. As your state representative I won’t be bashful about using this tool if needed and I will never vote for a tax increase! If a bill can’t pass through the filter of the AZ & US Constitutions and the Bill of Rights — I’ll Have to vote “NO.” I will never make any apologies for obeying my oath to the Constitutions, for fighting to lower taxes and increase personal responsibility!

I’ll leave you with one last thought. Who is the highest law enforcement officer in the land? A four Star General? Our Commander and Chief, the President of the United States? Nope. It’s your local sheriff! So when electing a sheriff, make sure you elect one who has principles, integrity and most of all one who will obey their oath to the Constitution and Bill of Rights, no matter how the political winds may change, and will stand up for what’s right.

We need to wake up and become passionate about learning about our Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It’s much more important than who won the football game or who got voted off American Idol. Help me bring this country back to its roots.

For Liberty!

David E. Fitzgerald III
Constitutional Conservative for State Representative
Legislative District 6
480-688-8217

“A government that is big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.” – Thomas Jefferson

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http://arizona.tenthamendmentcenter.com/2010/03/getting-back-to-our-roots/

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Glenn Greenwald
Salon
Fri, 19 Feb 2010 21:01 EST

Yesterday, Joseph Stack deliberately flew an airplane into a building housing IRS offices in Austin, Texas, in order to advance the political grievances he outlined in a perfectly cogent suicide-manifesto. Stack’s worldview contained elements of the tea party’s anti-government anger along with substantial populist complaints generally associated with "the Left" (rage over bailouts, the suffering of America’s poor, and the pilfering of the middle class by a corrupt economic elite and their government-servants). All of that was accompanied by an argument as to why violence was justified (indeed necessary) to protest those injustices:

I remember reading about the stock market crash before the "great" depression and how there were wealthy bankers and businessmen jumping out of windows when they realized they screwed up and lost everything. Isn’t it ironic how far we’ve come in 60 years in this country that they now know how to fix that little economic problem; they just steal from the middle class (who doesn’t have any say in it, elections are a joke) to cover their asses and it’s "business-as-usual" . . . . Sadly, though I spent my entire life trying to believe it wasn’t so, but violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer.

Despite all that, The New York Times’ Brian Stelter documents the deep reluctance of cable news chatterers and government officials to label the incident an act of "terrorism," even though — as Dave Neiwert ably documents — it perfectly fits, indeed is a classic illustration of, every official definition of that term. The issue isn’t whether Stack’s grievances are real or his responses just; it is that the act unquestionably comports with the official definition. But as NBC’s Pete Williams said of the official insistence that this was not an act of Terrorism: there are "a couple of reasons to say that . . . One is he’s an American citizen." Fox News’ Megan Kelley asked Catherine Herridge about these denials: "I take it that they mean terrorism in the larger sense that most of us are used to?," to which Herridge replied: "they mean terrorism in that capital T way."
All of this underscores, yet again, that Terrorism is simultaneously the single most meaningless and most manipulated word in the American political lexicon. The term now has virtually nothing to do with the act itself and everything to do with the identity of the actor, especially his or her religious identity. It has really come to mean: "a Muslim who fights against or even expresses hostility towards the United States, Israel and their allies." That’s why all of this confusion and doubt arose yesterday over whether a person who perpetrated a classic act of Terrorism should, in fact, be called a Terrorist: he’s not a Muslim and isn’t acting on behalf of standard Muslim grievances against the U.S. or Israel, and thus does not fit the "definition." One might concede that perhaps there’s some technical sense in which term might apply to Stack, but as Fox News emphasized: it’s not "terrorism in the larger sense that most of us are used to . . . terrorism in that capital T way." We all know who commits terrorism in "that capital T way," and it’s not people named Joseph Stack.
Contrast the collective hesitance to call Stack a Terrorist with the extremely dubious circumstances under which that term is reflexively applied to Muslims. If a Muslim attacks a military base preparing to deploy soldiers to a war zone, that person is a Terrorist. If an American Muslim argues that violence against the U.S. (particularly when aimed at military targets) is justified due to American violence aimed at the Muslim world, that person is a Terrorist who deserves assassination. And if the U.S. military invades a Muslim country, Muslims who live in the invaded and occupied country and who fight back against the invading American army — by attacking nothing but military targets — are also Terrorists. Indeed, large numbers of detainees at Guantanamo were accused of being Terrorists for nothing more than attacking members of an invading foreign army in their country, including 14-year-old Mohamed Jawad, who spent many years in Guantanamo, accused (almost certainly falsely) of throwing a grenade at two American troops in Afghanistan who were part of an invading force in that country. Obviously, plots targeting civilians for death — the 9/11 attacks and attempts to blow up civilian aircraft — are pure terrorism, but a huge portion of the acts committed by Muslims that receive that label are not.
In sum: a Muslim who attacks military targets, including in war zones or even in their own countries that have been invaded by a foreign army, are Terrorists. A non-Muslim who flies an airplane into a government building in pursuit of a political agenda is not, or at least is not a Real Terrorist with a capital T — not the kind who should be tortured and thrown in a cage with no charges and assassinated with no due process. Nor are Christians who stand outside abortion clinics and murder doctors and clinic workers. Nor are acts undertaken by us or our favored allies designed to kill large numbers of civilians or which will recklessly cause such deaths as a means of terrorizing the population into desired behavioral change — the Glorious Shock and Awe campaign and the pummeling of Gaza. Except as a means for demonizing Muslims, the word is used so inconsistently and manipulatively that it is impoverished of any discernible meaning.
All of this would be an interesting though not terribly important semantic matter if not for the fact that the term Terrorist plays a central role in our political debates. It is the all-justifying term for anything the U.S. Government does. Invasions, torture, due-process-free detentions, military commissions, drone attacks, warrantless surveillance, obsessive secrecy, and even assassinations of American citizens are all justified by the claim that it’s only being done to "Terrorists," who, by definition, have no rights. Even worse, one becomes a "Terrorist" not through any judicial adjudication or other formal process, but solely by virtue of the untested, unchecked say-so of the Executive Branch. The President decrees someone to be a Terrorist and that’s the end of that: uncritical followers of both political parties immediately justify anything done to the person on the ground that he’s a Terrorist (by which they actually mean: he’s been accused of being one, though that distinction — between presidential accusations and proof — is not one they recognize).
If we’re really going to vest virtually unlimited power in the Government to do anything it wants to people they call "Terrorists," we ought at least to have a common understanding of what the term means. But there is none. It’s just become a malleable, all-justifying term to allow the U.S. Government carte blanche to do whatever it wants to Muslims it does not like or who do not like it (i.e., The Terrorists). It’s really more of a hypnotic mantra than an actual word: its mere utterance causes the nation blindly to cheer on whatever is done against the Muslims who are so labeled.
UPDATE: I want to add one point: the immediate official and media reaction was to avoid, even deny, the term "terrorist" because the perpetrator of the violence wasn’t Muslim. But if Stack’s manifesto begins to attract serious attention, I think it’s likely the term Terrorist will be decisively applied to him in order to discredit what he wrote. His message is a sharply anti-establishment and populist grievance of the type that transcends ideological and partisan divisions — the complaints which Stack passionately voices are found as common threads in the tea party movement and among citizens on both the Left and on the Right — and thus tend to be the type which the establishment (which benefits from high levels of partisan distractions and divisions) finds most threatening and in need of demonization. Nothing is more effective at demonizing something than slapping the Terrorist label onto it.

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/203322-Terrorism-The-most-meaningless-and-manipulated-word

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Obama Moves to Unravel Twenty Years of ‘Law & Order’ Episodes, Seeks Optional Miranda –By Lori Price, www.legitgov.org 13 Feb 2010 The Obusha Friday night bad news dump (under cover of the Olympic Games), is really, really bad and is way beyond Bush! In a single night, President Barack Obama re-invaded Afghanistan… and announced that the White House is ‘reviewing a plan that would require the Justice Department and FBI to consult with the intelligence community before *deciding* whether to inform terrorism suspects arrested in the United States that they have the right to remain silent and to consult with an attorney.’ Now, how are we going to watch ‘Law & Order,’ ‘The Closer,’ ‘NCIS,’ and all the other good crime dramas, after the constitutional law scholar unravels their plots by deciding *if* suspects should be read their rights? Soon, the only show we’ll be able to watch will be ‘24,’ whose plots — like Fox News itself — revolve around torture for the sake of sexual gratification of Fox’s audience.

Obama’s secret prisons in Afghanistan endanger us all –He was elected in part to drag us out of this trap. Instead, he’s dragging us further in By Johann Hari 12 Feb 2010 [Barack Obama] is escalating the war in Afghanistan, and has taken the war to another Muslim country. The CIA and hired mercenaries are now operating on Obama’s orders inside Pakistan, where they are sending unarmed drones to drop bombs and sending secret agents to snatch suspects. The casualties are overwhelmingly civilians… Obama ran on an inspiring promise to shut down Bush’s network of kidnappings and secret prisons… Yet a string of recent exposes has shown that Obama is in fact maintaining a battery of secret prisons where people are held without charge indefinitely – and he is even expanding them.

Karzai warns US troops about civilian deaths 13 Feb 2010 Afghan President Hamid Karzai urges all troops operating in Afghanistan to avoid civilian casualties during the new military operation in the country. Thousands of US troops have launched a major offensive in the southern Afghan town of Marjah in Helmand Province to allegedly rout out Taliban militants in the region.

Refugees flee to capital of Helmand to avoid huge Nato Afghan offensive 10 Feb 2010 As British troops count the hours until the start of the largest Nato offensive since the US-led invasion of 2001, Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand province, is witnessing the arrival of a grim procession of frightened refugees desperate to escape the battle. Nato forces have urged civilians to flee Marjah — one of the most heavily populated parts of rural Helmand — as more than 15,000 British, Afghan and American troops make their final preparations for Operation Moshtarak — "Togetherness" [aka Operation War Crime].

British soldier dies in Afghanistan offensive on Taleban 13 Feb 2010 A British soldier died as more than 15,000 troops launched the biggest military offensive in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taleban in 2001. The soldier from 1st Battalion Grenadier Guards was killed by an explosion while on patrol in a Jackal vehicle in Nad Ali, Helmand province, in the early stages of Operation Moshtarak, the Ministry of Defence said.

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Bill Nye the Science Guy: Climate change deniers are ‘unpatriotic’

By David Edwards and Stephen Webster
Thursday, February 11th, 2010 — 6:50 pm

 

Frozen water fell from the sky today, therefore thousands of scientists the world over are liars. Just go with it.

That’s the narrative coming from Fox News in their coverage of the heavy snow blanketing the eastern coast of the United States this winter. Thankfully, there’s Bill Nye the Science Guy, ready to explain the complexities of climate science in terms easy enough for even a child to digest.

Nye, however, jacked his assessment of meteorology into the realm of partisanship, scoffing on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show on Wednesday night that climate change deniers are "unpatriotic" in parroting simple minded, anti-science propaganda.

"[We] remind you that global warming was the first term for this phenomenon that we now call can climate change," he said. "So it‘s very reasonable that a snowstorm in Washington that‘s this severe is a result of climate change."

"There‘s more energy in the atmosphere, and this is stirring things up," Nye continued. "If you want to get serious about it, these guys claiming that the snow in Washington disproves climate change are almost unpatriotic. It’s really, they’re denying science."

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Nye, who once hosted a popular children’s show, explained that as an educator he’s noticed a sharp divide between older and younger people when it comes to accepting the science of climate change.

"This is anecdotal for me," Nye said. "Older people just have a much harder time grasping the idea that you have many billions of people on the planet with a very, very thin atmosphere, you‘re able to affect its climate. It’s younger people are able to sort of embrace it, understand the evidence and move forward."

Weather, he noted, is day-to-day. The average global climate on a year-to-year basis, however, is something else entirely.

NASA scientists announced toward the end of January that the last 10 years were the hottest decade in over 2,000 years, with 2009 being the second warmest on record.

"This thing of denying science, you know, science has done so much to make this country what it is: A technological leader," Nye said. "It’s improved the quality of life for so many people, here and around the world. To deny what scientists or scientific evidence is showing, is inappropriate. And as I said earlier … It’s unpatriotic."

His words did not sit easily with conservative blog Hot Air, which retaliated in a Thursday post.

"Maybe Nye is an expert on patriotism?" writer Ed Morrissey rhetorically asked. "Er, no."

"Demanding unquestioning acceptance of recent scientific claims as gospel amounts to a forced belief system, and our Constitution actually has an explicit prohibition against religious tests for office," he continued. "Is the Constitution unpatriotic as well? Maybe Nye should stick to classroom demonstrations of basic science and leave AGW and the measurement of patriotism to those more intellectually capable of discernment."

This video is from MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, broadcast Feb. 11, 2010.

Bill Nye the Science Guy: Climate change deniers are ‘unpatriotic’ | Raw Story

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Fox News contributor Sarah Palin will make two high-profile appearances in Central Florida next month, but the press will not be welcomed. Palin’s camp has barred the media from recording or photographing the former governor’s speeches, so if reporters want to attend, they’ll have to buy a ticket like anyone else. (Prices are between $150 and “at least” $250.) The Orlando Sentinel reports that the unusual decision was made by Palin’s handlers, not local organizers:

“These are the terms of the contract that were presented to us,” said Orange County Republican Party Chairman Lew Oliver, who said he is ecstatic that the GOP “rock star” will headline his group’s annual major fundraising event.

Oliver acknowledged that previous Lincoln Day dinner speakers — mostly elected officials and political hopefuls — have sought media coverage. However, he said, “this is an unusual circumstance.”

Palin’s speaking fees are also not being disclosed, but she was paid a reported $100,000 for speaking at the National Tea Party Convention last week. Palin has consistently tried to limit media access at her recent events, even discouraging “attempts at citizen journalism” by barring attendees at her book-signings from carrying cell phones or cameras, and refusing to “talk about politics with them.” Several local Alaska bloggers were put on a black list and banned from Palin’s Wasilla book-signing, and at a December event at the Mall of America, officials initially said that “only English speaking press” would be let in.

http://thinkprogress.org/2010/02/12/palin-media-florida/

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