The above quote appears in a Sept. 15, 2009 article entitled “ACORN blocked from Census, HUD funding” on your website.

This quote is a lie. James O’ Keefe and Hannah Giles are not nor have ever been employees of FOX News. Their investigation was not part of a FOX News sting operation. You owe these two invidiuals an apology. This article is not journalism, but rather out right fraud and deception

So now I do know that this is not some local Minnesota politician, and jonerik’s statement above makes more sense to me now.

I have to admit, I like what I have seen him saying so far, and I am going to check out if he is someone who’s been saying these things for a while, or if he’s just somebody who’s jumped onto our bandwagon, like a lot of politicians have been trying to do.

Also, I heard from a friend that there were several thousand Tea Party members who held a rally in Washington DC last weekend, and he said there were “a lot” of people there. I looked around on the web, and it looks like when he says “several thousand” what he really means is something like 50,000. ABC News went so far as to claim 70,000 were there, but I’m not sure there are even 70,000 people in the whole country involved in the movement. I have seen some pictures that members of my group brought back from DC, and there were a LOT of people there. I know that DC Police no longer make crowd estimates after the Million Man March, so any claims are only going to be somebody’s opinion.

At any rate, I am wondering where Glenn Beck was when we started this up back in February.
-mike

I appreciate your open minded look at what I had to say. I will not make the claim that I am always right, only that I have given these things considerable thought.

The Tea Party movement has been portrayed by the media and the party powerhouses as a bunch of slobbering, gun slinging white separatists intent on murdering minorities. Like any other movement of upset political activists, there are plenty of targets to point a camera at. I will not insult your intelligence by pretending the movement is not conservative, or that it does lean to the right. But it leans only slightly.

It is a movement, not a party. It is composed of a broad swath of American viewpoints, some very liberal, others very conservative. It is not one homogenous philosophy. There are many different groups and philosophies within its boundaries. Most of the people involved have never been political activists or spoken out about much in their lives. You often hear Democrats asking where were these people when Bush was puttering around with people’s rights and being a military adventurist. Most of them were yelling at their televisions and casting punishment votes that they now regret.

The primary thing that ties them together is a simple feeling of uneasiness, that something isn’t right in this country, and that it’s not limited to one or the other party. Many of them have a difficult time expressing why they feel this way. We have people that are Republicans, yes, but most are unafiliated independents. Some are liberal Democrats who are upset that their party has been taken over by dishonest actors. There are a lot of Libertarians, who don’t fit into the system, because their views are a mixture of viewpoints found in both parties.

There are Constitutionalists, some who are liberal and others who are conservative, that just want a return to the fundamentals of our Constitution. There are a lot of Native Americans, Hispanics, blacks and asians involved. In the weekly meetings I go to, there are two former Obama state electors that feel they were duped.

We have a firm commitment not to let either the Republicans or the Democrats hijack our movement, and at many gatherings, politicians that currently hold office are not allowed to speak in front of the crowd. They can mix with people and protest alongside us, but not stand up in front of us. It’s mostly about broken promises, and about a sense of profound corruption running rampant in our system.

My branch of things is the Tea Party Patriots. We align along three principles. They are preserving the Constitution, Fiscal Responsibility, and Free Enterprise solutions. The parties have co-opted the “liberal” and “conservative” tags. It is possible to be both. There is no reason you can’t express yourself freely and also believe in personal responsibility and governmental restraint and frugality.

Keep an open mind.

ACORN is frustrating to me because in the 35 years since I first encountered them, they’ve always been well meaning, but rarely effective. What they are trying to do is something that needs to be done, and if not by the government, by who? Do we write off our inner cities just like waves of white Americans did when they moved to the suburbs? Or do we work at trying to rebuild a UNITED States of America?

As for progressives, I do have to disagree with your Wilson comments. Woodrow Wilson has never been cited by any progressive I know of, and I’ve been active in the online portion of that movement since it began. Progressives don’t really own up to this, but they are to a surprising degree comprised of former Republicans (fiscally conservative, socially liberal). Kind of like Libertarians say they are but much more willing to use government as a tool in keeping this country strong. The presidents we identify with are both Roosevelts and . . . well, that’s about it. A lot of admiration for both Lincoln and Jefferson though.

Progressives trust the Democratic party about as much as you trust either party. We have that in common (Congressional “progressives” rarely are.)

And to the advice in your last post I would add, FOLLOW THE MONEY.

ACORN is not trying to do anything for poor people except use them to further its own agenda. The way to help people out of a mess is to teach them self-sufficiency, not how to cheat the system. Goldman Sachs, General Motors and all these other mega corporations that received OUR money should have been left to fall by the wayside. We have unemployment, general assistance, food stamps and education programs to aid in the recovery of those affected by such failures.

It is obvious that charitable Americans should reach out to those in need of aid. This does not automatically mean that the Federal government is responsible for your welfare. They are to facilitate commerce between the states, provide for the common defense, and a very short list of other tasks laid out in a document known as the Constitution. The United States is a country based on individual rights and responsibilities, and tasks like helping the poor or taxing the rich, infrastructure improvements, and education are intended to be left to the States and their communities. The Federal government was not placed “above” the states in the founding documents. It is an association of the states and the people.

The Republicans are just as foolish and overbearing as the Democrats. I see very little to distinguish one from the other. Bush spent foolishly, said stupid things, and interfered with civil liberties with scams like the Patriot Act, just as Clinton did before him with the Brady Bill, and on back for a long, long, time. Now Obama says stupid things, does nothing to reverse the Patriot Act, spends even more money, lies about pulling out of Iraq(he plans on stationing 50,000 troops there), signs unread bills not shown to the public as he said he would, and messes with civil liberties with giant program proposals, appointing an entire shadow cabinet to circumvent Congress, while his appointments that require Senate confirmation continue to go unfilled. His Treasury Secretary is a tax cheat. He continues to allow lobbyists to work in his administration after he said he wouldn’t. NO DIFFERENCE. Whether it was McCain or Obama, it’s still a Bush Third Term.

Simply naming yourself a Democrat means nothing to civil liberty or compassion. Progressives like to point out that they are an extension of Progressivism of the early 20th century. Woodrow Wilson, a Progressive Democrat who laid the groundwork for the League of Nations, imprisoned over 150,000 people for their political beliefs and opposition to WW1, and segregated the Federal Government. FDR, a Progressive Democrat, rounded up hundreds of thousands of American Citizens and held them in concentration camps for years because of their cultural heritage. Harry Truman, a Progressive Democrat, unlawfully seized steel corporations and was ordered to relinquish his control of them. And don’t forget those little explosives experiments in Nagasaki and Hiroshima that he conducted.

I find it interesting that you would immediately throw the bigot label in there without a clue as to my racial identity. I expressed nothing in my viewpoints that has a thing whatsoever to do with either race or culture. Inflammatory labeling is one of the first reactions when there is little to support an argument. Think for yourself and don’t accept these people for what they say, only watch what they do. Right or Left, they are crooks and liars.

-mike